Way back when, people could gauge the passage of time by seeing how far a candle burned down. This has nothing to do with that- it has to do with the flicker of the flame. Candlemakers spent hundreds or even thousands of years getting rid of the flicker because it was annoying in your only light source. Now we are trying to engineer LED candles to mimic the flicker because people like it. So now wax candles are mostly flicker-free, but you can bring it back by tying three candles together.
By measuring the flicker of such candles with modern high-tech instruments, we've determined that candles flicker at 9.9 Hz, which is roughly one tenth of a second. With a lot of measuring equipment and an awful lot of candles, one could build a clock out of such knowledge. Read how this was determined at Tim's Blog.
This project is an entry into HackaDay's One Hertz Challenge, in which entrants design a device that measures time in 1 Hz (one second) increments. If you are so inclined, you can read 116 entries so far. -via Metafilter
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The title of the post at Metafilter is golden: Don't put your finger in the flame, it hertz.
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