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Bugmaster comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84 - Less Wrong
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The humming torture sounds similar to Vetinari's clock, only taken to the next level. I liked it too.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, the memetic attack is also similar to "The Book" in Anathem, though the delivery vector is different.
I tried looking up Vetinari's clock, but I only found a bunch of people building them. Which book is it from?
It's from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havelock_Vetinari
Thank you.
I wonder how hard it would have been to build such a clock at Discworld's tech level. It might require magic.
Fortunately, magic is widely available. That said, it should be possible to build such a clock using perfectly mundane means; after all, Discworld denizens do have perfectly ordinary mechanical clocks, AFAIK.
It would have to have its own tick completely muffled while just producing the fake tick. Perhaps the accurate time is produced by a clock on the other side of the wall.
Assuming, of course, that the clock does keep accurate time :-)
Pratchett quote a few posts upstream.