“Watches, Stories, and Gear” is a roundup of our favorite content, watch or otherwise, from around the internet. Here, we support other creators, explore interesting content that inspires us, and put a spotlight on causes we believe in. Oh, and any gear we happen to be digging on this week. We love gear.
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The “leap second” is one of those weird little timing quirks that sometimes comes up in human interest stories about online networks going down for unexpected reasons, or the strange particulars of how we arrive at standard time worldwide. Leap seconds, for the uninitiated, have to be implemented periodically because of the irregular rotation of the earth. One second might not seem like a big deal, but extrapolating a one second timing error over the course of years, centuries, and millenia can have a major impact. Now, as NPR reports, we might need to lose a second rather than add one at some point in the near future, and the culprit might be climate change. It’s not often discussed, but the impacts of climate change extend to the rotation of our planet, and it appears that it might be slowing it down slightly. It’s not the first thing you think of when you consider the impact of our warming planet, but in its own way could be as critical as many of the effects that get most of the headlines.
We love a collection, and this New York Times story features one that is unlike anything we’ve come across. Troy Nelson, who passed away earlier this year, was a lifelong Star Trek fan and collected all kinds of memorabilia related to the show. After the show, his family began posting images of his collection to social media, and it became something of a sensation in the Trek community. It’s an enormous trove of action figures, models, marketing materials, and just about anything else you could think of that’s Star Trek related. The collection heads to auction soon.
Max Busser never misses an opportunity to remind his fans that the M.A.D. 1 series of watches are not MB&F branded timepieces, but the latest release from Max’s spin-off brand is kind of close in a way that is core to the MB&F philosophy: it’s been made with a created partner. The “f” in MB&F stands for “friends,” after all, so it makes a certain amount of sense that the idea of shared creativity and collaboration would find its way to the M.A.D. 1 collection eventually. The newest release, which you can enter a raffle for a chance to purchase here, is a collaboration with the French artist and designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, and unlike previous iterations of the watch, this one features a smattering of bright colors throughout, particularly on that wild rotor, which now provides an entirely new visual experience.
It’s not like anyone really has a full grasp on dark energy, right? Maybe now, though, we just have even less of a grasp on it. That’s after scientists unveiled a map of the universe that’s purportedly the biggest ever, according to the Guardian. The map shows many more times the number of galaxies than we’ve ever seen in this type of imaging before, and hidden in the data is hte somewhat disconcerting information that while the universe continues to expand at a high rate of speed (information we expected), it hasn’t always expanded at the same speed. This is exciting and somewhat confounding to scientists, who expected that so-called dark energy would keep that speed constant.
No, we never tire of bringing you Dune news here on Watches, Stories, & Gear. Yes, we may soon change the name of the column to Watches, Stories, & Dune, and that might actually be an entirely reasonable thing to do based on the late breaking news that Dune 3 is officially a go at Legendary, the production company responsible for the first two films in the franchise. No official word on timing, but it’s expected that a third Dune film will be made before the next project Legendary is said to be working on with Denis Villeneuve, an adaptation of Nuclear War: A Scenario, a 2024 nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.
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