A recent video captured the display ticking along shortly after 11:15 AM, and honestly, it's the kind of delightfully absurd thing that makes you remember San Francisco can still be charming when it's not busy stepping over its own bureaucracy.

As one local put it: "I love that clock. How did they make it? Literally made a couple guys do this for 12 hours?" The answer is basically yes — artists performed the painstaking work of changing the time in real-time, creating a full 12-hour loop of footage. Another SF resident joked, "These guys are working overtime," which — fair.

In a city that spends millions on consultants to study problems we already understand, there's something beautifully efficient about the Exploratorium's whole deal. It takes complicated ideas — time, light, perception, physics — and makes them accessible without a single PowerPoint deck or oversight committee. The place runs on curiosity, not grant applications for feasibility studies about curiosity.

The Exploratorium is one of those rare San Francisco institutions that actually delivers on its promise. No grift, no bloat, just genuine wonder at a reasonable price point. It's the kind of place that reminds you why people moved here in the first place — not for the housing costs or the tent encampments, but for that peculiar Bay Area blend of creativity and nerdiness that produces things like a human-powered clock.

If you've got kids, take them. If you don't have kids, go anyway. You deserve to watch two guys change the time by hand for a few minutes. We all do.