One advantage of our 24 hours a day, 60 minutes an hour clock is that it's easy to divide up days and hours into various equal parts since 24 and 60 are highly composite numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number
My favorite retirement gift is a seven segment clock that points to the day of the week. It usually gets a laugh, followed up months later with an honest thank you and an anecdote about how it saved them from going to the bank on a Sunday or the like.
These are particularly interesting because they isolate the one part of time that is completely made up: the week. Days, months, years have natural markers - but weeks and particularly days of the week are a totally arbitrary coordination function.
Nice. Related, I also love exploring different ways to visualize time, so a few months back I came up with twelve variations arranged in the form of an actual clock that you can click through to see each one.
Each one presents a different type of visualization (from sand, where each falling grain represents a second to a 3D-modeled set of water wheels)
That's pretty neat. The ? (help) link and the speed up button overlap on my browser (firefox on android, url bar on the bottom). My email is in my profile, I can send a screenshot if you need it.
Kari Voutilainen created a new way to display analog time with his Vingt-8 ISO watch. It enables the minute hand to be opposite the hour hand when it's half-past, and aligned to the hour hand at the top of the hour. The location of the minutes rotate with the hours. From https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-voutilainen-vingt-8-is... the description says, "the minute hand makes 13 revolutions around the dial every 12 hours, meaning the top of each hour migrates over the course of each day."
Once you get the hang of it, it feels more intuitive than the traditional analog displays and has become my favorite way to display analog time.
My favorite alt time is definitely the ancient way of doing things: there are twelve hours during the day, and twelve hours during the night. Yes, this means that the length of an hour at night is different from the length of an hour during the day (at least most of the year). This system is still used in some oddball places (like certain aspects of Jewish religious law, and possibly Islamic law as well for all I know), but, having written such a clock once, I did kind of like that you could get a feel for where you were in the year purely based on how fast the second hand was ticking during which half of the day.
I think the day needs time units which are factors of 10x or 1000x to match SI prefixes. I give translations assuming current solar day length and current normal units:
- deciday (2.4 hrs)
- centiday (~0.24 hrs, ~14.4 minutes)
- milliday (~1.44 minutes, ~86.4 seconds)
- microday (~86.4 milliseconds)
But, to really get into the decimal clock, we want to also extend this into culturally useful multi-day units.
- decaday is somewhat akin to weeks
- hectoday is somewhat akin to months or quarters
- kiloday is somewhat akin to years
So we need to do some hard thinking and invent some insane tech to adjust planetary mechanics so that we can have decimal relationships between diurnal, lunar, and annual cycles. ;-)
I think we need to accept that calendars and clocks are different. Calendars are based on years and days of planets, planets are different, and they don't divide evenly. Clocks are measured in seconds, the SI seconds are basis of units.
One solution is local seconds and SI seconds. Another is use metric seconds for stopwatches and local minutes for scheduling, and accept there is uneven number of seconds in minute.
Why not 64 minutes and 64 seconds for the hexadecimal in the base 16 clock? The second duration would be closer to the real life one (1.3 seconds) and 64 is closer to 60 too
Represent the minute component with an imaginary number, so you can tell it apart from the hour... you know, for clarity of course heheheh. I think you'd have to apply the same transform that the 360 degree clock gets in the article, where (1) and (2π) are at the top and adding runs clockwise.
"It's i till 2π... oh yeah sorry, that's what we call 3π/2:-1 around here."
You used to look at the sun or stars to make an estimate, then we had sundials. For larger time scales, there are tons of archaelogical sites around the world which tracked the solstice, equinox, etc and there's evidence that a few cultures even tracked the full period of the moon's orbit (18.6y).
~250BCE, there was a comedy by Plautus which had in it a poem lamenting the proliferation of sundials, which may or may not have been a parody of some of the attitudes at the time:
The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sundial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions! When I was a boy,
My belly was my sundial -- one surer,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when 'twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat;
But nowadays, why even when I have,
I can't fall to unless the sun gives leave.
The town's so full of these confounded dials
The greatest part of the inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the street.
Yes, people make up silly things for silly reasons all the time.
All core systems should run on 64bit UTC posix Epoch date-time stamps, and abstract that into whatever ISO 8601 format local communities think is effective policy. If finer granularity is required to recreate events in non-real-time analysis, than additional sampling interval data with event ordering indexes become relevant.
The Metrology around how a Second was (re)defined is actually really interesting. Considering it started as an arbitrary interval originally derived from some dudes heartbeat. =3
One thing that annoys me about am/pm is that the clocks have a 12 at the top and not a 0. So it goes 11:59 am to 12:00 pm and not 11:59 am to 00:00 pm. Even as a kid I was confused as to why 12 belonged to PM but 11 was still AM, but I never thought about it much until recently, decades after I had learned and was using the system. Which I guess is why it is still like this.
One advantage of our 24 hours a day, 60 minutes an hour clock is that it's easy to divide up days and hours into various equal parts since 24 and 60 are highly composite numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number
My favorite retirement gift is a seven segment clock that points to the day of the week. It usually gets a laugh, followed up months later with an honest thank you and an anecdote about how it saved them from going to the bank on a Sunday or the like.
https://dayclocks.com/
These are particularly interesting because they isolate the one part of time that is completely made up: the week. Days, months, years have natural markers - but weeks and particularly days of the week are a totally arbitrary coordination function.
Nice. Related, I also love exploring different ways to visualize time, so a few months back I came up with twelve variations arranged in the form of an actual clock that you can click through to see each one.
Each one presents a different type of visualization (from sand, where each falling grain represents a second to a 3D-modeled set of water wheels)
https://clocks.specr.net
The Pi clock is excellent.
That's pretty neat. The ? (help) link and the speed up button overlap on my browser (firefox on android, url bar on the bottom). My email is in my profile, I can send a screenshot if you need it.
Tip Clock is the best one yet.
very cool thanks for sharing.
Kari Voutilainen created a new way to display analog time with his Vingt-8 ISO watch. It enables the minute hand to be opposite the hour hand when it's half-past, and aligned to the hour hand at the top of the hour. The location of the minutes rotate with the hours. From https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-voutilainen-vingt-8-is... the description says, "the minute hand makes 13 revolutions around the dial every 12 hours, meaning the top of each hour migrates over the course of each day."
Once you get the hang of it, it feels more intuitive than the traditional analog displays and has become my favorite way to display analog time.
My favorite alt time is definitely the ancient way of doing things: there are twelve hours during the day, and twelve hours during the night. Yes, this means that the length of an hour at night is different from the length of an hour during the day (at least most of the year). This system is still used in some oddball places (like certain aspects of Jewish religious law, and possibly Islamic law as well for all I know), but, having written such a clock once, I did kind of like that you could get a feel for where you were in the year purely based on how fast the second hand was ticking during which half of the day.
I think the day needs time units which are factors of 10x or 1000x to match SI prefixes. I give translations assuming current solar day length and current normal units:
- deciday (2.4 hrs)
- centiday (~0.24 hrs, ~14.4 minutes)
- milliday (~1.44 minutes, ~86.4 seconds)
- microday (~86.4 milliseconds)
But, to really get into the decimal clock, we want to also extend this into culturally useful multi-day units.
- decaday is somewhat akin to weeks
- hectoday is somewhat akin to months or quarters
- kiloday is somewhat akin to years
So we need to do some hard thinking and invent some insane tech to adjust planetary mechanics so that we can have decimal relationships between diurnal, lunar, and annual cycles. ;-)
I think we need to accept that calendars and clocks are different. Calendars are based on years and days of planets, planets are different, and they don't divide evenly. Clocks are measured in seconds, the SI seconds are basis of units.
One solution is local seconds and SI seconds. Another is use metric seconds for stopwatches and local minutes for scheduling, and accept there is uneven number of seconds in minute.
The movie Metropolis has a base-10 clock in the background. It's in the scenes with the business owner.
Here’s a different kind of binary clock https://www.hey.earth/posts/binary-clock
Why not 64 minutes and 64 seconds for the hexadecimal in the base 16 clock? The second duration would be closer to the real life one (1.3 seconds) and 64 is closer to 60 too
Im surprised not to find a radians-based clock among these.
Represent the minute component with an imaginary number, so you can tell it apart from the hour... you know, for clarity of course heheheh. I think you'd have to apply the same transform that the 360 degree clock gets in the article, where (1) and (2π) are at the top and adding runs clockwise.
"It's i till 2π... oh yeah sorry, that's what we call 3π/2:-1 around here."
I want to see a binary clock with fourteen hands.
I'm curious, are there any other notable time measurement systems other than the ones listed here?
You used to look at the sun or stars to make an estimate, then we had sundials. For larger time scales, there are tons of archaelogical sites around the world which tracked the solstice, equinox, etc and there's evidence that a few cultures even tracked the full period of the moon's orbit (18.6y).
~250BCE, there was a comedy by Plautus which had in it a poem lamenting the proliferation of sundials, which may or may not have been a parody of some of the attitudes at the time:
Any mention of sundials reminds me of this funny bit I saw elsewhere online:
> “what time is it” you ask, i pull out my 2.7 metric ton granite sundial and immediately crush both of your feet, I loudly announce “it is cloudy”
Swatch Internet Time was almost kind of a thing in the late 90s.
I almost think that one was a bit too early. Having a "universal" way to share time that's not timezone ambiguous would be pretty handy these days.
There's for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_timekeepin...
Yes, people make up silly things for silly reasons all the time.
All core systems should run on 64bit UTC posix Epoch date-time stamps, and abstract that into whatever ISO 8601 format local communities think is effective policy. If finer granularity is required to recreate events in non-real-time analysis, than additional sampling interval data with event ordering indexes become relevant.
The Metrology around how a Second was (re)defined is actually really interesting. Considering it started as an arbitrary interval originally derived from some dudes heartbeat. =3
https://www.nist.gov/atomic-clocks/how-atomic-clocks-work/cl...
if you havent seen the movie project hail mary, at least find the clip with the Eridian Clock from an alien world, really interesting!
One thing that annoys me about am/pm is that the clocks have a 12 at the top and not a 0. So it goes 11:59 am to 12:00 pm and not 11:59 am to 00:00 pm. Even as a kid I was confused as to why 12 belonged to PM but 11 was still AM, but I never thought about it much until recently, decades after I had learned and was using the system. Which I guess is why it is still like this.
I'll never accept a 24 hour dial that puts midnight at the top and noon at the bottom.
Low Noon Saloon
Time is a figment of our imagination
No centons?