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vunderba 4 days ago [-]
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.
vunderba 3 hours ago [-]
Thanks toast0 - that's my bad, there was an old dev button that was shifting everything over causing the issue because I always mix up "visibility hidden" with "display none" in CSS. Should be fixed now!
isatty 6 hours ago [-]
The Pi clock is excellent.
3dedb728-3f77 3 days ago [-]
Tip Clock is the best one yet.
ethanpil 4 days ago [-]
very cool thanks for sharing.
ortusdux 8 hours ago [-]
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.
somat 3 hours ago [-]
Weeks are quarter months. Or are supposed to be. Months have been screwed up for a long time now.
I can imagine in prehistorical times keeping track of midrange time by the phase of the moon, if months were kept synced to the moon we would probably name weeks as such, waxing gibbous, waning crescent...
On the subject of keeping months in sync, I can imagine having a fun festival season around the weird 13th month(all months being 29.5 days long) that bisects the new year.
vova_hn2 5 hours ago [-]
Aren't modern months made up as well? They are not in sync with lunar cycles anymore.
throwaway173738 31 minutes ago [-]
December used to be the tenth month until Augustus and Julian added a couple of months in the middle of the year.
BrenBarn 4 hours ago [-]
Well, seconds, minutes, and hours are also arbitrary.
kridsdale1 3 hours ago [-]
Not exactly. They’re based on spherical coordinates for navigation on our Earth Globe.
joshuaheard 18 minutes ago [-]
Incorporate the metric clock into a "metric" calendar:
1 year = 360 days + 5 days of Festivus (6 for leap year)
360 days = 12 months
1 month = 3 weeks
1 week = 10 days
10 days = 6 work days + 4 day weekend
dovys 10 minutes ago [-]
metric is base10. you'd want a to start with 1 day being a single earth revolution and scale it down. 1/10th of a day is a deciday (an hour) and so on. or start with a certain period of cesium decay as a second and scale up
zoratu 6 hours ago [-]
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.
> The Neralie clock has two groups of 3 digits, called the beat & the pulse. A beat contains 1000 pulses, and equivalent to 86.4 seconds. A day is 1000 beats, or a million pulses.
1 hours ago [-]
gecko 7 hours ago [-]
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.
goda90 5 hours ago [-]
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
somat 2 hours ago [-]
I sort of wish we had went with base 12 instead of base 10 for our counting system.
Based on the number of base 12 systems it was a near thing. Don't get me wrong using base 12 units in a base 10 number world is several sorts of cursed. but if we had went with base 12 numbers and cleaned up some of the stupider unit variants into a SI I could see it working well.
And before someone brings up the 10 fingers thing, I don't buy it. One. we have 8 fingers. and Two. for the most part the people who actually needed to count(the shepherds counting their sheep) did it in base 12, thus why it was so common. The method as I understand it is to count on your finger bones using your thumb as a marker, this gets you to a dozen, then use the other hand to keep your twelves place to get to a gross. There is the normal off by one error when counting, but nobody wants base 13 so do the standard thing and ignore it.
But really it is just fun fantasy, There is nothing wrong with base 10 (but the lack of divisors sort of sucks) and the way effectively the whole world regardless of language uses the exact same arabic derived numbering system is pretty neat.
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. ;-)
kps 3 hours ago [-]
The revolutionary French tried decimal timekeeping, but no amount of guillotines could make it stick.
Planetarily, we only need to slow the Earth's rotation by 1.46%, so that the year becomes 360 days (1 day = 1° of revolution) and I can sleep an extra 21 minutes.
ianburrell 6 hours ago [-]
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.
ymolodtsov 4 hours ago [-]
On the Moon or even Mars it's a bit irrelevant because you're not following the Sun anyway.
But let's talk sci-fi: what if there is a habitable colony where the day is 26h30m. What do you actually do?
all2 3 hours ago [-]
In some of the scifi books I've read there's local time and there is 'sol' or 'earth' time, where 'sol' or 'earth' time is the absolute time, and the local time slides by the absolute time.
So... not time 'zones', per se, but time 'frames'.
kps 3 hours ago [-]
I get to sleep in. When do we leave?
But seriously, the ‘second’ becomes a purely technical unit, and you have some other suitable local units.
gwbas1c 6 hours ago [-]
The movie Metropolis has a base-10 clock in the background. It's in the scenes with the business owner.
binaryturtle 47 minutes ago [-]
In the same scene there's also a 24h clock. The movie was way ahead of its time (pun intended). :-)
The 10h clock is also used in the scenes where a worker madly adjusts the hands to keep the moloch running.
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
banach 8 hours ago [-]
Im surprised not to find a radians-based clock among these.
graypegg 6 hours ago [-]
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."
ayaros 8 hours ago [-]
I'm curious, are there any other notable time measurement systems other than the ones listed here?
helterskelter 7 hours ago [-]
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.
pavel_lishin 6 hours ago [-]
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”
vova_hn2 5 hours ago [-]
I find unequal hours [0] interesting.
Basically, day (from sunrise to sunset) and night (sunset to sunrise) are each divided into 12 equal periods. But night hours and day hours are, of course, not equal to each other and changing throughout the year.
You can make a computer implementation by pulling astronomical sunset/sunrise times for a specific geographical location and then it's a simple arithmetic to convert from modern hours to horae temporales
Swatch Internet Time was almost kind of a thing in the late 90s.
ginko 6 hours ago [-]
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.
vova_hn2 5 hours ago [-]
Why not use UTC?
ginko 3 hours ago [-]
Because then you have to add that you mean UTC since the time format looks like local time. With beats it's obvious from the formatting that it's internet time.
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
if you havent seen the movie project hail mary, at least find the clip with the Eridian Clock from an alien world, really interesting!
huslage 7 hours ago [-]
Time is a figment of our imagination
fellowniusmonk 3 hours ago [-]
I want a clock partially tied to gps that purely measures my dead reckoning movement along with a universal lock as near as we can tell.
A causal wristwatch that purely lets me label my self relative increments. I'd allow cesium oscillations on my person as well I guess.
We can all then crdt ourselves together for group interactions or I can just live on my own branch.
alnwlsn 6 hours ago [-]
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.
saltcured 6 hours ago [-]
I'll never accept a 24 hour dial that puts midnight at the top and noon at the bottom.
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
https://dayclocks.com/
I can imagine in prehistorical times keeping track of midrange time by the phase of the moon, if months were kept synced to the moon we would probably name weeks as such, waxing gibbous, waning crescent...
On the subject of keeping months in sync, I can imagine having a fun festival season around the weird 13th month(all months being 29.5 days long) that bisects the new year.
1 year = 360 days + 5 days of Festivus (6 for leap year)
360 days = 12 months
1 month = 3 weeks
1 week = 10 days
10 days = 6 work days + 4 day weekend
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.
> The Neralie clock has two groups of 3 digits, called the beat & the pulse. A beat contains 1000 pulses, and equivalent to 86.4 seconds. A day is 1000 beats, or a million pulses.
Based on the number of base 12 systems it was a near thing. Don't get me wrong using base 12 units in a base 10 number world is several sorts of cursed. but if we had went with base 12 numbers and cleaned up some of the stupider unit variants into a SI I could see it working well.
And before someone brings up the 10 fingers thing, I don't buy it. One. we have 8 fingers. and Two. for the most part the people who actually needed to count(the shepherds counting their sheep) did it in base 12, thus why it was so common. The method as I understand it is to count on your finger bones using your thumb as a marker, this gets you to a dozen, then use the other hand to keep your twelves place to get to a gross. There is the normal off by one error when counting, but nobody wants base 13 so do the standard thing and ignore it.
But really it is just fun fantasy, There is nothing wrong with base 10 (but the lack of divisors sort of sucks) and the way effectively the whole world regardless of language uses the exact same arabic derived numbering system is pretty neat.
They even sold physical watches with this design.
- 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. ;-)
Planetarily, we only need to slow the Earth's rotation by 1.46%, so that the year becomes 360 days (1 day = 1° of revolution) and I can sleep an extra 21 minutes.
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.
But let's talk sci-fi: what if there is a habitable colony where the day is 26h30m. What do you actually do?
So... not time 'zones', per se, but time 'frames'.
But seriously, the ‘second’ becomes a purely technical unit, and you have some other suitable local units.
The 10h clock is also used in the scenes where a worker madly adjusts the hands to keep the moloch running.
"It's i till 2π... oh yeah sorry, that's what we call 3π/2:-1 around here."
~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:
> “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”
Basically, day (from sunrise to sunset) and night (sunset to sunrise) are each divided into 12 equal periods. But night hours and day hours are, of course, not equal to each other and changing throughout the year.
You can make a computer implementation by pulling astronomical sunset/sunrise times for a specific geographical location and then it's a simple arithmetic to convert from modern hours to horae temporales
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_hours
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...
A causal wristwatch that purely lets me label my self relative increments. I'd allow cesium oscillations on my person as well I guess.
We can all then crdt ourselves together for group interactions or I can just live on my own branch.