I could not catch that the circle meant the sun. I did catch seconds, minutes, day, month, and I deduced TK meant Tokyo and SF meant San Francisco and could not deduce the city ZG represents. So, I don' think you can actually be free of baggage.
Some minor things bugging me:
- The lines at the bottom don't align! Really annoying, I spent a lot of time trying to understand it meant something or not.
- Dark mode shows only 1 city. I could not understand what TK meant until I saw SF.
Some advice:
- Change the pictoric representation of the sun for something a bit more "sunny". Some flames feel like something not cultural (since there literally is solar activity at the surface), so aliens could get that it is the sun.
- In the intro you say there is a puzzle, but you don't say what the puzzle is. I thought it might be some interactive thing. It was only until I gave up I start reading the explanation and got that the puzzle is to understand how the clock works, given it has no cultural baggage. Then I went back to try to understand it. Maybe add a little explanation somewhere saying the intention.
I had thought that months aren't quite a human construct, they correspond roughly to lunar cycles. Weeks were a way to carve the month up into the four lunar phases per cycle.
Seconds, minutes, hours, etc. are, as you say, all sexagesimal math bias.
> Earth rotates around its axis – one rotation is called a day
A [solar] day is the time between noons, which is slightly more than one rotation on our axis. A single rotation is a [sidereal day] — the Wikipedia article has a good animation.
(The ellipse part of our orbit means the length of a solar day isn't consistent, as the rotation required to get back to pointing at the sun isn't the same throughout the year, which is what leads to mean solar time. The the article doesn't want to do ellipse orbits, which is fine… for a moment… but…)
> When the tick comes directly under the sun, that's (solar) noon, and one full rotation is one day.
But this is sort of where if you do you MST (if you have a fixed day length, you are), then when the tick is directly under the sun it won't necessarily be noon. The difference (between MST & solar) is like 17 minutes at its peak. The aliens will be looking at this going "it's uh… close? But off."
I still think "solar time" is a cultural assumption, though I do think there's a high likelihood of aliens sharing that assumption. But one might also imagine a species on a tidally locked world (maybe having grown up in the twilight region) with no concept of "days".
This is awesome! I kinda wanna make one that adapts even more to your location: lengthen and shorten the light part of the circle according to your local sunrise and sunset times! Unfortunately that kinda sorta breaks the neatness of displaying multiple timezones, since it won't line up nicely with different latitudes.
Instead of anchoring the sun and thus noon at the top it would be interesting to have the sun move around the clock face as the year progresses. Noon then moves around as the year progresses.
”Up” could be said to point towards the center of the galaxy instead.
After staring at it some more, I'd suggest perhaps switching places between the day of month and month of year circles. That way you would have consistently smaller unit of time=smaller circle.
> Note the day/night line is a bit tilted – it's not exactly perpendicular to the sun. This is because, as I write this, Croatia uses DST (Daylight Saving Time) – we intentionally shift time to have more daylight in the evening. While this shortens daylight in the morning, most people are asleep at that time so won't mind it.
Erm, WTF? DST does not change when dawn and sunset occur relative to solar noon. So what exactly is this showing?
This article, being in turn inspired by another project, has a much more fun to read writing style.
The "Gonon: building a clock with no numeral" is full of AI slop and that is very distracting.
I think in the end the takeaway from both your and the Gonon - project is that timekeeping only makes sense if it is linked to commonly shared, clearly perceptible phenomena that occur regularly, because otherwise you either have no shared concept to communicate time or you always land at even more arbitrary conventions or social constructs.
Turns out if you want to have a useful clock it needs to use the social/cultural constructs. This was not at all obvious to me before I started with the project, but now, especially after the discussions here and elsewhere, it looks unavoidable.
Or to quote one of my favorite books: "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so."
The obvious thing for me is to have the orbit around sun, second, etc - all the things you decided to run clockwise - as fixed points, at the top, and let the tracks themselves run anti clockwise. Then everything would move the same way, same direction, and a "now" that's a the same spot always.
As it is now, "now" is at different places at the different circles.,.,.
Couldn't you just stack some continuous progress bars? The article is allowing use of hours, minutes and seconds, so just have a 1 minute bar, a 1 hour bar, a 1 day bar, etc. No numbers needed, and if you differentiate between "past" and "future", say by filling in the progress bar, direction is unambiguous
Meant to be free of cultural preconceptions, but it uses 24-hour division.
There might be a natural, Schelling division to use -- the same ratio year:day could be applied, day:minute. Thus, the day can be broken up into 365.25 "Schelling-minutes" (corresponds to 3.94 SI minutes), and further into 365.25^2 "Schelling-seconds" (corresponds to 0.65 SI seconds). I think it's interesting that we get something not too distant from our own minutes and seconds if we do this.
Of course, for practical daily usage, lacking anything similar to an hour would be a problem. A "half-division" might be in order; that is, √365.25, or roughly 19.11 divisions of the day. Sure, that's close enough to SI hours... but it's probably worth remembering that there's a reason we don't like to use fractional divisions. :P
Math is pretty culturally neutral though, and 24 has a high number of divisors, which makes it convenient. I'd argue that hours and minutes being easy to divide up into equal blocks is more important and natural than having the same ratio as year:day.
If you turn off the numbers you get a pretty decent and (i think anyway) culturally assumption-free clock. It tracks the sun and moon, shows the seasons (in #calendar). The direction it turns matches the way the Sun moves in your hemisphere.
More generally, I think 24-hour analogue clocks are already pretty culturally neutral — I don't understand why we ended up with 12-hour clocks being the dominant form.
25 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 67.7 ms ] threadThe end result is: https://senko.net/clock/
Tech trivia: implemented as a reusable web component, powered by CSS animation, JS is just used to set up the initial state.
Some feedback:
I could not catch that the circle meant the sun. I did catch seconds, minutes, day, month, and I deduced TK meant Tokyo and SF meant San Francisco and could not deduce the city ZG represents. So, I don' think you can actually be free of baggage. Some minor things bugging me: - The lines at the bottom don't align! Really annoying, I spent a lot of time trying to understand it meant something or not. - Dark mode shows only 1 city. I could not understand what TK meant until I saw SF.
Some advice:
- Change the pictoric representation of the sun for something a bit more "sunny". Some flames feel like something not cultural (since there literally is solar activity at the surface), so aliens could get that it is the sun. - In the intro you say there is a puzzle, but you don't say what the puzzle is. I thought it might be some interactive thing. It was only until I gave up I start reading the explanation and got that the puzzle is to understand how the clock works, given it has no cultural baggage. Then I went back to try to understand it. Maybe add a little explanation somewhere saying the intention.
I had thought that months aren't quite a human construct, they correspond roughly to lunar cycles. Weeks were a way to carve the month up into the four lunar phases per cycle.
Seconds, minutes, hours, etc. are, as you say, all sexagesimal math bias.
A [solar] day is the time between noons, which is slightly more than one rotation on our axis. A single rotation is a [sidereal day] — the Wikipedia article has a good animation.
(The ellipse part of our orbit means the length of a solar day isn't consistent, as the rotation required to get back to pointing at the sun isn't the same throughout the year, which is what leads to mean solar time. The the article doesn't want to do ellipse orbits, which is fine… for a moment… but…)
> When the tick comes directly under the sun, that's (solar) noon, and one full rotation is one day.
But this is sort of where if you do you MST (if you have a fixed day length, you are), then when the tick is directly under the sun it won't necessarily be noon. The difference (between MST & solar) is like 17 minutes at its peak. The aliens will be looking at this going "it's uh… close? But off."
I still think "solar time" is a cultural assumption, though I do think there's a high likelihood of aliens sharing that assumption. But one might also imagine a species on a tidally locked world (maybe having grown up in the twilight region) with no concept of "days".
[sidereal day]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time
This is a charming clock :)
https://clocks.specr.net/solar-system
Senko you might also be interested in this one - it doesn't go into the same depth as yours but it's visually similar.
https://www.clockfaceonline.co.uk/clocks/circles/
Erm, WTF? DST does not change when dawn and sunset occur relative to solar noon. So what exactly is this showing?
Main changes are greater information density and minor modifications to the movement mechanism. Site has themed examples and a tutorial.
https://rimasu.github.io/orbitalclock/
so, kudos to the author at Senko.net!
Turns out if you want to have a useful clock it needs to use the social/cultural constructs. This was not at all obvious to me before I started with the project, but now, especially after the discussions here and elsewhere, it looks unavoidable.
Or to quote one of my favorite books: "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so."
As it is now, "now" is at different places at the different circles.,.,.
There might be a natural, Schelling division to use -- the same ratio year:day could be applied, day:minute. Thus, the day can be broken up into 365.25 "Schelling-minutes" (corresponds to 3.94 SI minutes), and further into 365.25^2 "Schelling-seconds" (corresponds to 0.65 SI seconds). I think it's interesting that we get something not too distant from our own minutes and seconds if we do this.
Of course, for practical daily usage, lacking anything similar to an hour would be a problem. A "half-division" might be in order; that is, √365.25, or roughly 19.11 divisions of the day. Sure, that's close enough to SI hours... but it's probably worth remembering that there's a reason we don't like to use fractional divisions. :P
If you turn off the numbers you get a pretty decent and (i think anyway) culturally assumption-free clock. It tracks the sun and moon, shows the seasons (in #calendar). The direction it turns matches the way the Sun moves in your hemisphere.
More generally, I think 24-hour analogue clocks are already pretty culturally neutral — I don't understand why we ended up with 12-hour clocks being the dominant form.
https://www.ouruboroi.com/