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.
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.
I’m not retired, but I may end up getting one of these. I tend to like clocks that give a general sense of the time without getting hung up on the minutes of seconds.
One of my favorite watches for weekends and vacation is a single-hand 24-hour watch.
The solar watch face on the Apple Watch would be a great implementation of the 24-hour dial, except it doesn’t let you turn off the more precise time in the center.
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
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 the day needs time units which are factors of 10x or 1000x to match SI prefixes
The nice thing about metric/SI prefixes is that they're generic multipliers, which can be used with any units we like. If you want to use them with day as the unit, you can just do that; nothing extra is required, and the meaning is clear (though unfamiliar!).
There is an alternative approach though: we could use prefixes for sexagesimal multiples (base 60). This has precedence, since we have a system of binary prefixes like "kibi" and "mibi".
For divisions, we can use the standard progression of "minute", "second", "third", "fourth", etc. to say there are 60 minutehours in an hour (or more generally, 60 minutefoo in a foo); that there are 3600 secondhours in an hour; and so on. Abbreviating "minutehour" to "minute" and "secondhour" to "second" when we're talking informally about time would be similar to abbreviating "kilogram" to "kilo" when talking informally about mass.
I'm not aware of any standard names for multiples (rather than divisions). My proposal[1] is “prota” for 60x, “defter” for 60x60x, “trito” for 60x60x60x, and so on; as Greek alternatives to the Latin "minuta", "secundus", "tertia", etc. (which "minute", "second", "third", etc. are derived from[2]). This Greek/Latin combo would match the multiply/divide naming of decimal, e.g. kilo (x1000, Greek) vs milli (/1000, Latin), hecto (x100, Greek) vs centi (/100, Latin), etc.
That would make an hour equal to protaminute, or one deftersecond.
[2] AFAIK the naming comes from "pars minuta" meaning "small part", with further divisions being "second small part", "third small part" and hence giving us "seconds", "thirds", etc. For consistency, we should really use "firsts" instead of minutes (or maybe "primes" from the Latin "prima").
Personally I thought that just using the equivalent of week number (again, starting with the 0th) was fine instead of using months / hectodays, but it seems fair to give nullday, unoday, duoday, triday, quadday, quintday, hexday, heptday, octday and nonday names.
I've been using decimal time for years and I really like it. I revived an obsolete unit, "dimi", to go with "centi" so that 1 centiday is 0.01 days, and 1 dimiday is 0.01 centidays.
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 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.
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.
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
> 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.
I feel like it was sooooo close to catching on, but basing it on CET instead of UTC made it a bit too clearly tongue-in-cheek. That also torpedoed its main user-base, which I always thought was sysadmins.
56 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 79.8 ms ] threadEach 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/
One of my favorite watches for weekends and vacation is a single-hand 24-hour watch.
https://www.slow-watches.com
The solar watch face on the Apple Watch would be a great implementation of the 24-hour dial, except it doesn’t let you turn off the more precise time in the center.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock
- 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. ;-)
The nice thing about metric/SI prefixes is that they're generic multipliers, which can be used with any units we like. If you want to use them with day as the unit, you can just do that; nothing extra is required, and the meaning is clear (though unfamiliar!).
There is an alternative approach though: we could use prefixes for sexagesimal multiples (base 60). This has precedence, since we have a system of binary prefixes like "kibi" and "mibi".
For divisions, we can use the standard progression of "minute", "second", "third", "fourth", etc. to say there are 60 minutehours in an hour (or more generally, 60 minutefoo in a foo); that there are 3600 secondhours in an hour; and so on. Abbreviating "minutehour" to "minute" and "secondhour" to "second" when we're talking informally about time would be similar to abbreviating "kilogram" to "kilo" when talking informally about mass.
I'm not aware of any standard names for multiples (rather than divisions). My proposal[1] is “prota” for 60x, “defter” for 60x60x, “trito” for 60x60x60x, and so on; as Greek alternatives to the Latin "minuta", "secundus", "tertia", etc. (which "minute", "second", "third", etc. are derived from[2]). This Greek/Latin combo would match the multiply/divide naming of decimal, e.g. kilo (x1000, Greek) vs milli (/1000, Latin), hecto (x100, Greek) vs centi (/100, Latin), etc.
That would make an hour equal to protaminute, or one deftersecond.
[1] http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/units/prefix_factors.html
[2] AFAIK the naming comes from "pars minuta" meaning "small part", with further divisions being "second small part", "third small part" and hence giving us "seconds", "thirds", etc. For consistency, we should really use "firsts" instead of minutes (or maybe "primes" from the Latin "prima").
Personally I thought that just using the equivalent of week number (again, starting with the 0th) was fine instead of using months / hectodays, but it seems fair to give nullday, unoday, duoday, triday, quadday, quintday, hexday, heptday, octday and nonday names.
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.
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.
But let's talk sci-fi: what if there is a habitable colony where the day is 26h30m. What do you actually do?
They even sold physical watches with this design.
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.
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
https://dozenal.org/
https://www.geochron.com
http://time.nixon.software