31–40 of 119 posts
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.
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.
I'm curious, are there any other notable time measurement systems other than the ones listed here?
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
> 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.
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
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.