24 hours is better imo than am-pm.
I made an app widget to measure time in percentages instead of 24 hours
https://www.reddit.com/r/Time/comments/1ujj9py/comment/ov6qo...
Alternate clock designs and time systems
71–80 of 119 posts
Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
I'd've thought modern weeks have biblical origins rather than being based on quarter moon phases.
Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems
#73One 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
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 d…
Personally I'm a bigger fan of base 6[0], which have many of the benefits of base 12, but the digits of simple fractions like 1/5 and 1/7 render more nicely in base 6 than base 12.
[0]: https://www.seximal.net/ is one advocate
Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
A lot of Hindu calendars do this. They use śukla and kr̥ṣṇa pakṣa (waxing and waning phases respectively). Days are numbered 0-14 with 0 referring to the full/new moon. Problem is each regional calendar is slightly different. And days might repeat.
Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems
#75On 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?
I think that once a large number of people are living off-Earth, we should just use Unix time to coordinate and for all technical work. Planets can use a local solar time and calendar. Habitats in free space could just move to Unix time and use a 100 kilosecond day.
Yes, but what do you use in life? What's on your watch?
Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems
#76Nice. 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
Pi clock is best by far
Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems
#77You can actually buy wrist watches with some of those systems (like binary) here: https://tokyoflash.com/collections/all
Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems
#78Somewhat surprised they're showing the decimal 10 hour clock without mentioning French Revolutionary Time
Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems
#79Current metric time can be seen here: https://metric-time.com/
Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems
#80There's also the ill-fated Swatch Internet Time, which was a decimal system that divided the day into 1,000 beats and no time zones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time They even sold physical watches with this design.
Decimal time isn't great because it doesn't divide into thirds. I like Swatch Internet Time as a retro novelty, but I consider New Earth Time the more practical take on the same idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Earth_Time. It's based on UTC and splits the day into 360 degrees.