81–90 of 119 posts
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
There'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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, seconds, minutes, and hours are also arbitrary.
They're not tied to anything physical; but they are a mathematical sweet spot. 24ths and 60ths are useful fractions because 24 and 60 are highly composite numbers, i.e. they have many divisors. 60 is a particularly good choice, since it's a "superior highly composite" number; and so is 12, if we consider an AM or PM period, rather than a full rotation. Such divisibility was important before the invention/discovery of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The tricky part about months (and weeks by inheritance) is that while the moon phases are a nice easy mid-range timekeeping device(something between days and years) they don't line up with days or years very well. So as your society settles on having 4 important religious observations per month and starts keeping better time. It changes to having that observation every 7 days and delinking the month from the moon so it does not drift around the year so much.
I don't really know how the BCE biblical world did the week keeping. but our modern interpretation was mostly solidified by incorporating approximations of that into the other big influence on Europeans society, the Romans. Who used a month and half month system so it fit fairly well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not tied to anything physical; but they are a mathematical sweet spot. 24ths and 60ths are useful fractions because 24 and 60 are highly composite numbers, i.e. they have many divisors. 60 is a particularly good choice, since it's a "superior highly composite" number; and so is 12, if we consider an AM or PM period, rather than a full rotation. Such divisibility was important before the invention/discovery of…
Weird that we chose these numbers because they have many divisors, and yet no one ever says "it's a third past 10", only "half past" and "a quarter past".
And another thing: I considered trying 28-hour days because my sleeping schedule always drifts. A 28-hour clock that's in sync with me sleeping would be nice if I ever do try that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Swatch Internet Time was almost kind of a thing in the late 90s.
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.
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. - decada…
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").
24-hour analogue clocks should have midnight at the bottom and noon at the top. Why? Because that's the way the sun moves. See https://sunclock.net
If we’re being nitpicky, your clock should be horizontally flipped and the hands should be going counterclockwise
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?