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Alternate clock designs and time systems

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Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#111

Post by cdmckay »

JoeDaDude wrote: post #105

I had a notion to make a 24 hour clock with just one hand. There is actually a watch company selling such a device and their tagline is that the watch "will change your conception of time". I'd like to see if that is true. Making a 24-hour clock looks to be relatively straight forward. Most clocks rely on pulses from a piezo electric crystal. Divide the pulse frequency by two with a D-flip flop and the clock goes hal…

I assume you’re talking about Slow Watches? I actually have one and while I love the simplicity of it, it turns out the minute hand is actually the more useful hand. Trying to figure out if you have 10 or 20 minutes until your next appointment on a Slow Watch is extremely painful, so much so that I only wear it if I don’t think I’ll need to know the time behind if it’s “roughly between 1 and 2 pm”.

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#113

Post by al_borland »

ortusdux wrote: post #5

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/

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.

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.

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#114

Post by al_borland »

vova_hn2 wrote: post #57
kps wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The revolutionary French tried decimal timekeeping, but no amount of guillotines could make it stick. Planetarily, we only need to slow the Earth's rotation by 1.46%, so that the year becomes 360 days (1 day = 1° of revolution) and I can sleep an extra 21 minutes.

Or you can just ignore the Earth's rotation completely and sleep whenever you want: https://xkcd.com/320/ https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/320:_28-Hour_Day

If it wasn’t for having to work 9-5, I would seriously do this. It’s what I tend to do naturally when I when several days off.

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#115

Post by al_borland »

flkiwi wrote: post #102
high_byte wrote: post #71

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...

Constant battle in my (American) house. I set my digital devices to 24-hour time years and years ago, because I ran into situations where there could be genuine confusion about which "4:32" someone might be referring to (global company, irregular work hours, etc.), but my family insists on calling it "military time", which is so very strange because they're well travelled and have been plenty of places that use 24-ho…

“Military time” is the common name for it in the US. It’s the only way to ever hear people refer to it.

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#116

Post by tashbarg »

trillic wrote: post #100
somat wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

10 fingers….

… means I can show the numbers from 0 to 10 with my fingers. But base 10 means I only have digits from 0 to 9.

… would 10 fingers not be a better argument for base 11?

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#117

Post by ivlad »

tdeck wrote: post #94
ivlad wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like a poorly thought-out marketing project. For example, how to deal with the Earth rotation irregularity and leap seconds? One beat is way too long to correct with, so the correction has to be in centibeats, fractions of beat, inconvenient. Why would this in CET and not in UTC? Aligning start of the day with the existing customs seems beneficial. But the idea of the universal decimal time is a nice one. I…

> It looks like a poorly thought-out marketing project. For example, how to deal with the Earth rotation irregularity and leap seconds? Most people don't care about those things though. How does a Casio watch deal with leap seconds? How does a Rolex deal with them? The barrier to adoption is going to be social and not some obscure technical objection by the IAU.

Rolex and Casio deal with simply when IERS introduces one.

Beats is a new time measurement system, not just a new clock. So if the world (IERS) would stops it, they would have to have new rules for dealing with leap “micro-days” or “mili-beats”.

And second is the fundamental SI constant, quite a bit of stuff is derived from it.

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#118

Post by Zecc »

somat wrote: post #48
goda90 wrote: post #32

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

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…

> we have 8 fingers

In English. I'm Portuguese, so I have twenty fingers.

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#119

Post by zoratu »

emoII wrote: post #106
zoratu wrote: post #26

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…

Damn that’s pretty awesome, very intuitive for me that the angular relation between hour/minute hand is always preserved

Exactly! I’m glad you liked it, too. It changed my whole way of thinking about analog timepieces.
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