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Alternate clock designs and time systems

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Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#91

Post by tdeck »

gecko wrote: post #17

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 kno…

Japan kept up with a system like this until the early Meiji period (1870s). As you can imagine, it led to some interesting mechanical clock designs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#92

Post by perilunar »

fph wrote: post #83
chriswarbo wrote: post #56

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".

Be the change you want to see: start using ‘a third past’ instead of ‘twenty past’ and see what happens.

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#93

Post by myself248 »

andsoitis wrote: post #38

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.

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.

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#94

Post by tdeck »

ivlad wrote: post #63
andsoitis wrote: post #38

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.

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.

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#95

Post by perilunar »

grishka wrote: post #86

Related: different people think of time different ways. I myself have never liked analog clocks because they require a conversion to make sense . Technology Connections made a video about this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NeopkvAP-ag 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.

I find the opposite: a 24 hr analogue clock shows you directly where you are in the day without any thinking or even looking at the numbers; with digital you always need to do a bit of mental arithmetic.

Also, 100,000 seconds is 27 hours, 46 minutes, 40 seconds — you could adopt a 100 kilosecond day and live on Unix time.

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#98

Post by andsoitis »

bluebarbet wrote: post #82
networked wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And not just thirds, decimal doesn't divide into quarters either.

Swatch Beats was a decimal system of 1000 beats a day. You can divide 1000 into 4 x 250 beats.

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#99

Post by chipsa »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #51
vova_hn2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't modern months made up as well? They are not in sync with lunar cycles anymore.

December used to be the tenth month until Augustus and Julian added a couple of months in the middle of the year.

False. The existing months were just renamed after them. Rather, they added new months to the front of the year (January and February).

Re: Alternate clock designs and time systems

#100

Post by trillic »

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…

10 fingers….
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