Alternate clock designs and time systems

https://serialc.github.io/altClocks/

by ethanpil • 16 days ago

205 115 16 days ago

serialc.github.io

vunderba3• 16 days ago

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

ethanpil• 16 days ago

very cool thanks for sharing.

3dedb728-3f77• 15 days ago

Tip Clock is the best one yet.

toast02• 12 days ago

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.

vunderba3• 12 days ago

Thanks toast0 - that's my bad, there was an old dev button that was shifting everything over causing the issue because I always mix up "visibility hidden" with "display none" in CSS. Should be fixed now!

isatty• 12 days ago

The Pi clock is excellent.

appplication• 12 days ago

Falling sand completely blew my mind

JuniperMesos• 12 days ago

This is super-neat!

purple-leafy• 12 days ago

Pi clock is best by far

franze• 12 days ago

My contribution to this topic https://triclock.franzai.com/

vunderba3• 11 days ago

Nice I've seen this one before - it's great! Get Nintendo to do a physical crossover in a "Zelda themed Triforce Clock".

ortusdux• 12 days ago

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/

NickNaraghi• 12 days ago

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.

vova_hn24• 12 days ago

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

BrenBarn• 12 days ago

Well, seconds, minutes, and hours are also arbitrary.

somat3• 12 days ago

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 months being 29.5 days long) that bisects the new year.

al_borland3• 11 days ago

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.

ayaros• 12 days ago

I'm curious, are there any other notable time measurement systems other than the ones listed here?

InsideOutSanta• 12 days ago

Swatch Internet Time was almost kind of a thing in the late 90s.

ginko3• 12 days ago

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.

helterskelter• 12 days ago

You used to look at the sun or stars to make an estimate, then we had sundials. For larger time scales, there are tons of archaelogical sites around the world which tracked the solstice, equinox, etc and there's evidence that a few cultures even tracked the full period of the moon's orbit (18.6y).

~250BCE, there was a comedy by Plautus which had in it a poem lamenting the proliferation of sundials, which may or may not have been a parody of some of the attitudes at the time:

    The gods confound the man who first found out
    How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
    Who in this place set up a sundial,
    To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
    Into small portions! When I was a boy,
    My belly was my sundial -- one surer,
    Truer, and more exact than any of them.
    This dial told me when 'twas proper time
    To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat;
    But nowadays, why even when I have,
    I can't fall to unless the sun gives leave.
    The town's so full of these confounded dials
    The greatest part of the inhabitants,
    Shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the street.

pavel_lishin• 12 days ago

Any mention of sundials reminds me of this funny bit I saw elsewhere online:

“what time is it” you ask, i pull out my 2.7 metric ton granite sundial and immediately crush both of your feet, I loudly announce “it is cloudy”

Joel_Mckay• 12 days ago

Yes, people make up silly things for silly reasons all the time.

All core systems should run on 64bit UTC posix Epoch date-time stamps, and abstract that into whatever ISO 8601 format local communities think is effective policy. If finer granularity is required to recreate events in non-real-time analysis, than additional sampling interval data with event ordering indexes become relevant.

The Metrology around how a Second was (re)defined is actually really interesting. Considering it started as an arbitrary interval originally derived from some dudes heartbeat. =3

https://www.nist.gov/atomic-clocks/how-atomic-clocks-work/cl...

ginko3• 12 days ago

There's for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_timekeepin...

vova_hn24• 12 days ago

I find unequal hours [0] interesting.

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

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_hours

banach• 12 days ago

Im surprised not to find a radians-based clock among these.

graypegg• 12 days ago

Represent the minute component with an imaginary number, so you can tell it apart from the hour... you know, for clarity of course heheheh. I think you'd have to apply the same transform that the 360 degree clock gets in the article, where (1) and (2π) are at the top and adding runs clockwise.

"It's i till 2π... oh yeah sorry, that's what we call 3π/2:-1 around here."

SomeHacker44• 12 days ago

No centons?

huslage• 12 days ago

Time is a figment of our imagination

jrmg• 11 days ago

Our imagination is a figment of time.

pjot• 12 days ago

Here’s a different kind of binary clock https://www.hey.earth/posts/binary-clock

Aardwolf• 12 days ago

Why not 64 minutes and 64 seconds for the hexadecimal in the base 16 clock? The second duration would be closer to the real life one (1.3 seconds) and 64 is closer to 60 too

BorisMelnik• 12 days ago

if you havent seen the movie project hail mary, at least find the clip with the Eridian Clock from an alien world, really interesting!

gecko• 12 days ago

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 know), but, having written such a clock once, I did kind of like that you could get a feel for where you were in the year purely based on how fast the second hand was ticking during which half of the day.

tdeck2• 11 days ago

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

dullcrisp• 12 days ago

I want to see a binary clock with fourteen hands.

saltcured2• 12 days ago

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.

- decaday is somewhat akin to weeks

- hectoday is somewhat akin to months or quarters

- kiloday is somewhat akin to years

So we need to do some hard thinking and invent some insane tech to adjust planetary mechanics so that we can have decimal relationships between diurnal, lunar, and annual cycles. ;-)

kps2• 12 days ago

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.

vova_hn24• 12 days ago

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

chriswarbo2• 11 days ago

I think the day needs time units which are factors of 10x or 1000x to match SI prefixes

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").

kybernetikos• 11 days ago

Just so long as you name the decadays so that the first one is zero indexed: https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ (day is in the top left).

Personally I thought that just using the equivalent of week number (again, starting with the 0th) was fine instead of using months / hectodays, but it seems fair to give nullday, unoday, duoday, triday, quadday, quintday, hexday, heptday, octday and nonday names.

vinc• 11 days ago

I've been using decimal time for years and I really like it. I revived an obsolete unit, "dimi", to go with "centi" so that 1 centiday is 0.01 days, and 1 dimiday is 0.01 centidays.

alnwlsn• 12 days ago

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.

saltcured2• 12 days ago

I'll never accept a 24 hour dial that puts midnight at the top and noon at the bottom.

goda902• 12 days ago

Low Noon Saloon

ianburrell• 12 days ago

I think we need to accept that calendars and clocks are different. Calendars are based on years and days of planets, planets are different, and they don't divide evenly. Clocks are measured in seconds, the SI seconds are basis of units.

One solution is local seconds and SI seconds. Another is use metric seconds for stopwatches and local minutes for scheduling, and accept there is uneven number of seconds in minute.

gwbas1c• 12 days ago

The movie Metropolis has a base-10 clock in the background. It's in the scenes with the business owner.

binaryturtle• 12 days ago

In the same scene there's also a 24h clock. The movie was way ahead of its time (pun intended). :-)

The 10h clock is also used in the scenes where a worker madly adjusts the hands to keep the moloch running.

zoratu2• 12 days ago

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 hours, meaning the top of each hour migrates over the course of each day."

Once you get the hang of it, it feels more intuitive than the traditional analog displays and has become my favorite way to display analog time.

emoII• 11 days ago

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

zoratu2• 10 days ago

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

goda902• 12 days ago

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

somat3• 12 days ago

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 don't buy it. One. we have 8 fingers. and Two. for the most part the people who actually needed to count(the shepherds counting their sheep) did it in base 12, thus why it was so common. The method as I understand it is to count on your finger bones using your thumb as a marker, this gets you to a dozen, then use the other hand to keep your twelves place to get to a gross. There is the normal off by one error when counting, but nobody wants base 13 so do the standard thing and ignore it.

But really it is just fun fantasy, There is nothing wrong with base 10 (but the lack of divisors sort of sucks) and the way effectively the whole world regardless of language uses the exact same arabic derived numbering system is pretty neat.

sheept2• 12 days ago

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

trillic• 11 days ago

10 fingers….

Zecc• 10 days ago

we have 8 fingers

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

yoshuaw• 12 days ago

My favorite base 10 clock is Neralie: http://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/time.html

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.

ymolodtsov2• 12 days ago

On 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?

all2• 12 days ago

In some of the scifi books I've read there's local time and there is 'sol' or 'earth' time, where 'sol' or 'earth' time is the absolute time, and the local time slides by the absolute time.

So... not time 'zones', per se, but time 'frames'.

kps2• 12 days ago

I get to sleep in. When do we leave?

But seriously, the ‘second’ becomes a purely technical unit, and you have some other suitable local units.

perilunar6• 12 days ago

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.

ymolodtsov2• 12 days ago

Yes, but what do you use in life? What's on your watch?

andsoitis2• 12 days ago

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.

ivlad2• 12 days ago

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 wish we had something like that.

tdeck2• 11 days ago

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.

networked• 12 days ago

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.

bluebarbet• 12 days ago

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

myself248• 11 days ago

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.

fellowniusmonk• 12 days ago

I want a clock partially tied to gps that purely measures my dead reckoning movement along with a universal lock as near as we can tell.

A causal wristwatch that purely lets me label my self relative increments. I'd allow cesium oscillations on my person as well I guess.

We can all then crdt ourselves together for group interactions or I can just live on my own branch.

joshuaheard• 12 days ago

Incorporate the metric clock into a "metric" calendar:

1 year = 360 days + 5 days of Festivus (6 for leap year)

360 days = 12 months

1 month = 3 weeks

1 week = 10 days

10 days = 6 work days + 4 day weekend

dovys• 12 days ago

metric is base10. you'd want a to start with 1 day being a single earth revolution and scale it down. 1/10th of a day is a deciday (an hour) and so on. or start with a certain period of cesium decay as a second and scale up

perilunar6• 12 days ago

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

phaserphile• 12 days ago

If we’re being nitpicky, your clock should be horizontally flipped and the hands should be going counterclockwise

NopIdoN• 12 days ago

sure if you're always facing North like a chump

perilunar6• 11 days ago

In the Southern Hemisphere Sun Clock does default to counter-clockwise rotation (because the Sun is to the North and appears to move that way). You can also set direction manually.

Topology1• 12 days ago

How could you forget the dozenal (base 12) clock and the Dozenal Society of America

https://dozenal.org/

plun9• 12 days ago

Maybe a clock should just overlay night/twilight areas over a map, like these:

https://www.geochron.com

http://time.nixon.software

Retr0id• 12 days ago

Related, my unix time clock ("base 256"): https://retr0.id/stuff/2038/

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37532426

DeluluDon• 12 days ago

I enjoy yours a lot better.

dharmatech• 11 days ago

Love it ( • ‿ • )

gblargg• 12 days ago

The binary (base 2) clocks

Shouldn't this just have a single tick at the top labeled 1?

noah7z• 12 days ago

Reminds me of the French revolution

high_byte• 12 days ago

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...

flkiwi• 11 days ago

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-hour clocks.

al_borland3• 11 days ago

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

d3Xt3r• 12 days ago

You can actually buy wrist watches with some of those systems (like binary) here: https://tokyoflash.com/collections/all

walrus01• 12 days ago

Somewhat surprised they're showing the decimal 10 hour clock without mentioning French Revolutionary Time

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

atoav• 12 days ago

Current metric time can be seen here: https://metric-time.com/

grishka• 11 days ago

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.

perilunar6• 11 days ago

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.

tapland• 11 days ago

Fun, but raising the view above a clock face would be cool. How would time perspective be if clocks were ovals? Would that change people's feeling about time? Could it help people fix sleep issues or get more productive

JoeDaDude• 11 days ago

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 half as fast.

cdmckay• 11 days ago

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”.

Eswo• 11 days ago

Really nice

Alternate clock designs and time systems

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