Alternate Clock Designs and Time Systems

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/

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

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.

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

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. ;-)

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.

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

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

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.

I want to see a binary clock with fourteen hands.

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

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

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

Time is a figment of our imagination

https://dayclocks.com/

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

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.

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. ;-)

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

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

I want to see a binary clock with fourteen hands.

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

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

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.

Tip Clock is the best one yet.

very cool thanks for sharing.

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

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

Time is a figment of our imagination

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."

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.

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

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...

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.

very cool thanks for sharing.

Tip Clock is the best one yet.

~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.

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

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.

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

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...

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.

A day has 24 hours in it. That's 1,440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. If you wonder why Americans don't understand the need for using the metric system then ask yourself why you use this inconsistent time measurement system.

What if we could design a better time system that is easier to read and convert between units? Would it still have the same number of hours, minutes or seconds in a day?

The clocks below explore some alternative clock designs and time systems.

The standard clock

Those who enjoy the metric system find computations regarding time inconsistent. The breakdown of a day into 24 hours containing each 60 minutes and each minute with 60 seconds, while steeped in history, seems arbitrary. The design however still looks great, classic and *ahem* timeless.

The 24 hour clock

I dislike AM / PM. I dislike that the hour hand must go around the face twice in one day. I don't need amazing accuracy with the hour hand. The minute hand gives me that. I would much rather own a wrist watch like this.

The decimal (base 10) clock

Let's slice up the day into 10 hours and give each hour 100 minutes and each minute 100 seconds. Look to your left and read the time (really do it!). It's a simplistic pleasure. It's currently 8:62 as I write this. The hour numbers also act as minute and second indicators. This is significantly easier to read. Try and do any kind of calculations and it's a simple matter of shifting the decimal in the correct direction and number of places. The observer will notice that the seconds are shorter/faster - each lasting 86.4% of a classic second.

The binary (base 2) clocks

This one is for those geeks out there. It's not extremely effective since each binary 'second' lasts three hours. It lacks accuracy. These clocks only update upon loading and for their 'seconds'. You'll have to come back within three hours to see a hand move.

The hexadecimal (base 16) clock

This is for those who enjoy hexadecimal characters. It uses 16 'hours' with 128 'minutes' and 128 'seconds'. Each hex 'second' lasts 1/3 a classic second. Again the labels should be 1-F

The 36(0) degree clock

Someone reached out asking for a clock with this break-down. The code doesn't handle all the labels too well, and I hadn't implemented a system where ticks can appear independent of labels. This time system uses 36 hours (a nod to the 360 degrees on a compass), 60 minutes, and 60 seconds. As there are 36 hours here, rather than 24, minutes and seconds last 2/3 the duration of 'normal'.

It's interesting to revisit this old code (2012?) and see how inflexible I designed it.

I hope you enjoyed this little exploration of time systems. If you are keen to suggest an additional time system please let me know as it's quite easy to add. If you hack around the code (if that's your thing) you can probably make it display your custom format yourself.

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