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

Pi clock is best by far

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.

Falling sand completely blew my mind

The Pi clock is excellent.

Tip Clock is the best one yet.

This is super-neat!

very cool thanks for sharing.

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.

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

Love it ( • ‿ • )

I enjoy yours a lot better.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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").

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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...

Our imagination is a figment of time.

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