alt Hacker NewsThe Clock
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Meant to be free of cultural preconceptions, but it uses 24-hour division.
There might be a natural, Schelling division to use -- the same ratio year:day could be applied, day:minute. Thus, the day can be broken up into 365.25 "Schelling-minutes" (corresponds to 3.94 SI minutes), and further into 365.25^2 "Schelling-seconds" (corresponds to 0.65 SI seconds). I think it's interesting that we get something not too distant from our own minutes and seconds if we do this.
Of course, for practical daily usage, lacking anything similar to an hour would be a problem. A "half-division" might be in order; that is, √365.25, or roughly 19.11 divisions of the day. Sure, that's close enough to SI hours... but it's probably worth remembering that there's a reason we don't like to use fractional divisions. :P
After staring at it some more, I'd suggest perhaps switching places between the day of month and month of year circles. That way you would have consistently smaller unit of time=smaller circle.
Very cool. Kind of reminds me a bit of my solar system clock though I did mine using ThreeJS.
https://clocks.specr.net/solar-system
Senko you might also be interested in this one - it doesn't go into the same depth as yours but it's visually similar.
Couldn't you just stack some continuous progress bars? The article is allowing use of hours, minutes and seconds, so just have a 1 minute bar, a 1 hour bar, a 1 day bar, etc. No numbers needed, and if you differentiate between "past" and "future", say by filling in the progress bar, direction is unambiguous
The obvious thing for me is to have the orbit around sun, second, etc - all the things you decided to run clockwise - as fixed points, at the top, and let the tracks themselves run anti clockwise. Then everything would move the same way, same direction, and a "now" that's a the same spot always.
As it is now, "now" is at different places at the different circles.,.,.
An experiment inspired by the "Gonon: building a clock with no numeral" recently shared on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532338)
The end result is: https://senko.net/clock/
Tech trivia: implemented as a reusable web component, powered by CSS animation, JS is just used to set up the initial state.
I think in the end the takeaway from both your and the Gonon - project is that timekeeping only makes sense if it is linked to commonly shared, clearly perceptible phenomena that occur regularly, because otherwise you either have no shared concept to communicate time or you always land at even more arbitrary conventions or social constructs.
This is awesome! I kinda wanna make one that adapts even more to your location: lengthen and shorten the light part of the circle according to your local sunrise and sunset times! Unfortunately that kinda sorta breaks the neatness of displaying multiple timezones, since it won't line up nicely with different latitudes.
Instead of anchoring the sun and thus noon at the top it would be interesting to have the sun move around the clock face as the year progresses. Noon then moves around as the year progresses. ”Up” could be said to point towards the center of the galaxy instead.
I've been working on something a little similar. It's also a clock with no numbers - but much nearer to a conventional analog clock.
Main changes are greater information density and minor modifications to the movement mechanism. Site has themed examples and a tutorial.
Cool project.
I had thought that months aren't quite a human construct, they correspond roughly to lunar cycles. Weeks were a way to carve the month up into the four lunar phases per cycle.
Seconds, minutes, hours, etc. are, as you say, all sexagesimal math bias.
> Note the day/night line is a bit tilted – it's not exactly perpendicular to the sun. This is because, as I write this, Croatia uses DST (Daylight Saving Time) – we intentionally shift time to have more daylight in the evening. While this shortens daylight in the morning, most people are asleep at that time so won't mind it.
Erm, WTF? DST does not change when dawn and sunset occur relative to solar noon. So what exactly is this showing?
Senko, note that dark mode hides the two secondary location labels.
This is a charming clock :)
This article, being in turn inspired by another project, has a much more fun to read writing style. The "Gonon: building a clock with no numeral" is full of AI slop and that is very distracting.
so, kudos to the author at Senko.net!
> Earth rotates around its axis – one rotation is called a day
A [solar] day is the time between noons, which is slightly more than one rotation on our axis. A single rotation is a [sidereal day] — the Wikipedia article has a good animation.
(The ellipse part of our orbit means the length of a solar day isn't consistent, as the rotation required to get back to pointing at the sun isn't the same throughout the year, which is what leads to mean solar time. The the article doesn't want to do ellipse orbits, which is fine… for a moment… but…)
> When the tick comes directly under the sun, that's (solar) noon, and one full rotation is one day.
But this is sort of where if you do you MST (if you have a fixed day length, you are), then when the tick is directly under the sun it won't necessarily be noon. The difference (between MST & solar) is like 17 minutes at its peak. The aliens will be looking at this going "it's uh… close? But off."
I still think "solar time" is a cultural assumption, though I do think there's a high likelihood of aliens sharing that assumption. But one might also imagine a species on a tidally locked world (maybe having grown up in the twilight region) with no concept of "days".
[sidereal day]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time