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

No centons?