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.
ortusdux 1 hours 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.
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)
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.
3dedb728-3f77 3 days ago [-]
Tip Clock is the best one yet.
ethanpil 4 days ago [-]
very cool thanks for sharing.
Aardwolf 4 minutes 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 1 minutes 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!
I'm curious, are there any other notable time measurement systems other than the ones listed here?
helterskelter 17 minutes 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.
Joel_Mckay 2 minutes 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://dayclocks.com/
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
~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:
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...