The “Black Standard” for binary clocks (2007) | Hacker News Reader

The “Black Standard” for binary clocks (2007)

romanblack.com

59 pointstzs25 comments

A web page devoted to the usability of an object whose main reason for existence was its uber-nerd signaling via poor UX. There's something both amazingly abstruse and disarmingly charming about the whole endeavor.

After having had to deal with designer page after designer page that tries to emulate a physical document using JS, this was a breath of fresh air.

Could be worse. Swatch tried "Swatch beats" in 1999.[1] A day is divided into 1000 parts. There are no time zones. The zero meridian is at Swatch HQ in Switzerland. (They could have used UTC, but no. "Beats" are UTC+1.)

Swatch sold watches with this, but not very many of them.[2]

[1] http://www.swatch.com/en_us/internet-time [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Hilariously, PHP supports this on its date/time formatting functions: http://php.net/manual/en/function.idate.php

The Dreamcast game Phantasy Star Online kept time using Swatch beats! I think the idea was to help players around the world synchronize their gaming.

Is that what that "Online Time" in the corner of the menu was? I would see it counting at roughly every minute and a half, but never realized it was Swatch Time!

I remain unconvinced that a bleary single-eyed glimpse of this display while on one's side in the dark wee-hours would inform me of the current time better than " 3:14"

As with everything, it would be about habits.

While you would not get the exact number as quickly, you would soon learn that having a bunch of lights on the right side of the display is "late" given darkness.

But I can already tell it's "late" just by looking out my window

I always wonder why no binary clock works with fractions. So the first minute pixel would show you in which half of the hour you are, the second in which of the both quarters of the hour. The rest 4 would show you which of the fifteen minutes in the quarter it is. That way you can see pretty fast around what time it is.

The top two lights in this system are 30 and 15 minutes. Still I think you could make it more intuitive still by just breaking up the 30 minute light into two smaller ones for each 15 minute increment. Maybe add another for the 45 and 60 case. You could sub divide these almost infinitely, maybe arrange them in a circle to make it easily readable.

In fact, as the lit region would anyways be contiguous, all that's really needed is to show the leading edge of the region which I guess you could do with some kind of needle or rotating pointer, and you'd always know the time past the hour at a glance.

Something similar could be done for the hour with a little thought, I believe. Maybe as a proportion of the day, or you could again increase readability by limiting to proportion of a half day, as I think people can instinctively tell whether it's +/- 12 hours of any given hour.

Not a bad idea; with practice, that representation could provide approximate time at a glance.

However, the on-off indicators shown here seem more precise, if less readable at a glance. With a bit of additional logic, a clock could translate the current time into a set of lights that could form rudimentary digit representations, providing an instantly readable time. Some rough sketches suggest that around 7 oblong lights or "segments" per digit could form readable, unambiguous decimal digits; the leftmost digit of the hour would only need two of those, making a total of 23 "segments", or more if showing seconds. Somewhat more than the binary version, but far more usable.

Using a series of these digit representations, we could display arbitrary numbers. One envisions a device that has a number of tactile buttons that correspond to numbers or mathematical functions, and by actuating these buttons, one may have the device perform operations that are laborious for human minds, but simple when expressed in digital logic.

Outlandish and frankly ridiculous. It would never catch on.

Bi-color LEDs should be used so that you can have a balanced ternary clock. This has the advantage that the time is correctly rounded even when digits are truncated. Also you only need 7 LEDs for a 24-hour clock.

Out of curiosity: is anybody here using a binary clock (or another rather exotic clock design) on a daily basis and is able to read the time as fluent as with a normal clock?

I feel like for the sake of standardization we should start with a more easily constructed shape like an equilateral or reuleaux triangle. Otherwise I like the cut of his jib.

The shape reminds me of Darth Vader's head. Perhaps that was intentional.

No support for a 24 hour clock?

That would only need one extra LED, to show which half of the day.

I would prefer a 16 hour led, to keep things properly binary, instead of silly AM PM stuff.

Why not add a rule that says that only one led may change upon the change of a digit. See e.g. gray codes.

The Berlin Set Theory clock is a similar idea. It still exists, somewhere.

http://www.3quarks.com/en/BerlinClock/

Yeah, but has anyone actually built the shaped-segment one?

This made me laugh. We definitely don't need a standard for this, but at least it's harmlessly useless. :)

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