More from outside knowledge than from the digital readout itself. There's no way to tell from a digital readout there are 60 minutes in an hour or seconds in a minute, or that there's a 12-hour period that means something (and no hints to guess.) There's no evidence that the time represented on a digital readout changes at a constant rate or is sequential and doesn't jump around or go faster sometimes and slower others. Everything on an analog clockface is just there.
If you found an alien digital clock written in alien language, it would take you forever to figure out anything about it; it would take a while to figure out anything useful even if you knew it was a clock. If you found an alien analog clock, it would be immediately obvious what it was and what it was doing, and you could use it to help you understand the alien digital clock.
edit: also, when your alien digital watch did the equivalent of jumping from 12 to 1, it would throw everything off, especially if there were a different symbol for 1 second or 1 minute that there was for 1 hour. An analog clock visually explains the transition between 12 and 1.
I think all this stuff is obvious, I'm confused about the argument being made that it's not. There's just less information on a digital readout. I feel like I'm trying to explain that movies have more information than movie scripts, but Kolmogorov would say to compress them both and compare the filesizes.
For whatever reason I get a faster and more accurate sense of what time it is from a digital watch. I am not alone in this. Therefor the assertion that an analog readout is more instantly meaningful for everyone is wrong.
When I am at the train station I can have an immediate idea of what time is it just looking at the analog clocks around (they are digital displays mimicking analog clocks) even if I can't read the numbers from afar.
Digital clocks are harder for me because I have to parse the information: is that a 6, 8, 9, or zero?
It doesn't make much difference in the end, bit having to actually read the number forces me to be precise and I can't rely on intuition.
The more I age, the more my vision deteriorate, the more I find analog clocks easier to read.
I'm not saying digital works better for everyone. I'm not even saying digital works better for most. It could easily be the case that I'm in the 1% of weirdos who have an easier time with digital. My only point is that it isn't universal either way. Adams said digital watches are silly because everyone gets a better sense of time from analog. It is a funny joke. But he is wrong about the facts.
Maybe I'm confused about the assertion. The sentence "A picture with a bird in it" is more quickly recognized by very fluent English speakers than an actual picture of a bird. But it conveys far less information to a far narrower audience.
It is faster to visually parse two hands of an analog watch than it is to parse four digits of a digital watch. But the price you pay for this is accuracy, and if you wanted to parse the analog watch face as accurately as digital, it'd take you more time than just reading the digits.
I disagree with this. This seems to assume that an alien analog clock would look/function more like our analog clocks than an alien digital clock would look/function like our digital clocks. I'm not sure there's any reason to make that assumption.
analog clocks are modeled around the idea that the time is circular because that's the natural cycle of day and night (same concept of the meridian, plus dark hours, when there is no shadow).
I imagine that any alien civilization that lives on a planet that rotates around its star and has a light/dark cycle would measure time in a similar fashion.
This is not supported by evidence. For one, it would make a 24 hour dial make more sense than a 12 hour one. For two, many early non-discrete clocks took the form of parallax observation or liquid flows and were not inherently circular.
https://muslimheritage.com/the-clocks-of-al-muradi/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_timekeeping_devices
"it cooks in half of that"
but they are circular inherently, when the top half falls to the bottom, we flip them and the cycle restarts.
analog clocks started as 24 hours historically [1]. the division of days in 24 equal segments was well know since ancient history, we still use base 60 to measure time because that's what babylonians used when they invented time keeping and started counting days in a year (360 of them, in base 60)
there are bizarre incantations of everything throughout history
Almuradi clock is still a *solar* clock hence it only works when the light rays hit it, so like a meridian, it can't show the full 24 hours rotation. in fact it's an half circle, because the earth rotates around the sun, the only approximation you can get is circular, of course there are meridians that do not display hours on an arc of circumference, but that's simply a design choice.
But at that time the fact that a day was of 24 hours was a long well known fact.
the point is that if your planet rotates around a star, the first thing beings living there would notice are the repeating patterns generated by light rays. Which are most probably shadows creating something like a circle (or an oval)
No, Almuradi's works are powered by water and moved by gears. At least one used light to illuminate particular numbers, but the optical aperture was moved by gears.
>Which are most probably shadows creating something like a circle (or an oval)
During the course of the day the shadows make a half circle at best. Over the course of a year the end point at the same time of day makes an uneven figure eight, known as the analemma. At no point is there a circle or an ellipse.
Passive solar timekeeping has its limitations and the next phase of development was the water clock.
These simple water clocks, which were of the outflow type, were stone vessels with sloping sides that allowed water to drip at a nearly constant rate from a small hole near the bottom. There were twelve separate columns with consistently spaced markings on the inside to measure the passage of "hours" as the water level reached them. The columns were for each of the twelve months to allow for the variations of the seasonal hours. These clocks were used by priests to determine the time at night so that the temple rites and sacrifices could be performed at the correct hour. [0]
If anything the circular three hand clock is a pragmatic method of indictors based on the method of power control. Looking at the Antikytheria mechanism for example, the back side shows a deep understanding of how the different cycles of time measures interact.
Going back to the original topic of "an alien digital clock written in alien language," to the degree that we could comprehend on what basis they kept time a time communication rooted in a sidereal period cannot be a given since the aliens might come from a tidally locked planet or one like Mercury which "rotates on its axis exactly three times for every two revolutions it makes around the Sun."[2] Even if they just used the Unix epoch time would look linear and relative; not circular.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_clock
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
Combine that with the fact that their time system might not be based on a fairly regular rotation of the planet. Perhaps they value some other less regular measurement more. Or perhaps their planet does not have regular rotation. How might a time system evolve and be portrayed in those cases? How can you be sure that an analog display would be easier to interpret than a digital one?
Similar to how a 12-hour analogue clock does not necessarily imply that we actually have 24 hours in our days, an alien analog clock could potentially be vastly different than the same alien's digital clock.
That said, every single event on my calendar, and every single communication about time I have with other people is expressed as a written (or spoken) number, not as a position on a clock face. That makes digital clocks far more useful for me personally; it saves me the extra step of having to mentally convert to digital time before being able to reason about how the time on my watch relates to other events or significant times throughout my day.
To those who prefer analogue watches I have to ask; how does that process work for you? Do you find it easier to mentally convert written times to a visualization of a position on a watch, and then do whatever mental reasoning you need to do in that space? Or are you doing the same thing I would be doing if I had an analog watch; converting it to digital and then reasoning from there? If the latter, why does skipping that extra conversion step by using a digital watch feel worse from your perspective?
At this point in my life I am definitely much more used to reading a digital clock so I don’t think you can attribute this to familiarity.
> If the latter, why does skipping that extra conversion step by using a digital watch feel worse from your perspective?
I'm quite capable of doing it either way, but my preference is to do the single required conversion to "analogue" so that repeated comparisons are visual and do not require repeated arithmetic. I also find it easier to remember a time visually, whereas single-digit errors in remembering a digital time can result in a greater error.
But it is a reasonable low resolution drawing of it, with some squiggly lines for reference, and arrows pointing in the approximate direction of the light source.
I think this is Adams' point: digital watches pretend to give you information but only give you data. That's a reason to consider them silly: they make you work (translating their data to something with meaning) while pretending to do the work for you.
Note: analogue watches also require interpretation. But they support coarse- as well as fine-grained interpretation: is it before or after a whole hour? Closer to half than to whole? Or to a quarter? 10 past or to? Etc.
Granted, a digital clock won't tell you there are 60 minutes in an hour, but teaching analog time involves much more than that. For starters, you have to explain that for minutes, the numbers are in increments of 5.
Then ask them if there is more or less time (since midnight) until lunch.
I find the translation I have to do from 15:39 to 3:39 pm to have much more friction than reading a digital or analog clock in the first place, both of which I can do with equal ease.
The problem of course is that I'm not used to 24-hour times, so I don't equate 15 with any particular time of day. Similar to how I have to translate C to F to make sense of C temperatures.
Now, a 24-hour analog clock with an embedded digital temperature read-out in C, that would really hurt.
Apparently 24-hour analog clocks are thing:
https://www.amazon.com/Navaris-Hour-Wall-Clock-Non-Ticking/d...
Ouch.
So there’s a good chance he just picked 15:39 as a familiar train time.
Likewise, I perceive 1539 as an alternative symbol for 1536, as I like to keep my clocks three minutes fast.
"it's 10 till", or "5 minutes before the hour" are statements that capture the human concept of time much better than 15:52