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Show HN: Nonius Clock

lykahb.com

63 pointslykahb16 comments

I’m a big fan of vernier scales from my machining days, and it wasn’t until I read this site that I learned why: human vision has what’s called “vernier hyperacuity”: the ability to detect slightly misaligned line segments at up to 10x the acuity of regular vision. So that’s why they always felt so precise and easy to read!

Unfortunately I can’t make much sense of the clock presented here. It would help me understand if you had a digital clock next to the vernier clock and both were running at 60x normal speed.

I'll think if the default view can show how it works in a more intuitive way. Perhaps moving faster than the actual time can help.

Actually, the page can already do what you ask. There is a digital clock in the form under the dial. The minutes field is a number input. If you put focus in it and press up or down, you'll both see the digital time and move forward time at a high speed.

Fantastic, I just tried it out and it makes a lot more sense. I should have played around more with the form!

One suggestion: allow the `minutes` input to wrap and increment the hour instead of setting max="59". This allows somebody to hold the up/down arrow and get a sense of how hour changes are represented.

Following this suggestion, I finally understood the two alignments needed to read this clock. I think this is a very neat idea.

Then, I stood back far away from my monitor and adjusted the hour and minute fields, and found that it was very difficult to discern the hour and minute alignments, even after increasing the minute marker thickness. I am afraid this mechanism might not be quite practical for people with poor eyesights.

Or maybe there is another way to show off the alignment better? Perhaps if the rings were lenticular and could magnify the aligned lines?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_printing

Updated the example to highlight the markers for the current time. If the clock looks the same, try reloading without cache with Ctrl-Shift-R or similar.

I checked this out at 11:58. The 11 was highlighted while the clock displayed "it's almost 12". Highlighting the 12 would have been more helpful.

One-handed clocks were once a thing. Benj. Franklin made one that rotated once every 4 hours. You probably know the time to within 4 hours, and so one hand was enough.

Anyone remember "Swatch Internet Time"?[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Yes if I remember correctly that was not only a linear scale, but with no timezone intended so that you could say: Meeting at 300 and it would be the same for both parties.

This is a cool way of tho king about the problem.

Nevertheless I wouldn’t switch.* The value of a clock with arms is that you can read it at a glance, while a text (”digital”) clock requires parsing — much slower, especially when you want to compute a relationship (how much time before I have to leave?).

* I like that the author wasn’t actually trying to convince anyone to switch. It’s just a nice exploration.

This would make a good wall clock rather than watch. You could make it say 1m across so super easy to figure out where it lines up. It would be for art rather than practical use.

Minutes are ok, but cahotic hours are not easy to read.

Can't you place the hours in the conventional order inside (except 12 would be where usually 11 is)? Imagine the moving ring has two sets of marks: 59 to 61 outer ones that align with the minute marks on the external ring, and 11 to 13 inner ones that align with the hour marks on the core disc...

There are several presets and controls to create other layouts. You can set 11 or 13 hour markers yourself and see how it looks.

The controls on the page are simple, with only one number and a few toggles. But those are enough to create all valid layouts.

When first exploring the idea, I had low-level controls to set angular size for each set of marks. All layouts other than what the current controls allow would have issues - several alignments that make time ambiguous or minute marker not aligning at 12 after an hour passes.

The preset where the ring rotates once in a week has both hours and minutes in order. But because of the extremely slow rotation, the minute indicators take less than a half of the circumference.

Not very well explained.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you know of a better way to explain, you'd be more than welcome to share it! But please don't just post a putdown. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

My ability to articulate myself in English varies greatly from hour to hour so I could only write up a simple explanation at the time.

Now I would say that the article lacks images explaining the concept. It particular I had trouble with understanding how the lines related to the minutes. The way they either line up or don't.

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