Different Clocks | Hacker News Reader

Different Clocks

ianto-cannon.github.io

243 pointspppone44 comments

Placed my cursor at the top of the hour peak on the 'Peaks' clock. Few moments later, it shifted slightly to the left. Had a bit of existential dread as I saw time slipping away.

Nice clocks though.

If you would like a little more existential dread https://ttl.hex.nz/

Oh, I clicked the link. My life is almost 50% complete.

However, the expected lifetimes are obviously too low. It expects me to end up at approximately age 80, but that is an underestimation. I dont know if the lifetimes that are used are just outdated, or if they lack expected mortality improvements.

Yeah I figured that 80 was a pretty good approximation because the average life expectancy in the US is 77. It surprisingly doesn't increase as much I would have expected as you age so I didn't account for that effect.

77 is the average life expectancy for all people. If one enters the website at 40 their life expectancy is much higher, since they are already 40

Yea. It's kind of the same error, in a way, as people who assume that there were no old people in the middle ages. The overwhelming majority of the increase in expected lifespan between then and now comes from drastic decreases in the infant and child mortality rates. While current medicine is only really making slow, incremental progress on letting the oldest people live longer, even if this was the bulk of the advancement you wouldn't see the kind of movement on overall life expectancy you'd get out of reducing those, and that's just on the pure statistical basis of how the metric is constructed. But on top of that, I think it's nearly impossible to understand just how many infants used to be stillborn, and how many diseases we essentially eliminated. The death of a child from an illness used to be a fairly common tragedy, now it is a rare one.

It's just a little internet toy that probably cashes out to be a slightly more impactful version of "memento mori", but you could add a little backend complexity without collecting any more demographic information and get a more accurate life expectancy given only one's current age from extant actuarial tables. If you wanted to be extra cheeky, you could have it adjust on a regional basis based on IP address too

Well, average life expectancy in the middle ages was in the low 30s or high 20s, but the child death factor does not bring the typical old person age to the 80s that we're used to from today, but into the late 50s, early 60s. That was an old person.

As for making the predicion more accurate, it's a rabbit hole you'd rather not enter. Whether you smoke or not or whether you live in a big city or not or your social class all have much higher impact than whether your IP is from Spain or Poland or Florida. Including people with the time and means to browse such website are a very select group. Not even speaking of VPNs hiding your actual geolocation. Whatever you do beyond "let's shoot at 80 for approximate time" may be making things worse.

It is higher, but not that much higher. It's not like 90 or 100.

For the U.S. you have https://www.ssa.gov/oact/population/longevity.html for this.

Yeah someone who is 40, comes out at roughly 82 which I thought was close enough. Also it is funny to enter famous old people's birthdays and see "110% complete".

Can you make a variant for relative passing time?

You probably barely remember anything up to around 10, and then each doubling of age adds one logarithmical unit

So 10 is 1, 20 is 2, 40 is 3 and 80 is 4 (or maybe 0, 1 and 2?)

20 is already half of life passed by -_-

I think that's a bit too simplistic, unless someone can testify that the 20 years 20 t0 40 feel as long as 40 years, 40 to 80.

Here's an interesting graph and discussion on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1e18fmz/pe...

Still looking if anyone has a study of (life/long-term) time perception w/ graph(s).

The binary clock reminds me of this real-life one near the Zoo in Berlin

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mengenlehreuhr

The train station in St. Gallen (Switzerland) has one too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Binary_clock_Swiss_rail...

The binary clock reminds me of a similar bar you sometimes saw on videotapes being played back on TV broadcasts. They didn't look like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_interval_timecode , since these are stripes, not blocks. Maybe specific to PAL?

Looks like base-5, but very cool!

yes, base 5, exactly

but lots of dots, so my mind couldn't help but wander ':D

I like the combined blob clock a lot! I plan to make a codepen of it, with just hours, minutes and seconds, to see what that's like.

Here's what I cooked up, in the spirit of the original I invite folks to modify it to their liking. Currently it has an hours shape, an hours-and-minutes shape, and an hours-and-minutes-and-seconds shape.

https://codepen.io/rezmason/pen/empBWgY?editors=1111

Beyond some basic style variation, I think there's a lot of room for experimentation with shapes and their centers of rotation.

When you're done, I'd love to see it as well, and I'm sure others would - yours was my exact thought when I got to that part!

Right? There's something oddly satisfying about watching The Time Blob.

The once-per-millennium marks are captivating. They feel almost within our understanding, but not quite.

Like those insane gear ratio videos on YouTube... You know the final gear is turning, logically, but the fact that the Sun will eat the Earth long before the gear completes a single turn lends a strange perspective.

I saw a neat one where they put the last gear in a block of cement while still spinning the first one quite fast.

Is the idea that it never moves, or that the cement will degrade by the time it does?

I think the artist put it as "and then the last gear turns so slowly it doesn't really matter, so I cast it in concrete."

Assuming we're talking about Arthur Gansons "Machine with concrete"[0] of course. I quite like how a lot of his work seems to have a punchline to it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH-tvxEg

It moves slowly enough that the wheel will approximately never turn enough to generate significant torque.

Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment

"Each droplet forms and falls over a period of about a decade."

"it is expected there is enough pitch in the funnel to allow it to continue for at least another hundred years"

I guess with enough pitch you an make a millennium-scale "water" (liquid) clock?

clock of the Long Now!

very cool. reminds me of an old iPhone clock app called "hms" that displayed a rectangular prism, and each dimension (x, y, z) corresponded with the hour, minute and second, so the shape would grow over time before resetting one or more dimensions. it got delisted years ago for some reason but i used to love it as a "nightstand mode" clock.

https://hms.gysin-vanetti.com/

Nice! @qq66 did you make this spiralling clock? https://www.shadertoy.com/view/flGGDy It's trippy, and I love how the spiral arms rearrange every few seconds.

Ahh that’s it! I would love for that to be a StandBy face for iOS.

You're missing the Towers of Hanoi, my personal favorite clock. https://saej.in/post/hanoi/

The Hanoi clock represents time by mapping disk positions to binary bits - each legal tower state uniquely encodes one moment, with the smallest disk moving every minute creating the beautiful recursive pattern where larger disks move exponentially less frequently.

Keep your AI slop off HN

AI coding tools are quite fun for making different clock concepts.

Here's a one-shot recreation of "Against the Run" (https://listart.mit.edu/art-artists/against-run-2019): https://g.co/gemini/share/c1dcfbd9cf9a

Love the binary and wave clocks, instantly got me thinking about how it could work as a subtle graphical element in a landing page footer or something like that.

Nice, very innovative. It makes me think of weird stuff

how about a pac-man running around the dial consuming your seconds as you watch? wooka wooka wooka wooka...

Had an idea for physical clock once where there is a chain of 60 links rotating around a central motor that moved the chain so slowly that the top link was showing the correct time within a twelve minute range - five links per hour for a twelve hour clock.

Everyone should redesign the representation of time once in their life :)

There's a lot of Pac-Man watches... most of them not very exciting, but this one [1] might be what you're looking for.

[1] https://timexjapan.com/products/pac-man-x-timex-camper

If you're into interesting clocks, here one that is obviously not digital but fun to watch (pun intended)

Corpus Clock - Wikipedia https://share.google/aAjMb15aeaVvHLJFa

24 variations of a clock (text-only):

http://24times.gysin-vanetti.com

The “cuckoo” one is interactive.

awesome post and thread clocks for me were an entry point to font creation and broadcast design. they make a great platform for design and coding experimentation

I love the combined blob!

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