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Comment by pkasting | Hacker News Reader

Crowing over omitting Arabic numerals in the name of avoiding any kind of cultural influence or bias seems silly when everything is still going to be expressed in decimal.

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And in hours, minutes and seconds. Yes, those are near universal (I guess there may still be a few tribes in the Amazon or Indonesia that don’t use them), but still are cultural.

Also, having each hour have the same duration is cultural. The Romans, for example, at some time, used a clock where “the period of the natural day from sunrise to sunset was divided into twelve hours” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_timekeeping). That means hours were shorter in winter than in summer.

<quote>The answer turned out to be geometry.</quote> The answer turned out to be creating a cool piece of digital art that's essentially unusable as a timepiece. Don't get me wrong, it's a cool art project, but it's not a practical timepiece.

If you want to see another cool artpiece clock, there's the one in the Berlin Europa Centre, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTUiWYLXD9g.

I was also confused why the outer ring must only show zero or one, and then it struck me — twelve hour system.

The author wanted it to retain some practical value, hence the discussion of the four “layers” of time—departing from the 12-hour system completely, even if there is a better way to represent time outside of it, would make the clock difficult to use.

I struggle to see how this clock would be less practical to use with a 24 hour system

Or if we want to keep the numbers small to make them easier to read in this clock's numerals, why not a 6 hour system?

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