Alternate clock designs and time systems
serialc.github.io
serialc.github.io
Each one presents a different type of visualization (from sand, where each falling grain represents a second to a 3D-modeled set of water wheels)
I can imagine in prehistorical times keeping track of midrange time by the phase of the moon, if months were kept synced to the moon we would probably name weeks as such, waxing gibbous, waning crescent...
On the subject of keeping months in sync, I can imagine having a fun festival season around the weird 13th month(all months being 29.5 days long) that bisects the new year.
The tricky part about months (and weeks by inheritance) is that while the moon phases are a nice easy mid-range timekeeping device(something between days and years) they don't line up with days or years very well. So as your society settles on having 4 important religious observations per month and starts keeping better time. It changes to having that observation every 7 days and delinking the month from the moon so it does not drift around the year so much.
I don't really know how the BCE biblical world did the week keeping. but our modern interpretation was mostly solidified by incorporating approximations of that into the other big influence on Europeans society, the Romans. Who used a month and half month system so it fit fairly well.
24ths and 60ths are useful fractions because 24 and 60 are highly composite numbers, i.e. they have many divisors. 60 is a particularly good choice, since it's a "superior highly composite" number; and so is 12, if we consider an AM or PM period, rather than a full rotation.
Such divisibility was important before the invention/discovery of general fractions (i.e. the rational numbers). Babylonian arithmetic used something akin to base 60 floating-point, which could represent halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, and their sums and products (but not e.g. sevenths, or reciprocals of higher primes; in the same way base 10 floating-point can't represent a third).
Minute, meaning "small", describes the shifting of the radix point in such a base 60 floating-point system. Second, as in the ordinal 2nd, describes a further shift of radix point; and likewise for thirds, fourths, etc. for ever-smaller increments.
One of my favorite watches for weekends and vacation is a single-hand 24-hour watch.
The solar watch face on the Apple Watch would be a great implementation of the 24-hour dial, except it doesn’t let you turn off the more precise time in the center.
Once you get the hang of it, it feels more intuitive than the traditional analog displays and has become my favorite way to display analog time.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37532426
Based on the number of base 12 systems it was a near thing. Don't get me wrong using base 12 units in a base 10 number world is several sorts of cursed. but if we had went with base 12 numbers and cleaned up some of the stupider unit variants into a SI I could see it working well.
And before someone brings up the 10 fingers thing, I don't buy it. One. we have 8 fingers. and Two. for the most part the people who actually needed to count(the shepherds counting their sheep) did it in base 12, thus why it was so common. The method as I understand it is to count on your finger bones using your thumb as a marker, this gets you to a dozen, then use the other hand to keep your twelves place to get to a gross. There is the normal off by one error when counting, but nobody wants base 13 so do the standard thing and ignore it.
But really it is just fun fantasy, There is nothing wrong with base 10 (but the lack of divisors sort of sucks) and the way effectively the whole world regardless of language uses the exact same arabic derived numbering system is pretty neat.
[0]: https://www.seximal.net/ is one advocate
In English. I'm Portuguese, so I have twenty fingers.
… would 10 fingers not be a better argument for base 11?
> The Neralie clock has two groups of 3 digits, called the beat & the pulse. A beat contains 1000 pulses, and equivalent to 86.4 seconds. A day is 1000 beats, or a million pulses.
They even sold physical watches with this design.
But the idea of the universal decimal time is a nice one. I wish we had something like that.
Most people don't care about those things though. How does a Casio watch deal with leap seconds? How does a Rolex deal with them? The barrier to adoption is going to be social and not some obscure technical objection by the IAU.
Beats is a new time measurement system, not just a new clock. So if the world (IERS) would stops it, they would have to have new rules for dealing with leap “micro-days” or “mili-beats”.
And second is the fundamental SI constant, quite a bit of stuff is derived from it.
- deciday (2.4 hrs)
- centiday (~0.24 hrs, ~14.4 minutes)
- milliday (~1.44 minutes, ~86.4 seconds)
- microday (~86.4 milliseconds)
But, to really get into the decimal clock, we want to also extend this into culturally useful multi-day units.
- decaday is somewhat akin to weeks
- hectoday is somewhat akin to months or quarters
- kiloday is somewhat akin to years
So we need to do some hard thinking and invent some insane tech to adjust planetary mechanics so that we can have decimal relationships between diurnal, lunar, and annual cycles. ;-)
Planetarily, we only need to slow the Earth's rotation by 1.46%, so that the year becomes 360 days (1 day = 1° of revolution) and I can sleep an extra 21 minutes.
https://xkcd.com/320/ https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/320:_28-Hour_Day
The nice thing about metric/SI prefixes is that they're generic multipliers, which can be used with any units we like. If you want to use them with day as the unit, you can just do that; nothing extra is required, and the meaning is clear (though unfamiliar!).
There is an alternative approach though: we could use prefixes for sexagesimal multiples (base 60). This has precedence, since we have a system of binary prefixes like "kibi" and "mibi".
For divisions, we can use the standard progression of "minute", "second", "third", "fourth", etc. to say there are 60 minutehours in an hour (or more generally, 60 minutefoo in a foo); that there are 3600 secondhours in an hour; and so on. Abbreviating "minutehour" to "minute" and "secondhour" to "second" when we're talking informally about time would be similar to abbreviating "kilogram" to "kilo" when talking informally about mass.
I'm not aware of any standard names for multiples (rather than divisions). My proposal[1] is “prota” for 60x, “defter” for 60x60x, “trito” for 60x60x60x, and so on; as Greek alternatives to the Latin "minuta", "secundus", "tertia", etc. (which "minute", "second", "third", etc. are derived from[2]). This Greek/Latin combo would match the multiply/divide naming of decimal, e.g. kilo (x1000, Greek) vs milli (/1000, Latin), hecto (x100, Greek) vs centi (/100, Latin), etc.
That would make an hour equal to protaminute, or one deftersecond.
[1] http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/units/prefix_factors.html
[2] AFAIK the naming comes from "pars minuta" meaning "small part", with further divisions being "second small part", "third small part" and hence giving us "seconds", "thirds", etc. For consistency, we should really use "firsts" instead of minutes (or maybe "primes" from the Latin "prima").
Personally I thought that just using the equivalent of week number (again, starting with the 0th) was fine instead of using months / hectodays, but it seems fair to give nullday, unoday, duoday, triday, quadday, quintday, hexday, heptday, octday and nonday names.
And another thing: I considered trying 28-hour days because my sleeping schedule always drifts. A 28-hour clock that's in sync with me sleeping would be nice if I ever do try that.
Also, 100,000 seconds is 27 hours, 46 minutes, 40 seconds — you could adopt a 100 kilosecond day and live on Unix time.
Making a 24-hour clock looks to be relatively straight forward. Most clocks rely on pulses from a piezo electric crystal. Divide the pulse frequency by two with a D-flip flop and the clock goes half as fast.
One solution is local seconds and SI seconds. Another is use metric seconds for stopwatches and local minutes for scheduling, and accept there is uneven number of seconds in minute.
A causal wristwatch that purely lets me label my self relative increments. I'd allow cesium oscillations on my person as well I guess.
We can all then crdt ourselves together for group interactions or I can just live on my own branch.
I made an app widget to measure time in percentages instead of 24 hours
https://www.reddit.com/r/Time/comments/1ujj9py/comment/ov6qo...
The 10h clock is also used in the scenes where a worker madly adjusts the hands to keep the moloch running.
But let's talk sci-fi: what if there is a habitable colony where the day is 26h30m. What do you actually do?
So... not time 'zones', per se, but time 'frames'.
Planets can use a local solar time and calendar. Habitats in free space could just move to Unix time and use a 100 kilosecond day.
But seriously, the ‘second’ becomes a purely technical unit, and you have some other suitable local units.
"It's i till 2π... oh yeah sorry, that's what we call 3π/2:-1 around here."
1 year = 360 days + 5 days of Festivus (6 for leap year)
360 days = 12 months
1 month = 3 weeks
1 week = 10 days
10 days = 6 work days + 4 day weekend
~250BCE, there was a comedy by Plautus which had in it a poem lamenting the proliferation of sundials, which may or may not have been a parody of some of the attitudes at the time:
The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sundial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions! When I was a boy,
My belly was my sundial -- one surer,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when 'twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat;
But nowadays, why even when I have,
I can't fall to unless the sun gives leave.
The town's so full of these confounded dials
The greatest part of the inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the street.> “what time is it” you ask, i pull out my 2.7 metric ton granite sundial and immediately crush both of your feet, I loudly announce “it is cloudy”
All core systems should run on 64bit UTC posix Epoch date-time stamps, and abstract that into whatever ISO 8601 format local communities think is effective policy. If finer granularity is required to recreate events in non-real-time analysis, than additional sampling interval data with event ordering indexes become relevant.
The Metrology around how a Second was (re)defined is actually really interesting. Considering it started as an arbitrary interval originally derived from some dudes heartbeat. =3
https://www.nist.gov/atomic-clocks/how-atomic-clocks-work/cl...
Basically, day (from sunrise to sunset) and night (sunset to sunrise) are each divided into 12 equal periods. But night hours and day hours are, of course, not equal to each other and changing throughout the year.
You can make a computer implementation by pulling astronomical sunset/sunrise times for a specific geographical location and then it's a simple arithmetic to convert from modern hours to horae temporales
Shouldn't this just have a single tick at the top labeled 1?