"Fixing" xkcd 1340 | Hacker News Reader

"Fixing" xkcd 1340

gist.github.com

132 pointshausen28 comments

In theory, won't the time in this and the original occur more than once in different timezones? (Thus I should open up an issue to add the timezone)

The "every second" version, while cheeky, probably is wrong during the fall when the end of DST causes an hour to be repeated every year in many jurisdictions.

(I'm not even sure UTC would save you here...)

Yeah, I should have printed a UNIX timestamp instead... ;)

A better workaround would be to write "Under our system that time and date may only happen at most once again!" in Cueball's speech bubble.

How does UTC not save you? There are no DLS transitions in UTC, and leap seconds are added (61 seconds in a minute).

leap seconds may also be negative, although none has been up until this point.

Either way you don't get repeated UTC timestamps. A negative leap seconds means you go from 23:59:58 to 00:00:00 without passing 23:59:59, and a positive one means you go from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 to 00:00:00.

UTC would save you w.r.t. timezones, but it still has leap seconds and the like to adjust for nonuniformities in the earth’s rotation (around itself and the sun).

However, these jurisdictions change timezones in autumn and spring, so specifying the current timezone should work just as well as specifying UTC. 01:30:20 CEST is not repeated, nor is 01:30:20 CET.

I may have weaseled out of the problem by using "may" instead of "will" in the new version at https://github.com/hausen/xkcd-clock .

Timekeeping enthusiasts: please clone, fork, and/or submit a pull request. You can now easily change the text to suit your needs.

Leap seconds don't cause timestamps to repeat, though. They're done by adding an extra second to a minute, so that instead of going between 0-59 seconds, that one minute goes from 0-60.

Can someone "fix" XKCD 1335 ("Now") so that the current time is at the 12 o'clock position?

http://xkcd.com/now/

That would be very difficult without the server-side code.

Maybe someone can think of a clever way though.

Here is a way to get any time you want from it: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/now/20h30m.png

There's a few Android widgets you can get that'll do it

Since the image is actually rebuilt server-side to reflect the current rotation of the earth, it's simple to just rotate it with CSS based on the current time:

http://jsfiddle.net/4taWt/1/

You inspired me :) http://meandavejustice.github.io/xkcd-now/

Heya! You inspired me! http://rodesp.github.io/xkcd-now-clock/

Only one problem - both of these (rather cool) implementations show the incorrect time.

Mine should show the correct time (it uses your system time), what makes you say it doesn't?

As of 15:36 UTC, the xkcd version has noon pointing at the S in "Canadian Maritimes", while yours has noon pointing at the U in "US East Coast". My browser timezone is currently GMT, and system time is accurate.

Well, I'm not sure how the XKCD version does it but if you draw a straight line from the middle of the map to your location and continue to the hour on mine it should match your system time pretty closely. The XKCD version doesn't create such a match for my time (even with daylight saving factored in).

Please let me know if that's not true for you on mine though. I'd like to fix it if it's wrong.

Your version is about two hours fast for the UK. XKCD version is about spot on. Meandave's version is six hours slow.

Hmm, yes I see... my version is about spot on for the US (Indiana) while the XKCD version is about an hour and a half behind. I'm not sure what to do about it other than re-draw the map but thanks for pointing that out!

Any suggestions? For now I just rotated the map so that the time will be based on the Greenwich Meridian instead of my local meridian.

six hours slow? I'll have to fix that up, I'm basically just matching MIDNIGHT to America/Los_Angeles timezone and rotating based on the offset. I'll have to rethink that it looks like, thanks for pointing that out.

The hover text (8000 years) should also update continuously.

Thanks for the XKCD font, didn't know it. Will put this to good use :)

I tried to strip it down to its minimal form:

http://jsfiddle.net/Lej6m/95/

Why does this trigger a GitHub authorization request?

It didn't for me.

This just begs for some hardware with an e-ink display for a tabletop xkcd...

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