Seems nice, but beyond 6 points the polygons are hard to distinguish easily. Certainly not something you can quickly glance at in a rush. I'd say sticking to 5 maximum would be best.
I don't think empty for 0 necessarily makes the best sense. You wouldn't easily be able to see where the gaps are at a distance.
Using base 60 and encoding digits doesn't necessarily make the most sense.
For instance hours, it might make sense to use 2x times base 5, probably with no 0 encoded so that there's always something in the hours column.
Or, of course you could do an encoding with a base 4 and a base 6, which is mentally easy to convert back to to a regular 24 hour clock. TBH I'd probably encode that as maybe a square where there's 1-4 sides enclosing a polygon of 0-5 points.
Maybe I'd encode half-minutes with 3 base 5 encodings and some encodings unused, or a base 3, base 4 and a base 5 encoding for minutes.
I would probably also then group them into functional groups that touch each other within the group, so you can easily see the groups, but tell them apart easily.
ralferoo 2 hours ago [-]
Actually, I was going to completely edit this comment with a different suggestion, but decided to leave that to show the thought process.
Thinking more about the hours, I like the circle progressing round, but also maybe you could do it as a box with 1-4 sides present enclosing a polygon of 0-5 points. It's easy to mentally convert that to both 12 and 24 hour clock format.
For the minutes, I'd be tempted to do something like the current hours, done as a fraction of the circle arc with an additional polygon of 0-5 points for the minute. It's relatively easy to eyeball the size of the 5 minute segment, and the polygon just refines that a bit. You could locate the polygon so it touches the arc at the 1/12 of the circle corresponding to the base, which would help with estimating the arc length too.
Either way, I wouldn't make the encoding rely on colours, especially colours that look very similar.
vova_hn2 19 minutes ago [-]
I get that this is an art project that is supposed to look cool and not necessarily be practical, but...
For practical purposes just having 3 "arcs" (hours, minutes, seconds) would be much more readable.
The "arc" idea already solves problems of relying on orientation and knowing that it is supposed to go "clockwise" (it is pretty funny, that the only word that we have to describe rotational direction is related to clocks).
perilunar 8 minutes ago [-]
Before clocks 'clockwise' was called 'sunwise', because that's the direction the sun moves across the sky in the Northern Hemisphere. Anticlockwise was called 'widdershins'.
zokier 3 hours ago [-]
As others have already noted, using decimal notation as a base here is problematic in many ways. I'd suggest seximal (base 6) instead. I'd also shift the digits by one, so have 1-6 instead of 0-5, because having empty ring for 0 is not good. The rings also need to be rotated by 30° relative to each other so that "2"s do not overlap like they do now.
60 in base 6 is 140, so in theory you'd need three rings for both minutes and seconds. But because that highest digit can only be 0 or 1 I think there would be other ways to represent it, so you'd manage with two rings. One option is to reverse the colors (/fill the ring).
raphman 3 hours ago [-]
Nice idea and interesting discussion in the article. However, I think the article might benefit from a few more editing iterations by a human author.
As others already mentioned: the article first sets out to strip away all culture-specific aspects of a clock but then retains the concept of seconds, minutes and hours. This makes some sense, of course, and is implicitly mentioned as "Calibration to a timescale". However, I would have liked a discussion of alternative ways how this could have been achieved and why the 12/24-hour system is used in the end.
Another nitpick:
> 4. A readable mapping. Humans don't read raw oscillations. We read "14:37:09" or "sunset in 42 minutes." Reading time is always a translation layer.
> That fourth point matters more than most people think. A sundial reads apparent solar time, which is local and visibly tied to the Sun. But apparent solar time is not uniform.
This argument - which is used to introduce the next section - makes no sense. A sundial has a readable mapping. (And I would argue that it might be the most non-culturally-defined, useful type of clock for humans).
Next, the author introduces "layers of time" that do not actually seem to be layers but different views (though partially layered).
Then we are given a number of requirements for the implementation - e.g., "no daylight savings time". The clock at the top is adjusted for local daylight savings time, however.
Finally, large parts read as if an LLM has written them (many cases of "Not X, Y", a full screen page explaining that n*2+1 is more than twice as large as n, a discussion of the irrelevant test suite, ...). [^1]
[^1] the few references to other sources have apparently been copied without changing the source markdown to hyperlinks. I think a human author would notice this when checking the rendered article, no?
imsohotness 7 hours ago [-]
Very interesting. Only thing that I see is that it's difficult to tell a difference between an 8 and a 9. Like I could see how it was different on the physical clock as it changes, but if I were to just look at it on its own, it would be hard to tell without literally trying to count the sides. I'd probably just make up some symbol for those. but otherwise very cool!
AndrewDucker 6 hours ago [-]
Grouping the dots would probably help.
mathieudombrock 5 hours ago [-]
Ignoring the orientation constraint, one easy way to tell is that one has a flat line on the bottom and the other doesn't.
pkasting 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Someone 5 hours ago [-]
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.
volemo 7 hours ago [-]
I was also confused why the outer ring must only show zero or one, and then it struck me — twelve hour system.
ray__ 6 hours ago [-]
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.
wongarsu 1 hours ago [-]
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?
sbinnee 5 hours ago [-]
I wonder if this article got inspired by the recent movie Project Hail Mary?
Another thing related to this subject is the frequency in watch making. I own a manual winding watch that I wear everyday. It is certainly an engineering marvel. These watches are ticking by the hair spring and its frequencies are targeted to 2.5Hz to 4Hz (5 times per second, or 8 times per second). I don't know the rationale behind these numbers. I guess that they must have been a combination of engineering constraints and finding a good balance to keep every second accurate.
When you remove every cultural assumption you end up with a sundial, not "geometry".
forinti 20 minutes ago [-]
I'm getting redirected do example.com.
9dev 5 hours ago [-]
Humans are really bad at counting groups larger than five (might be related to the amount of things you can point on at once). So the choice of using ten polygons seems suboptimal to me, especially given the 12 hour system used. I think using only six shapes might work better for an actual clock.
Cool idea nevertheless.
azayrahmad 6 hours ago [-]
I was about to say that if it's still using a 12-hour system, it should use duodecimal numeric system instead of decimal. But then the polygons became much harder to differentiate the larger the number is so I'm not sure. Perhaps make the polygons spiky?
lou1306 1 hours ago [-]
But those are numerals. Made-up numerals, but still.
A friend of mine once prototyped a clock that would make a full walk along a loop in the RGB color space every 24 hours. That's closer to what I would call a "clock with no numerals".
0wis 4 hours ago [-]
What about a continuous scale ?
Choosing a base 60/24 for counting time is cultural and even if it is now the world’s norm, I would argue that an alien would not get this choice
mememememememo 5 hours ago [-]
You just need your normal watch without numerals?
amouat 3 hours ago [-]
That's what I thought, but in the 2nd para:
> No Roman numerals. No Arabic numerals. No left-to-right reading direction. No assumed orientation. Something that works in a mirror, in zero gravity, in any language spoken on Earth or beyond it.
As other comments have pointed out, base 10 is a pretty big assumption though.
vova_hn2 9 minutes ago [-]
Normal watch + "arc" remove the assumptions about orientation and direction.
tamimio 6 hours ago [-]
> The answer turned out to be geometry.
But that’s how Arabic numerals are made, it’s the count of the angles in each one.
I don't think empty for 0 necessarily makes the best sense. You wouldn't easily be able to see where the gaps are at a distance.
Using base 60 and encoding digits doesn't necessarily make the most sense.
For instance hours, it might make sense to use 2x times base 5, probably with no 0 encoded so that there's always something in the hours column.
Or, of course you could do an encoding with a base 4 and a base 6, which is mentally easy to convert back to to a regular 24 hour clock. TBH I'd probably encode that as maybe a square where there's 1-4 sides enclosing a polygon of 0-5 points.
Maybe I'd encode half-minutes with 3 base 5 encodings and some encodings unused, or a base 3, base 4 and a base 5 encoding for minutes.
I would probably also then group them into functional groups that touch each other within the group, so you can easily see the groups, but tell them apart easily.
Thinking more about the hours, I like the circle progressing round, but also maybe you could do it as a box with 1-4 sides present enclosing a polygon of 0-5 points. It's easy to mentally convert that to both 12 and 24 hour clock format.
For the minutes, I'd be tempted to do something like the current hours, done as a fraction of the circle arc with an additional polygon of 0-5 points for the minute. It's relatively easy to eyeball the size of the 5 minute segment, and the polygon just refines that a bit. You could locate the polygon so it touches the arc at the 1/12 of the circle corresponding to the base, which would help with estimating the arc length too.
Either way, I wouldn't make the encoding rely on colours, especially colours that look very similar.
For practical purposes just having 3 "arcs" (hours, minutes, seconds) would be much more readable.
The "arc" idea already solves problems of relying on orientation and knowing that it is supposed to go "clockwise" (it is pretty funny, that the only word that we have to describe rotational direction is related to clocks).
60 in base 6 is 140, so in theory you'd need three rings for both minutes and seconds. But because that highest digit can only be 0 or 1 I think there would be other ways to represent it, so you'd manage with two rings. One option is to reverse the colors (/fill the ring).
As others already mentioned: the article first sets out to strip away all culture-specific aspects of a clock but then retains the concept of seconds, minutes and hours. This makes some sense, of course, and is implicitly mentioned as "Calibration to a timescale". However, I would have liked a discussion of alternative ways how this could have been achieved and why the 12/24-hour system is used in the end.
Another nitpick:
> 4. A readable mapping. Humans don't read raw oscillations. We read "14:37:09" or "sunset in 42 minutes." Reading time is always a translation layer.
> That fourth point matters more than most people think. A sundial reads apparent solar time, which is local and visibly tied to the Sun. But apparent solar time is not uniform.
This argument - which is used to introduce the next section - makes no sense. A sundial has a readable mapping. (And I would argue that it might be the most non-culturally-defined, useful type of clock for humans).
Next, the author introduces "layers of time" that do not actually seem to be layers but different views (though partially layered).
Then we are given a number of requirements for the implementation - e.g., "no daylight savings time". The clock at the top is adjusted for local daylight savings time, however.
Finally, large parts read as if an LLM has written them (many cases of "Not X, Y", a full screen page explaining that n*2+1 is more than twice as large as n, a discussion of the irrelevant test suite, ...). [^1]
[^1] the few references to other sources have apparently been copied without changing the source markdown to hyperlinks. I think a human author would notice this when checking the rendered article, no?
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.
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?
Another thing related to this subject is the frequency in watch making. I own a manual winding watch that I wear everyday. It is certainly an engineering marvel. These watches are ticking by the hair spring and its frequencies are targeted to 2.5Hz to 4Hz (5 times per second, or 8 times per second). I don't know the rationale behind these numbers. I guess that they must have been a combination of engineering constraints and finding a good balance to keep every second accurate.
Cool idea nevertheless.
A friend of mine once prototyped a clock that would make a full walk along a loop in the RGB color space every 24 hours. That's closer to what I would call a "clock with no numerals".
> No Roman numerals. No Arabic numerals. No left-to-right reading direction. No assumed orientation. Something that works in a mirror, in zero gravity, in any language spoken on Earth or beyond it.
As other comments have pointed out, base 10 is a pretty big assumption though.
But that’s how Arabic numerals are made, it’s the count of the angles in each one.
Still, I like the concept of this watch.
http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2015/07/21/arabic-numerals-have...