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His argument about digital watches did not age well. My kids have known how to understand a digital clock since they were toddlers, but even now, in elementary
by jawns 4y ago
His argument about digital watches did not age well.
My kids have known how to understand a digital clock since they were toddlers, but even now, in elementary school, they require entire lesson units in school on telling time from a clock face.
Beyond that, he argues that pie charts tell us more about the relationship between things than tables of numbers, and a clock face is "the world's most perfect pie chart." But a clock face is not really a pie chart. It does not indicate distribution among categories, as a pie chart does. The arms are not delimiters; they merely indicate position.
- _trackno5 4y agoFunny how we got downgraded into "smart watches" that barely hold a charge for a day and are good at everything other than telling the bloody time. Having an always on display is an actual feature nowadays lol
- llimos 4y agoWhy else would God have given you two wrists?
- _trackno5 4y agoI don't know what you're trying to get at with that comment.
- kayodelycaon 4y agoThe idea is you can wear a longer lasting watch on the other wrist.
- tomc1985 4y agoSo that people can look as ridiculous as possible, it would seem
- nradov 4y agoThere are smart watches that will go for weeks on a charge. They automatically set time based on the cell phone network and GPS so are always accurate to within 1 second. https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/702797 https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/702797
- ravi-delia 4y agoWe could have had Pebble, never forget what they took from you
- skykooler 4y agoI still use my Pebble Time; I can't understand why you'd buy a watch with a battery that lasts less than a week. (I've had people tell me that you just put an apple watch on the charger overnight. Then why does it have a sleep tracker app that requires the watch to be on your wrist?)
- nradov 4y agoGarmin has several smart watch models with sleep tracking and batteries that last for over a week.
- Adraghast 4y agoMine is extremely good at telling me the time. I just look at my wrist and there it is. Maybe you're using it incorrectly?
- scarface74 4y agoPeople said the same about smart phones compared to Nokia candy bar phones with battery lives that lasted a week. In exchange for charging my cellular watch every night, I get a device on my wrist that can make phone calls, stream music, store 16GB worth of music, has GPS for when I run, monitors my heart rate, gives me notifications and let’s me send messages. If I went into coma in 2009 and the most advanced piece of technology that I knew at the time was the iPhone 3GS or the then current laptops and woke up in 2022, I would be much more impressed with the Apple Watch than any other piece of technology.
- gramie 4y agoI would never wear a watch that had to be charged every day. My Amazfit Bip (stupid name, I know) is good for about 6 weeks if I don't use the GPS and heart monitor, and 2 weeks if I do.
- rkangel 4y ago> Funny how we got downgraded into "smart watches" We didn't get downgraded. The "dumb watch" product category is still alive and kicking. Whether it's the more moderate priced quartz segment, or the less moderately priced mechanical segment it's not even slightly dying. What we've gained is choice. And I say this as someone who would never buy a smartwatch because it would need charging. I have a perfectly decent Citizen analog watch that has worked perfectly every day since I bought it five years ago (not even needing a battery change because it's solar powered). I occasionally consider splashing out on a mechanical watch, but even a 3 year servicing interval would be tedious.
- joppy 4y agoAre you sure this is not just the amount of exposure to each type of clock? On the other hand, I’ve noticed that children who understand how to read only digital clocks are quite capable of answering what the time is (just read the numbers right off), but have trouble telling how many hours there are from 10am to 3pm.
- NeoTar 4y agoGreat argument for using the 24h clock ;-)
- capitainenemo 4y agoEver seen the 24h analog clock? :) https://m8y.org/images/24.svg https://m8y.org/images/24.svg
- Izkata 4y agoI have the widget on my phone, it uses local sunrise/sunset to adjust the nighttime shaded area: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.staticfree.android.twentyfourhour https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.staticfre...
- lucumo 4y agoI've been staying at that click for a solid ten minutes, but I can't figure out why minutes and seconds start on top, but hours on the bottom. Any idea why that particular choice was made?
- pikminguy 4y agoI think this is more of a "different people's minds work differently" thing than an age thing. Some people who grew up in the digital age still find analog clock faces more useful. Here's a short youtube video exploring that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZArBfxaPzD8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZArBfxaPzD8 . I think Adam's mistake was assuming the preference for analog was universal which was probably wrong even when he first wrote the joke. I think the argument could be made for a clock face being a pie chart if you think of it the way the host of that video does. The categories are "time left in the hour/day" and "time passed in the hour/day". All that said I was really happy to finally understand what Adams was trying to say with that joke witch, as a person who finds digital readouts more useful, never landed for me before.
- fijiaarone 4y agoThe author’s point was that technology was making people stupider. They’re being told what to believe and their data source is isolated from reality so not only are they easily fooled by those who control the sources of information, they lose the ability to process data on their own, and they do it to themselves for reasons as banal as fashion.
- boesboes 4y agoI'm 37 and have a hard time parsing clock faces, I remember having a hard time with it in kindergarten and they basicaly wrote it of as me being a little prick and refusing to do it right
- worker_person 4y agoSame. I can do it. But not fast.
- develoopest 4y agoAlso same, this seems to be related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia
- wink 4y agoI am just apparently very bad at estimating which hand is the longer one (if there's not a huge amount of difference). Once I figured that out... reading the time is not a problem.
- hotpotamus 4y agoDo you where one strapped to your body at all times? If you did, I bet you'd find it more intuitive.
- plorkyeran 4y agoI wore an analog watch for about 15 years and never hit the point where it was easier for me to read than a digital display.
- joemi 4y agoSame for me. My house had loads of analog clocks when I was growing up, I had one for a watch for over a decade, but still it was always a little bit harder to figure out than digital for me.
- eadmund 4y ago> His argument about digital watches did not age well. Didn't it? I think it remains true. Time is a continuum, not discrete; analogue watches demonstrate that, while digital ones do not. And yes, schools have to teach one how to use a clock, but at the end of the process one actually has enhanced one's understanding of time. Much like using a slide rule teaches one far more about numbers and maths than using a calculator.
- pikminguy 4y agoEven if you're right that analog watches are better tools that's not what Adams was saying. "We all know, really, that [analog clock face] is a lot more instantly meaningful to us than 15:39" which is just wrong. Plenty of people, myself included, get more instant meaning from a digital readout.
- js2 4y agoFunny you should use 15:39 as your example. I find the translation I have to do from 15:39 to 3:39 pm to have much more friction than reading a digital or analog clock in the first place, both of which I can do with equal ease. The problem of course is that I'm not used to 24-hour times, so I don't equate 15 with any particular time of day. Similar to how I have to translate C to F to make sense of C temperatures. Now, a 24-hour analog clock with an embedded digital temperature read-out in C, that would really hurt. Apparently 24-hour analog clocks are thing: https://www.amazon.com/Navaris-Hour-Wall-Clock-Non-Ticking/dp/B09F2YJXDQ/ https://www.amazon.com/Navaris-Hour-Wall-Clock-Non-Ticking/d... Ouch.
- pikminguy 4y agoI didn't pick 15:39 that's the quote from Douglas Adams. He pretty clearly went with a hard to read digital time to emphasize the point that he (and according to him everyone else) can more readily get useful information from an analog readout. My own watch is a digital 12 hour display and that is more useful to me.
- 4y ago
- giancarlostoro 4y ago> in elementary school, they require entire lesson units in school on telling time from a clock face. I'm not sure our age difference, but as a millennial I'm pretty sure we did when I was in elementary school as well. I don't remember which grade though, I didn't learn about how to read those watches from my parents. Digital clocks became so common that I never cared for it. Same with cursive, because of computers making cursive really pointless, I don't know how to write in it outside of my own signature.
- egypturnash 4y agoseriously, I am a GenXer who grew up with mostly digital clocks and I still have to stop and think to get a time out of a clock dial. But then again as Adams said elsewhere, Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so. That one still rings true, especially if you're a freelancer like me who never needs to get up and go to an office at 9AM.
- blarg1 4y agosame, every single morning I have to and think for a second to figure out the time :(
- jsmith45 4y agoIf I just want a sense of progress of time, especially within an hour, an analog clock works just fine for me. It obviously is more work if I want an exact to the minute time for logging something, and then it must be converted. On the other hand, analogue might probably slightly easier if I just want to get an to the nearest 15 minutes approximation of the time. If reading from an analogue clock, I'll probably say it is 3:30, but would say it is 3:27 if reading from the digital clock, as reading it exact is faster than rounding it. I have had people seem bemused by my telling them the precise time like that, but like, I'm not going to make more work for myself to make the time less precise to better match tradition. But unlike some other people I know, I don't have much difficulty understanding the progress of time with a digital clock either. 13:54, and the equivalent clock face both give me equally good impression of how much time is left until until 14:00, and I feel no need to translate either into the other for that purpose.
- coldtea 4y ago>but even now, in elementary school, they require entire lesson units in school on telling time from a clock face. I'd say that's a failure to teach them analog time as toddlers, not digital time being inherently superior.
- Adraghast 4y agoDigital time is inherently superior. Analog time requires the extra cognitive step of translating to the numbers being represented. Digital time skips that process and shows you the numbers directly.
- danachow 4y agoThis thread has devolved into what sounds like a bunch of web devs that think that makes them experts on perception and psychophysics. But on this point there isn’t anything inherently more abstract about Arabic numerals as a representation of numbers than the angles of the hands on a clock face (ie a short hand to the right is 3 and upright is 12, etc is a pretty efficient way to convey a number). As for what can be read quicker probably has overwhelmingly a lot to do what was learned in youth. Similar to stenographic shorthand this can probably be acquired but there just isn’t much incentive to do so. There isn’t necessarily any extra “cognitive step” in the pattern recognition of a clock face vs that of a numeral. I don’t know much about research on this particular area but there is some in the related area of written language.
- solveit 4y agoNeither numerals nor configurations of clock hands are numbers and both require a translation step. For what it's worth, time isn't a number either and you translate from a number to a time.
- rswail 4y agoTeaching kids about analog clocks isn't just about telling time. It's teaching them about how gauges work. If they can understand how the hour hand goes around, they can understand how a fuel gauge goes from Full to Empty. They can tell how a battery gauge on their iPad means they're running out of power. Kids that age are soaking up concepts.
- Melatonic 4y agoYea I am not sure I get his argument much at all either. While I love my analog watches and wallclocks I also have digital ones. If anything I think the argument should be that the AM PM system is just ridiculous - why do we use it? I am an american but always switch all clocks to 24 hour time (if digital) and while I am completely used to analog clocks being on the standard 12 hour cycle it always also seemed crazy to me that we do not just all use 24 hour analog watchfaces.
- rswail 4y agoProbably because when watchfaces were invented, the hour was much more important than the minute or the second. People wanted to look up to the town hall or church clock and see what hour it was, maybe quarter hour. Maybe keeping it more distinct from a distance during daylight hours was more important?
- monknomo 4y agoSure it does - for example the portion of the hour in front of the minute hand's sweep is "in the future" whereas the portion of the hour behind the minute hand's sweep is "in the past" and the portion of the hour under the minute hand is "now". Three categories, and the distribution of the current hour's minutes between them
- fineIllregister 4y agoIt's really two overlapping pie charts, each hand forming a side of a slice with an imaginary line from the center to the top forming the other side. We read them together, but to work as pie charts they have to be read separately. You can't get much useful information from the hands' relationship to each other without knowing their relationship to the imaginary up line. If I say, "The hour and minute hands are 30° apart", what does that tell you about the distribution of time into past and future? The hour hand shows distribution of hours between most recent 12 and next 12 into past and future. The minute hand is an entirely separate chart showing the distribution of minutes in the current hour into past and future. Trying to read a clock from the frame of a pie chart is kind of confusing though, given this overlap. I don't think I would call it a good pie chart, much less the most perfect one.
- fijiaarone 4y agoImagine Douglas Adams thinking that within a single generation, digital clocks would render the majority of smart, technical people adult people to not only be unable to read a clock but also unable to grasp the idea of fractions, ratios, time elapsed or remaining, or the concrete nature of the way days occur in the physical world.
- FabHK 4y agoA similar issue arises in aviation. In the cockpit, airspeed and altitude used to be presented on a dial like a watch (one hand in the case of airspeed, two hands or even three in the case of altitude). In modern cockpits with screens, they could be presented like that, or just as numbers, but they are presented as infinite bands that move up and down. One sees the number on it, but also perceives movement (and how fast it moves) "out of the corner of an eye". Maybe it combines the advantages of both. See here, for example, for both styles: https://www.flight-mechanic.com/pitot-static-pressure-sensing-flight-instruments-part-one/ https://www.flight-mechanic.com/pitot-static-pressure-sensin... I wonder what studies were made regarding this design.
- AceJohnny2 4y agoAnecdote: my partner can't read analog watches at a glance, they prefer digital displays. It's a funny little hole in their wide skillset!
- WalterBright 4y agoI wear an analog watch for the simple reason that I can tell the time at a glance, and don't need glasses to get it. With a digital watch, I have to wear glasses and deliberately focus on it. There's good reasons why cars and airplanes still have analog displays, and people present data with graphs rather than columns of numbers.
- cameronh90 4y agoAnalogue displays are quicker to read, but less precise. Which is better depends. On analogue clocks, it doesn't usually matter if I think it's 8:32 when it's really 8:34 unless I'm running for the train. However, I often make the terrible mistake of reading the wrong hour entirely. For that reason (and that I'm frequently running for trains) I do generally prefer digital clocks. For a rev meter on a car on the other hand, all I care about is if it's getting too far to the bottom or too close to the red. Whether it's 3218RPM vs 3389RPM is entirely irrelevant. So for that, analogue is far better. For flying, I quite like that electronic flight instrument panels have both analogue and digital displays.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoNumbers on a digital face can be read by anyone who knows numbers. Just yesterday my toddler told me it was 6 oclock because the big hand was pointing at the six. Trying to explain to a three year old that the small hand was for the hour, and the big hand pointed at a number which you multiply by 5 to get the minutes was beyond him. But the digital clock, he gets.
- fijiaarone 4y agoYou make a good argument about people growing up with digital clocks not understanding a clock face. Maybe if you fill in the area covered you could more easily see it’s relation to pie charts. A clock face is actually 3 pie charts on top of each other, indicating the ratio between hours, minutes, and seconds left in a sequence. It might not be intuitive that it only covers half of the hours in a day (12) but then covers all minutes in an hour (60) and seconds in a minute (also 60). By looking at the long hand (minutes) you can see the fraction of an hour that has elapsed if you color in the area between the “12” at the top, and for example, the “6” at the bottom. That would be half an hour. Or if the hand was in the “3” it would be a quarter hour, and you and see at a glance that a good majority of the hour is still remaining. Seconds work the same way, with the skinny hand. For minutes and seconds you can just ignore the big numbers (or multiply then by 5 because 12 * 5 is 60). But because the hours only cover half a day the ratio covers only half of that day, but you can still use the clock to decipher how much time has elapsed (or is left) between midday and midnight. Having grown up with digital clocks, and only sweated through the difficult lessons of learning to read a clock face and not used them practically, even at school, you may not have realized this ratio (staring at the clock waiting for class to finish does not obviously indicate this property because classes are not evenly divided into hours)