10 ms·
Interesting take! Both of your pic examples are wrong though. That digital clock does show seconds and the London clock has its minute hand in between minute m
by hartator 2y ago
Interesting take!
Both of your pic examples are wrong though. That digital clock does show seconds and the London clock has its minute hand in between minute mark - showing progres between minute mark if you look closely. This is the same for all analogue clocks.
- crgk 2y agoI’m ready for the rebuttal post: “different clocks have different approaches to conveying information about seconds within a minute” which uses the same photos as examples.
- fouronnes3 2y agoNo my digital clock doesn't show seconds. As for the london one, I was actually wondering about that! I know it depends, because some analog clocks work like digital one and snap to the next minute by discrete increments.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoAll escapement driven clocks are discrete.
- michaelcampbell 2y agoPedantically, only above second granularities. They're continuous between second hand sweep movements at subsecond ones, no? I mean, there's no point on the watch that the second hand doesn't "hit" at some point, however small. Or am I wrong that "intermittent, jerky, continuity is still continuity"?
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoWell it depends on the interval. Taken to the limit, this would be a very nerdy way to rediscover calculus.
- donkers 2y agoThis is true unless you look at something like a Seiko Spring Drive, which has a completely smooth second hand sweep, although it’s not entirely mechanical (and maybe only watch nerds care about this) https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/does-spring-drive-have-an-escapement https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/does-spring-drive-have-an-...
- undersuit 2y agoAnalog Clock movements with second hands! The seconds hand is rarely smooth, we want the tick, but the minute hand and hour hands are smooth.
- necovek 2y agoMost analog (really, with a geared mechanism) clocks do not "snap" on exact minutes but slowly drive toward them (because that's simpler and thus cheaper).
- tavavex 2y agoNot all analogue clocks smoothly move the minute hand to show progress in the current minute. Many of them tick over, truncating the information to the minute like what digital clocks do.
- michaelcampbell 2y agoMaybe; I think of analog clocks as ones with an analog, continuous mechanism. As such they happen to use a sweep hand display. Quartz and the like CAN also use non-digital displays, but I wouldn't consider them analog timekeepers.
- lupire 2y agoQuartz is an analog mechanism like a pendulum. It doesn't stop at each cycle.
- BenjiWiebe 2y agoQuartz is an analog mechanism, but AFAIK it's always read/used digitally.
- perryizgr8 2y agoNo. Most analog wrist watches use a quartz mechanism.
- itishappy 2y agoThe output of the quartz oscillator is a high frequency electrical signal which is read by a digital frequency divider then fed back into a motor. > The data line output from such a quartz resonator goes high and low 32768 times a second. This is fed into a flip-flop (which is essentially two transistors with a bit of cross-connection) which changes from low to high, or vice versa, whenever the line from the crystal goes from high to low. The output from that is fed into a second flip-flop, and so on through a chain of 15 flip-flops, each of which acts as an effective power of 2 frequency divider by dividing the frequency of the input signal by 2. The result is a 15-bit binary digital counter driven by the frequency that will overflow once per second, creating a digital pulse once per second. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock
- roywiggins 2y agoVaguely related: I don't think people are being taught how to read analog clock faces nearly as much anymore, and apparently phrases like "quarter past ten" are becoming, so to speak, anachronisms.
- marpstar 2y agoa "quarter" means 1/4th -- it's a "quarter" turn of rotation on a physical clock, but 60/4 is always 15. or were you making the distinction between "quarter past" and "quarter after", because I'd agree that the former is a lot less common.
- roywiggins 2y agoI'm not sure, but either way, "it's a quarter past 6" has gotten me blank stares.
- 1718627440 2y agoIn Germany, that would be quarter 7, which means either the quarter in the 7th hour or the 7th time that a quarter has passed since the hour, which is of course that same. (Unless you are in a part, that got conquered by the US after 2WW, which now uses "English time".)
- dmd 2y agoPublic schools here in suburban Boston MA still teach analog first.
- PeterCorless 2y agoYes. Though analog second hands often "tick" the seconds. (Some move the second hand smoothly.)
- adamanonymous 2y agoThis is why analog clocks are superior to digital
- RIMR 2y ago>That digital clock does show seconds It most certainly does not. I see HH:MM, temperature in Celsius, humidity in percent, alarm status, alarm time, day of the week, and DD/MM. None of those are seconds. It is a truncating digital clock that rounds down. >the London clock has its minute hand in between minute mark - showing progres between minute mark if you look closely. "If you look closely" isn't really how analog clocks work in practice. Without a second hand, the limits of human vision prevent us from fully calculating the time between minutes, as each second only represents a 0.1° change in angle of the minute hand, and most mechanical analog clocks aren't designed for the minute hand to move perfectly linearly between minutes.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwaway519 2y agoI feel you're missing the elephant in the room with the clock observation: Time is a cube, not a cuboid.