6 ms·
Different Clocks
- DougBTX 1y agoThe once-per-millennium marks are captivating. They feel almost within our understanding, but not quite.
- DaveZale 1y agoclock of the Long Now!
- beej71 1y agoLike those insane gear ratio videos on YouTube... You know the final gear is turning, logically, but the fact that the Sun will eat the Earth long before the gear completes a single turn lends a strange perspective.
- daedrdev 1y agoI saw a neat one where they put the last gear in a block of cement while still spinning the first one quite fast.
- Chris2048 1y agoIs the idea that it never moves, or that the cement will degrade by the time it does?
- Piskvorrr 1y agoIt moves slowly enough that the wheel will approximately never turn enough to generate significant torque.
- Doxin 1y agoI think the artist put it as "and then the last gear turns so slowly it doesn't really matter, so I cast it in concrete." Assuming we're talking about Arthur Gansons "Machine with concrete"[0] of course. I quite like how a lot of his work seems to have a punchline to it. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH-tvxEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH-tvxEg
- Chris2048 1y agoReminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment "Each droplet forms and falls over a period of about a decade." "it is expected there is enough pitch in the funnel to allow it to continue for at least another hundred years" I guess with enough pitch you an make a millennium-scale "water" (liquid) clock?
- xnx 1y agoAI coding tools are quite fun for making different clock concepts. Here's a one-shot recreation of "Against the Run" (https://listart.mit.edu/art-artists/against-run-2019 https://listart.mit.edu/art-artists/against-run-2019): https://g.co/gemini/share/c1dcfbd9cf9a https://g.co/gemini/share/c1dcfbd9cf9a
- rezmason 1y agoI like the combined blob clock a lot! I plan to make a codepen of it, with just hours, minutes and seconds, to see what that's like.
- MrJohz 1y agoWhen you're done, I'd love to see it as well, and I'm sure others would - yours was my exact thought when I got to that part!
- rezmason 1y agoHere's what I cooked up, in the spirit of the original I invite folks to modify it to their liking. Currently it has an hours shape, an hours-and-minutes shape, and an hours-and-minutes-and-seconds shape. https://codepen.io/rezmason/pen/empBWgY?editors=1111 https://codepen.io/rezmason/pen/empBWgY?editors=1111 Beyond some basic style variation, I think there's a lot of room for experimentation with shapes and their centers of rotation.
- water-data-dude 1y agoRight? There's something oddly satisfying about watching The Time Blob.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agovery cool. reminds me of an old iPhone clock app called "hms" that displayed a rectangular prism, and each dimension (x, y, z) corresponded with the hour, minute and second, so the shape would grow over time before resetting one or more dimensions. it got delisted years ago for some reason but i used to love it as a "nightstand mode" clock.
- qq66 1y agohttps://hms.gysin-vanetti.com/ https://hms.gysin-vanetti.com/
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoAhh that’s it! I would love for that to be a StandBy face for iOS.
- jantuss 1y agoNice! @qq66 did you make this spiralling clock? https://www.shadertoy.com/view/flGGDy https://www.shadertoy.com/view/flGGDy It's trippy, and I love how the spiral arms rearrange every few seconds.
- DaveZale 1y agoNice, very innovative. It makes me think of weird stuff like how about a pac-man running around the dial consuming your seconds as you watch? wooka wooka wooka wooka...
- Towaway69 1y agoHad an idea for physical clock once where there is a chain of 60 links rotating around a central motor that moved the chain so slowly that the top link was showing the correct time within a twelve minute range - five links per hour for a twelve hour clock. Everyone should redesign the representation of time once in their life :)
- toast0 1y agoThere's a lot of Pac-Man watches... most of them not very exciting, but this one [1] might be what you're looking for. [1] https://timexjapan.com/products/pac-man-x-timex-camper https://timexjapan.com/products/pac-man-x-timex-camper
- rook_line_sinkr 1y agoThe binary clock reminds me of this real-life one near the Zoo in Berlin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mengenlehreuhr https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mengenlehreuhr
- sublinear 1y agoLooks like base-5, but very cool!
- rook_line_sinkr 1y agoyes, base 5, exactly but lots of dots, so my mind couldn't help but wander ':D
- bux93 1y agoThe binary clock reminds me of a similar bar you sometimes saw on videotapes being played back on TV broadcasts. They didn't look like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_interval_timecode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_interval_timecode , since these are stripes, not blocks. Maybe specific to PAL?
- CommonGuy 1y agoThe train station in St. Gallen (Switzerland) has one too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Binary_clock_Swiss_railway_station.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Binary_clock_Swiss_rail...
- iosjunkie 1y agoPlaced my cursor at the top of the hour peak on the 'Peaks' clock. Few moments later, it shifted slightly to the left. Had a bit of existential dread as I saw time slipping away. Nice clocks though.
- miteyironpaw 1y agoIf you would like a little more existential dread https://ttl.hex.nz/ https://ttl.hex.nz/
- qixv 1y agoOh, I clicked the link. My life is almost 50% complete. However, the expected lifetimes are obviously too low. It expects me to end up at approximately age 80, but that is an underestimation. I dont know if the lifetimes that are used are just outdated, or if they lack expected mortality improvements.
- miteyironpaw 1y agoYeah I figured that 80 was a pretty good approximation because the average life expectancy in the US is 77. It surprisingly doesn't increase as much I would have expected as you age so I didn't account for that effect.
- ndndndnhxh 1y ago77 is the average life expectancy for all people. If one enters the website at 40 their life expectancy is much higher, since they are already 40
- advael 1y agoYea. It's kind of the same error, in a way, as people who assume that there were no old people in the middle ages. The overwhelming majority of the increase in expected lifespan between then and now comes from drastic decreases in the infant and child mortality rates. While current medicine is only really making slow, incremental progress on letting the oldest people live longer, even if this was the bulk of the advancement you wouldn't see the kind of movement on overall life expectancy you'd get out of reducing those, and that's just on the pure statistical basis of how the metric is constructed. But on top of that, I think it's nearly impossible to understand just how many infants used to be stillborn, and how many diseases we essentially eliminated. The death of a child from an illness used to be a fairly common tragedy, now it is a rare one. It's just a little internet toy that probably cashes out to be a slightly more impactful version of "memento mori", but you could add a little backend complexity without collecting any more demographic information and get a more accurate life expectancy given only one's current age from extant actuarial tables. If you wanted to be extra cheeky, you could have it adjust on a regional basis based on IP address too
- ghxst 1y agoLove the binary and wave clocks, instantly got me thinking about how it could work as a subtle graphical element in a landing page footer or something like that.
- mattmar96 1y agoI love the combined blob!
- pvillano 1y agoYou're missing the Towers of Hanoi, my personal favorite clock. https://saej.in/post/hanoi/ https://saej.in/post/hanoi/
- ethan_smith 1y agoThe Hanoi clock represents time by mapping disk positions to binary bits - each legal tower state uniquely encodes one moment, with the smallest disk moving every minute creating the beautiful recursive pattern where larger disks move exponentially less frequently.
- pvillano 1y agoKeep your AI slop off HN
- fitsumbelay 1y agoawesome post and thread clocks for me were an entry point to font creation and broadcast design. they make a great platform for design and coding experimentation
- agys 1y ago24 variations of a clock (text-only): http://24times.gysin-vanetti.com http://24times.gysin-vanetti.com The “cuckoo” one is interactive.
- mlukaszek 1y agoIf you're into interesting clocks, here one that is obviously not digital but fun to watch (pun intended) Corpus Clock - Wikipedia https://share.google/aAjMb15aeaVvHLJFa https://share.google/aAjMb15aeaVvHLJFa
- cherissacheris 1y ago[dead]