Im surprised not to find a radians-based clock among these.
My favorite retirement gift is a seven segment clock that points to the day of the week. It usually gets a laugh, followed up months later with an honest thank you and an anecdote about how it saved them from going to the bank on a Sunday or the like.
No centons?
I'm curious, are there any other notable time measurement systems other than the ones listed here?
Swatch Internet Time was almost kind of a thing in the late 90s.
You used to look at the sun or stars to make an estimate, then we had sundials. For larger time scales, there are tons of archaelogical sites around the world which tracked the solstice, equinox, etc and there's evidence that a few cultures even tracked the full period of the moon's orbit (18.6y).
~250BCE, there was a comedy by Plautus which had in it a poem lamenting the proliferation of sundials, which may or may not have been a parody of some of the attitudes at the time:
The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sundial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions! When I was a boy,
My belly was my sundial -- one surer,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when 'twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat;
But nowadays, why even when I have,
I can't fall to unless the sun gives leave.
The town's so full of these confounded dials
The greatest part of the inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the street.Nice. Related, I also love exploring different ways to visualize time, so a few months back I came up with twelve variations arranged in the form of an actual clock that you can click through to see each one.
Each one presents a different type of visualization (from sand, where each falling grain represents a second to a 3D-modeled set of water wheels)
very cool thanks for sharing.
That's pretty neat. The ? (help) link and the speed up button overlap on my browser (firefox on android, url bar on the bottom). My email is in my profile, I can send a screenshot if you need it.
Tip Clock is the best one yet.