tithonium: (Spinning Mars)
[personal profile] tithonium
So, something I would like for my birthday, and I mention it now, since it'll take some development time.

A clock. No, really, two clocks.

The first, perfectly normal analog 24 hour clock. When it hits 24:00:00, it stops. For 2375 seconds. Then starts again.

The second, probably more complicated, perfectly normal analog 24 hour clock. When it hits 24:00:00, the minute and second hands keep going, but the hour hand stops moving. It doesn't crawl along like normal. When the minute+second hit --:39:34, they swing back to vertical so that what would have been --:39:35 is 00:00:00, and things resume as normal, with the hour hand sweeping slowly along as the minutes move forward.

Date: 2006-10-03 04:32 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] neuro42.livejournal.com
Electric, or mechanical? Battery or line-powered?

Date: 2006-10-03 04:33 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tithonium.livejournal.com
Not that picky. I'd prefer battery, but whatever.

Date: 2006-10-03 04:39 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] gfish.livejournal.com
That would be... very hard.

Date: 2006-10-03 04:45 am (UTC)

Date: 2006-10-03 04:53 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tithonium.livejournal.com
That's not a time-slip clock. That's a longer-second clock. It runs about 97.324% as fast as a standard clock.

Date: 2006-10-03 07:14 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] gfish.livejournal.com
So you want a clock that can't keep Earth time, can't keep Martian time to an accuracy greater than one sol, and can only be used as a stopwatch?

Date: 2006-10-03 05:22 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ilmarinen.livejournal.com
I think the point is that is how time was kept in those Mars books . . . or so I vaguely recall (or was that a different story?). Essentially one creates a phantom partial-hour at midnight, much like the daylight savings time phantom full hour in the fall. (How does that get officially handled, timestamp-wise?)

Seems one would want some indication that the minute/second hand were working through the phantom partial-hour and not the start-of-the-next day 00: hour.

-B.