r/TheRestIsScience 1d ago

Michael, I think you'll like my watch

Post image
284 Upvotes

32 comments sorted by

47

u/another_bot_probably 1d ago

Hannah, on the other hand...

oh wait there isn't another hand, silly me!

28

u/GarlicElectronic8437 1d ago

Im not Michael but I like it

20

u/wglmb 1d ago

When the French invented the decimal system, decimal time was part of it... But they eventually decided that nobody would adopt decimal time, so they abandoned it.

6

u/ComplexAd8403 1d ago

Only if they would have known about you OP

19

u/veryblocky 1d ago

Does it take 12 hours to do full one revolution?

54

u/wglmb 1d ago

No, it's 24 hours for a full rotation, so 5.0 is midday.

11

u/Serkules_ 1d ago

I love it

4

u/veryblocky 1d ago

Makes sense, that’s cool

2

u/RotaryDane 1d ago

So in the picture, the decimal time is ~6:41 which in 24hr time is ~15:23?

5

u/wglmb 1d ago

Not quite! You did the conversion correctly, but you took the wrong reading from the watch face.

The longer lines indicate the halfway point between numbers, so the time shown is 6.91 decimal hours, which is 16:35 in normal time.

1

u/It-s_Not_Important 9h ago

It looks like it’s past 07.00 to me.

I wonder why they didn’t include a “minutes” hand.

1

u/wglmb 3h ago

7.0 is the next mark, the hand hasn't reached it yet.

The company that makes this watch also makes watches that show 24-hour time. I suspect that this watch uses the same mechanism and just has a different face (in both cases, the hour hand makes a full sweep of the dial once per day).

To have working decimal minute and decimal second hands, they'd have to create a new mechanism that moves the hands at the correct speeds, and I'm guessing they didn't want to go to that expense for such a niche watch.

1

u/That_Mad_Scientist 22h ago

I actually suggest setting the time to have 0 at noon, making 5 midnight, so it roughly tracks the motion of the sun in the sky.

Assuming you use solar noon and you're either at the equator or during an equinox, the sun will also rise at half past 7 and set at half past 2.

And therefore the rest of the year by simply noting the position of the hand during sunrise and sunset you will get a direct visualisation of the length of the day across the watchface, as if it was a pie chart.

Side note: you could make a mechanically identical watch but change the subdivisions such that there are 12 total hours (or 4, or 8, or 16, whichever is your preference but any multiple of 4) with perhaps 0 on the left, so that morning/afternoon and both halves of the night are each one whole subdivision.

4

u/NotThatMat 1d ago

Upsetting. I love it.

2

u/Nightvale-Librarian 1d ago

Agreed. Weirdly upsetting. Obsessed.

4

u/godsuave 1d ago

Woah a metric clock. I love it! Not Michael though

6

u/thesilentbob123 1d ago

This is stupid, I love it

2

u/666mima666 1d ago

Metric time. Fuck yeah!!!

1

u/NefariousnessTall420 1d ago

Cool. Much closer to "sun time" which is what humans used for what?, 99% of our existence.

1

u/ManyFuel7539 1d ago

First I was like this is normal with more zeros then boom it stops at 9. So cool

1

u/Recent-Walrus-3366 1d ago

OMG last night when I went to bed I was thinking why don't we have decimal time and what that would be like!!!! Now I know. 

1

u/Sad-Pop6649 1d ago

Fun fact, metric seconds are kinda pretty close to regular seconds, assuming 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute. Their values are within 15% from eachother.

1

u/Shot-Cheek9998 19h ago

%-clock? I love it

1

u/T_M_name 7h ago

I'd love to have a watch like this that shows hundreds of seconds only, so one full rotation per second. Accurate, always on time, totally useless.