Re:Realtime Web Messaging over Animated Gifs
by kragen on Friday September 14, 2012 @03:52PM
(#4523628)
As a remarkable coincidence, another hack that Ka-Ping Yee did once was writing a nonstandard clock for his Palm. He spent a summer living 28-hour days: six 28-hour days per normal week, going in and out of phase with the sun once a week. So he needed a way to remember when to go to sleep, when to wake up, when to eat dinner, and so on. When it's 25:00, what do you do? We have a lifetime of intuition built up around clock times on a 24-hour clock.
So he wrote a digital clock that used standard-length seconds, but 70 of them per minute, 60 of those minutes per hour, and 24 of those hours per day. So when it was 10:30:59 by his nonstandard clock, he was at the phase of his nonstandard day that corresponds to 10:30 or so of the standard day --- but the clock would then roll over to 10:30:60, 10:30:61, ... 10:30:69, 10:31:00.
It was very amusing to see people's reactions upon watching the clock for a little while, especially at the time of week that it was more or less in phase with normal time.
So he wrote a digital clock that used standard-length seconds, but 70 of them per minute, 60 of those minutes per hour, and 24 of those hours per day. So when it was 10:30:59 by his nonstandard clock, he was at the phase of his nonstandard day that corresponds to 10:30 or so of the standard day --- but the clock would then roll over to 10:30:60, 10:30:61, ... 10:30:69, 10:31:00.
It was very amusing to see people's reactions upon watching the clock for a little while, especially at the time of week that it was more or less in phase with normal time.