On 8/30/2015 5:07 PM, Vic Smith wrote:
On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 09:01:47 -0700, Don Y
wrote:

On 8/29/2015 7:50 AM, wrote:
On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 07:59:34 -0400, Stormin Mormon
wrote:

On 8/28/2015 10:56 PM, Dean Hoffman wrote:


I was at a historical site at the same time a bunch of high school
kids were. A girl asked me what time it was. A quarter after eleven
meant nothing to her. Eleven fifteen made sense.

Did you tell her you'd inform her at the
bottom of the hour?

Kids just look at this clock and scratch their heads.

http://gfretwell.com/ftp/clock.jpg

In the 70's, I built a "digital analog clock" as a gift for
my in-laws. A friend tried to get me to manufacture them:
"No! Then it wouldn't be unique!".

Some years later, he purchased this for me:
http://orbichronics.com/CoverOrbCropped.jpg
I suspect largely as an "I told you so".

[I enjoy designing/building clocks as gifts. My favorite was
a clock that "displayed" the time in Braille, using LEDs for
each dot position in the 6-dot Braille cell. The humor, of
course, lies in the fact that the folks most likely to
understand what it even *is* are folks who are blind -- to
most folks it just looks like an odd collection of blinking
lights! Yet, those blind folks would typically NOT be able
to SEE the LED lights! :-/ ]

I have a wris****ch timepiece, which I've squirreled away in a drawer.
It's branded "Apha" Swiss made. Waterproof, Anti-Magnetic.
Bought it from a Chief Boilerman in the Navy in 1964.
$60. Almost a month's pay as an Fireman's Apprentice.
I can't get it focused in my camera, so I'll describe it.
I has a window with the hour, which flips to a new hour.
Directly under that is a window with minutes on a revolving dial.
Near the bottom is a window with seconds on a revolving dial.
I just wound it and it still runs!

When I was (very much!) younger (I no longer wear a watch), I had an
"autowinding" watch. Didn't last long. I guess you're not supposed
to *deliberately* wind them! :

Very neat looking watch. But you need good eyes.
I prefer time-at-a-glance analog. Don't need numbers.

Exactly. Much easier to read "angles" than to try to make out
micro-miniature digits!

One of the flaws with the Orbichron is you can't easily read
the "angles" -- all you effectively see is the tips of the
(imaginary) hands.

The clock I made for my in-laws was octagonal shaped -- "corners"
at 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10 & 11. So, even in the dark, you could get
a reference as to where the (tip of the) minute hand was located by
just watching the second hand for, at most, 10 seconds (the length of
the longest "side" of the octagon).

With the orbichron, you don't have a "reference" until the second
hand passes 12 (which you know by noticing the *minute* hand's
motion!)