A clock and calendar made of concentric rings
March 18, 2020 9:23 AM   Subscribe

Concentrichron: a clock and calendar made of concentric rings. Twitter link.
posted by cgc373 (21 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
I want a physical wall version of this.
posted by wanderingmind at 9:30 AM on March 18, 2020 [6 favorites]


I do too, but sadly, a physical version would not work, due to short months and leap years.
posted by vitout at 9:33 AM on March 18, 2020


Beautiful, but the year ring bothers me because it should not loop around like that. I guess you could do it with individual digits.

You could build a physical version of this, but you'd need to have complex enough gearing to solve the days of the month problem. My watch is able to do that normally, I didn't even have to adjust it for leap year!
posted by rikschell at 9:38 AM on March 18, 2020 [3 favorites]


Kind of like this googolplex gearbox that was going around a couple weeks ago?

I think most mechanical watches with month/date complications simply have a 24 hour wheel that flips over the day at midnight, with a 31 day wheel for the month. Are there any elegant analog solutions to the irregular month problem?
posted by Think_Long at 10:01 AM on March 18, 2020


You could build a physical version with complex gears -- or you could use commodity electric motors controlled by a raspberry pi or similar.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 10:01 AM on March 18, 2020 [2 favorites]


Needs a millennium ring and an eon ring.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:05 AM on March 18, 2020 [9 favorites]


Why is this not available via Rainmeter for my desktop? Must have.
posted by Keith Talent at 10:08 AM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


Think_Long, I have a Citizen Eco-Drive Perpetual Calendar e760. Not a super fancy watch, and it will keep the date right until 2100, if we make it that long.
posted by rikschell at 10:18 AM on March 18, 2020


Love this. Curious what the display does when switching between months of different lengths.

Super-high-end analog watches have complications that can handle all the leap year math. Slight aside: I saw a video about a Japanese watchmaker who made a watch that observed traditional Japanese time—which divided daylight into 10 units of time. Obviously these units would vary in length depending on the season and your latitude, and his watch reproduced that, with different cams for different latitudes.
posted by adamrice at 11:06 AM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


Here's a good explainer about mechanical watches with a perpetual calendar.
posted by SteveInMaine at 11:22 AM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


Perpetual calendar mechanical watches are a thing, by which I mean that they're a thing for rich watch geeks. Like, it was news when one was released priced at less than $10,000.
posted by box at 11:23 AM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]


I would buy this watch.

I think I could live with having to reset it once every 4 years.
posted by Mchelly at 11:45 AM on March 18, 2020


Very cool, I guess I never knew the term was 'perpetual calendar'.
posted by Think_Long at 11:48 AM on March 18, 2020


Overhead view of the TARDIS controls.
posted by SPrintF at 12:20 PM on March 18, 2020


I remain a fan of the SVG gear clock, which doesn’t require JavaScript to animate (by Tavmjong Bah).
posted by sysinfo at 4:16 PM on March 18, 2020 [3 favorites]


It's cool, but there's a big chunk of JavaScript starting at line 595.
posted by sjswitzer at 4:35 PM on March 18, 2020


I like it, and agree that a physical version would be neat. But, couldn’t they have made the motion go, well, clockwise?
posted by Dip Flash at 8:52 PM on March 18, 2020 [2 favorites]


I remain a fan of the SVG gear clock, which doesn’t require JavaScript to animate

That one is very cool too! But it certainly does require JavaScript. There's a <script type="text/ecmascript" id="script2259"> tag starting at line 591.
posted by a car full of lions at 9:46 PM on March 18, 2020 [2 favorites]


This isn’t as comprehensive, but it’s physical, and it feels related: I’ve had a Day Clock for many years and I love it. It just has a single hand that tells the day of the week. (And it does go clockwise!) I don’t even have to change it for daylight-saving time.
posted by LEGO Damashii at 10:58 PM on March 18, 2020


Well, at least now I’ve learned that you can embed JavaScript/ECMAScript in an SVG (I did try to view the SVG source, but was on my phone). That raises a whole host of questions as to how extensive that scripting support is in browsers. Thanks!
posted by sysinfo at 12:29 AM on March 19, 2020


This is really cool.
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:39 AM on March 21, 2020


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