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These are wonderful!

Thanks perilunar - I see from your profile you're a clock enthusiast as well! I'm starting to think we should start an HN web ring for clocks.

A bit of feedback for your sun clock: since it asks for my location, by the time I clicked “Allow,” it had already timed out while trying to get the location. You may want to have it continuously check for permission changes and then initialize the sunrise and sunset features once access is granted. Cheers!


I wonder if you could find all the seconds in the region around the HH:MM time — or more to the point, how much do you need to zoom out to find the nearest SS pair?

Then you could keep the HH:MM time centered as it is now, but highlight the nearest SS each second.


That's a good idea! It would make that sixty seconds a little bit more engaging instead of just hanging around on one time and having to wait before it zooms out to find the next HH:MM combination.

I had initially set it up to go for each second, but it was physically giving me whiplash.


To blow my own trumpet a bit: https://sunclock.net/

If you turn off the numbers you get a pretty decent and (i think anyway) culturally assumption-free clock. It tracks the sun and moon, shows the seasons (in #calendar). The direction it turns matches the way the Sun moves in your hemisphere.

More generally, I think 24-hour analogue clocks are already pretty culturally neutral — I don't understand why we ended up with 12-hour clocks being the dominant form.


> How do we keep the meanings of words from diverging so dramatically and so rapidly?

By reading and re-reading old books. You learn the original meanings and usage of words and then recognise when someone tries to twist them.


Can someone more knowledgeable explain this better please? I have questions:

- if you can measure the 'optical singularities' travelling FTL, then surely 'information' is travelling FTL?

- does it matter (i.e. violate relativity) if something is travelling faster than light speed in some medium as long as it doesn't travel faster than light in vacuum?


Good questions:

> if you can measure the 'optical singularities' travelling FTL, then surely 'information' is travelling FTL?

Information is not traveling FTL.

The canonical example is when you have a lighthouse in the middle of a huge circular wall. The light spot may move faster than light when you see it on the wall, but the info moves from the center to the wall, not along the wall.

When the singularities are far away, you can treat them like a single entity, and track the anti-peak and measure it's speed and they will move like 1/100 of the speed of light in this case.

When the singularities are very close together the anti-peak may move at a faster speed (FTL IIUC), but it's just an illusion for tracking the peak. The information moves slower than light.

> does it matter (i.e. violate relativity) if something is travelling faster than light speed in some medium as long as it doesn't travel faster than light in vacuum?

This is totally possible. It's common if you live inside the water pool of a nuclear reactor or a neutrino detector. More info in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation


No. It's not really a predator-prey relationship, because the predators aren't consuming the prey for sustenance. They are killing out of self-defence only.

"predators aren't consuming the prey for sustenance".

You don't know that....


Strictly speaking fossil fuels being finite does not mean we have to move to electric vehicles. We could switch to 'green' hydrogen, biofuels, or synthetic fuels. We'd still switch to renewables (or maybe nuclear), just not necessarily to electric.

> "In Combined mode, every possible time (43,200 of them) is spelled out, sorted alphabetically"

Why limit yourself? — make a 24-hour version and you have 86,400 possible times!


Before clocks 'clockwise' was called 'sunwise', because that's the direction the Sun moves across the sky in the Northern Hemisphere. Anticlockwise was called 'widdershins'.

> Did something like this exist before, with the same level of interactivity?

Yes, many of them. There have been online interactive tables of the elements since the early days of the web, and even before that they were available on DVD-ROM encyclopedias — I think Encarta had one.


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