The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock | Hacker News Reader

The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock

boat.horse

63 pointsohjeez27 comments

As a Show HN (40 points, 15 days ago, 27 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571401

> Accursèd

For those who don’t know, the accent indicates that the -ed ending is pronounced as a separate syllable, I.e. “a-curse-ed”. For that extra mysterious, old-timey feel!

Just like beloved is supposed to be pronounced (don't @ me Descriptivists).

What a ridiculous idea. As hard to read as it is dumb!

For a senior engineer like myself with decades of experience it is trivial to see how to fix this to make it much more readable.

1/ pick a sunny day

2/ at each hour, measure the bearing to the sun

3/ encode as a dict[str, float] e.g.

    {“twelve”:180.00}

4/ sort the hours by dict.get

Voila.

As an added bonus, for some reason this ends up sorting the minutes and seconds too. (“# wtf?!”)

For now, I was only able to fix the hours when I could see the sun (eleven, twelve, and two to eight — I don’t get up very early and I like lunch). Patches form the arctic circle welcome :P

I also need to tilt my head a bit as eleven is at the top instead of twelve. Other than that I would say it’s a considerable improvement on the OP’s rather naïve implementation! Scoff!

Here in Singapore on many sunny days, the bearing is largely the same hour after hour. The sun just changes apparent altitude.

Jam a stick in the ground aligned with the earth's axis and take your bearing from the shadow's direction. Then follow GP's instructions. Never mind that we've reinvented the sundial...

> Jam a stick in the ground aligned with the earth's axis [...]

You mean place a stick flat on the ground? (Singapore is pretty much on the equator.)

The closer you are to the equator, the taller the stick needs to be. If you're really close, the height requirements diverge, and the stick is at this point technically more of a space elevator[1] than a stick.

But don't lose hope, just tell Bezos that Musk wants to fund your space elevator, and vice versa, to goad one of them into funding your $10tn near-equatorial sundial boondoggle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

A space elevator is not aligned with the axis of earth's rotation. It sounds like what you are describing is a different device?

Why would a sun dial need to point in the north/south direction? It just needs to point up along the normal axis of the ground (assuming flat ground).

From the original comment I replied to:

> Jam a stick in the ground aligned with the earth's axis and take your bearing from the shadow's direction.

Ah, that comment would be incorrect.

You could make either method more secure by hashing the encoded time and displaying that.

Make sure to use a cryprographically-secure hash function and a strong salt.

Could someone please explain the minute hand? It says it’s Nine : Twenty-nine but the minute hand is pointing at the word Twelve.

I think the labels are pointlessly confusing.

I mean to be fair the entire thing is pointlessly confusing.

Maybe, but the labels and hour markers that contradict the meaning of the hand positions is just perverse :-)

I have changed it now (see another comment above.) But now it is less accursèd! Ah well.

Hmm. I wonder what it would look like if you added the corresponding "minute" labels (eight, five, four, etc) at the appropriate places. It might make it at least a little feasible to read the time!

For inspiration: https://www.alamy.com/clock-face-hour-dial-with-numbers-dash...

Yeah, might add this as a toggle. Seems to be the bit that people ask about.

Arrange all sixty minutes alphabetically around the clock. Same for seconds. Twenty-nine is near the end of the alphabet.

The labels only relevant to the hours. For some reason the hour labels don’t align well to where the hour hand is.

THAT explains it, thank you.

I tweaked the labels when I was working on the combined mode, where I figured they make more sense as indicative of the general, combined alphabetical area. I hadn't considered they'd be confusing in the 3-hand mode. I've split the positioning of them between the two now. Appreciate the feedback! It does make it _less_ accursèd now, which I feel could be either an improvement or a regression. I leave it to weigh on your consciences.

Check the "show all labels" to make it correct. The big labels are incorrect, the "twelve" should be "twenty-five".

I love the fractal nature of this, where the big shape of one two three four... is then roughly repeated both on a slower scale (twenty thirty forty...) and on a narrower scale (twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four...).

I'm now wondering the hausdorf dimension of the graph of alphabetical numbers <n, and how other languages might compare.

Imagine the mechanical gears behind this if it was an analogue watch. So many funky curved gears in there.

Syntax is wildly continuous with semantics, what’s the problem?

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