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Binary Watch
sovereignclass writes: "IDG in Sweden ran a little story about a firm in Norway that has built a binary wrist watch. It look way cool and I am definitely in line for getting one myself. With a price-tag of 250 norwegian kronor it's not a tough buy either. Yes, it shows time in decimal too... In Sweden we often poke fun at the Norwegians (like the Germans do to the Ostfriesen) and this almost sounds too good to be true."
I was hoping for blinkenlights, not numbers!
The product shots are CG renders! I doubt this product really exists...
This would be fun, I hear they mgiht be sale in the US on 0110101101110000101110101, 01101101301EST.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
It says:
This page is under construction
In a few days we will present a complete new type of watch.
This watch will communicate with other similar watches and send virus to each other.
Wow, nothing like truth in marketing, I guess.
What's your damage, Heather?
and get a matching binary "ties suck tie", and the "you are dumb" binary t-shirt!
Sell all three together as a set.... Then head to work for the day..... That will keep you from getting a date for at least the next year!
On a side note, the idea is cool for the watch and I like it, I just wish they looked a little cooler... They kinda look cheap.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
it already takes me a long time to figure out an analog watch... now this...
"Excuse me sir, do you have the time?"
"Yes, it's... uhhh... 12.. no, 14! I mean, er, do you have a pencil?"
"Uh, never mind. Thanks anyway, you fucking dork."
Now if they had a hex watch, THAT would be cool... :->
But yeah, blinking led's would be far cooler. ;-) I wonder how long it would take to get quick at telling the time at a glance? The digits are not grouped in 4 bits (which would have made it easier but subject to overflow). 4, 5, 5.
Yeah, but does it show the time in binary, using little blinky LEDs, like mine does?
Incidentally, I also think that the LEDs would make a far cooler watch than the LCD display with 1's and 0's.
Hmmm.... maybe I should just make one.
Help find a cure for Gidget.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Does anyone know of a watch that does this?
1/1000th of a day is a Swatch .beat that they use in their 'Internet Time'. You can buy all sorts of Swatches that will display the time in .beats (@500 == 12:00 noon in their system).
"Hey buddy, what time is it?"
"It's 110101000100101101000101"
"Nevermind then."
------
Let me give you the lowdown
My clock is fuzzier than yours... right now the time is "End of week".
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
You know, the kind with hands pointing at numbers that are scattered about a dial? They used to be fairly common, and are why you hear about "half past" the hour or "quarter til" the hour. They are also why we use AM/PM instead of 24 hour clocks.
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As a guest of the norwegians, I find it amusing that they were given the hardest, rockiest land in all of Sweden as their own, only to become the some of the most valuable land on earth, because of the oil, gas, fish, and other wealth just off the shoreline.
It's lots of fun tho, the tit-for-tat between them and you. I saw a widely circulated map the other day which shows scandanavia without sweden. Very popular here.
Closest thing to it in the States that I can think of is the ongoing rivalry between Oklahoma and Texas. (although there is probably more physical violence in that one, heh.)
Stillig klokke, dudes.
You can find a real shot here.
Plain 'ol LCD stuff. Still pretty cool for the price though.
The displays on the models shown are all showing:
10111
111011
110010
But every watch marketer knows that you should be showing:
01010
001010
000000
which is 10:10 AM. Apparently it's recommended for digital watches as well, so I don't see why they shouldn't use it for binary watches.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
This is cool. Sending virii to each others watches! It'd work like this:
I set up my virus to give the message 'all your squares are belong to torus' and walk about with my watch blasting that out in IR. Any other watch I pass gets infected with the virus!
Then everytime a watch links to a base unit it puts all its messages (along with where they are geographically) into a website.
I can call up 'all your squares are belong to torus' and see how far its spread.
I walk past someone on a street in London who flies off to Tokyo and goes dancing allnight - soon most of Japan is infected with 'all your squares are belong to torus'. How cool a game is that! I'd play!
The best locations to get your virus to would be Antrctica and the ISS I'd have thought. Oh, and Manchester.
HH:MM:SS time is actually called "sexagesimal."
Yes, it is called sexagesimal, but that's a misnomer. It's three decimal components with distinct modulo periods.
For mathematicians, sexagesimal numbering would use sixty different digit symbols, for every component. The Babylonians used sexagesimal numbering for a range of things, not just counting minutes, but that's where we got the hour/minute/second convention.
Someone below also mentioned that the watch is "binary coded sexagesimal". That's closer to the mark, as the minutes and seconds digits are shown in distinct groupings of six binary digits (wasting four permutations for 60, 61, 62, 63). It does not count for the hours position, though, as that is shown with only five binary digits.
A twelve-hour system would be "binary coded duodecimal," but the watch appears to use a twenty-four hour system which would be called "binary coded tetravigesimal."
[
the other cool part is that the .beat thing is also a timezone-less time. @500 is 1200 GMT, @999 is 2359 GMT.
Why is that cool? When I say something happens at @500, you then need to translate that to, lets see, maybe 4 am your time to figure out if it was light or dark. I suppose if it really was universal, so you knew what time dawn, dusk, lunch and midnight are where you are, it might be OK, but otherwise it's annoying.
I guess these are the same sorts of arguments people have against metric weights and measures, to some degree.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
From the looks of their video, they definitely need to hang out with some marketing folks, if only for a couple hours over a few beers. Still, the video has an enduring, ineffable charm. All the qualities of amateur pr0n. Without the pr0n. (Be sure to turn up the volume in order to hear the dialogue in the live-action scene -- unlike pr0n, the dialogue makes the magic.)
-dwd-
The Binary watch from RSI -- Perfect for the geek with RSI!
Or will you just get carpal tunnel syndrome from wearing it?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Why _normal_time_ in binary, not miliseconds from The Epoch?
May The TRue Time be with you!
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Someone from East Frisia, an area in the north-west of Germany (from the Dutch border along to coast up to maybe Bremen or so). There's also West Frisia (in the Netherlands) and North Frisia (up along the western coast of Germany from north of the Elbe river up to Denmark).
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
Yep, that would come in handy.
...
Bystander: Excuse me, do you have the time?
Me: Yes, its been 1007744600 seconds since midnight of January 1st, 1970.
Bystander:
there is another binary wrist watch at http://www.museumsmarket.de/ for about 40$. Have that watch for years. Looks much better than the photo suggests.
After some time you can read the time as fast as you can read it from a normal watch.
When I was growing up my parents had a Spartacus Backwards Clock, a popular item from the 1950's, I guess. Unfortunately for me, though, I am now completely broken about clockwise and counter-clockwise. I have gotten to where I can now figure it out, but it is definitely a cognitive task, not an immediate perception as it is with normal people.
A friend reports a similar confusion with orange and purple, but it was purposefully engendered by her many cooperating (all older) siblings...
In Roman times the Frisian tribes lived from what is now northern France along the North Sea coast all the way up into Denmark. In Medievial times there once were to be 7 Frisian Kingdoms (or Islands). The Flag
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Swatch started this in 1998, and you can still buy Swatch watches that use it, but it's only marginally more useful than the binary watch.
I was half expecting to read 23:59:59 on the watch, but it reads 23:59:50. Didn't I hear Norway moved to a 50 second minute somewhere...
:)
hah - gotta get my slams on Norwegians when I can. I went to school with a girl who used the e-mail sig the Norwegan goddess, so we of course made fun of her as the Nor-WEGG-An goddess rather than the Nor-Weeg-An goddess. Ah, the good old days
Anyhow, straying offtopic. Not much you can say about a friggin watch, tho (ooh - mine does base 2!).
I can just imagine a conversation here:
So, is there a time I can take you home and show you the true meaning of love?
Scrawling on a bar napkin: 11001
Um, is that supposed to be a time? It looks like you forgot the colon... what's the extra one for?
It's in binary - see? Look at my watch.
That's a weird watch... it looks like it's almost that time now... you're not trying to pull something over on me, are you?
Naw. Ask one of your buddies over there, maybe they can figure it out.
Smiling slyly - by the looks of things, it's almost that time now.
I'm waiting...
(asking buddies) What the f*ck is binary? For that matter, what the f*ck does 11011 mean in it?
(shrugging) The heck if I know.
Me either. Hey, your friend over there just headed out the door... did you get a phone number?
Shit!
(for the technically challenged or lazy, 11001 binary is 25 decimal [16+8+1=25] - thanks go out to the Dukes of Stratosphear [aka XTC] for their strange and weirdly inspiring song 25 O'Clock)
You're right gay is not the correct word. I mean no disrespect in saying this, but if he had said "how queer" that would have been more appropriate since one of the meanings of queer deals with the odd or unconventional. As we all know the word gay has several meanings, one of which is happiness another meaning deals with sexual orientation. On the other hand, one meaning of queer has to do with the unconventional. Another meaning of queer is geared towards those of the same sex. Therefore, many people cross the use of the slang term gay as a synonym for the "unconventional" since it is a synonym for sexual orientation. Obviously, this is incorrect because the watch can not be happy and cannot choose its fate as you have. However, we are free to label the watch as queer since it is very odd and very unconventional :)
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
If you always used .beats, you would have to think about when light was, you'd know, the same way you don't have to think about when it is light now.
When you go east or west, however, you may have problems
-no broken link
I assume from what little they have at the website (haven't watched the movie yet) that you can switch from binary time to sexagesimal (i know i must have spelled that wrong) I actaully like the idea. I';m lousy at converting binary to decimal. This could be a great learning tool and nifty to boot.
-
None of this binary stuff for me -- too complicated. What I need is a watch that will give me the seconds since Jan 1, 1970!
1007771123
1007771124
1007771125
1007771126....
Maybe I can just get a watch that has a perl interpreter:
perl -e "while() {print time; sleep(1);} "
A thought.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.