Anti-clocks

I was writing alternative texts for a few pictures of clocks I took last weekend in Antwerp. One of the clocks turned out to be impossible to describe correctly: the minute hand clearly points at five minutes to the hour, while the hour hand points to at least five minutes after the hour. The hands were out of sync. This happens every now and then. I decided not to use this image for the pix clock.

But the clock kept bugging me. And this morning I woke up with the solution. Some sort of an anti-clock would solve the problem. The clock is not wrong, it simply ignores the conventions we use when it comes to the directions that the hands are supposed to turn.

In this anti-clock the hour hand keeps moving clockwise, like most clocks do. The minute hand is the rebel here: it moves counter clockwise. And now, when we look at the same clock with this anti-convention, all of a sudden it shows the time as five past one. As you may understand, I wanted to know what this clock looks like, not just at five past one, but whenever. So here it is, a clock with a normal hour hand, and a reversed minute hand. Time does look rather normal at the whole and the half hour.

I encountered another problematic clock recently. The hour hand of this clock points exactly at nine, while the minute hand suggests it is half past something by pointing down. Very confusing. Is it half past nine? Or half past eight?

Again, this problem can be solved by ignoring conventions. Convention tells us that both at zero hour and at zero minutes the hands should point upwards. By moving zero minutes to the bottom of the clock this frustrating problem was solved as well.

When I wrote on Mastodon that I was working on some anti-clocks Roman Komarov asked but how about ant clocks? So I also made an ant clock.