The OBA Clock
Recently I’ve been taking pictures of clocks. It can be real clocks, like a clock on a church or a watch on someone’s wrist. It can also be an image of a clock, like a clock as an illustration on a poster or a painting of a clock. Recently I took a picture of a drawing of a clock at the OBA, our local public library. I didn’t pay too much attention to it until I tried to add it to the Pix Clock. While it does look like a normal clock, when you look closer all of a sudden it’s not clear at all what time it indicates.
So I asked the people of Mastodon what time it is on that clock. 9% said it’s seven o’clock, which seems to be right. The weird thing is that nobody thought it was eight o’clock, which seems to be right as well. 9% said it is five, which is correct it you simply count the units. 82% said What
which is a logical answer. A few people came up with sensible alternatives. Peter Gasston came up with this simple solution that definitely made the most sense:
Eight major units, so it must be a 24 hour clock divided into three hour segments, so 3pm.
It’s a 24 hour clock. So at midnight the hour hand points up, and at noon it points down. At six in the morning it points east, and at six in the evening it points west. And indeed, at 3pm its hands point exactly in the same directions as the hands in the original picture.
I think I like the minute hand even more. Since it takes three hours for the hour hand to move from one unit to the next, it seemed logical that it should also take three hours for the minute hand to make one turn. This makes it contrarian in a weird but logical way: When it points to the top or to the bottom, all is fine. But when it points at the place where we expect a quarter past, it is actually a quarter before. And the same way, when it points at a quarter before it is a quarter past.
I’m adding it to my collection of clocks.