Love nonsense

It is 25:14

Itis

Last week Robert Jan Verkade sent me an image of a clock. This was a peculiar one. It shows the time in a format I hadn’t seen before. It is a digital clock in a billboard for a company that buys and sells gold. The clock on this image shows the time as 25:14. This clock needs an answer, because it triggers the question: What kind of clock needs more than 24 hours?

It’s dark outside. A billboard, attached to a brick building, which houses a business that buys and sells gold. There’s a digital clock in this billboard with red, brightly lit numbers. It shows the time in an extraordinary way: it says it is 25:14 which means, I think, 14 minutes past one o’clock in the middle of the night

Two day clocks.

There are a few possible clocks I could think of. One of them would be a clock that keeps on counting for two days, instead of just 24 hours. This clock would show 25:14 every 48 hours. Here’s a version of this clock where 00:00 start on even days at midnight, and here’s a version where 00:00 starts on odd days. I made two, just for you, so you can see its effect no matter what day it is. I have found no use for this clock.

Week clocks

Another clock that will show 25:14 every now and then is a week clock. It keeps on counting the hours for seven days, until it reaches 167:59. Where I come from, weeks start on Monday. If your week starts on Monday too, here’s your link to the week clock. If your week starts on Sunday, here’s a link to another week clock. There was a period in my life where I would go out for a proper meal, with good amounts of wine, with good friends every Wednesday. During this period me and my friends used to say that the week starts on Wednesday. For those of you who live like that right now, here’s a version of this week clock that starts on Wednesday. I don’t find this clock very useful.

Longer clocks

I skipped the fortnight clock because I couldn’t figure out when a fortnight starts. So I move over to the month clock instead. It shows 25:14 on the second day of each month, at 14 minutes past one. I thought about making a trimester and a semester clock, time periods commonly used in educational institutions, but again, I couldn’t decide on when to start. Where I work, the semesters start in September and in February, which makes no sense. So let’s see what a year clock looks like instead. Once a year, exactly 25 hours and 14 minutes after this clock switched from 8759:59 to 0000:00 (or from 8783:59 to 0000:00 after a leap year) it shows the time as 0025:14. Wait for it!

You may imagine what a century clock looks like. A century has less than a million hours in it. You’ll have to wait until 2 January 2100, and stay awake until fourteen minutes past one to see it switch to 000.025:14. If you want to see a two day clock, a week clock, a month clock, a year clock, and the century clock switch to 25:14 all at once you’ll have to wait until the second of January, 74 minutes past midnight in the year 2300. And don’t forget to use the week clock that starts on Monday, and the two day clock that starts on odd days. If you miss it, your next opportunity is in the year 2700. I published this post at 24 minutes past 221.627.

More options

But what if we don’t want to wait a century? What if we’re impatient? Or what if we’re always asleep at 01:14? There are other possible clocks that can show 25:14 as a valid timestamp. For instance clocks that use a system where we have more than 24 hours in a day. And why not? I’ve never understood why we should have 24 hours in a day. 24 is such a random number, we could just as wel have 48 hours in a day. So here it is, a clock for a 48 hour system. At 37 minutes past noon it will display the time as 25:14.

Let’s zoom in a bit more. Here’s a clock for a 168 hour system, those are as many hours as there are in a week. Makes just enough sense as a 24 hour clock to me. It’s 25:14 between 3:36:18 and 3:36:25 on this clock. Here’s a clock that has 720 hours in a day, indeed about the average amount of hours in a month. It will flip to 025:14 at 0:50:28, and it will show it for just two seconds. And indeed, here’s one with 8760 hours in a day, as many as there are hours in a year. It shows the time as 0025:14 for a fraction of a second around 9 seconds past four minutes past midnight. Yes, here’s a clock with 876.000 hours in a day, as many hours in a day as the hours in a century. It might crash your computer. Somewhere between two and three seconds past midnight it shows the time as 000025:14 for a tiny, tiny fraction of a second.

Let’s switch to a 876600 hour time system. It was 42 past 418.574 when I wrote this.