Cisterian clocks

Being a nerd is fantastic. Chris Heilman is a nerd, and he made a fantastic thing. He wrote a javascript library that can turn normal numbers into cisterian numbers. This numeral system was developed by the Cistercian monastic order in the early thirteenth century, around the same time that the Arabic numerals were introduced to northwestern Europe. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if we should be happy that our ancestors chose the Arabic numerals instead of this much more compact, and thus much more efficient cisterian numeric system.

The cisterian numeric system is very, very compact. Where we need four glyphs to write the number 9999, cisterian monks only needed a single glyph for that same number. This system is based on a clever, and pretty simple visual algorithm. Chris has an illustration and a good explanation on his website, you should read it over there.

To show this cisterian system in practice Chris made a clock, of course. A Cisterian clock that shows the hours, the minutes and the seconds in cysterian numbers. While it is a nice example, it is also a pity that it only shows the glyphs from 0 - 60. There are almost 10000 more glyphs that will never be shown in this clock. It’s also not very efficient: It uses three(!) glyphs to show the time!

Single glyph cisterian clock

Instead of using three glyphs, I came up with this super efficient single glyph, decasecond cisterian clock. It shows you the time as decaseconds that have passed since midnight. There are 86400 seconds in a day, too many for a single glyph. But there are just 8640 decaseconds in a day, which means that this clock can show 86.4% of all cisterian glyphs every day! That is a nice score, many middle managers would be happy with such a KPI.

The single glyph cisterian decimal clock

But I want more. So I made the single glyph, decasecond cisterian decimal clock, which shows a new glyph every decasecond of a decimal time system. This system uses 10 hours instead of those weird 24 hours that we use. And it uses 100 minutes, and 100 seconds, instead of those randomly chosen 60 that we use. This clock has exactly 10000 decaseconds in a day, which means that it can show 100% of all cisterian glyphs.

I decided to use all the colours of the rainbow to style the glyphs, because we need more rainbows.

Is this a good clock?

It is a very efficient clock. It uses just one glyph, where our normal way of displaying time needs 5 glyphs to tell the time in decaseconds. That’s much better, from an efficiency point of view. There are some arguments against this clock. For instance, do you know what time it is when the clock tells you it is 6498? You probably don’t. But this is not a convincing argument, the first time someone told you it was 22:45:2 did you understand what they meant? Of course not, you had to learn to understand the time. Another argument is that the glyph is very hard to read. Which, again, is probably something you just have to get used to.

When they had to choose between this highly efficient cisterian system and the arabic system, the medieval europeans chose for the inefficient system. I think we can conclude that middle management had not been invented yet.