More cisterian clocks

This week I found out about the midieval cisterian numerical system, which uses a single constructed glyph that can represent any number from 0 to 9999. Of course I turned this numerical system into a simple clock that divides the day into 10000 parts of 8.64 seconds each. The clock simply counts these parts.

The first examples I made used a javascript library. The downside of this library is that the complete glyph is replaced by another glyph every time it updates. This means you cannot animate the (dis)appearance of the different parts of the glyph whenever they change. And I want stuff to animate. So I moved most logic from javascript to a simple SVG, with some hand made CSS. The difference is clear. On the left the old clock, on the right a new one.

Writing the SVG and the CSS files myself also gives me more control over some details. For instance, I can now randomise the order of the stems: sometimes when you open this clock a certain stem is shown as if it is placed on top of the middle stem, and sometimes it is placed behind it. Just refresh the page to see this in effect.

The original layout of the glyphs is a bit mathematical. With my own codebase I find it easier to try out different layouts, like the one where the top and bottom parts are placed a bit closer to each other.

Other stuff I wanted to animate immediately is the thickness of each stem. My first experiments were very skinny, I was very eager to see what result would be when I used ridiculously thick stems. Well, it results in these very blobby, very colourful, things.

More blobbiness? Here’s more blobbiness.

When I wrote about these cisterian clocks on mastodon, Tom Arnold sent me a link to his own experiments with making a cisterian calendar that he did a few years ago. He also pointed at the update at the bottom of his article: apparently the nazis thought about using these numerals, they certainly loved their pseudo pagan bullshit.

I wonder if the nazis would have liked these symbols as well if they looked like this extra horny, extra blobby rainbow clock.