Placed my cursor at the top of the hour peak on the 'Peaks' clock. Few moments later, it shifted slightly to the left. Had a bit of existential dread as I saw time slipping away.
Oh, I clicked the link. My life is almost 50% complete.
However, the expected lifetimes are obviously too low. It expects me to end up at approximately age 80, but that is an underestimation. I dont know if the lifetimes that are used are just outdated, or if they lack expected mortality improvements.
Yeah I figured that 80 was a pretty good approximation because the average life expectancy in the US is 77. It surprisingly doesn't increase as much I would have expected as you age so I didn't account for that effect.
Yea. It's kind of the same error, in a way, as people who assume that there were no old people in the middle ages. The overwhelming majority of the increase in expected lifespan between then and now comes from drastic decreases in the infant and child mortality rates. While current medicine is only really making slow, incremental progress on letting the oldest people live longer, even if this was the bulk of the advancement you wouldn't see the kind of movement on overall life expectancy you'd get out of reducing those, and that's just on the pure statistical basis of how the metric is constructed. But on top of that, I think it's nearly impossible to understand just how many infants used to be stillborn, and how many diseases we essentially eliminated. The death of a child from an illness used to be a fairly common tragedy, now it is a rare one.
It's just a little internet toy that probably cashes out to be a slightly more impactful version of "memento mori", but you could add a little backend complexity without collecting any more demographic information and get a more accurate life expectancy given only one's current age from extant actuarial tables. If you wanted to be extra cheeky, you could have it adjust on a regional basis based on IP address too
Well, average life expectancy in the middle ages was in the low 30s or high 20s, but the child death factor does not bring the typical old person age to the 80s that we're used to from today, but into the late 50s, early 60s. That was an old person.
As for making the predicion more accurate, it's a rabbit hole you'd rather not enter. Whether you smoke or not or whether you live in a big city or not or your social class all have much higher impact than whether your IP is from Spain or Poland or Florida. Including people with the time and means to browse such website are a very select group. Not even speaking of VPNs hiding your actual geolocation. Whatever you do beyond "let's shoot at 80 for approximate time" may be making things worse.
The binary clock reminds me of a similar bar you sometimes saw on videotapes being played back on TV broadcasts. They didn't look like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_interval_timecode , since these are stripes, not blocks. Maybe specific to PAL?
Here's what I cooked up, in the spirit of the original I invite folks to modify it to their liking. Currently it has an hours shape, an hours-and-minutes shape, and an hours-and-minutes-and-seconds shape.
Like those insane gear ratio videos on YouTube... You know the final gear is turning, logically, but the fact that the Sun will eat the Earth long before the gear completes a single turn lends a strange perspective.
The Hanoi clock represents time by mapping disk positions to binary bits - each legal tower state uniquely encodes one moment, with the smallest disk moving every minute creating the beautiful recursive pattern where larger disks move exponentially less frequently.
Love the binary and wave clocks, instantly got me thinking about how it could work as a subtle graphical element in a landing page footer or something like that.
Had an idea for physical clock once where there is a chain of 60 links rotating around a central motor that moved the chain so slowly that the top link was showing the correct time within a twelve minute range - five links per hour for a twelve hour clock.
Everyone should redesign the representation of time once in their life :)
awesome post and thread
clocks for me were an entry point to font creation and broadcast design. they make a great platform for design and coding experimentation
very cool. reminds me of an old iPhone clock app called "hms" that displayed a rectangular prism, and each dimension (x, y, z) corresponded with the hour, minute and second, so the shape would grow over time before resetting one or more dimensions. it got delisted years ago for some reason but i used to love it as a "nightstand mode" clock.
Nice! @qq66 did you make this spiralling clock? https://www.shadertoy.com/view/flGGDy
It's trippy, and I love how the spiral arms rearrange every few seconds.
Nice clocks though.
However, the expected lifetimes are obviously too low. It expects me to end up at approximately age 80, but that is an underestimation. I dont know if the lifetimes that are used are just outdated, or if they lack expected mortality improvements.
It's just a little internet toy that probably cashes out to be a slightly more impactful version of "memento mori", but you could add a little backend complexity without collecting any more demographic information and get a more accurate life expectancy given only one's current age from extant actuarial tables. If you wanted to be extra cheeky, you could have it adjust on a regional basis based on IP address too
As for making the predicion more accurate, it's a rabbit hole you'd rather not enter. Whether you smoke or not or whether you live in a big city or not or your social class all have much higher impact than whether your IP is from Spain or Poland or Florida. Including people with the time and means to browse such website are a very select group. Not even speaking of VPNs hiding your actual geolocation. Whatever you do beyond "let's shoot at 80 for approximate time" may be making things worse.
For the U.S. you have https://www.ssa.gov/oact/population/longevity.html for this.
You probably barely remember anything up to around 10, and then each doubling of age adds one logarithmical unit
So 10 is 1, 20 is 2, 40 is 3 and 80 is 4 (or maybe 0, 1 and 2?)
20 is already half of life passed by -_-
Here's an interesting graph and discussion on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1e18fmz/pe...
Still looking if anyone has a study of (life/long-term) time perception w/ graph(s).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mengenlehreuhr
but lots of dots, so my mind couldn't help but wander ':D
https://codepen.io/rezmason/pen/empBWgY?editors=1111
Beyond some basic style variation, I think there's a lot of room for experimentation with shapes and their centers of rotation.
"Each droplet forms and falls over a period of about a decade."
"it is expected there is enough pitch in the funnel to allow it to continue for at least another hundred years"
I guess with enough pitch you an make a millennium-scale "water" (liquid) clock?
Corpus Clock - Wikipedia https://share.google/aAjMb15aeaVvHLJFa
http://24times.gysin-vanetti.com
The “cuckoo” one is interactive.
Here's a one-shot recreation of "Against the Run" (https://listart.mit.edu/art-artists/against-run-2019): https://g.co/gemini/share/c1dcfbd9cf9a
like
how about a pac-man running around the dial consuming your seconds as you watch? wooka wooka wooka wooka...
Everyone should redesign the representation of time once in their life :)
[1] https://timexjapan.com/products/pac-man-x-timex-camper