The Friday Fillip

The Friday Fillip arrives a little early today, but it’s a holiday weekend and there may not be much posting to cap. (This weekend is Easter, Passover, Baisakhi, and only one week off Mawlid al-Nabi, Mohammed’s birthday, and three weeks off the birthday of the Buddha.)

So all of this calendaring, lunar and solar, got me thinking of time.

world clockCharlotte van der Waals has designed a marvelously simple 12-sided clock. The concept is brilliant: no numerals on the face; turn one facet uppermost depending on what city/locale you want to know the time in; the top is noon and midnight, of course, and the rest follows from that. Ameico and Junro offer various styles to choose from, including a flat disc model suitable for traveling. This is the sort of “obvious” design-cum-function that makes me slap my (large-target, ever-expanding) forehead and exclaim: Why didn’t I think of that.

The good people in Newfoundland will have reason to complain, though, it being tricky in the extreme to balance the thing on an edge.

[via Cool Tools]

Comments

  1. Not merely the good people in Newfoundland and Labrador (come from aways always get it wrong), but 1.1 billion folks in India feel slighted too.

  2. Newfoundland and Labrador is/are the least of it — Labrador uses Atlantic Time except for the small portion between L’Anse au Clair and Norman Bay, which is on Newfoundland time — and, as Simon C points out, India is indeed the most of it, being half an hour ahead of Pakistan and half an hour behind Bangladesh.

    But there are lots of other places that are in “offset time zones.” Among them:

    Iran, Afghanistan,Australia’s Northern Territory and South Australia, Nepal (off by fifteen minutes from Bangladesh), Burma, and the islands of Marquesas in French Polynesia.

    Still, it’s a cool clock.