Inspired by the cursive thread: Analog clocks

[JJChicken]

Fuck digital and analog watches. I carry a sundial and I'm the coolest! :thumbsup:

Sending some major e-brownie points your way sir

 

[Anubis]

clock here at work in the cube farm in analog
we have digital ones in the facility as well

at home i dont own a stand alone clock. alarm clock is the closest thing, its digital, all other clocks are on appliances. i also dont own a watch. even before i got a cell phone i never had one, id just ask someone else if they knew what time it was

 

[KeithTalent]

Any watch I own will always be analog and most of the digital clocks I have I switched to look analog as I just prefer that.

KT

 

[lxskllr]

Fuck digital and analog watches. I carry a sundial and I'm the coolest! :thumbsup:

Dude, those are a PITA. They're ok for work or something when it's light out, but you have to use a flashlight to check the time at night. I don't feel like carrying a flashlight everywhere.

 

[Fritzo]

Who the heck wants to pull out their phone and hit a button to power the screen to see what time it is? I'd rather just look at my wrist watch. Plus, there are many times where I'm doing yard work, washing the car, etc when I don't want to be carrying a phone with me.

Hot off the press:

NYT: Watches are rediscovered by the cellphone generation

Andy Greenblatt of Watchismo, an online retailer that has seen more interest from a generation of men who rely on their cellphones for the time.
Tyler Thoreson, the head of men’s editorial for Gilt Man, the flash sale Web site, often kept his forgettable watches stashed in a drawer.

And Eddy Chai, an owner of Odin New York, a downtown men’s boutique, gave up wearing watches regularly in his mid-20s, when he outgrew his Casio.

But after going watch-free for much of the last decade, the three men — all in their 30s and considered style influencers — are turning back time. Mr. Thoreson, 38, is shopping for a vintage gold IWC with a white dial or a Rolex GMT-Master. Mr. Chai, 38, has been wearing a vintage Rolex, loosely dangling around his wrist, “not as a timepiece, but as a piece of jewelry,” he said.

And Mr. Williams, 32, splurged on three watches: an IWC Portuguese, a Rolex GMT-Master II and an Omega Speedmaster, also known as the “moon watch,” since that is what Apollo astronauts wore.

“The men’s-wear set has recently rediscovered the joy of proper mechanical timepieces,” Mr. Williams said. “Right now there is no clearer indication of cool than wearing a watch. If it was your grandfather’s bubbleback Rolex, even better.”

As recently as a half-decade ago, time seemed to be running out for the wristwatch. With cellphones, iPods and other clock-equipped devices becoming ubiquitous, armchair sociologists were writing off the wristwatch as an antique, joining VHS tapes, Walkman players and pocket calculators on the slag heap of outmoded gadgets.

The wristwatch “may be going the way of the abacus,” declared a news article in The Sacramento Bee in 2006. The Times of London had it “going the same way as the sundial.” The Boston Globe, in a 2005 lifestyle feature, was more definitive: “Anyone who needs to know the time these days would be wise to ask someone over the age of 30. To most young people, the wristwatch is an obsolete artifact.”

Or, not.

The “sundial” of the wrist is experiencing an uptick among members of the supposed lost generation, particularly by heritage-macho types in their 20s and 30s who are drawn to the wristwatch’s retro appeal, just as they have seized on straight razors, selvedge denim and vintage vinyl.

"It’s an understated statement about your station in life, your taste level,” Mr. Thoreson said.

He got a taste of the pent-up demand last fall, when Gilt organized a high-end vintage watch sale with Benjamin Clymer, 28, who runs an online magazine for watch enthusiasts called Hodinkee.com. (Mr. Clymer, a former UBS manager, said his site attracts 250,000 unique visitors a month, more than half of them under 40.)

Fourteen of the 17 watches, with an average price of $4,800, sold in the first six hours. Gilt now holds a watch sale every month. “In certain circles,” Mr. Thoreson said, “if you don’t have a substantial timepiece with some pedigree, you feel like you’re missing out on something.”

To be fair, the doomsayers were not entirely wrong. Few people actually need a watch to tell time anymore. Melanie Shreffler, editor in chief of Ypulse, a Web site and market research company that tracks youth trends, observed, “even the high school and college students who wear watches usually pull out their cellphones to check the time.”

But that’s the point. A watch these days may strike some people as an impractical, frivolous and often costly way to express individual style. But that is just another way of saying that it’s fashion.

“Considering how casual most people dress on a day-to-day basis, a glamorous watch is one of the few accessories that can be at once sporty, luxurious and utilitarian,” the designer Michael Kors wrote in an e-mail. Mr. Kors has a line of oversize chronographs, manufactured by Fossil, that is popular among women (they are a current must-have accessory among under-30 fashion assistant types in Manhattan).

For a generation raised on Game Boys, however, the appeal seems to go a little deeper than just a desire for another fashion accessory. In a world surrounded by ever-glowing LCD screens, there’s an analog chic to wearing a mechanical instrument.

“A cool machine that is all moving parts has got to be intrinsically interesting to someone born into this generation, because there’s just nothing like that in their life,” said Mitch Greenblatt, a founder, with his brother, Andy, of Watchismo, a California online retailer of design-forward watches.

 

[Fritzo]

I don't find analog clocks any harder to read than digital. It's virtually instantaneous recognition for either, unless the analog is some kind of bizarro design. The only concession I'll make on ease of viewing is for dial lighting. Digitals are either inherently bright(LED), or have very bright backlighting(LCD).

Until they start pulling crap like this:

http://coolmaterial.com/style/19-cool-watches-that-require-a-phd-to-tell-time/

 

[Fritzo]

When I was growing up in the 90s, there were a lot of kids that couldn't tell time from an analogue clock. None of the schools had digital clocks. They still don't.

Digital clocks and and watches were all the rage back then. Before analogue came back into style in the early 2000s. Digital watches look tacky IMO. Only kids wear them.

"Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

-The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

 

[lxskllr]

Until they start pulling crap like this:

http://coolmaterial.com/style/19-cool-watches-that-require-a-phd-to-tell-time/

:^D

That's exactly what I had in mind. I was on some site once, that showed watches from a specific designer, and there were a couple I couldn't decipher how to tell time, even after minutes of study.

From your link, I really like this watch. It's maybe a little too feminine, but the design is great...

 

[OOBradm]

speaking of analog clocks, I really really want this for my home:

http://shatteredclock.com/clocks/order-in-chaos/demo/

 

[Macamus Prime]

Watches and clocks are an illusion anyway - so, it doesn't matter to me.

 

[Perknose]

Uh, no. Here, I'll repeat myself for you and maybe this time you'll better grasp what I said: "Analog's elegant magic of hands rotating around a dial, which encompass and display the overarching relationship of minutes to hours at one inclusive glance..."

Uh, repeating the same thing doesn't help your case. There's nothing special about moving rods around a disk that doesn't also apply to the technological design of the integrated circuitry in a digital clock. If you like analog, fine, your choice. There's no need to be a jerk if you can't support your argument at all.

Well, not with you, but please don't blame your repeated inability to grasp my point on anyone but yourself.

Here, I'll let Douglas Adams REPEAT the same idea for you. Maybe this time, some small glimmer of comprehension will come to you:

Adams couched his complaint—appropriately—using an analogy. In the early days of personal computers, he said, people got very excited that their spreadsheet programs could finally create pie charts. This was considered a revolutionary advance, because as everyone knows, a pie chart visually represents a part-whole relationship in a way that is immediately obvious—a way that, to be more specific, mere columns of numbers did not.

Well, the hands of an analog timepiece form wedges that look very much like a pie chart, and like a pie chart, they represent a sort of part-whole relationship in a way that requires a bare minimum of mental effort to comprehend. Not so digital timepieces, which for all their precision say nothing about the relationship of one time of day to another.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Its faster to read a digital clock

Not true, unless you need to be accurate to the exact minute / second. Just like digital readout vs dial speedometers in cars - you can get a sense of the reading that is sufficiently accurate for most purposes with just a glance.

 

[Rastus]

You could always use right-hand or left-hand rotation (physics students will know what I'm talking about). Would be quite cumbersome, though, since direction needs to be specified.

Turn the electromagnet in an old analog clock around and put a reversed photocopied face on it and you have a backward running clock. I've seen it a few times.