Thursday
When I arrived home from work yesterday I discovered a package had arrived for me. I suspected that it was a Christmas present from my sister, and this was later confirmed. I opened it, and found this.
Yes, that's right. It's a clock that tells the time in binary, using flashing blue LEDs. To tell the truth, it has a nice "dawn of computing" feel about it, harkening back to the days when input devices were more primitive. Of course, they didn't have blue LEDs back in the dawn of computing (or even in 1990 for that matter) but I will forgive that.
Alas, I can only conclude that my sister knows me too well.
(Actually, it only sort of tells the time in binary. Each vertical row of LEDs gives the binary for one decimal digit of the time. So the time as shown in the photograph is 21:26:25).
It's real binary, just in a packed BCD format.
And that concludes today's episode of obscure techno-marginalia. It confused me the first time I saw it, but in retrospect it makes sense. A more thoroughly binary number (say milliseconds since epoch) would probably be less than useful.
Posted by Scott Pedersen at December 22, 2005 11:59 PM
Well yes, we could all see that at a glance!
Had anything else really useful this xmas?
My soap on a rope relations are dieing off alas.
Posted by RAB at December 23, 2005 01:15 AM
Bugger,
Here I was, all excited at the opportunity of being able to show off the true depths of my own nerdyness, only to find Scott had beaten me to it.
Drat, foiled again.
Yeah, packed BCD.
Posted by Chris Harper at December 23, 2005 08:17 AM
But milliseconds from the epoch would alow us to so easily work out so many other things.
A unified method of both dating and time keeping!! Such a much more sensible way of doing things.
Posted by Chris Harper at December 23, 2005 08:21 AM
The book, Perry. You (subconsciously?) want to tell us about the book. In which section of Waterstones can I find it, btw, popular science?
Posted by Colin at December 23, 2005 02:50 PM
I love my binary clock!
I have the red LED version. It keeps pretty good time too.
Serious geek points.
Posted by Marty at December 23, 2005 03:14 PM
As they say:
There's only 10 types of people:
Those that get binary and those that don't....
Toodle Pip!
PG
Posted by The Pedant-General at December 23, 2005 09:08 PM
I've got one myself, a gift from my uncle. It bathes my living room in its soothing, eerie blue glow at night.
Posted by davetheweatherman at December 24, 2005 01:11 AM
"As they say:
There's only 10 types of people:
Those that get binary and those that don't....
Toodle Pip!
PG"
Actually, that would code for 4 people types.
The correct statement would be"
There's only 1 types of people....
The cases being 0 and 1.
The One's case being those who "Get" binary, and the Zero'th case being those who don't.
Posted by j.pickens at December 24, 2005 07:39 PM
