I just want to say, as someone who lives near such a bell, I'm grateful that they appear to observe "quiet hours" between 8pm and 8am. When I first moved in, I was worried it'd be dinging all night. Thank goodness that's not the case.

I just have car alarms going off for no reason at 4am to worry about.

I thought these were still common? Any time I'm near a church they do their thing every 15 minutes, banging one bell 1-4 times and then if it's 4 they bang another 1-12 times, signaling the time.

Well, not entirely, they're usually quiet during the night, but you get my point.

Didn't know people can't understand those anymore.

I used to live in a city with many striking clocks, which meant that no matter where you were in the city, you could probably hear a bell ring out on the hour.

I'm realising now how much I miss it. I remember times like drinking with friends into the wee hours of the morning, when we would hear a bell and then all fall silent as we counted how many chimes there were. If it was only 2, we would laugh and continue, but for four or more, we would wince and contemplate the future consequences of our choices.

Or while doing an all-nighter to get an assignment in before a morning deadline, how my handwriting speed would become a touch more frantic with each passing chime

I met someone the other year who didn't know the difference between cut and paste, and copy and paste

Edit: I agree with the last part of your comment especially. So often, I see people blaming GenZ for their lack of knowledge, but that feels unfair to me. From my perspective as a younger Millennial, it looked like society seemed to assume "oh, GenZ are digital natives, so they're naturally a whizz at all this computer stuff" and often assumed that it wasn't necessary to do much work to teach them how to use computers. Now that I've had more chance to meet GenZ folk in the workplace, I've heard this complaint from them a lot.

It's made me grateful for growing up as a Millennial. I was too young to experience the early days of computing, but at least I got to experience computers and the internet before they became the closed, walled-off gardens that GenZ grew up with

And yet, we still have analog clocks all around us. Seems to me we should know his to use them... Unlike a sextant.

Still, knowing what those things are and how they work just might be useful if something similar becomes important for some reason.

Those things should be known by at least enough of the population to bring them back and use them if everything goes apocalyptic.

If things start falling apart, I'm throwing in with the Amish.

I remember we were taught a segment on how to use an abacus and how they worked, because it demonstrated certain mathematical principles. Of course I don't remember now how to use one, but I'm sure that visual demonstration of the mathematical concepts helped us as we were learning math. In the same way, learning about analog clocks at a young age would probably help with learning about geometry/trigonometry, angles and degrees, arcs, etc.

It's better to use an AVR for that. 6502 was a ridiculous kludge for the sake of slightly improved code density.

Don't mind the people who can't get a joke, I thought this was funny.

You have to be paying attention to this one. An /s would have been a good idea.

Please. Turn every school into a node in the network

Yeah, especially with schools being somewhat evenly distributed around cities - this could really help with coverage. I've only read about Meshtastic but I recall it's extremely low bandwidth so that would be a problem for the little dissidents.

Yeah I bet they're going to figure out mandatory education that's more interesting and fun than chatting with your friends and playing games. Lol

People forget skills they don't use. I'm guessing you and I had plenty of practice reading analog clocks over the years until the skill became completely ingrained.

Judging by the stories my mom has after teaching for decades they no longer really teach anything. Nor are they allowed to. These days they have to follow a script for everything down to how you move your hands and when.

Disruptive student? Just keep teaching like nothings going on.

Student struggling with a subject? Don't stop to help or try a different method to help them learn. No child left behind so they'll still move up a grade even if they can't read or do simple addition.

Just make sure the students are in the classroom so the school gets money. Nothing else matters.

Still not teaching about taxes... or anything useful, clearly.

... Not doing that anymore? Because they're very rare and you can easily get by without it most of the time

pfff bet you were one of those poors with a bucket with a hole in it

It's wild to think that, "It's a quarter to 8," must be a mental exercise for some people. That is, instead of having an immediate understanding from being able to glance at an analog clock and think, "That's clearly 1/4 of an hour," it instead relies on a cognitive exercise that requires a knowledge of division and subtraction (60 divided by 4, then subtract the result from 60.)

Though I tend to think of time spatially, in part due to being raised with analog clocks. They're much easier for me to read and understand at a glance without having to process much. Reading a digital clock requires converting it to analog in my mind, because the spatial appearance of the hands is what my brain makes sense of. I sometimes hear from people who can't do that though, who instead have to convert the analog to digital in their minds. Which is fine, it just sounds much more "mathy" to me and like it takes more work than making sense of shapes. But to each their own.

Yeah I graduated high school in 2019 and some of my classmates had a hard time reading analog clocks, in private schools lmao. It's definitely has increased with Covid and smart phones but kids who don't want to learn never do.

You didn't understand what I meant. I meant that those articles complaining about the youth have always existed 

Maybe not but technology connections is great.

Possibly the case here as well. I learned roman numerals in school enough to pass whatever was on tests

Note that there are multiple systems of writing them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals

While subtractive notation for 4, 40, and 400 (IV, XL, and CD) has been the usual form since Roman times [citation needed], additive notation to represent these numbers (IIII, XXXX, and CCCC)[9] very frequently continued to be used, including in compound numbers like 24 (XXIIII),[10] 74 (LXXIIII),[11] and 490 (CCCCLXXXX).[12] The additive forms for 9, 90, and 900 (VIIII,[9] LXXXX,[13] and DCCCC[14]) have also been used, although less often.

The two conventions could be mixed in the same document or inscription, even in the same numeral. For example, on the numbered gates to the Colosseum, IIII is systematically used instead of IV, but subtractive notation is used for XL; consequently, gate 44 is labelled XLIIII.[15][16]

Especially on tombstones and other funerary inscriptions, 5 and 50 have been occasionally written IIIII and XXXXX instead of V and L, and there are instances such as IIIIII and XXXXXX rather than VI or LX.[17][18]

Modern clock faces that use Roman numerals still very often use IIII for four o'clock but IX for nine o'clock, a practice that goes back to very early clocks such as the Wells Cathedral clock of the late 14th century.[19][20][21] However, this is far from universal: for example, the clock on the Palace of Westminster tower (commonly known as Big Ben) uses a subtractive IV for 4 o'clock.[20][c]

They teach it but since they will not use this skill they will forget how to

The humor for me is realizing how old I am that the kid has never seen windows 98 before and tries to interact with it blind is so interesting. 

Yep, it seems to be the new American Way. I have one analog clock in our family room and I periodically ask my son the time. He's not always right, but he's pretty good.

I'm genX. I take him camping, hiking, biking and show him the plants and objects he can use when he needs them. Some of it sticks.

When society forgets the basic skills, a simple shock can bring it down. Permanently.

Seeing clocks in public is also becoming rare

Is it? I hadn't noticed but I'm probably not looking for clocks in the wild much either. I can think of one big quasi-public space (my YMCA gym) that has nothing but analog clocks up high on the walls. I could speculate that analog is easier than digital to read from a distance, or that large digital clocks designed to be read from a distance are more expensive than analog or hard to find, but I wouldn't think either of these would be true.

Also camp counselors.

AFAIK there is a wall clock in every classroom, for a start.

Not sure where else kids go these days. But I work part time as a ski chaperone and there's a huge clock at the ski resort you can see from the ski hill, and other clocks at the pool where the swim team is, and at the gym, and by the library at the town center.

Every classroom I was in from kindergarten through university had analog clocks on the wall, so I was absolutely able to just glance. For years.

But since I haven't been in a classroom for so long, and I'm not surrounded by analog clocks anymore, I think I've mostly lost that ability and I've found that it takes me a couple of seconds nowadays to decode it.

It's definitely a skill that needs to be practiced to keep it up

It would just depend on how often you actually use them, it's just familiarity. If you had one in your house/classroom/office that you looked at whenever you wanted to know the time (as it used to be before digital), it would take only a quick glance. Your brain recognizes the shapes, just like it recognizes words in your native language immediately without figuring out the individual letters.

How do you not read it at a glance? After 20 years you think you would just notice the general shapes, its all basically the same, especially if you simply round everything, which is what a lot of people do as time on an analog clock is rarely used super precise.

1/4 or 1/2 after or before, and almost.

Then what hour is the small hand approaching?

Quarter to 3.

Half past 1.

Almost 4.

Seems pretty simple. Unless you are used to 24 hours, then you would have to ignore or add 12.

That's not necessarily true, how clocks display time, and how they maintain time don't have to match up. You can get digital or analog clocks that keep time by setting them then using a quartz clock to count the passage of time. You can also get digital or analog clocks that talk to a network time server, and can keep within tens to low hundreds of milliseconds easily. Gear-driven analog clocks are reasonably common, and you can even find a gear-driven clock with a digital face, though those are more of a gimmick.

Obviously, a clock with an analog face that speaks NTP is digital electronics, and there's a certain aesthetic loss, in that something like a grandfather clock that does this is a silly thing to make. But you absolutely could if you wanted to.

My coworker is 23 and couldn't understand why I told him it was "a quarter to four" instead of the exact "three forty four". A discussion followed about the way old people think.

I think we've had 50/50% analogue and digital clocks at home. Analogue on walls and wrists, digital on microwaves and VCRs. I'm sure that helped make the connection.

I can understand that kids are not motivated to practice telling time from an oldskool watchface when they always have a digital clock in their pocket.

We recently switched cars. The previous one had a big digital display for the speed. My wife is completely unable to tell the speed from a regular gauge now.

Same here, it takes a fair bit of thinking, but can be done. Some people think it’s funny/sad that it needs processing time, but I never practice the skill, because I really never need to, so who cares? It’s never been something that has made intuitive sense to me, and has always been a struggle, but there have been digital alternatives nearly my entire life which are now far more common, so why bother getting better?

You're a funny bugger :)

I was going to reply to your hourglass and sundial joke with a reflection that hourglasses are so much older than the relatively recent development of sundials, but you clearly knew that so I didn't. And then the one-two. You could have done cuneiform vs hieroglyphs but tablets vs papyrus is the better gag. Keep it up :)

And look at the competition. You get what you ran against

If you can make it to 20 years old without realizing you're missing a critical skill and learning it yourself, that's also on you.

I think the difficulty here is judging what is and isn't critical. How would they know, if they never have to use it otherwise, that reading analog clocks is critical?

We're also seeing a lack of critical thinking skills and ability to retain information.

But the institutions are adapting by teaching things with less depth, which then dumbs down further education because they now have to re-cover everything from scratch.

I think this issue would have to be tackled early on, but I'm not sure how. At some age, you probably could explain to the students why it's important, but I tend to overestimate the comprehension of younger students in particular, and just understanding the value doesn't make for a good training in doing so either.

Also, the hour hand isn't going to point directly to a number unless it's the top of the hour

I like thinking of the minutes in quarters and halves, "Its a quarter after 6pm" ≈ 1/4 * 60min is 15mins, so its 6:15pm. "Its 10 to seven" ≈ 60 - 10 is 50mins, so its 6:50. Idk unless its a timed activity I usually just round the clock to the higher number divisible by 5 "7:33" becomes "7:35"

I never heard that one, but in my family if we weren't wearing a wristwatch and someone asked the time, we'd look at our wrist and say, "It's two hairs past the freckle." :) Those were the days.

As kid I knew how to read the clock, still I found it confusing and I needed to consciously put effort in it and I'd need to take some time concentrating.

At some point I decided to just ignore the minute hand, the hour hand alone is good enough for most uses and that helped.

Interestingly early clocks just had the hour hand, the minute hand was a later invention.

The hour hand is fucked up in some of those. With 5 lines in between numbers each one represents 12 minutes. But #4 clearly points to right around the 2nd line, rather than closer to the 3rd line. Numbers 10 through 12 are also wrong.

I get that it's mostly for kids to be able to read the minute hand, but how hard could it be to not fuck up what they'd see in the real world?

A lot easier version is just short hand = the hour, long hand * 5 = the minutes

Yeah, same principle as a sundial, but using known time to find north instead of known north to find the time.

Personally I find it pretty easy to achieve the same thing just by judging the height of the sun.

What sorcery is that, do clocks even have magnets

our experience of time is linear

Absolutely.

A clock is not time itself.

Except if time is an emerging property of causality, then maybe it kind of is. Since all clocks are based on the causality that causes time to exist.

thinking that the photon that hits your retina already “experienced” that moment when it was first emitted millions of years ago.

I never thought of it that way, but yes that must be the logical conclusion. Time is indeed a funny thing, but when I think of it as causality, it kind of makes sense.

and it is worse for dogs. the quartz clock has a ring to it, calibrated so it is just beyond human hearing, but not for dogs. they likely hear every device with a quartz clock

Good warning. Analog clocks that make noise drive me nuts. Search for "noiseless analog clock" and be sure it says that in the description before buying.

Not only that but Technology Connections got me thinking about analog clocks in a whole new way.

If it's 1:40 and you know you gotta leave in half an hour, you don't need to know that you need to leave at 2:10...just 'when the big hand does half a lap from now'.

It's better for visualizing time, if that makes sense?

Most likely more digital then analog clocks these days. I can read analog but I cant remember the last time I needed. Besides the both do the same job but one is quicker and more accessible.

People are really scared of change but just because something is new doesn't mean it's bad.

Plus when it is broke it still works a couple times per day.