Natural clock?

After pondering the eightness of natural money, and the twoness and fourness of natural sleep, the concepts merged in my tired brainlet into a question.

What if clocks were consistently binary? Our clocks inherited the quadrants of Roman ‘watches’, mixed with the 12s and 60s of the Babylonian system.

As with money, we say the quarters and halves but we don’t say the eighths.

Our compasses have the same mixture, but compasses take the natural route a bit more seriously. Letter directions are pure 4/8/16. We superimpose the Babylonian 360 behind the binary letters.

The 8s are there**, but the area between the 8s is 5s and 10s instead of binary. Uncomfortable mixture of rhythms.

The natural binary is still used in weather reports:

All 4s and 8s and 16s, no 360s.

If we applied the pure compass rose to a clock, what would it look like?

I can imagine a setup that would give a famliar size of minutes and seconds without mixing rhythms. Midnight to midnight would be 16 hours around the full circle. 64 minutes in each hour and 64 seconds in each minute. I’ll call this the Roman clock in honor of the four ‘watches’, though it might be more appropriate to call it English.

The Roman clock would divide a day into 65536 seconds, versus 86400 in the Babylonian system. My Roman clock would have made life easier for computers, since one day is exactly one 16-bit word.

How would it compare with Babylonian time? I’ve modified the Box Depots Clock two ways. On the left is my imagined Roman clock. On the right is a 24-hour Babylonian clock as used in computer time and ‘military time’.

First the points of agreement. Midnight, default sunrise, default sunset.

Now some disagreements just for illustration. The times are written in the usual Babylonian 12-hour style for clarity.

Running both clocks through the first quarter of the day, midnight to dawn.

The hour hand moves the same way across different numbers, while the minute hand moves differently.

See also the fan clock in my lengthy series of early clocks.

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** Footnote: Oops, even the 8s aren’t there. I made this compass for the declinometer in my Leeds and Northrup set. I didn’t notice at the time that the 8s (NW, NE, SW, SE) are out of rhythm! So the only point of agreement between Roman and Babylonian is the 4s. Beyond that the binaries end up on fractional numbers like 7.5 or 3.75 degrees.