Made with Processing. No audio.

I love that I can add the word 'study' to a title and nobody will fault me for posting something boring or incomplete. Fun with words!!!

A coworker/friend/drinkin buddy who teaches at UCLA asked if I would make him a code-based clock because I guess tomorrow (tuesday the 3rd) is everyone-codes-a-clock day. "It is the oldest data visualization known to man". So, UCLA programming students, if you come across this blog tonight, you get a jump on your in-class assignment.

It started out as a binary clock. Like most stuff I work on, I usually have absolutely no idea where I am headed. In this case, I started binary, but ended up with both traditional and binary.

The white blocks at the very top of the cylinder are the binary representations for hours, minutes, seconds, and 30ths of a second. You can choose to read the clock that way but it is a bit annoying (mostly because my 'design' didn't accommodate an uncluttered binary view).

The four green strips are the clock hands. They are a bit of a side effect from the binary thing. I had originally intended to just show the binary and the history of the binary over the last few dozen frames. When I wrapped this history around a cylinder and color-coded the 'zero' place for each time category (second. minute, hour, etc), it started to look and behave more like a traditional clock. I trimmed the history length down to 60 for minutes and seconds, 12 for hours, and 30 for the 30th of a second bits and voila, clock hands that (mostly) make sense. I parenthetically say 'mostly' because visually, the second hand is larger than the minute hand which makes the mind want to juxtapose the two.

In this video, you will see that it is a little after five twelve.