Notices by Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com), page 2

I think I'll wear this one today. Retro-futuristic to welcome in the new year.

#WristCheck

OK, you can all stop sending the AI Clocks now. I've seen them. 🤣

#WristCheck no, I mean #PalmCheck

OK, maybe I went too nerdy 🤓 on this one? 🤣

#Ternary

There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary, those that don't, and those that didn't expect a ternary joke.

Breakfast time!

#coffee #bagel #Iceland #Reykjavik #DEIG

OK we are into Hai (亥) 🐖 now. Getting late. 😉

#WristCheck but not really. It's more of a
#PalmCheck 🤣

How about more time trivia then. So what is the deal with 12 hour clocks if we have 24 hours in a day? Furthermore, why 24 hours? And if they are 24 hours in a day, why are there 60 minutes and 60 seconds? This seems illogical, right? Maybe we should decimalize it, like we did with the metric system!

#DecimalTime #DecimalWatch #TimeTrivia

The 12-hour division seems to have come from ancient Egypt. While in the modern world we tend to learn and use a decimal number system (base ten), that was not always the case. Historically many cultures used a duodecimal system, also known as base twelve. It uses twelve as its foundational counting unit. Sort of like how our usual decimal system revolves around the number ten.

If I use "modern numerals" you then get 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, ↊ and ↋. Thus twelve itself represented in this way would be… you guessed it "10". The cool thing with twelve is that it's easily divisible by lots of other numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, and 6). This makes fractions like ½, ⅓, ¼ easier and cleaner than in base ten.

Anyway the Egyptians used sundials during the day and water clocks at night [water clocks are like hour glasses but with water instead of sand] to keep track of time, dividing both day and night into 12 parts each. So a full day cycle is 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night, thus 24 hours [total].

But if Egyptians used a duodecimal system, why not have 12 minutes to the hour? Well, they did have general terms for shorter time segments, used in certain religious or astronomical contexts but for the most part they didn't really count subsections of an hour quite as we do.

The 60 actually comes from the Babylonians, who rather than a decimal or duodecimal numbering system used sexagesimal (base sixty) because it is even more highly divisible than 12! Babylonian astronomers applied this system to track celestial movements.

When mechanical clocks emerged centuries later, dividing hours into 60 minutes and minutes into 60 seconds made some sense since timekeeping was always closely tied to astronomy and so the sexagesimal logic carried over and it preserved the precision and divisibility of the Babylonian system.

Side note, in base ten, ten is written as 10, in base twelve, twelve is written 10. In sexagesimal, sixty would be 10. Those of you who know (or vaguely recall learning) binary (a.k.a. base two) from school, will also know that two is represented as 10.

For this reason I have avoided writting base-10 , base-12 and base-60 above. It is better IMHO to write out "base ten", "base twelve", etc.

Anyway, on that note, here is a joke for you.

Ok a little pet peeve about Roman numerals on watches and clocks.

I regularly read "smart" comments on watch related Reddit threads and watch reviews that state that dials on some watches are misprinting the 4 as IIII, rather than IV. Maybe this is some long running joke but in case it is not, let me point out that the people saying this are actually the ones who are wrong. The use of IIII is intentional.

On time pieces it is actually more common than IV. A quick image search with your search engine of choice for "Roman numeral watch" (or clock), will verify this.

Early Roman numerals often used additive notation (e.g. IIII or VIIII) before subtractive forms like IV and IX became the "modern standard". Both are valid. Indeed the two conventions sometimes even get used together (and not just on clock faces), often in the same text or even sometimes in the same numeral. On the numbered gates to the Colosseum for example, the additive notation IIII is used but subtractive notation is used for XL (40). Thus you get gate 44 labelled as XLIIII.

Why do I refer to the bike as a "lamplighter"? In the old days lamp lighting was a job. A lamp lighter went around in the evening usually with a ladder and lit up each gas powered lamp post in turn.

Some of the people doing this job had specialist bikes made that were very tall. Then they could just cycle between each one, hold on (or lean) and light them without needing the ladder.

The design here is classic lamplighter bike style, albeit scaled down. A real lamplighter would be over 7 foot.

@forteller It's nice but the they are too small and/or have too many wheels.