Cheesy Quintessence

Am I the only one who finds analog clocks to be idiotic? Analog clocks came into being centuries ago, long before it was possible to display the time in digits. In a sense, the many analog methods of displaying clocks are hacks; the use of hands pointing at various positions of a circle was a feasible mechanical workaround to the inability to display digits in a stationary position.

Now the year is 2006, and everything is digital. The possibilities of digital media far surpass those of analog counterparts; it can be copied instantly and losslessly; it can be more easily manipulated; the quality is ultimately better. Yet, despite all these technological advances that continue to change the way we live, the analog way of telling time is still with us… and we’re using digital devices to display it!

Look at how inefficient the analog clock face is. The clock face everyone knows can only display 12 hours, so one is left in the dark as to whether it’s AM or PM. There’s no way to quickly tell what the minute is when it’s not right on a mark; one must carefully measure the distance between two marks and determine what the minute is from that, and even if there were 60 marks around the clock face, one must take the time to count what mark the hand is actually pointing at. The clock doesn’t shrink well, either; where a digital clock would be readable in a 6-pixel font, an analog clock can abrely be made out in a 45×45 pixel square. In the time it takes me to decipher my best guess for what the time is from an analog clock, I could have glanced at a digital clock 20 times and known exactly what time it was.

So why do people tolerate this crap? Why do people still buy analog wristwatches? Are they classy? If one is going to try to be classy by carrying around obsoleted time-telling technology, why not just carry around a little sundial instead? That would be so much fancier. Heck, it could even have built in LEDs that shine light on the hand based upon the atomic internal clock, thereby allowing it to work in the dark! That would only be one step beyond the inefficiencies introduced in using digital devices to reproduce analog clocks.