July 10, 2026
Tick tock, comment war o’clock
Alternate Clock Designs and Time Systems
People are roasting our weird clocks — and begging for even stranger ones
TLDR: A designer imagined cleaner, stranger ways to tell time, from decimal days to binary clocks. The comments immediately turned into a playful pile-on, with readers flexing their own bizarre clock ideas and joking that the biggest scandal was which weird time system got left out.
The big idea here is deceptively simple: why is time still such a mess? The article playfully pokes at the fact that a day is split into 24 hours, 60 minutes, and 60 seconds — a system so old and oddly chopped up that even people who love neat, tidy measurements have to admit it’s kind of chaos. So naturally, the creator rolled out a parade of alternatives: a 24-hour clock for people tired of AM and PM, a decimal clock that turns the day into 10 clean hours, a super-geeky binary version, a hexadecimal one, and even a 36-hour clock inspired by the 360 degrees of a compass.
But the real action is in the comments, where readers instantly turned this into a full-blown time-nerd variety show. One person proudly jumped in with their own collection of artsy clock experiments, from sand grains to water wheels, basically saying: oh, you like weird clocks? I brought twelve more. Another commenter stole the spotlight with a retirement-gift anecdote about a clock that only tells you the day of the week — a joke gift that somehow became weirdly useful, which is exactly the kind of internet twist people adore.
Then came the classic comment-section escalation: readers demanding missing formats like radians and centons, as if the original post had committed a scandal by leaving them out. The mood wasn’t angry so much as delightfully obsessive — half serious debate, half inside joke. In other words, the internet saw alternative clocks and responded in the only way it knows how: by asking for even more ridiculous clocks.
Key Points
- •The article compares the standard 24-hour, 60-minute, 60-second system with several alternative time systems.
- •A 24-hour clock format is presented as a way to avoid AM/PM and have the hour hand rotate once per day.
- •The decimal clock divides a day into 10 hours, 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute, with each decimal second lasting 86.4% of a standard second.
- •The binary clock is described as less practical because each binary "second" lasts three hours, limiting accuracy.
- •The article also presents hexadecimal and 36-hour clock systems, with adjusted second and minute durations relative to standard time.