The Narrative of Kurt & Becky

Becky and I have this old portable digital alarm clock. We keep it in the bathroom so we can keep an eye on the time during our morning routine. Now, the clock is old and has been dropped one to many times. You see, part of the digital display is malfunctioning. It will show the hour digit just fine, and it will show the last digit of the minute just fine, but the first digit of the minute does not show correctly.

This led us to an observation: The first digit of the minute, for this purpose at least, is the most important one. Exempli gratia: You know you must leave the house by 6:30 to get to work on time. You are doing your hair, you look down at the clock and it reads: 6:E8. What does that mean? Is it 6:08 and you have plenty of time? Or is it 6:28 and you should wrap it up? Or is it 6:58 and you are unequivocally late?

In most situations, you can guess the hour, and the last digit of the minute is often inconsequential. This leads me to another conclusion. We could save some money on clocks by producing new ones with only one digit: What time is it? 3.

Oh, and this will also work across time zones… neato.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 9:34 and is filed under Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.