And yet a wrong clock is far more useful than a stopped clock
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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I dunno man. 'i don't know' is often more helpful than 'sure, I know how to do this, trust me bro'
A wrong clock can show the passage of time and if you know how far it's off it just requires mental math. A stopped clock merely tells you when it stopped. Now a clock that advances at the wrong speed, that's useless and a hindrance to you knowing what time it is
Me for months when the oven clock is off by an hour because of daylight savings time.
I set the clock in the kitchen a little fast because my partner is chronically late, and this way he leaves on time for work.
Akshurreally..., a wrong clock is correct somewhere on the planet. Same as all other clocks.
It might not align with any known time zone, but it will show you the solar time of some location somewhere.
If you stop the clock, you’ll see the solar time of a place that moves around the earth all the time. Twice a day, that place is here.
Thank you for organizing the concept concisely :)
Bastard. Have my upvote.
Not if the minutes are off.
Rounding!
Yes, analog clocks are round 🕘
I bet if you roll it like a wheel, the time will probably be right somewhere...
Solar time, not agreed upon time.
I mean I have heard this reasoning said differently a lot of times but isn't that technically not true? I mean time zones only go in 1 hour increments. So if the time is 5:30 and a wrong clock says 5:40, it isn't really 540 somewhere. It's 530 or 630 or 730 or w/e
Fun fact! Timezones don't just break at 1 hour increments. https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-interesting.html
Or maybe if the clock is exactly an hour off, it'll eventually be right when daylight saving time rolls around.
The planet is a clock.
Fun fact: If you take a cheap quartz crystal digital LCD watch and short the two terminals to the quartz crystal, the display will go blank and it'll literally freeze in time, until you remove the short circuit.
No idea what might happen on a modern smart watch, I ain't got that much money to piss away on experiments..
All clocks are wrong except broken clocks, which are right twice a day.
A wrong clock is just in the wrong place
Nope. Time differences are countable, not continuous. Wrong clock can be 12 minutes wrong - thus wrong in any timezone.
Depends on what your error bounds for correct is. Technically there are very few clocks that are by definition "correct." Every other clock is just close enough for a given region.
If a clock runs backwards how many times a day is it right?
Four?
It would depend on how fast it runs. The faster it runs the more times it's right. So if we extrapolate, once you get a clock running backwards fast enough, it will be right all of the time.
It will be right infinitely many times, but not all the time, as it will also be wrong infinitely many times.
If it's running fast enough, it wouldn't matter what time it is.
Solution: break all clocks.
/joke
A wrong clock can still track time intervals.
And if you know by how much the clock is wrong, it's totally usable.
A broken clock can be a kind of a wrong clock.
Stopped clocks are the real deal!