Skip to main content

Analog Clock Trivia?

Alright... now I've seen some pretty weird stuff on the Internet... but how about this?

Picture an analog clock with an hour hand, minute hand, and second hand, ticking every second.  Have you ever wondered...
  • How often is the second hand between the hour and minute hands?
  • At what time is the clock equally divided into three parts (by the positions of the hour, minute, and second hands)?
... ya, I think about this stuff all the time. (sarcastic)

Well... in case you were wondering, I've found the answers.  The second hand is between the hour and minute hands about 32% (13832 of 43200) of the time.  There are a total of 43200 possible positions for the hour, minute, and second hands on an analog clock.  That is, 60*60*12.

And... a perfect analog clock really never is divided equally into three parts by the hands (unless you count the times when the second hand is in motion to its next position... that is, in the middle of a "tick").  However, it is closest to three equal parts at 8:22:02 (either AM or PM).  At this time, the hour hand will be about 251.0166 degrees from 12:00:00 (moving clockwise, of course).  The minute hand will be at exactly 132.2 degrees from 12:00:00, and the second hand will be at exactly 12 degrees from 12:00:00.

Good to know, right?  It was so ridiculous, that I had to post it.  My apologies for completely wasting your time.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Developing a lightweight WebSocket library

Late in 2016, I began development on a lightweight, isomorphic WebSocket library for Node.js called ws-wrapper .  Today, this library is stable and has been successfully used in many production apps. Why?  What about socket.io ?  In my opinion, socket.io and its dependencies are way too heavy .  Now that the year is 2018, this couldn't be more true.  Modern browsers have native WebSocket support meaning that all of the transports built into the socket.io project are just dead weight.  On the other hand, ws-wrapper and its dependencies weigh about 3 KB when minified and gzipped.  Similarly, ws-wrapper consists of about 500 lines of code; whereas, socket.io consists of thousands of lines of code.  As Dijkstra once famously said: "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." ws-wrapper also provides a few more features out of the box.  The API exposes a two-way, Promise-based request/response interface.  That is, clients can request dat...
Post a Comment
Read more

Wedding Prediction - October, 2013

Carla and I are planning on getting married sometime in October next year.  We need to pick a date, and that decision may  involve some science and mathematics.  :) For example, we want the weather to be nice.  To be more precise, we'd like the high temperature for the wedding day to be between 60 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit.  Obviously, we have both lived in Ohio our entire lives, and we have a pretty good idea of what the weather will be like.  We both hypothesised that October was a "hit or miss" sort of month; it could be cold, or it could be nice. But, for me, a simple hypothesis was not enough; I really wanted to know the probabilities of decent weather based on historical weather data.  Many websites on the Internet (i.e. almanac.com) charge you to review historical weather data, but Carla and I discovered a cool page on cleveland.com that provided exactly what we wanted.  I loaded the historical temperature data from 1903 to 2011 f...
2 comments
Read more

Web Browsers You Should Support

As a web developer, generally speaking, you should consider supporting the following browsers (at the time of this writing): Chrome (latest) - the browser that sets the bar for the others; you should be using it and supporting it Internet Explorer 9+ - the browser that finally caught up with the times a bit; basically, a Chrome wannabe.  I still say that IE sucks... even if it really doesn't anymore.  Yes... I'm sour about IE8 and below. Internet Explorer 8 - the old, sad browser that we sadly still have to support for a while.  CSS 3 is not well-supported here, so we use projects like CSS3 PIE or whatever.  By the way... IE8 sucks.  I can't wait until this comes off of the list. Firefox (latest) - the browser that was once awesome and has sadly suffered recently because it's slower than Chrome... but hey, lots of people still use it. Safari (latest) - Watch out for Safari as more iPhones, iPads, Macs, and more overly-priced Apple products flood the ...
Post a Comment
Read more