For those who don’t know, the accent indicates that the -ed ending is pronounced as a separate syllable, I.e. “a-curse-ed”. For that extra mysterious, old-timey feel!
What a ridiculous idea. As hard to read as it is dumb!
For a senior engineer like myself with decades of experience it is trivial to see how to fix this to make it much more readable.
1/ pick a sunny day
2/ at each hour, measure the bearing to the sun
3/ encode as a dict[str, float] e.g.
{“twelve”:180.00}
4/ sort the hours by dict.get
Voila.
As an added bonus, for some reason this ends up sorting the minutes and seconds too. (“# wtf?!”)
For now, I was only able to fix the hours when I could see the sun (eleven, twelve, and two to eight — I don’t get up very early and I like lunch). Patches form the arctic circle welcome :P
I also need to tilt my head a bit as eleven is at the top instead of twelve. Other than that I would say it’s a considerable improvement on the OP’s rather naïve implementation! Scoff!
Jam a stick in the ground aligned with the earth's axis and take your bearing from the shadow's direction. Then follow GP's instructions. Never mind that we've reinvented the sundial...
The closer you are to the equator, the taller the stick needs to be. If you're really close, the height requirements diverge, and the stick is at this point technically more of a space elevator[1] than a stick.
But don't lose hope, just tell Bezos that Musk wants to fund your space elevator, and vice versa, to goad one of them into funding your $10tn near-equatorial sundial boondoggle.
I tweaked the labels when I was working on the combined mode, where I figured they make more sense as indicative of the general, combined alphabetical area. I hadn't considered they'd be confusing in the 3-hand mode. I've split the positioning of them between the two now. Appreciate the feedback!
It does make it _less_ accursèd now, which I feel could be either an improvement or a regression. I leave it to weigh on your consciences.
Hmm. I wonder what it would look like if you added the corresponding "minute" labels (eight, five, four, etc) at the appropriate places. It might make it at least a little feasible to read the time!
I love the fractal nature of this, where the big shape of one two three four... is then roughly repeated both on a slower scale (twenty thirty forty...) and on a narrower scale (twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four...).
I'm now wondering the hausdorf dimension of the graph of alphabetical numbers <n, and how other languages might compare.
