On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 2:18 AM, Ian King <IanK at vulcan.com> wrote: I just watched the Quartz Clock episode of "The Secret Life of Machines", and there was a bit in there about that - the animated character was trying to figure out how late he was to the opera by "doing the math" in his head about what time his digital watch showed and when the curtain would rise on the performance. He gave up with his sums and asked another animated character what the time was on her analog watch - he quickly saw the minuscule number of degrees difference between now and they and understood how late he was. It used to be a big deal to learn how to tell approximate time when learning foreign languages, but perhaps now that quartz/electric motor analog watches are inexpensive (certainly compared to a mechanical watch), knowing that it's "half past ten" or "ten to eleven" will become fashionable once again. My first watch was a "cheap" ($15?) digital LED watch, c. 1978. I got a Timex mechanical watch for a graduation present a few years later, but I guess I gave it more of a licking than it could stand, because I remember tearing it apart less than 5 years later (because it didn't work, not just to see what was inside). I don't really miss the Timex, but I miss those glowing red digits. Much more recently, someone got me a modern BCD/binary watch from ThinkGeek. I like it, but I've been reading binary clocks since they were popular when I was a kid. I remember trying to find a binary clock kit between about 1982 and 1992 and they just couldn't be found anywhere. That pendulum has certainly swung the other way (pun intended). Now if I could just find where I stashed my 4000-series CMOS and ~100 LED clock from the late 1970s that I picked up at a St Vincent DePaul's a couple of years back - I need to find which of the 30ish chips has a bad gate and consider replacing the LEDs with new, non-age-dimmed ones. It's a pretty neat clock, made in Indiana (can't remember where right now), and has a couple of concentric rings of LEDs to simulate analog hands. It mostly worked when I got it home, but there's a stray "ghost" hand that comes and goes as the time ticks around the face. So many ways to tell time in the modern era. This is a huge change -ethan