Douglas Adams on digital watches

[trailboss99 996]

This is something Douglas Adams wrote to his editor in 1992:

 

"(...) there is something inherently ridiculous about digital watches (...) Digital watches came along at a time that, in other areas, we were trying to find ways of translating purely numeric data into graphic form so that the information leapt easily to the eye. For instance, we noticed that pie charts and bar graphs often told us more about the relationships between things than tables of numbers did. So we worked hard to make our computers capable of translating numbers into graphic displays. At the same time, we each had the world’s most perfect pie chart machines strapped to our wrists, which we could read at a glance, and we suddenly got terribly excited at the idea of translating them back into numeric data, simply because we suddenly had the technology to do it..."

 

[tribefan 6,768]

I flipped a watch on this morning before setting it and forgot. It was about 6 hours and change off. But by habit looked at it and saw the minute hand was past the six marker and thought, shit, I'm late for a call. It took a couple of minutes before I realized, one I hadn't set it, two the watch said 3:30 not 9:30.