When scientists discover new things they are aided most times by the patterns or models on which those objects are based. Calendars, for example the Gregorian calendar, were based on patterns drawn from natural observations, and so for so many scientific examples, like gravity, relativity etcetera. The list can go on and on.
I like to pretend I can be an inventor. Pretense or make-believe, where one works towards it, can lead to undiscovered treasures. So in my make-believe in looking for patterns in everyday objects like license plate numbers, colors of clothes people wear, shoe sizes at the market and telling the time, I search for factual patterns, hoping to make a sale.
Voilà, I did succeed one unholy day. That day was the tenth of October, two thousand and ten or when written in numerals, 10/10/10. It’s not everyday that the date and time gives you a pattern, and by the way, those do not look like patterns, just chance coincidences, so I decided to concentrate on the time.
Another eureka! It will surprise that when you copy and paste the hour hand on the minute and seconds side, you can get a pattern for every hour of the day, whether counting by 12-hour or 24-hours?
Let’s start from one o’clock in the morning. You will always get to the time: 01:01:01, that is one minute and one second to the hour. Another is 02:02:02 or two minutes and two seconds to two o’clock in the morning.
11 |
11 |
11 |
I noticed that every hour can be copied and pasted on the minutes and seconds side.
13 |
13 |
13 |
Even when the hour is close to midnight.
22 |
22 |
22 |
I really cannot find any functional value of this patterns except for the fact that they possess some aesthetic value. Also, I find much delight waiting for the next pattern to appear on the digital watch embedded on my handset.
There are times though when the patterns do not really make good matches on the hour, especially when you want to flip the hour.
For example, at one o’clock, when you flip the hour and paste it on the minutes side and then flip the minutes and paste it on the seconds side, sometimes the patterns follow but sometimes they do not.
01 |
10 |
01 |
The one o’clock hour do follow beautifully, but these pattern is followed until six o’clock.
05 |
50 |
05 |
But at six o’clock, when you flip 06 at the hour, you do not get a translation for the minute hand.
Notwithstanding, from ten o’clock, the pattern starts to make another connection.
| 10 | 01 |
10 |
11 |
11 |
11 |
And this connection continues until the fifteenth hour.
15 |
51 |
15 |
And breaks up at the sixteenth hour, when 16 cannot translate to the minute when you flip the hour readings. But at the twentieth hour, our pattern continues again.
20 |
02 |
20 |
23 |
32 |
23 |
Looking for unbroken patterns on flipping the hour hand is not possible, but the start and continuation of the patterns can create a good aesthetic graphic display.
As I said before, patterns in nature if one cannot find the functional value yet, can serve for their aesthetic value and also as a time killer, to kill the boredom. When I do find another pattern in nature, I’ll surely be blogging on it.
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