Quine Clock

June 3, 2024 3:54 AM

Quine Clock – code that displays itself as a digital clock.
posted by Wolfdog (18 comments total)

This is perfect for me! I've been trying to keep track of the time I spend on the Quine-Putnam argument & figuring out the Duhem-Quine problem (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
posted by HearHere at 4:15 AM on June 3 [2 favorites]

Cooooooooooooooooooool.
posted by whatevernot at 4:17 AM on June 3

@hearhere – You might find this and this useful, the latter is an overview / survey article. These two pieces stand alone but they probably fall together.
posted by Joeruckus at 5:11 AM on June 3 [1 favorite]

What am I looking at? Context would be helpful!

(Yes I know I could Google it but that kind of defeats the object of the post?)
posted by freya_lamb at 5:27 AM on June 3

A quine is a program that displays its own code. This isn't exactly that, but it's damn clever. A program that displays the time in a display of its own code.
posted by adamrice at 5:39 AM on June 3 [2 favorites]

And from the wiki:

The name "quine" was coined by Douglas Hofstadter, in his popular science book Gödel, Escher, Bach, in honor of philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), who made an extensive study of indirect self-reference, and in particular for the following paradox-producing expression, known as Quine's paradox:

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
posted by Gorgik at 5:43 AM on June 3

No. No. Stop it.
posted by procrastination at 6:20 AM on June 3

true MetaFilter
posted by lalochezia at 6:25 AM on June 3 [1 favorite]

My aunt recently gave me a binary clock that her deceased boyfriend had in his office. I put it beside by bed. Not only do you really have to think about what time it is in a conscious way, the thing makes all sorts of weird patterns. I find myself staring at it, waiting for a rectangle, or a pyramid, or whatever. Kudos to the nerd who thought it up.
posted by jabah at 6:29 AM on June 3

I take it the yellow is supposed to be the numerals of the time? I cannot read this clock.
posted by dis_integration at 7:01 AM on June 3

Blur your eyes a little, and it really pops out.

I love quines, but this takes it to a whole new level of genius. The weird string in the middle - odRFacb67o2vi5gmOZmwFNteohbOh3sw - seems to be an index of sorts in Base-36 (!) to store the on or off state for every character in the five lines it gets when it prints itself out, depending on the HH:MM:SS time it gets from the date() function. This is wizardry.
posted by DangerIsMyMiddleName at 7:58 AM on June 3 [6 favorites]

@ dis_integration it helps if you squint.
posted by Captain_Science at 7:59 AM on June 3

I cannot read this clock.

It helps if your browser has a "zoom" built in, shrink the code a little until your eyes stop trying to read the individual chracters in the code.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:00 AM on June 3 [1 favorite]

Holy macaroons. This is achingly poetic and sublime. The appearance is the meaning is the purpose is the mechanism, all at once, collapsing the four 'causes' of Aristotle into a singular object, that exists only to affirm itself as constituted in, by, and of the time in which it exists. You don't even need to 'run' it: it runs on time itself.
posted by dmh at 9:13 AM on June 3 [3 favorites]

I am very impressed with this.
posted by zenon at 10:11 AM on June 3

My first thought, when seeing this: Tupper's Self-Referential Equation.
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 10:58 AM on June 3

Martin Kleppe is an amazing code artist. He is responsible for JSFuck, a discovered dialect of JavaScript, which uses only six characters. I interviewed him in 2017 about his work.
posted by rottytooth at 11:11 AM on June 3 [5 favorites]

@Joeruckus, many thanks. I appreciated the former for problematizing 'theory-ladenness' (340ff); the latter for introducing a revision "paradox", then providing a solution: feminism
posted by HearHere at 11:34 AM on June 3 [1 favorite]