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New York teachers stunned to learn some students can’t read time on old clocks after phone ban comes into play
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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Hehe, I remember when my paternal grandparents used an old wall clock to teach me and my sister how to read it.
It took a few hours, then we understood what it said, over time we learned what it actually meant.
I finally had my “aha” moment when someone demonstrated how to use an analogue clock to find north. And the neat thing is, if you already know where north is, you can use the clock to find a rough lat/long too (longitude by number of minutes away from the nearest zone border, latitude by calculating the real difference between north and clock north based on time of year). Of course, this only works with a proper swiss watch; the ones that don’t have a smooth action but tick between demarcated points spend most of their time being wrong.
Yeah, same principle as a sundial, but using known time to find north instead of known north to find the time.
Personally I find it pretty easy to achieve the same thing just by judging the height of the sun.
What sorcery is that, do clocks even have magnets