Tick-Tock

I don’t appreciate digital clock faces because you have to read them. You can glance at a traditional face with two arms and know immediately it’s ten after two. Digital reads, 2:10—a minimum of two steps, one for the hour, one for the minutes. And with digital, you have to think how close your time is to the hour, or quarter-hour, or half-hour; and how far from noon (or midnight) you are, proportionally. One quick glance at a clock face with hands and you know it all. Digital, well, you have to think about it. Not for very long, hopefully, but it’s not a welcome effort.

Another benefit: With an analog clock face you get aesthetics. There are attractive digital displays out there, but so many more traditional clock faces are minor works of art—especially if you’re into classic utilitarianism.

A mechanical stopwatch is an even simpler pleasure. A glance at one hand and you know how much time has passed—as long as you’re under a minute. All right, I’ll grant that, in the case of a stopwatch, having a digital number blinking at you may be saving mental effort, because you want that single number, and as precisely as possible, usually.

But if a one-second margin for error is acceptable, and you really want to know roughly how close you were to some mark, say 30 seconds, or a minute, then once again the mechanical watch is more friendly to your task.

And, by the way, for any hand-held stopwatch, digital or analog, I feel a one-second margin for error is the best you can hope for. Our reaction time is human.

I'll leave for another day whether "human" is naturally more analog or digital, but I bet you can guess how I feel about that.