Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

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I suppose it might not be tricky for number people to understand, but it’s taken me five months to figure out what the constantly-changing red numbers on the outer wall of the Circuit City on 14th St. meant. It’s pretty impossible to miss—a string of fifteen numbers with the middle few rapidly changing and affecting the outer numbers [Note: My representation of the middle ones may not be entirely accurate; it’s difficult to see what they say since they change so quickly]. It had always seemed like some sort of clock, but it distrubed me. Not knowing what it really was, I imagined that it counted something morbid, like deaths versus births (though I had no idea in what part of the world or over what time period). I’d considered asking the people in Circuit City what it meant, but I never did. Once I was fortunate enough to overhear some boy telling his female companion that it counted the hours in the day. Still, for several more months after that I could never get it to work out right.

Then tonight! I finally got it. The left side counts how many hours have passed in military time; the right side tells how much time remains until midnight. The thing is, the right side doesn’t read backwards totally. The two digits on the very right count hours, the next two count minutes, etc., but within each two-digit segment the numbers must be read left-to-right to make sense. I think I had so much trouble with the clock because I expected a greater symmetry.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006 at 12:03am and is filed under New York. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.