www.panopticist.comA few months ago I began to notice something unusual about the 24 clock-the timer that appears onscreen at regular intervals throughout each episode. It’s modeled on a standard LED clock, the kind you’ll see on the radio next to your bed or the microwave in your kitchen or inside a ticking rogue nuclear weapon once you’ve pulled off the face plate. You know-the standard workaday places. On a typical such clock, each number is rendered within a matrix of two vertical bars on either side and three horizontal bars in the middle. At first glance, the 24 clock appears to be based around exactly that sort of matrix.
[…]
A couple of months ago, I noticed that the 24 clock renders the numeral 1 with a short serif at the top. Here’s another screenshot from last Monday’s episode, with the serif circled […] Then I noticed that these half-width 1’s are always kerned artificially close to the numeral (or the colon) to its left.
And that’s how I stumbled onto this weird pattern: The clock never shows a 0 turning into a 1, and it never shows a 1 turning into a 2.
Sometimes I love the interesting irrelevances of the net.
Leave a Reply