When I was looking for a cover image for the very first post I almost instinctively reached out to one of my favorite paintings: The Persistence of Memory by Dalí. You might know it by the name: The Melting Clocks. It’s only now, a couple weeks later that it dawned on me why. Read on to find out…
🎥 How it all started
The story says Dalí got his inspiration for the painting from the surreal way he once saw a piece of runny Camembert cheese melting in the Sun. The melting clocks represent the omnipresence of time, and identify its mastery over human beings. I feel lucky to have been able to witness this painting in real life at the MoMa in New York City.
I am fascinated by the concept of time. Don’t really know (yet) why, but I always have been. Back when I was a freshmen at the university - Budapest University of Technology and Economics or BME that is - the gateway drug language into software engineering they taught us was Pascal. I know, right?! I feel old. During the first semester everyone had to pick an idea and implement it as their take home assignment over the course of those few months. When people think about Pascal, command line applications usually first pop in mind. Not for me though. Excited to get my hands dirty with real software engineering - after having been hacking at it on my own well before university - I wanted to jump in the deep.
So I picked a graphics problem. An idea that I had for some time that found its roots in Dalí’s painting and that I lacked the know-how on how to execute it up until that time. See, mechanical clocks, watches and timepieces have a major limitation in my eyes. The shape of them are mainly influenced by the length of their hour, minute and second hands. The longest hand sets the minimum of the radius the clock face can have. Anything smaller and the face would not be able to complete a full circle without bumping into the wall of the clock face. Or worse run off the clock face. Sure, you see rectangular clock faces every now and then. But that’s usually the farthest the imagination of the creator goes. Enter Dalí. He was first to break down this barrier raised by the physical limitations presented by watch hands in his painting. However, he was cheating or more like lucky in a sense that through his painting he was able to freeze time so he didn’t have to worry about the length of the clock hands.
⏰ Free-style clock face
For the take home assignment my idea was to take Dalí’s concept one notch further leveraging the creative freedom provided to us by computers. Here’s the brief algorithm for the code:
- Step 1 Draw an arbitrary shape of a closed loop.
- Step 2 Point somewhere inside the shape to pin the center of the clock
- Step 3 Draw the hands of the clock starting from the center point according to the current time
- Step 4 Dynamically update the length of the clock hands as they sweep around showing the current time to adjust for the given radius between the center point created in Step 2 and the outline created in Step 1
🔘 Connecting the dots
It is indeed funny how life gives you dots and its up to you to connect them. Or not. This is me having a great time realizing how I subconsciously used Dalí’s painting as the cover of the first post of my blog in which I focus mainly on software engineering. Only to realize a couple months later that how that very painting ties back into the early days of my software endeavors. Also fascinating that it seems to me that this idea has not been leveraged much yet with the dawn of all the smart watches out there that has the necessary screens built in to support watch faces of dynamic shape. A missed opportunity?!
This post ended up being a bit unusual in that we haven’t done much coding. But I will find some time to recreate that original dynamic clock of mine and write about it in a next post. Heck, I might even have the original Pascal code laying around somewhere. And that wraps our non-coding session for today. Happy coding!