Average Clocks Conundrum

All the clocks in my house are slightly wrong, but if I take the average of them all I get the right time. Except sometimes. Why?

Comments

[Sean]

is it when one or more of the clocks cross midnight?

[Daniel]

Maybe Uri Geller didn't not correctly revive your clocks ;)

http://site.uri-geller.com

[Mike]

Because you don't include all of them in the average?
Or maybe because one of hem is a sun dial? After dusk your average would change?

[Edd]

Who says all clocks are 12/24hr?

[Karen]

Are all of them in the correct time zone / taken daylight saving time into account?

[Boris]

Across the switch to British Summer Time. The average will be a time that does not exist.

[Bill]

Some are stopped

[Simon Johnson]

It depends entirely upon the time keeping quality of each individual device as the analogue devices are likely to have variations, with the mechanical parts slightly effecting time by a few milliseconds as the wear and tear of the device takes affect.Over a period of a few months, those milliseconds will begin to collate into a size of time that would meaningfully effect the average.

[Rob]

At the end of the day it all depends how you work your average out. If you assume that all you have to do is average the minute values then you have a solution which will work fine until some of the faster clocks go into the next hour, at which time really bad things happen to the result.

[Simon]

If you used the TimeSpan class from C# though you'd have no problems with the average. It would only be incorrect when clocks went forward or back, for a couple of minutes. And even then, it might be right depending on how you judge the transition of time during that period. How zen. Time would appear to accelerate very fast during that period as more clocks passed over 2am. The more clocks you had, the smoother the transition. But if you had infinite clocks, it would break. I think.

[seatkiwitle]

How about when daylight saving occurs. :-)