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Mechanical or Electronic, Watches the GQ of Men's Jewelry

CASIO AE-1500WH-8BV $22 Amazon
10 year LiMnO2 2032 battery
30 sec. per month accuracy
100 Meter Water Resistance

Anything beyond a basic digital sports wrist watch more about the ownership experience, style or look than telling time, a secondary function to the main act of wearing your bling where others can see it. Flick your wrist up to check the time & others will likely notice "it" reflecting glints of light at them off the shiny screen surface! 


Most watches have a shiny face over the time display that reflects natural & artificial light. Some are made of acrylic, hardened mineral glass, & better ones have a sapphire window, on the back too, so you can see the insides in skeletonized mechanic & automatic model movements. Automatics have a swinging weight mass in the back to wind the mainspring, & magic lever Seiko movements & the nicest watch movements from Germany wind the mainspring (mechanical energy storage) when the weight swings clockwise or counter clockwise. 

Friction Reducing Jewel Bearings

I really like automatic jewel bearing low friction enhanced movements. The highest quality quartz movements also use jewel bearings to reduce friction in the gear train connected to analog hand displays. Some of the best quartz analog watches can get 40-65 months of runtime out of a Renata 395 silver oxide button cell. Automatics have 25-80 hrs of power reserve stored up in a fully wound mainspring mechanical energy storage device that powers the movements gear train. Horology the art & science of watch & clock & time technology. No matter which watches we are talking about, reducing friction improves the runtime & in electrical watches, reducing power consumption increases the runtime per battery or per charge. 

Solar Wrist Watches 

Solar photovoltaic bezel features produce a few nano-watts of energy from light energy & store the resulting direct current in (Casio, Citizen) lithium titanate batteries that lasts up to 23+ years or 55,000 cycles. Some solar electric watches store power in a capacitor or super or ultra capacitor. I really like the Tough Solar & Eco-Drive models. 

A watch for all budgets 

Wrist watches are available at all price points, most that sell well & all of my personal collection hitting in that $20-$500 whim or affordable cost level that any "working" person & even some children & vagrants can come up with; to flex that wrist bling & be on time to the next grey market deal or school function or work.

Men's wrist bling!

Sure, women wear wrist watches, but few ladies are spending their mid life crisis funds on a Rolex or TAG/ if its art in small bits of titanium & sapphire jewel bearings & skeletonized movement windows front & back, then its the boys among us that are flexing flashy expensive wrist clocks when they are well healed enough to obtain a genuine luxury model instead of one of those affordable Chinese Clone's / some of which have turned into state owned watch making empires like Hangzhou Watches that made the 7500 movement in my BODERRY BDA001T or the ST90089 in the Sturhling Original. 

My wrist watch EDWF (every day wear favorite) 

Today I am left wrist wearing a CASIO G-SHOCK WAVE CEPTOR TOUGH SOLAR GW-5600J water resistant to 20BAR pressure with a rechargeable lithium titanate battery that lasts 23+ years. It's photovoltaic amorphous silicon solar bezel keeps the battery charged, it also goes into PS or power save mode if the face of the watched placed downward so that its not taking in any light. It keeps time in PS mode but turns off the exceptional low power consumption B&W LCD information display & resumes displaying information in full power mode when you pick it up to put it on again. It even shows you the state of charge of the battery, high, medium or low. 5 different timer functions, stop watch, world time zones & NIST Colorado atomic radio clock signal reception, its so precise, its amazing & my favorite overall wrist watch. 

Atomic Clocks

9,192,631,770 cycles per second, the oscillation frequency of the Cesium 133 atom used in common Cesium Atomic Clocks at NIST & other national academy or institutes of "standards" scientific base unit references like the SI base unit of Time, the Second! This kind of Cesium fountain clock like the F1 & F2 at NIST are used to pump the 60khz radio signal from Fort Collins, Colorado, USA to clock & watches & other instruments that receive the atomic clock radio signal. GPS satellites carry their own atomic clock at a base reference of very high precision needed for the GPS signals of similar precision that affect the accuracy of the ground position satellite constellation data multiple GPS timing signal reception of your standalone or vehicular or cell phone based GPS receiver system. Similar satellites are used by Galileo, Glonass & GNSS, Baidoo sat nav systems. 

Fading LIPO in Apple Watches

Some stranger smart watches mixing the latest IoT wifi bluetooth SOC stacked memory compute gpu logic board symphony into a battery powered wrist worn information appliance that can make & take phone calls like an Apple Watch with thousands of bands to choose from that can interchange between every generation of Apple timepiece with their fragile failure prone sealed LIPO batteries that fade over 2-3 years until your desire for the next one hard enough to compel you to buy a new model by throwing down another couple of hundred on the next generation Apple Watch. Do you know how I know about Apple watches ? 

Apple Watch Obsession 

Surfing the tech news for years online & really enjoying my iPhone SE origin gen. back then, the unassuming Apple Watch 2 launches & catches my fancy. It still works too, in the desk in front of me without the $8 Milanese stainless steel loop band I got on amazon instead of the Apple $150 version thats 99% similar in all ways. I charge it to throttle its second LIPO battery as I had changed out the original battery in 2019 as the original battery life was really bad. Down the road I got the feature packed Apple Watch Series 5. I stopped wearing an Apple Watch for about a year & gave my Series 5 to Meg & she still wears it, mostly as a fitness tracker these days in early 2022. A recent trip to Costco netted me an Apple Watch SE, their latest cost optimized version that pairs nicely with my iPhone SE2, a similarly low cost optimize version. 

Apple Watch Official Claims 

Apple claims their smartwatches have 18 hrs of battery life. That completely depends on the Apple Watch settings configuration. If you just use the basic time function, it can go like 4+ days. If you turn on some of the features & do not text or make a lot of phone calls with it or listen to music & only check your activity rings sparingly throughout the day, you can probably go 2.5 days between charged. I try to keep mine partially charged by charging for about 25 min per day & use it sparingly.  It works as my alarm clock on my wrist with a nice song & vibrational Taptic feel to gently wake me up with a positive vibe :) I really like being able to take a phone call while driving without touching my smartphone too, I keep them short & tell the caller I am driving & will call them back when I reach my destination & am no longer driving. 

Lithium Cobalt Oxide etc LIPO Long Life Charging Trick 

Keeping LIPO batteries 30-80% charged & avoiding the top 10% between 90% & 100% & avoiding discharging below 10%, these partial charging tricks can make the battery last 5-10x longer in both calendar & cycle life. 30-80% long life lithium ion charging trick, it works with other lithium battery electronics like smartphones, laptops, tablets - things you charge daily. Never park your stuff on a charger all night, in a small number of cases when something goes wrong, venting with flame & home fires & personal injuries have resulted. Apple usually settles out of court for a tidy sum after figuring out how much to offer the victim by figuring out the victims financial state, offering less to people who are hard up for money & more to people who can afford to & likely to take it to trial to recuperate their losses. 

Swiss Watches Watch Out for Smartwatches 

If the Japanese Quartz movements gave the Swiss watch industry a scare, silicon valley's sinful Foxconn sister fruit company's Apple Watch's should have them quivering. Samsung the South Korean government private fusion also slanging information technology for the wrist with round screens instead of the rounded rectangles that Apple prefers in seemingly all its device designs. I can only image the obsession put into picking the radius of that corner rounding. I can imagine Jonny Ive & his lackeys hovering around design software on a screen CAE CAD style for hours every day for weeks & months & years with a fanatical focus on picking the epitome of corner radius to side lengths ratios of their Designed in California USA & Made in China hardware devices. At Apple, rounder rectangles are the main design theme! 

Esoteric Mysterious Time

Time one of those, ephemeral aspects of life, so close & yet so distant in thought & reality. Concrete & real in physics, time precision measure with cesium atom fountain atomic clocks that radio broadcast a signal to models that can update to stay precise by using the aforementioned high science device of great cost as a repeatedly accessible reference, every 24 hours update with the latest time signature signal. GPS system & GLONASS & Galileo satellite navigation systems make use of electronic measure timing signals to triangulate your position using the "visible signals" constellations that your Garmin can obtain timing signals from etc // 

Important Time

Time deeply esoteric & mysterious with historical & modern significance so profound its hard to summarize, but one of those foundational technological creations of man that moved from primitive advanced sun dials to mechanical spring driven machining precision excellence examples & now deep extreme ultraviolet lithography SOC 5nm feature chipsets with the lowest power consumption, in the latest smartwatches. 

Making Chipsets with Timing Control Essential

TSMC cooking up Apple reference designs on ASML projector EUV mirror optic machines that are nothing short of aerospace modern marvels of applied engineering, accuracy & precision using very short UV to machine features into semiconductor materials using nickel metal giga-pixel masks (like photographic film negatives) to project feature details, layer by layer, almost like 3D resin printing, but way tighter & much more advanced, photoresist polymer, etched away with HF of hydrofluoric acid. Making chipset both energetic & chemically dirty, ironically requiring the most purified ultra pure water for rinsing each layer perfectly clean to prevent defects in the wafer. A single large wafer containing thousands of chips, cut with a diamond band saw that costs a fortune. 

Chip Manufacturing QAQC 

The testing & verification equipment to QA:QC the wafers, an international fusion of CANON & NIKON & INTEL & AMD & GLOBAL FOUNDRIES & TSMC & APPLE & FOXCONN & ASML & Others // Timing very important in chipset manufacturing tooling, the production pipeline & operations at chip fabs. Most industries from humble retail shops to the largest companies on earth have to have all their employees on time. I am a school bus driver & timing is paramount when picking up the children in the morning to take them to school. 

We are all running out of time

Time that esoteric thing that sneak that squeaks away from all of us endlessly. There is a time for enjoyment, a time for productivity, a time for sleep & rest, a time to work & play, a time to pray & have spiritual reflection, a time to make intimacy with your partner, a time to work out or exercise, times to wind down or go on vacation, times to get your vaccine to slow down COVID19. There is a time for every action in life & your brain uses signal timing to enable thinking so that you can read & made sense of this. 

Repeating Patterns at All Scales of Existence

You see the same patterns at every scale from the subatomic to the macromolecular & galactic, repeated. Time has meaning in all domains of our dimension with 3 cordial directions XYZ & time going forward continually so 4th dimension or 3rd if your just talking about spatial orientation. At one dimensional layer above our existence, time & place have no meaning as both super position & FTL or faster than light travel are normal. 

Higher Dimensional Levels 

Energy takes on new meaning when time & space have no relevance. Eventually energy & information are it, just knowledge & power. Go to the top of all dimensional layers & you will find God, the all powerful, all knowing & every present being beyond comparison, of Infinite Power & Might unequalled in all ways, stronger & smarter, more creative & more knowledgeable, the most skilled & most excellent in all ways, God as superlative being of sublime beauty beyond comparison. 

My Favorite Watches 

I have a soft-spot for Citizen Eco-drive wrist watches & own 3, 2 are exactly the same (Chandler) while a Titanium GN-4-S 480220 H500-S021260 HST was my first & still works. The oldest Chandler has a scratched bezel glass & I lost it for a while. I looked & looked & frustrated, order another one on Amazon. Then one day I found the old one, so now I have a new & old model, very slightly different, same part numbers & movements, just one with newer battery & newer solar PV & not scratched. The Titanium model has poor legibility because of its all silver design. The stainless steel, black bezel with lumens white number demarcations of the Chandler's have excellent legibility, with high contrast easy to read at a glance design. The green nylon weaved strap & polished stainless steel case, it reminds me of the CIA & really only missing tritium gas vials for auto illumination as a feature vs the pentagon issued model that I was forced to return upon leaving back then, that evil program that I was unwittingly inducted into with a seductively handsome compensation package that was hard to let go of, but I hated that kind of work, abroad, not helping but hurting & breaking & destroying to protect the military industrial complex I later came to dislike because of runaway corruption driven capitalism income inequality increasing along with currency inflation of fiat currencies all fake & made up from thinking just like our views about numbers & time & making wrist watches & other technologies by combining energy with materials & information to arrange said together in organized detailed systems that work as a device or similar, gadget, furniture, appliance, vehicle, equipment. 

Making Stuff 

All things that man makes in the world are made of minerals from the world & some from space that impacted earth, but mostly Earth based minerals, & fossil fuel or carbon combustion energy, some renewable electricity & nuclear power, with a mix of applied thinking *information* to arrange & assemble the materials, like a 3D FDM printer takes a noodle of thermoplastic & extrudes it into "a thing", using machine G-CODE instructions made by a Slicer software from 3D files made in 3D design software by thinking people who design stuff. I operate a PRUSA MINI OG 3D FDM printer using PLA & PETG filament & get designs from Thingiverse website & elsewhere online & use the official PrusaSlicer software to configure the layer height, placement of the part on the smooth PEI on steel printing bed, with more advanced controls to edit the number of perimeter shells & infill type & percentage & printing nozzle & bed temperatures & other parameters etc // this is not a tutorial, its an editorial commentary about technology & information & software & 3D printing equipment I play with & the basic workflow, in my own weird wording :)

Obsessed with Time Devices 

I love wrist watches & clocks & time, especially self-winding mechanical movements & smart watches by Apple. I really like analog clock information displays since they are easy to read fast! I like digital information displays too. I like Nixie tubes & VFD displays & cold cathodes & LED's & lights & bulbs of all kinds, especially deuterium vapor & HID & especially low & high pressure sodium & microwave sodium & short arc xenon & plasma lighting. I like light & time & physics & chemistry & science & technology & software & computers & machines & engines & motors & energy, ENERGY, especially renewable energy, nuclear energy & energy storage technologies like batteries & flywheels & compressed air & mechanical block crane storage & pumped hydro & geothermal, especially insulation & thermodynamics & heat energy storage & heat movement, air & water heating, sanitation, buildings & machines & mechanisms & systems of all kinds! I even like movies & content like South Park, the comedy show. I love TED talks & edifying information, factual stuff! Real truth, facts, science! I really like documentary films & science fiction, to watch & listen too! I really like have a wrist watch so I do not have to pull our my hand computer *smartphone* just to check the time. So I ask you, what time is it? Was it time to read this posting. I suppose if you made it this far, it was! 

Check out the Cartier Energy Efficient Watch, the ID Two 

32 days of power reserve from an oil-less fiberglass movement held inside a ceramic vacuum case held together with the front & back glass & gaskets utilizing the vacuum to stay sucked together without any glue or screws. This contrasts with 20-80 hrs of power reserve of traditional automatics. Not a production watch, a proof of concepts from which certain design features will be present in future models offered by Cartier! https://sites.psu.edu/johnsedsgn100/blog/personal-interest/2-watch/

Thermocouple Generator Watches 

Utilizing body heat available at the wrist & the difference between that temperature & that of the outside air via a PN gap semiconductor generator & capacitor switching voltage booster to power the quartz movement. A thermoelectric generator makes electrical current when the hot & cold side temperature differential creation a molecular vibratory gradient cascade inside the bismuth tellurium BiTe n-type material & bismuth tin tellurium p-type material, arrange like alternating batteries in series, between two silicon plates. These micro-electrical interfaces creates electrical current flowing tangential to the thermal heat flow between the heat source *wrist* & heat sink *high surface area bezel radiator & environmental gases in air* https://www.plus9time.com/blog/2020/5/30/body-heat-powered-watches-seiko-thermic

Time a powerful tool in so many industries! 

Consider the role that timing plays in global navigation systems, shipping & logistics, transport, education, healthcare, government, even basic cooking at home, baking, restaurant operations, retail stores, websites, power systems & grid power distribution, the function of all compute devices & more. Timing in physics & the SI second so important that computing information would be impossible without it. Even the basic cheapest sports watch made of acrylic & nylon contains an amazingly complex timing circuit with a quartz oscillator measured by a capacitor induction device by a circuit that creates a time reference impulse from this source to produce better than the best mechanical or automatic movement precision. 

From wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_watch

In horology, the term electric watch is used for the first generation electrically-powered wristwatches which were first publicly displayed by both Elgin National Watch Company and Lip on March 19, 1952, with working laboratory examples in Chicago and Paris. The Hamilton Watch Company would be the first to produce and retail an electric watch beginning in 1957,  before the commercial introduction of the quartz wristwatch in 1969 by Seiko with the Astron. Their timekeeping element was either a traditional balance wheel or a tuning fork, driven electromagnetically by a solenoid powered by a battery. The hands were driven mechanically through a wheel train. They were superseded by quartz watches, which had greater accuracy and durability due to their lower parts count. Recent automatic quartz watches, which combine mechanical technology with quartz timekeeping, are not included in this classification.

A weak point in early balance wheel electric watches was the switch contacts on the balance wheel, which turned the solenoid on briefly to provide the impulse to keep the wheel oscillating. These wore out and did not operate reliably. Later designs used electromagnetic sensing, with a transistor in the circuit to turn the solenoid on.

Furthermore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horology

Horology ("the study of time", related to Latin horologium from Greek ὡρολόγιον, "instrument for telling the hour", from ὥρα hṓra "hour; time" and -o- interfix and suffix -logy) is the study of the measurement of time. Clocks, watches, clockwork, sundials, hourglasses, clepsydras, timers, time recorders, marine chronometers, and atomic clocks are all examples of instruments used to measure time. In current usage, horology refers mainly to the study of mechanical time-keeping devices, while chronometry more broadly includes electronic devices that have largely supplanted mechanical clocks for the best accuracy and precision in time-keeping.

People interested in horology are called horologists. That term is used both by people who deal professionally with timekeeping apparatus (watchmakers, clockmakers), as well as aficionados and scholars of horology. Horology and horologists have numerous organizations, both professional associations and more scholarly societies. The largest horological membership organisation globally is the NAWCC, the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, which is USA based, but also has local chapters elsewhere.

Most importantly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock 
(your GPS unit probably your most accurate clock) 

Specifically the SI "second" definition to unify time measurement worldwide! Atomic clocks are the most accurate & are made at the chip scale now, with very low power consumption suitable for battery powered applications. This wiki a deep dive, TLDR special with lots & lots of information in the Horology science domain :)

If you really want to dig deep check out Time on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time

Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience. Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions.

Time has long been an important subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars. Nevertheless, diverse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems.

Time in physics is operationally defined as "what a clock reads".

The physical nature of time is addressed by general relativity with respect to events in spacetime. Examples of events are the collision of two particles, the explosion of a supernova, or the arrival of a rocket ship. Every event can be assigned four numbers representing its time and position (the event's coordinates). However, the numerical values are different for different observers. In general relativity, the question of what time it is now only has meaning relative to a particular observer. Distance and time are intimately related and the time required for light to travel a specific distance is the same for all observers, as first publicly demonstrated by Michelson and Morley. General relativity does not address the nature of time for extremely small intervals where quantum mechanics holds. At this time, there is no generally accepted theory of quantum general relativity.

Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in both the International System of Units (SI) and International System of Quantities. The SI base unit of time is the second. Time is used to define other quantities – such as velocity – so defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition. 

An operational definition of time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the second, is highly useful in the conduct of both advanced experiments and everyday affairs of life. To describe observations of an event, a location (position in space) and time are typically noted.

The operational definition of time does not address what the fundamental nature of it is. It does not address why events can happen forward and backward in space, whereas events only happen in the forward progress of time. Investigations into the relationship between space and time led physicists to define the spacetime continuum. General relativity is the primary framework for understanding how spacetime works. Through advances in both theoretical and experimental investigations of spacetime, it has been shown that time can be distorted and dilated, particularly at the edges of black holes.

Temporal measurement has occupied scientists and technologists, and was a prime motivation in navigation and astronomy. Periodic events and periodic motion have long served as standards for units of time. Examples include the apparent motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, the swing of a pendulum, and the beat of a heart. Currently, the international unit of time, the second, is defined by measuring the electronic transition frequency of caesium atoms. Time is also of significant social importance, having economic value ("time is money") as well as personal value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day and in human life spans.

There are many systems for determining what time it is, including the Global Positioning System, other satellite systems, Coordinated Universal Time and mean solar time. In general, the numbers obtained from different time systems differ from one another.

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