I just heard of the Talus watch on boingboing (http://www.boingboing.net/). It's an interesting concept for a watch because typically watches are trying to be exact. Well, this one is not. A couple of years ago I heard a talk about time pieces and the one thing that I still remember of that talk is how people use analog and digital watches differently: A digital watch gives you *exact* time, what time is it now. The analog is not quite as exact typically, but not because it couldn't be. Rather you don't look so closely! And here is maybe the main difference in use as well.
The speaker gave a fascinating example, a simple experiment which I have tried a couple of times (successfully). If you see somebody with an analog watch look at the watch, walk up to him/her and ask him for the time. S/he will most likely have to look at the watch again. If the person wears a digital, the most likely can give you the time. Now why is that? It's because analog watch users actually don't look at the *time* but very frequently they look for another piece of information derived from time, for example: how many minutes do I have till X, how long am I waiting here already, etc. The difference to looking for the time is that they are looking for an interval, not for a time point. So if they have just looked at the watch to and found out they still have -- say -- 5 minutes till the bus leaves, they may not know the exact time. They could probably figure it out, but looking at the watch again is just easier.
So where does this discussion lead and what does it have to do with the Talus watch? It seems that watch is sort of an odd case in between the analog and digital watch. It doesn't give you the correct time, but an approximation. For instance it tells you "a bit after 5" instead of "5:03", or "nearly 1 thirty" for "1:27". But it shows it digitally, so it's not an analog watch either. And the watch has a special mode to show the exact time too.
Now I wish I'd run into somebody who has one so I can do my little experiment with them and figure out what would happen.
Oh, here is a page about that fascinating time piece: http://www.talusfurniture.com/amusements/watch/index.html
