Wclock 2000 Help

Wclock is a clock program from  (God N Locomotive Works) that calculates and displays the time of day the way the Mayans might had they invented mechanical clocks and counted their day in twenty-four 60-minute hours as we do. It shows the current time of day using Mayan glyphs. Glyphs can be displayed in the head-variant (new, improved, color)  (also known as portrait) style, or in the more familiar normal-form  (bar-and-dot notation) style (also in new, improved, color). In addition, wclock will also display the time of day in arabic numerals,  allowing the program to be used as a digital clock. Starting the program with a -d command-line argument, or with the name dclock, will cause it to display arabic numerals. You can thus instruct Windows (95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 or XP) to start both a Mayan clock and a digital clock when it starts up. By default, wclock places itself at the upper right corner of the screen, while running wclock as dclock will display in the upper left hand corner. You can change these default behaviours, however; see Using Wclock.

Topics

The following topics explain how to interpret the Mayan clock display and how to use the wclock program.

Click On:	For Information About:
Installing Wclock	Installing Wclock
Wclock Display	Organization and interpretation of the wclock display
Using Wclock	Using Wclock
Using the Color Editor	Using the Color Editor
A Theory of Mayan Timekeeping	How the Mayans might have kept time
The Letter Glyphs	Glyphs A-G and X-Z
Mayan Chronology	Chronology of the Mayan civilization
References	References
Notes	Notes
What’s New?	What’s New?
How to Contact the Author	How to Contact the Author
Acknowledgments	Acknowledgments

Installing Wclock

Installing wclock is very simple. Download the WClock.zip file anyplace you please and use winzip or pkunzip to unpack the .zip file. Make sure that you use the “Use Folder Names” option; a new directory will then be created, called “WClockDist”.  In that directory will be this HTML document, numerous image files (both GIF and JPEG format), and two .exe files named dclock.exe and wclock.exe.

Using Wclock

Using wclock is also extremely simple, and the best way is place a shortcut to it into your startup group.  The next time you start Windows, wclock will appear on your screen in the default location.  If you also set up a shortcut to dclock, you will get a digital clock in its default location.

Wclock, by default, puts itself in the upper right-hand corner of your screen and shows the head-variant display.  Dclock puts itself in the upper left-hand corner and shows the red version of the digital display.

In addition to using startup shortcuts, you can simply double-click on the program files to run them.  They won’t start up automatically, however, if you do this.

Once it is running, you can leave the clock alone if you wish. To do more, however, you should click with the right mouse-button anywhere in the display. Depending on the current state of the clock, you will get one of two menus.

	Normal-form or head-variant version menu Arabic Normal Form Head Variants Show Seconds/Hide Seconds Color Show/Hide Caption Bar Show/Hide Taskbar Button Save Position, Position Choices About Help Exit
Arabic version menu Arabic Normal Form Head Variants Show Seconds/Hide Seconds Red Green Yellow Cyan LCD ffc/079 Show/Hide Caption Bar Show/Hide Taskbar Button Save Position, Position Choices About Help Exit

As specified in the Wclock Display topic, below, when the normal-form or head-variant display is used, the leftmost glyph (which is a sun god during the daytime and a moon goddess during the night) acts as a quit button; it always asks before exiting, though, whereas selecting Exit from the right-button menu will exit without confirmation.

Wclock Display

The Wclock display is laid out in five blocks, which are referred to for the purpose of this discussion as Quit, A, B, C, and D:

Block:	Quit	A	B	C	D
Glyph:	Sun or Moon	Hour	Hour	Min	Min
Period:	1 day	20h	0-19	20m	0-19
		(0-1)		(0-2)

The first block, Quit, (which acts as the quit button) shows a Mayan god.  If it is between the hours of 0600 and 1800, the glyph is the Mayan sun god: .  After 1800 until 0600, it’s the Mayan mood goddess glyph: . The next four blocks (A-D) give the time of day in Mayan numeration, base 20. These blocks can be displayed as normal-form glyphs (bar-and-dot) or as glyphs known variously as head-variant glyphs^(Morley) or portrait glyphs^(Closs). For a fuller explanation of the purpose of each block, click on a block in the illustration above.

Since the head-variant numerals are the faces of gods and may be difficult to recognize, the clock can be adjusted to display normal form glyphs. When you click on a face glyph (positions A-D) with the mouse, a popup window appears bearing the face’s normal-form equivalent: . When the popped-up window is clicked on, it goes away. Similarly, when you click on a normal form glyph, the popup window displays a face glyph.

Bar-and-dot, or normal-form, notation is the more common form of numeric notation and is much simpler than head-variant glyph representation, being composed of just three basic items:

1. a bar ,  ,  or  for five;
2. a dot ,  ,  or  for 1 (note the extra decoration sometimes used to fill space); and
3. a shell , a lobed symbol, a hand , or other glyphs  for zero.

In small normal-form (those used to display the seconds counter) glyphs, then, if the time displayed were: then the time in arabic notation, base 10, would be 09:41 ( = zero,  = 9,  = 2*20 = 40, and  = 1).

The time is presented as standard, 24-hour, time but is displayed in vigesimal (base 20). We can be sure that the Mayans did not keep track of the time of day in this fashion, but it does make it easier for Westerners to use. Nine o’clock in the morning, for example, is shown on the face of the clock as a zero symbol, the face for the god of the number nine, and two more zero symbols; 11:30 PM would be shown as god one (standing for 20 hours), god three (for three hours over the 20), the god for one again (standing for 20 minutes), followed by the god-face for 10 (10 over 20), and the whole assemblage could thus be read as 20 + 3 hours and 20 + 10 minutes, or, in 24- hour time, 2330.

By paying attention to the faces of the number-gods, and clicking on the faces not recognized, one can gradually learn the diagnostic elements of these gods; god one, or hun, for example, is diagnosed by the symbol on the cheek that looks like IL. See the  Names of the Numbers topic for a table showing the names of the numbers and both kinds of glyphs.

A Theory of Mayan Timekeeping

There is no evidence in either the monuments or the codices that the Mayans divided time into any unit smaller than a whole day. Some hints, contradictory at best, have been found in several of the Books of Chilam Balam and in a few of the Histories from the conquest. There have been several ingenious suggestions, however, regarding how they might have subdivided their day, and these are summarized in Thompson, Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, p. 177-ff^(Thompson).

One theory, initially proposed by Seler, is based on the Mayan perception of the universe as a series of layers or circles (cf. Dante); it suggests that the Mayans might have split the day into thirteen parts corresponding to the layers of the heavens, each layer of which had its own special god, and the hours of darkness into nine parts corresponding to the layers of the underworld. Thompson has also speculated on the existence of seven layers of the earth, and there is some evidence for this, notably the demonstrated existence of a seven-day cycle marked by what are known as the Z glyphs. The seven-day, nine-day and thirteen-day cycles ttotal to 9 + 13 + 7, or 29—which is a prime number and one of the two standard lunation lengths used by the Mayans.

The Oxlahun ti K’u

The thirteen gods, or lords, of the heavens were known collectively as the Oxlahun ti k’u (thirteen gods, literally thirteen in holiness), and were, perhaps, identified with the first thirteen numbers, since it is believed that the Mayans saw the integers as gods (who knows how they would have perceived fractions!). The name for the number one, for example, was Hun ’Ahaw, or One Lord.

Although we know the collective name of these thirteen gods, we do not know their individual names. The situation is analagous to what ours would be if we knew that there had been 40-odd presidents of the United States numbered 1 through 40, and known as President One, President Two, and so on, but had not the faintest idea that the first president’s name was George Washington. We know neither the thirteen names nor the thirteen glyphs for the Mayan lords of the day, although (as mentioned) we suspect that the numbers from one to thirteen are these same gods. However, we do know the corresponding thirteen gods and their names from the Aztec, and their names are listed here, in Nahuatl:

#	Nahuatl Name
1	Xiuhtecuhtli
2	Tlaltecuhtli
3	Chalchiuhtlicue
4	Tonatiuh
5	Tlazolteotl
6	Mictlantecuhtli
7	Cinteotl
8	Tlaloc
9	Quetzalcoatl
10	Tezcatlipoca
11	Chalmecatecuhtli, a god of sacrifice
12	Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli
13	Citlalincue, goddess of the heavens (Taube)

The Bolon ti K’u

The nine lords of the underworld were known as the Bolon ti k’u (nine gods, literally nine in holiness). Again, we do not know the names of these gods, but the glyphs corresponding to these deities are well-known, the series having been definitively established by J. S. Thompson in the late 1920’s^(Thompson). In the absence of proper names, the lords of the underworld have been assigned G Numbers. We can make some attempts at identification, though: G7  may be identical to the patron god of the month Pax , and G9  is almost certainly a pauahtun. While we are not as certain of the corresponding Aztec Lords of the Night, the cycle is generally believed to be:

G#	Mayan Glyph	Nahuatl Name
1		Xiuhtecuhtli
2		Itztli or Tecpatl
3		Piltzintecuhtli
4		Cinteotl
5		Mictlantecuhtli
6		Chalchiuhtlicue
7		Tlazolteotl
8		Tepeyollotl
9		Tlaloc(Taube)

If the entire 24-hour day were to be divided into 22 parts (13 plus 9), then a daytime hour would have been about 55 minutes long, and each hour of the night would have been about 80 minutes, with the average length over the day being about 66 minutes. If the Mayans had used such a timekeeping system characterized by the different duration of day-time and night-time hours, they would not be unique. Before the development of mechanical (non-water) clocks, the hours of the day and night in western European civilization were also of differing lengths.

The difficulty with variable-length hours, of course, lies in their computational complexity. If you are using a water-clock, you can just determine empirically how big your source vessel needs to be, and, similarly, determine how far apart the markings on the destination vessel have to be. Not so hard, especially if you are an astronomer and it is your job to find these things out. But to write a program, you must figure out when sunrise and sunset are, based on the current time and the latitude and longitude; this leads you pretty directly into celestial mechanics, and figuring out what you are going to call the hours, and what new bitmaps/glyphs you have to come up with, and you are not getting paid for it anyway, so pretty soon it becomes procrastinated work^(Hadfield).

I did implement such a clock some time ago, on the X Windows system, but it proved to be impenetrable: .  The only thing from that implementation that I incorporated into this version of wclock was the division of the day into “daytime” and “nighttime” periods, using the sun god and the moon goddess. After trying to use it for a few weeks, I feel safe in saying that the only way the Mayans might have been able to make such a system work would be with some form of water clock, with no finer resolution than a named division of the day.

Names of the Numbers^(Lounsbury)

Number	Mayan name	Portrait Glyph	Normal Form Glyphs	Small Normal (Seconds)
0	mih
1	hun
2	kaa
3	ox
4	kan
5	hu, ho
6	wak
7	wuc
8	waxac
9	bolon
10	lahun
11	buluk
12	lahka
13	oxlahun
14	kanlahun
15	hulahun
16	waklahun
17	wuklahun
18	waxaklahun
19	bolonlahun
20	hun kal (one twenty)	(Kal)

Chronology of Mayan Civilization

From Scientific American, August, 1986.

References

1. Morley, Sylvanus Griswold, An Introduction to the Study of the Mayan Hieroglyphics, Bulletin 57 of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, U. S. Government Printing Office, 1915 (Dover reprint).
2. Closs, Michael P., ed., Native American Mathematics, University of Texas Press, 1986.
3. Lounsbury, Floyd G., “Maya Numeration, Computation, and Calendrical Astronomy”, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed., Charles Coulston Gillespie, Vol. 15, Supplement 1 (1978), Scribners, 1978, pp 759-818.
4. Thompson, J. Eric, “Maya Chronology: Glyph G of the Lunar Series”, in American Anthropologist n. s. 31, 1929, pp. 223-31.
5. Taube, Karl and Miller, Mary, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, Thames and Hudson, 1993.
6. Harris, John F. and Stearns, Stephen K., Understanding Maya Inscriptions: A Hieroglyph Handbook, The University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania,1992.
7. Thompson, J. Eric S., Maya Hieroglyphic Writing (Third Edition), University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. (Most of the head-variant glyphs used in the display were adapted from here.)

Notes

1. Morley, Sylvanus Griswold, An Introduction to the Study of the Mayan Hieroglyphics, Bulletin 57 of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, U. S. Government Printing Office, 1915 (Dover reprint).
2. Closs, Michael P., ed., Native American Mathematics, University of Texas Press, 1986.
3. Lounsbury, Floyd G., “Maya Numeration, Computation, and Calendrical Astronomy”, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed., Charles Coulston Gillespie, Vol. 15, Supplement 1 (1978), Scribners, 1978, pp 759-818. See also Tozzer, Alfred A., A Maya Grammar, Dover, 1921, pp. 97-104. Also, present-day Mayans have reconstructed the word for zero (mih), which had become lost over the centuries. Thanks to Nikolai Grube for bringing this to my attention.
4. Thompson, J. Eric, “Maya Chronology: Glyph G of the Lunar Series”, in American Anthropologist n. s. 31, 1929, pp. 223-31.
5. Taube, Karl and Miller, Mary, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, Thames and Hudson, 1993. See also “The G and F Glyphs of the Lunar Supplementary Series”.
6. Harris, John F. and Stearns, Stephen K., Understanding Maya Inscriptions: A Hieroglyph Handbook, The University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania,1992.
7. Quit Block The glyph displayed in this position is either the sun god glyph.  or the moon goddess glyph , depending on the time of day; between 0600 and 1800, you would see the sun god. Between 1800 and 0600, you would see the moon goddess.
8. A Block The glyph displayed in the A block shows the head-variant or normal-form representation of the first digit of the hour in base 20. This block can have a value of either 0 or 1. Time earlier than 8:00 PM (20:00 hours) will have the glyph equivalent value of zero. Time later than 8:00 PM will have the glyph equivalent value of one.
9. B Block The glyph displayed in the B block shows the head-variant or normal-form representation of the second digit of the hour in base 20. This block can have a glyph equivalent value of 0 through 19.
10. C Block The glyph displayed in the C block shows the head-variant or normal-form representation of the first digit of the minutes in base 20. This block can have a value of either 0, 1, or 2. Minutes before 20 after the hour will display the glyph equivalent of 0 in this block. Minutes from 20 to 39 after the hour will display the glyph equivalent of 1, and minutes from 40 to 59 after the hour will display the glyph equivalent of 2.
11. D Block The glyph displayed in the D block shows the head-variant or normal-form representation of the second digit of the minutes in base 20. This block can have a value of 0 through 19.
12. Kal, or 20, glyph This glyph for the number twenty is from the codices (the four surviving Mayan books written on fig-bark paper that survived the pyromania of Bishop de Landa). It is not used in wclock.
13. Procrastinated work ...assumes titanic proportions.
    —Sam Hadfield
15. Thompson, J. Eric S., Maya Hieroglyphic Writing (Third Edition), University of Oklahoma Press, 1971.

What’s New?

This version of wclock, 2000 or “12.19.7.15.4 9 K’an 7 K’ank’in G7”, contains a number of improvements.

1. Color:  the most notable improvement. Both head-variant and normal-form glyphs are now in color. The small normal-form glyphs used for the seconds display are still monochrome, but are colored to match your preferences.
2. No more .INI files:  settings are stored in the registry, and have reasonable default values, so starting both versions of the clock up the first time should result in clocks that look mostly like you want them to.
3. Taskbar button hiding:  this is on by default.
4. Default colors:  the default colors, used only by the seconds digist, match the background color of the glyphs; you can change them, but it probably won’t look right.
5. Finally, this document has been improved to match the clocks.

Show/Hide Caption Bar

This is what allows you to move the clock to someplace other than the default upper-right or upper-left corners of the display. Simply show the caption bar , grab the caption and move the clock to where you’d like it; then hide the caption bar again. Refer also to the Save Position menu entry.

Show/Hide Taskbar Button

This is what allows you to run wclock without a button taking up space in your taskbar; note that after changing this option, you must restart wclock.

Save Position

Use this when you have moved wclock to a non-default position and you wish the clock to stay put. Selecting this item tells wclock to write the new position into the registry; there are two sets of settings stored in the registry, one for wclock and one for dclock. I would advise moving the clock to where you want it, hiding the caption bar, checking “Save Position”, and re-starting wclock immediately.

About

Selecting this item pops up the About window, giving credits & copyrights.

Help

Now, how did I get here?

Exit

Exits wclock, which will save your current settings in the registry.

How to Contact the Author

TERMS AND CONDITIONS:

NO WARRANTY

BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.

IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS

However, if you find any bugs, send me mail and explain in as much detail as you can exactly what you were doing and how to reproduce the problem. The clearer you are in your description, the quicker I can respond.

If you use wclock and find it useful, tell me and tell your Mayanist friends.

Ivan Van Laningham, God N Locomotive Works,

Red

Changes the color of the “LED” display to red to simulate the typical LED display found on many stand-alone digital clocks.

Green

Changes the color of the “LED” display to green to simulate the typical LED display found on many stand-alone digital clocks.

Yellow

Changes the color of the “LED” display to yellow to simulate the typical LED display found on some stand-alone digital clocks.

Cyan

Changes the color of the “LED” display to cyan to simulate the typical LED display found on many stand-alone digital clocks and VCRs.

LCD

Changes the color of the “LED” display to simulate the typical LCD display found on many digital wristwatches.

ffc/079

Changes the color of the “LED” display to have a background of RGB F0F0C0 and a foreground of RGB 007090; these are colors I use on my X-Windows display; naturally, windows changes the colors to what it wants.

Color

This pops up the standard Windows color editor. Its use with wclock is explained in Using the Color Editor

Show Seconds/Hide Seconds

Selecting this when it says “Show Seconds” will display the seconds counter , which will be in the appropriate number style  for the current display . Selecting this item when it says “Hide Seconds” will, of course, turn off the seconds counter.

G Numbers

Early students of the Mayan hieroglyphs assigned letters to the hieroglyphs on monuments (stelae). See The Letter Glyphs topic for more information. The G glyph is the first glyph to appear after the actual date, followed by the F glyph, and the nine different forms of this glyph are numbered one through nine. Thus, the nine lords of the underworld are known today as G1 through G9:

Normal Form

Switch the wclock display to show normal form  (bar-and-dot) Mayan numerals.

Arabic

Switch the wclock display from a Mayan form to standard Western Arabic numerals .

Head Variants

Switch the wclock display to show the Mayan face, or head-variant, glyphs. This is probably the most useful variant of the displays, as it trains you (if you pay attention, anyway) to recognize the faces of the integer gods.

Using the Color Editor

This section describes how to pick colors for the Mayan versions of the wclock display. The figure below shows the standard Windows Common Color Dialog, with 4 custom colors selected.

In the custom color section, notice that the first four entries have colors in them. These correspond to the foreground and background colors of the two Mayan versions of the display, normal-form and head-variant, as shown by the table below.

Custom Color Index	Clock	Plane	Default value
0	Head variant	foreground	black
1	Head variant	background	white
2	Normal form	foreground	black
3	Normal form	background	white

Follow the standard procedure for selecting and adjusting your custom colors. Note that there is no real need to do this anymore, since the background color of the clock is fixed (for now) and can’t be changed. The default colors for the seconds display match the background color of the clock, and they are the only colors affected by the color dialog anymore.

The Pauahtuns

The pauahtuns hold up the sky, one for each of the cardinal directions; in the center of the Mayan universe is Tzuk Te, the world tree. One would think that a god entrusted with such an essential task would be eminently trustworthy, but Pauahtun  (a.k.a. “God N”) is often portrayed as a drunk and a lecher.

Acknowledgments

Mike Sawyer did the LED bitmaps for the Arabic version.

The Letter Glyphs

Examining stelae, early students of the monumental inscriptions could discern patterns usually followed in glyph placement. First, of course, was the ISIG, or Initial Series Introductory Glyph, at the top left corner of a monument; this was followed by the Long Count (LC) glyphs, as in “12.19.3.5.13”. Immediately following the LC was the number of the day (3) and the day glyph itself (Ben). The next glyphs directly related to the full LC/Calendar Round position were the day number of the month (16) and the month (Sek). Between the day glyph and the number of the day in the month glyphs were a series of optional glyphs that were given the letters A-F; for convenience, the letters were assigned starting with the last glyph in this optional series, so that the sequence often observed was:

ISIG	LC	Day #	Day Name	G	F	D or E	C	B	A	Day # of Month	Month

Naturally, after these letters were assigned, epigraphers recognized more glyphs that were found inserted into the sequence. These new glyphs were given the letters X, Y and Z (again, for convenience, not in that order). Thus, the entire sequence revised now could, in its full complexity, conceivably be:

ISIG	LC	Day #	Day Name	G	F	D or E	C	X &/or B	Z & Y	A	Day # of Month	Month

If you are not confused by now, you should be^(Harris).

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