Clock Bearing Threat Orientation Training Tool Launch TPS-0103

I'm announcing a very primitive at this stage, proof of concept a training tool to help people such as myself to get proficient at what is known as clock position or clock bearing.

Those were the phrases, the terms that I discovered when I was trying to find where there was any official documentation of this.

It's something that you hear throughout popular culture, where people who are somewhat tactically savvy or sophisticated will identify a threat or a target, or a direction to move in.

It's a way to orient oneself against something else, or with something else, using this spatial metaphor of the dial of a clock that has twelve hour units, going from twelve at the top, three to the right, six at the bottom, nine to the left, and then increments of 2 hours in between those.

So between twelve and three, you get one and two and so forth.

It's funny and interesting to describe a clock like you've never seen one before.

But hey, there are people in these next generations. They won't know what a what an old phone would be, what an old disk would be even what a pencil would be.

There are still icons on modern apps, you see quite outdated icons.

I don't know when they're gonna be upgraded, or if it'll just remain a sort of artifact of the ancient times.

But, but for now, I think there are still probably enough legacy wrist watches that are non digital and school clocks, I don't know where else they still would have, them unless they're kind of a designer piece like an antique.

I think they have a certain charm, I think they're gonna stick with this useful metaphor, at least for now, it is a useful metaphor for spatial orientation.

It's very dynamic in the sense of relative to what you're communicating, let's say you're in a team or a unit or even a vehicle, is probably the most common circumstance where, if you're driving, it gets confusing when people have different lefts and different rights, people have different ideas of what left and right are.

And are you talking about driver's side, passenger side?

It can get confusing, so it makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons.

If it's emergency situations or high risk situations where you're confronting danger or evading danger, it could really make a difference how efficient you're able to create that schema, that map of your surroundings and then communicate important information.

So the idea that, let's say you're driving along and someone is directly heading towards you, oncoming traffic, someone is in your lane, and they should be in another lane, that would typically be 12:00. Someone's bearing at us, let's swerve off to the shoulder.

Or the review mirror, 6:00, someone's following us.

Or then out the look at the left and right side windows, someone's gonna t-bone you at 3:00.

Or if you wanted to incorporate the rear view mirrors that could give you some of the other slots on that clock dial.

There's a sort a rough gradient, or transition between the different units, because it's not like, oh, I said 3:00, but it was actually 3:15, and we died because it was 3:15.

No, it's like, just look in that direction. You will probably discover quickly that near 3:00, there's something going on.

If you hadn't thought about it or haven't used it yourself, you might wonder, what are they talking about? When they are pointing in a direction and saying that there's a time there.

It's probably easy to deduce, but stuff like that goes over my head all the time.

So I would not judge anyone if they had not made that connection.

But, even the other night, I had a dream where that metaphor was used in a tactical situation, and I was almost compromised, or left scratching my head in the dream about why it wasn't instantaneous to me where to set my attention on that dial of of directions.

I'm not gonna go into specifics about anything else that happened in that dream, but I will say it was timely.

When I was thinking about tools to build, to help to kind of back fill some of those gaps in things that would have been drilled into me more if I would have, shall we say, joined any number of organizations where that would be drilled in, I'm left to drill in myself.

Hence, the tool that I made, which was an interesting web development experience.

Part of this process is me wanting to get as proficient as I can what the options and opportunities are within modern web browsers, namely HTML five and client side javascript and all these crazy apis, application programming interfaces.

All these fun toys and tools and things that you get to work with, and they build on each other, and they start to really elaborate development.

So something that was past my event horizon for a long time, has been the canvas element, where you can do some very interesting, somewhat primitive, somewhat constrained, but still all kinds of things.

It allows you to use code to generate imagery and animations and whatnot.

I have some experience with a sort of an older platform called flash.

You don't see it so much anymore but I did some animation with that I've done animation with other video editing software.

With Flash, it was about creating time lines and manipulating already existing visual objects, like image files or photos, or even clips or frames and whatnot, and, it was far more visual.

But with this canvas, even though there are ways to do that with drawing image files onto the canvas, and then being able to do more visual manipulation...

It has the ability to do a lot of programming based on just the coordinates of mapping, the coordinates of the window in the browser.

So the logic of, let's say, draw a box, a square, there's a formula and a logic to what that looks like when you're creating lines that each have a property, or properties of where they begin and where they end along the x and Y axis.

So it becomes its own form of art to discover what a square looks like written out in this notation. These are the numbers that are revealed and then the secret magic is in the relationship between the numbers. Because if you can turn that into your own system of formulas that are useful for something, then you can start to do things like set one parameter and then scale based on all of the other parameters being some multiple of the first parameter, or some difference of subtracting from it, or sum of adding to it.

You see where I'm going with this. So it gets to be really fun to, to start to learn how to draw mathematically.

Without it being on paper, it's just telling the computer where to put stuff in a very straightforward objective way.

That's the way to put it. Yes, it's extremely objective, so you have to get it right.

And as you're fumbling trying to get it right, you get a lot of bizarre artifacts on the screen.

It's rewarding to finally get an understanding of it, and then it builds on itself.

So what I have arrived at in my journey with this canvas element now with this clock, is that I had to go through a very painstaking process of first drawing an outer circle, and then trying to figure out what it would take to make the little lines that represent the numbers of the clock, and have them be in the right place and angled the right place.

It's all very easy to do when you were using square, rectilineal points, it's easy to make a grid.

Everything is squared away and squared off so it's easy to extrapolate and add, and divide, and subtract, and get it to work in that way.

But once you are working off of circles, which is just the next logical thing to do, and that's certainly what I had to work with.

I had to start with the square, put a circle in the middle of it, or put a circle within it so that the edges of the circle would be making contact with the square then do the obvious things. Put twelve, six, three and nine in place, because those don't have any angle to them, or they're at right angle to the outer square.

But then all of the other, whatever it is, eight total other lines they have a relationship to the square, a relationship to the circle, relationship to each other.

You can wing it, but to do it correctly, I actually realized, okay, the way to get the position, the perfect position of those additional lines, is to draw another square within the circle that, now it looks sort of like a diamond, because it's, it's tilted sideways, if you will.

It's more like what appears to be a diamond, even though it's still a square, because it's rotated in that way to make the corners of the inner square start where the circle points meet the outer square.

And then I realized, okay, what happens next is that you have to divide that, each of those four lines for that sort of diamond square, divide the length of that line into thirds.

Once I had that figure, I was able to multiply it by two to double it, to subtract from it.

And that is what gave me the starting points of each of those lines, representing the other numbers of the clock.

Then I had to visually adjust the endpoints of those lines so that they would actually hit and connect with and stop at the ring of the circle, so that it what was.

It's just always interesting to discover.

One of my favorite sayings is that you have to ask yourself, is math invented or is it discovered?

That's a very interesting philosophical question, because I would say the answer is yes it's both.

It was really interesting to appreciate how powerful numbers can be in geometrical forms. The ways that you arrive at this seemingly unknowable perfection, just by building a bridge to it with other shapes and other steps in a process that result in that final destination or that emergent property.

Certainly all kinds of different traditions of art that are based on that algorithmic sense, algorithmic art before it was generated by artificial intelligence.

But what it does for this app, what it teaches is it's not just like, oh great, I drew a clock on a web page using the canvas element, that's great but what does it do?

It is a clock that has that designer avante guarde motif of not actually having the numbers written out on it or printed out on it.

It's just those lines representing where those hour numbers are.

The point of omitting the numbers is that this trainer is trying to get me and you and anyone else to know very instinctively, very intuitively, the direction that each of those lines is pointing in or is calibrated to in order to begin to associate those hidden or omitted numbers with that clock.

If I had 5 minutes, I could reverse engineer it.

Like in that dream, the time it took me to have to visualize a clock and then count all the way around it to know where that number would be at, that's the amount of time that you would be dead in.

So if I say 3:00, you gotta know that's directly to your right.

If I say 12:00, you gotta know it's directly in front of you, etc.

And I need to react the same way when you say that to me.

So to train that, I decided to sort of gamify it in a way to where what happens is a number between one and twelve flashes about every 1.5 seconds in the center of this of shape that is essentially like a clock but it has some extra features I'll explain.

The number flashing in the center is prompting you almost like if you have ever played, or remember, a game called Simon Says.

This is very much a similar experience to the experience of a Simon Says game where you had this little table top device, it had different segments, those Segments would light up and you had a time period in order to tap the segment that lights up.

I can't remember how it all resolves, whether it keeps a score or I think what it does is you have to repeat the pattern of lights that it shows, and then whoever can go the longest without hitting the wrong panel would be the winner.

I believe that as long as you keep getting the pattern right, it'll keep giving you a longer pattern.

Then I think the second time that you try to repeat its pattern, you get it wrong.

I think it probably did some kind of response that showed you that the game was over, and then you'd start over, I think that's the way it was, but something to that effect.

So with this, the number between one and twelve shows up, and then there's a circle or almost like a pad looking image on each of the ends of those lines on the clock so you have to use the mouse to mouse over.

You don't have to click on it. You just have to mouse over it.

But you mouse over the circle that is connected to the line, which is the hour of the clock and if you are wrong, it turns red. They all start out yellow. If you were on the wrong circle, like you you saw Twelve flash, and you got confused, and you mouse over the 6:00 circle, then that 6:00 circle would turn red from yellow.

Then, if it was correct, if you saw the twelve and you mouse over the twelve, then that yellow circle would turn green.

And intuitively, you have a score that is subtracted from when you're wrong, and you see the red, and you have a score that's added to when you get the green.

So you basically have a running score and in that sense, it's gamified. It worked for me. Within seconds I fully I felt like I was driving a hundred miles an hour or something.

It was so exhilarating, that sounds ridiculous, and I know it is, but as you know, as someone who's developing these interfaces, you know, I'm not the biggest gamer anymore, but certainly used to be when I was young, and the games were not that sophisticated.

But if you could get thrilled by playing things like Missile Command and Pacman and Centipede and Asteroid, to me, if they get you to suspend disbelief, forget about what you know, your worries, and you get to be immersed and absorbed even in the simplest of worlds...

They may not hold your attention forever, but it got me there.

I don't know how I would rank it, I would just say there are things that don't do it for me and things that do, and then it's just on a scale once they do.

So it's at least at the beginning of the scale of taking me to that place of feeling like the fear, oh, I'm gonna get it wrong and you have a little bit of that motivating anxiety.

Then when you get back above a negative number on the scoreboard, and it gets up, you know, it gets up there, you start to feel good.

So this is really gonna get fun when I add some more features to, shall we say, incentiviize the learning process.

I'm gonna just leave that as a cliff hanger for the moment.

But this is a prototype that is very simple but it's conducive for more gamification and then more incentivized gaming just like the old pinball games, they would let you enter in your initials.

Then it was like a culture of awareness within an arcade of who is tagging almost like graffiti, they're tagging their high score initials on the games so you know who the king or queen is or are of the arcade and that's obviously a small psychological ego boost at that point, sort of clout within a video arcade.

But this could lead to points within an exam, or points within an in-game economy, or even beyond.

So I like the idea of the educational materials that I am gamifying, if there's interest beyond myself, to grant fund people's developing of these skills using these tools…

Those points now actually mean something. They're redeemable in the real world.

There are technologies that that are well understood by now, although there's more work to be done on their being, shall we say, fully integrated within the modern economic financial systems and regulatory systems.

But the technology is already here. So I'm excited. I'm gonna be rolling out some prototypes of ways to incentivize people to learn what I think is important to learn for myself, what I would want members of any team that I'm ever on again, to be versed in.

I want members of my team to know the radio telephony alphabet and I want people to know this clock bearing system and be proficient at it, like I wasn't in my dream the other night.

But playing this game, the clock bearing calibration tool is what I called it on my tools page. You go there, you click on it, and it's not the most impressive thing in the world visually, although, these are all just proofs of concepts at this point.

I'm already feeling that I'm more proficient and more aware of that clock dial as I as I go about life.

So that's great. I hope it improves your life in some way. Hope you enjoy it. And I think, even without the agenda of it being something tactical, I do feel a tiny little drop of pride that it's just kind of a throwback, retro, fun, simple video game experience that takes you to that place.

I put the original Tron on in the background a lot of times when I'm coding and whatnot and more and more stuff comes out at me to appreciate about how prophetic and how wise and how mystical the original Tron was.

If what I do in the days or in the hours that I'm not working the land, is that I create these tools, and I evolve in my skill set, building them.

I will end up with an online theme park of fun online experiences that are very conducive to learning very useful things but that are not intimidating, and that don't require massive overhead. I crank this out basically in less than a day.

It does the job. It conveys the point. It doesn't have to be any more luxurious than it is now, but it could always be built and expanded upon later, or integrated into other flows of experience.