Message text written by Frank King >.... my guess is that the ratio would not be much different for clock faces.<
Hmmm, I have no data on this but because of the bias mentioned before (regarding the apparent better balance of a clock face when using IIII) I would suspect that the prevalance of IIII could be even greater. It would be nice to know.. Perhaps Gordon Uber might be able to comment here? > I would naively expect on vertical dials to find IIII (for 4pm) used more on an east decliner where the pm time lines are more widely spaced and IV used more on a west decliner where they are closer together.< The use on vertical dials of IIII is generally much greater than that of IV in my experience. I think that numeral size and position is often better considered in the design of vertical dials and this possibly counters any considerations of hour line spacing etc. The information stored on the database relating to this aspect is in a free-text field so searching by only using a simple query can be suspect. On top of that dials that decline by angles other than a full 90 degrees are recorded differently in the BSS Register to those which point to the four cardinal points. I shall try and have a proper go at developing the SQL statement necessary for a proper search in the next days but a simple (and therefore not necessarily exact!) search suggests the following for declining dials excluding those that are Direct East or Direct West dials East decliners using IIII - 14 East decliners using IV - 6 West decliners using IIII - 15 West decliners using IV - 4 Regards Patrick -
