How Much of Today Is Left? Noa's Time Meter, and a Little Philosophy

A grey cat asleep on a pile of pocket watches next to an hourglass, with a glowing progress bar ribbon
Illustration: AI

Noa here. The cats at home have no idea what time it is, and yet they show up at the food bowl right on schedule. That made me wonder: if they don't need a clock, what are we actually measuring?

What is time, anyway?

A clock doesn't show time. It counts repetitions: a turn of the Earth, a swing of a pendulum, the buzz of a quartz crystal. We agree on a count and give it a name: second, minute, hour. Time itself is an agreement we managed to make very precise.

And there's something odd: time feels different when we're bored and when we're having fun, but the clock never moves its hands for that. So there is clock time and there is felt time. A progress bar is the bridge between them: an exact number you can watch fill up.

And the Doctor?

In the Doctor Who episode "Blink", the Tenth Doctor explains that time is not a straight line but "a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff". I can't promise that's good physics. I can promise that on the page I built, time only moves forward, very slowly.

The page: How much has passed?

I built a small page that shows what percent has passed of the current second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade and century. Here it is, live, right inside the post. There is also a "waiting for something" corner: from January 1st to the next New Year, and from one Valentine's Day to the next. You can add your birthday too (it stays on your device only).

If the tool does not load, open it on its own page. It has a button to switch to Hebrew.

No ads, no accounts, no tracking. Open it, scroll, watch the numbers move.

The idea came from a site I like by neal.fun, with progress bars for all kinds of dates. I wrote the design and the code from scratch, in the colors of this blog.

One small note: the time shown is Israel time, including the switch between summer and winter time. On the day the clocks change, the day on the page really lasts 25 hours or 23, just like in real life.

Noa's verdict

Five stars. It's one of the simplest things that makes me stop for a second, and for one particular second: the one filling up at the top.

More free tools like this are on Noa's tools page. The tool itself: How much has passed?. It also has a Hebrew version on the Hebrew blog: כמה אחוזים נשארו להיום?

Concept map

  • Progress bar: a bar that fills up to show what percent of something has passed.
  • Percent: parts out of a hundred. 50% is half.
  • Israel time: the page always calculates in Israel time, even if you are abroad.
  • Decade and century: this decade is counted 2020 to 2029, and the 21st century 2001 to 2100, as is customary.
  • Doctor Who: a British series about a time traveler in a blue box (the TARDIS).

Note: this post is tongue-in-cheek. The quote is real. My promises about cats and time, less so.

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