Friday, March 30, 2018

Time

A thousand years ago if it was dark outside your window, that was pretty much all you knew. The rich had clocks to tell the precise hour, but most didn't. Anyway, the clock changed little. If it was seven at night for you, you wouldn't think of it being otherwise for anyone else.

In practical terms this is in a way still true. But now we know of the whole wide world, divided into 24 segments. We know our time isn't quite universal, even if its progression is.

This post, a little idle musing, brought to you by Vivaldi, with which I recently replaced Opera. No regrets there.

2 comments:

susan said...

I could be wrong but I believe a thousand years ago even rich people had to go outside to look at their sundials. Then they had servants to turn the hour glass. Perhaps that's a duty Zuckerberg and Musk et al still have their serfs perform.

I remember my mother wondering why on a particular evening that it was already dusk in RI when the sun was still up in Ontario. I tried to explain that despite its being the same time in both places that since Providence was near the beginning of the time zone and Toronto was about fifty minutes later the sun was in a different relative position. She didn't get it.

I hope your new browser works well for your needs.

Ben said...

Is it comforting to think of Zuckerberg and Musk having serfs instead of faceless robot servants? And would they even notice the difference?

Most of us forget that time zones are an entirely artificial division, at least as we use them. In terms of the position of the sun or moon in the sky there are a lot more than 24 slices of the globe. That's before you even get into the zone borders that are rerouted because of political divisions and the like.

It's working well. There were too many glitches with the last one, toward the end.