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Monday, January 02, 2006

Not law but interesting - The ultimate "time" article, from the LA Times

The LA Times today has what I would consider the ultimate feature article on the concept of time, in all its permutations.

The headline: "Going to Extreme Measures: Even as digital countdowns and televised timers fill our waking hours, does anybody really know what time it is?" Some quotes:

Once measured by the arc of the sun through the sky, by the changing of the seasons, life these days is measured by an increasingly complex and exacting system of timers.

There it is, on the Caltrans signs dotting Southland freeways: "25 min to downtown LA." Walk signals count down until the light changes. In the digital sphere, time is sectioned into a series of laptop and cellphone battery meters and iPod song timers.

Radio stations alert listeners to time intervals, a la "more Howard Stern in two minutes" or "30 minutes of uninterrupted music." Al Gore's new network, Current TV, displays a progress bar at the bottom of the screen indicating the amount of time left in each segment. * * *

[C]ritics claim that our focus on time as a commodity is the source of our frenzy rather than its salve, and that it leads to a kind of "time famine" and to all sorts of stress-related maladies.

"This is a public health problem of extraordinary dimensions, similar to smoke in public places," says Peter C. Whybrow, director of UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and author of the book "American Mania: When More Is Not Enough." "We've become the victims of our own technology."

We have an "old brain" inherited over many millenniums, Whybrow says, a brain that is conditioned to "measure time through the seasonal variation and the rituals that were tied to that, to the day-night cycle, all tied to the sun." By binding ourselves to a concept of time not anchored in nature, "we're perturbing the insides of our heads in a way that's quite disturbing and distressing."

The concept of "time famine" is increasingly entering into public and academic discourse. Seattle-based Take Back Your Time, an education and public policy nonprofit, aims to "challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and our relationships, our communities and our environment."

About half-way through this lengthy article, the writer, Steven Barrie-Anthony, gets to what I would call "big-picture time,' as opposed to "piece-meal time." More quotes:
Controversy about time is as old as time-keeping itself, and a new furor seems to arise whenever time moves further from its natural moorings. Once time was simply the cycle of the sun and moon through the sky, the passage of seasons, the cropping up of wrinkles on skin. Then humans invented ways to quantify the pace of change, such as sundials and almanacs derived from natural cycles.

Even the earliest mechanical clocks were set according to the sun. But in the U.S. in the early 1800s, time began to move in fits and starts toward the disembodied breed we know today. And controversy bubbled forth. * * *

In 1883, standard time was introduced by the railroads, breaking up the country into zones. In 1918, daylight saving was imposed, largely to conserve fuel during World War I — but was repealed a year later. The people who most objected to daylight saving time, O'Malley notes, were those who lived at the boundaries of time zones, where daylight saving spelled an even greater distance between nature and the clock. (Daylight saving was governed by local jurisdictions until Congress passed the Uniform Time Act in 1966, which standardized daylight saving times.)

While factory hours and train schedules had once been adjusted to fit the light/dark pattern of each season, with daylight saving, time itself became adjustable.

Slowly, a new conception of time as synonymous with the machine integrated itself into the American psyche. Early science-fiction movies halt time by showing a clock with frozen hands, indicating that when the physical clock stops, time stops, while the rest of nature and humanity continue unabated. Time is no longer that mysterious passageway we enter at birth and exit at death; it is a commodity, external to us, that we can control.

And more on time, from NPR's Saturday Weekend Edition:
Weekend Edition - Saturday, December 31, 2005 · How do we perceive time? How do we form and retrieve memories? Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, tells Linda Wertheimer how the French novelist might answer such philosophical questions.
NPR this weekend had a good feature on Einstein and Time, but I can't locate it. But I did find this, an "interactive time travel game to see Einstein's so-called twin paradox in action," via PBS Nova, on Einstein's Big Idea. The intro:
One of Albert Einstein's greatest insights was realizing that time is relative. It speeds up or slows down depending on how fast one thing is moving relative to something else. How much does it change?

Posted by Marcia Oddi on January 2, 2006 09:16 AM
Posted to General News