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Another essay I've been procrastinating on: clocks and calendars are tools imposed by rulers (consider what "to rule" really means) to measure, manage and control the world. it's a way of colonizing time, which is in many ways even more insidious than colonizing space https://t.co/gbMX3PuPku
Time is social, political, multifaceted, subjective. The introduction of "1 second = 9,192,631,770 oscilations of the cesium atom" is an imagined, imposed order. Leapseconds have to be added because the Earth simply refuses to spin according to regulations https://t.co/Rvctv3zBcc
What year is it? 2018? Why? Why do we have months named after Caesar (July) and Augustus (August)? Why 7 days in a week? Why is "the work week" 5 days on, 2 days off? https://t.co/cFjeIQngHb
Do ya'll realize who Thursday is named after? https://t.co/BmH8JKiejj
Railroads! Railroads were the first real reason that anybody had to demand that different cities and towns had to use the same clocks to keep track of their time. And fascinatingly, people were very upset about this idea when it was first introduced https://t.co/SXe84i7khx
Eventually the convenience of having things like railroads outweighed an archaic idea like "local solar time" – and so lots of places around the world now have clocks that don't exactly correspond to solar time. SG has changed time zones multiple times https://t.co/N7xCEQuzEe
"to avoid inconvenience to businessmen and travellers", Singapore has now spent 37 years waking up 30 minutes earlier than 'natural'. we are all so tired https://t.co/gzPpfa4sHo
don't need scifi! there are still human beings around the world who live outside the tyranny of centralized standard time. Jay Griffiths' A Sideways Look At Time is a great starting point to get a sense of this. Generally it's more 'oceanic' https://t.co/RpWj3tsvn8
"You can't use the Roman calendar to know when to fish. It's imposed on us for registering births and for baptisms, but it doesn't function for use in the forests. Bats tell us when to fish, when they fly close over the water." https://t.co/TcJjmtK1hR
"In Rajasthan– the herds returning at evening is “cattle-dust-time”. Cow-time is local, social, embedded in nature’s processes. Clocktime is global, applical anywhere, cow-time is local to the very udder-hour." https://t.co/C2Ebt0CseW
I think my big takeaway is that there are actually many different possible ways of thinking about time, & that the default stopwatch-timer, clock-in-clock-out attitude that we inherit from our factory-farm schools & culture's not always conducive to the human spirit's flourishing
People tend to assume that this Steve Jobs quote is about making products. He does say "everything around you that you call life" – it applies equally to ideas, perceptions, ways of seeing, ways of being. And so it is with time – we can reimagine our relationship with it https://t.co/K91gMKGE8r
I'm currently into my 3rd month of being a free agent – happily unemployed, growing out my hair, eating and sleeping at weird hours, tweeting excessively... and I absolutely love it. I don't think I would have had the guts to do this if not for these POVs on time and space
@Malcolm_Ocean super big picture is to develop as a thinker, writer, people-r; trying to be as open-minded as possible to how I do that, following curiosity. may have already spent a bit too much time in purely-open-ended-space, reorienting slightly to optimize for writing output for a while
some fun history https://t.co/ziIEFRWjW5
a diversity of timekeeping https://t.co/e5J1b3c1cz
some of the folks in the replies seem really confused and/or troubled by this https://t.co/xDEFPKs4U6
@visakanv Before rail, I think standardized luggage was done by boats.Rail also synchronized measurements of 2x4s apparently.https://t.co/LexqdBsPEg