Posts tagged time

Why 7/6 and not 1/6? There is no spoon I used a more convoluted method If f is the homomorphism that sends elements of Z_12…

mathematics, spoon, mathblr, there is no spoon, time, meme, hannibal, typhoid, swans, eternal return, time machines

Why 7/6 and not 1/6?

There is no spoon


I used a more convoluted method

If f is the homomorphism that sends elements of Z_12 into products of powers of roots of unity, there are 12 different possible selections for what f(1) equals. f(1) = e^(pii/6) may be the most obvious. since 1 generates Z_12 f(1) is all you need to define to define f, but when the group is not cyclic you need to use a more general method to find the homomorphism.

first you would have to find the basis of the group by representing it as products of groups of prime power order, in this case represent Z_12 as the direct sum of Z_3 and Z_4.

0 = (0, 0)
1 = (1, 1)
2 = (2, 2)
3 = (0, 3)
4 = (1, 0)
….
11 = (2, 3)

then you know that Z_12 as ordered pairs of elements Z_3 and Z_4 can be generated as linear combinations of (1, 0) and (0, 1).
So in order to define a function f that sends elements of Z_12 into products of roots of unity, you only need to define f((1, 0)) to be ANY 3rd root of unity and f((0, 1)) to be ANY fourth root of unity.
In my case I arbitrarily defined f((1,0)) = e^(2ipi/3) and f((0, 1)) = e^(2ipi/4), which gives f((1, 1)) (the generator of the cyclic group) to be f((1, 0)) * f((0, 1)) = e^(7ipi/6)

Since there are 3 third roots of unity and 4 fourth roots of unity, there are 3*4 = 12 possible different functions and hence twelve different representations of Z_12 using the exponential function (when the group is not cyclic, the homomorphisms will not be isomorphisms).



“Typhoid & swans - it all comes from the same place.”

Keeping Time with Incense Clocks - JSTOR Daily

time, incense clocks

rfpreiwaphase:

writernotwaiting:

Fire makes it better.

jokoban or koban-dokei
(following is web archive not auction site itself)

we’ll end up designing our own maze - but for real here was Japanese style. the stands included were important because they had to account for earthquakes

Keeping Time with Incense Clocks - JSTOR Daily

Coronavirus: how the pandemic has changed our perception of time

covid-19, coronavirus, pandemic, time, capitalism, perception, crisis, 2020

Because the corona crisis has allowed us to experience a very different time, it will be interesting to see whether parts of this new normality, such as home offices and reduced mobility, will remain. But even if it is just an involuntary pause from capitalist times, we should reconsider neoliberalism’s temporal regimes of growth, decline and acceleration that have shaped life on Earth. Our experiences of corona time has given us a training in temporal thought and flexibility. Humanity will weather this crisis, but there are others ahead. Perhaps then, it will be comforting to know that we can, and must, trick time and plan for the future – even when we feel stuck in the present.

via https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-how-the-pandemic-has-changed-our-perception-of-time–139240

What Can We Learn From Degas About the Nature of Time?

time, perception, art, cognition, nautilus

One of the richest veins in temporal-perception research is on the effect of emotion on cognition, and Droit-Volet has conducted a number of compelling studies that explore the relationship. In a recent series of experiments, her subjects viewed a series of images of faces, each of which was neutral or expressed a basic emotion, such as happiness or anger. Each image lasted onscreen for anywhere from 0.4 seconds to 1.6 seconds, and the viewer was asked to say whether the image lasted for a “short” or a “long” time—that is, closer to one of the two standard durations they’d been trained beforehand to recognize. Consistently, viewers reported that happy faces seemed to last longer than neutral ones, and both angry and fearful faces seemed to last longer still.


(via http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/time-is-contagious)

My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even…

Ted Chiang, Nature, time, free will, reality, civilisation, self-deception

“My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know that they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”

Ted Chiang

Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’

AWG, Stratigraphy, Anthropocene, Geology, time, 2019

Following guidance from the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy and the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the AWG have completed a binding vote to affirm some of the key questions that were voted on and agreed at the IGC Cape Town meeting in 2016. The details are as follows:

No. of potential voting members: 34 No. required to be quorate (60%): 21 No. of votes received: 33 (97% of voting membership)

Q1. Should the Anthropocene be treated as a formal chrono-stratigraphic unit defined by a GSSP?

29 voted in favour (88% of votes cast); 4 voted against; no abstentions

Q2. Should the primary guide for the base of the Anthropocene be one of the stratigraphic signals around the mid-twentieth century of the Common Era?

29 voted in favour (88% of votes cast); 4 voted against; no abstentions

Both votes exceed the 60% supermajority of cast votes required to be agreed by the Anthropocene Working Group as the official stance of the group and will guide their subsequent analysis.

The ‘Anthropocene’ has developed a range of meanings among vastly different scholarly communities. Here we examine the Anthropocene as a geological time (chronostratigraphic) unit and potential addition to the Geological Time Scale, consistent with Crutzen and Stoermer’s original proposal. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) is charged with this task as a component body of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) which is itself a constituent body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS).


via https://mronline.org/2019/05/24/working-group-on-the-anthropocene/

令和 REIWA the beginning of a new era.

Reiwa, 令和, Japan, 2019, nengō, time, era

hayakawajunpei:

Welcome to year one of Reiwa. The beginning of a new era in Japanese history. The end of Heisei (平成時代). Welcome to the era of the reign of his Royal Highness Emperor Naruhito.

The Reiwa period will start on May 1st 2019 when Prince Naruhito ascends the throne to become the 126th emperor of Japan. 2019 corresponds to Heisei 31 until April 30th, and Reiwa 1 (令和元年 Reiwa gannen, gannen means “first year”) from May 1st.

Reiwa ushers in a new era of significant change in Japanese society. New systems aimed at changing the way people work. The introduction of greater numbers of foreign workers - something that would never have been considered only ten years ago. Major revisions to the Labour Standards law will be implemented to stop the practice of working excessively long hours and to force Japanese people to take more time off work. Companies will be required to force employees to take at least five days of paid leave per year. Regulations with penalties for overtime are being introduced.

In the next five years, with the new visa status of “specified skilled worker” as many as 340,000 foreign workers are expected to move to Japan to work in 14 areas including nursing - and in the biggest shock to Japanese society - agriculture. Imagine that, foreigners tilling the fields and working on farms in Japan. I never thought I’d see that!

Numerous other things will see even more significant changes in Japanese society: the National pension premium will rise by ¥70 to ¥16,410 per month. A tax cut will be introduced for those who purchase electronic cars. Oh, and did I mention more foreigners.  

So, what’s in a name? 

令和 Reiwa. 令 rei: orders, command, ancient laws, decree, fortunate + 和 wa: harmony, peace, Japan, Japanese style. 

Reiwa signifies order and harmony. This is the first time the kanji for nengō have been chosen from Japanese classical literature. The kanji were selected from the ancient Manyōshū (万葉集) - the oldest extant compilation of Japanese poetry, written between 600 and 759 CE. "初春令月、氣淑風和", which means “Nice weather in an auspicious month in spring.“ The two kanji used in nengō have always previously been chosen from ancient classical Chinese literature. 

Reiwa is the 248th era in the history of Japan, the worlds oldest monarchy. Reiwa was the first time a new era has been announced while the reigning emperor is still living. Akihito is also the first emperor to abdicate for 200 years. 

An era name, nengō (年号) is an indivisible part of public life and shared memory in Japan. Everything that happens in the years to come — births, deaths, natural disasters, cultural and social circumstances, elections and political scandals —all will be connected to the era name. 

The proclamation of a new era has happened only twice in nearly a century. Japan has had 247 era names since instituting the system under Emperor Kōtoku in 645. From the Meiji era (1868–1912), there has been one era for each emperor. Previously, however, the name often changed several times during an imperial reign, such as in a spirit of renewal after an inauspicious event like a war, earthquake, epidemic, or major fire.

After his May 1 investiture, the new Emperor Naruhito will bear the new era name Reiwa for the duration of his rule and into death, becoming his official name after he passes.

Since Emperor Akihito announced his intention to abdicate, a highly confidential committee has been scrutinising ancient Japanese documents in search of the quintessential two kanji to describe the new era. The process, like the imperial system itself is steeped in Shintō ritual.

The introduction of the new era name brings with it some immediate conundrums in so much as it affects the printing and manufacturing of everything from government documents to calendars, family history registers, money, train tickets to computer software, official documentation to criminal and police records. Printers and programmers will be hard at work over the coming months bringing everything up to date. City offices and government agencies, which mostly use nengō in their computer systems and paperwork, have been preparing for months to avoid glitches. Car, bike, truck, bus, and boat manufacturers have been creating new VIN tags and Identification plates.

Officials will cross out Heisei on thousands of documents and stamp the new nengō above it until all old documents have been used and the new ones will come into use.

Schools and hospitals have been updating their electronic sign on systems and data bases to accept he new nengō.

The nengō is more than just a way of counting years for many Japanese. The introduction of a new nengō brings a lot of weight with it, it defines a period in history. As the Heisei era ends, it is remembered for all that it has defined in the hearts and minds of the Japanese. 

The nengō is a word that captures the national mood of a period, similar to the way "the roaring ‘20s” evokes distinct feelings or images. Nengō gives a certain meaning to a historical period, it’s the same as when historians refer to Britain’s “Victorian” or “Tudor” eras, tying the politics and culture of a period to a monarch. 

The 64-year Shōwa era (昭和時代) was a period of extraordinary pandemonium. The reign of the Shōwa Emperor Hirohito (December 25, 1926 until his death on January 7, 1989) saw Japan move from a minor democracy to outright militarism, bringing aggressive colonial expansion. It pursued a war of aggression that killed millions across the Pacific. Something China and South Korea, even after 73 years, can’t ever forgive. Following the end of defeat in the war, Japan’s remarkable economic growth has been called the “Japanese Miracle,” as the economy grew three times faster than other major nations. Shōwa has then generally come to be identified with Japan’s recovery and rising global prominence in the decades after World War II.

The Heisei era (平成時代) the reign of Emperor Akihito (8 January 1989 until abdication on April 30 2019) began on a high with decades of robust economic growth which saw Japan become a world leader in electronics and manufacturing, textiles and fashion, art and science. But the economic bubble soon popped, ushering a long period of stagnation. A series of disasters, the Kobe earthquake in 1995 and the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011, have marred the image of the Heisei era. Particularly the governments inability to provide efficient and effective relief during these times has given the Heisei era a gloomy image.   

Reiwa is looking already to see major changes in Japanese society. The introduction of more foreigners, the merger of major companies and the closing of others. The, as yet, supposed willingness of the Japanese government to implement better care for the people and a more robust and efficient labour system. Possible changes to the constitution. 

With the 2020 Olympics in Japan and the beginning of a new era, Japan is hoping to move beyond the Heisei era, beyond all the turmoil and stagnation. The ascension of a new emperor and the naming of a new era gives the people the sense of a fresh start and it’s certain to have a positive effect on the economy and society as a whole.

image

“Most displays are looking to play things faster. We’ve got movies at 60 frames per second, and gaming displays that run at 144…

VSMP, time, perception, slow media, Bryan Boyer, film, 2018

video link

“Most displays are looking to play things faster. We’ve got movies at 60 frames per second, and gaming displays that run at 144 fps. But what about moving in the other direction? [Bryan Boyer] wanted to try this out, so he built the VSMP, or Very Slow Movie Player. It’s a neat device that plays back a movie at about 24 fph (frames per hour) on an e-ink display to demonstrate something that [Bryan] calls Slow Seeing, which, he says “helps you see yourself against the smear of time.” A traditional epic-length movie is now going to run you greater than 8,000 hours of viewing.“

https://hackaday.com/2018/12/30/the-very-slow-movie-player-does-it-with-e-ink/

Time travel is time research

Medium, Long Now, James Gleick, time, time travel, futures, history

“We’re still trying to figure out what time is,” Gleick said. Time travel stories apparently help us. The inventor of the time machine in Wells’s book explains archly that time is merely a fourth dimension. Ten years later in 1905 Albert Einstein made that statement real. In 1941 Jorge Luis Borges wrote the celebrated short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In 1955 physicist Hugh Everett introduced the quantum-based idea of forking universes, which itself has become a staple of science fiction.

“Time,” Richard Feynman once joked, “is what happens when nothing else happens.” Gleick suggests, “Things change, and time is how we keep track.” Virginia Woolf wrote, “What more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another.”

“Enjoy the present. Don’t waste your brain cells agonizing about lost opportunities or worrying about what the future will bring. As I was working on the book I suddenly realized that that’s terrible advice. A potted plant lives in the now. The idea of the ‘long now’ embraces the past and the future and asks us to think about the whole stretch of time. That’s what I think time travel is good for. That’s what makes us human — the ability to live in the past and live in the future at the same time.”


via https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/time-travel-is-time-research–6f3248fef6b0

Dust is everywhere because its source is everything. Its most remote origins in time and space are the Big Bang, collapsing…

dust, time, matter, dirt, milky way, interconnectedness

“Dust is everywhere because its source is everything. Its most remote origins in time and space are the Big Bang, collapsing stars, and the dark line across the center of the Milky Way, which, according to astronomer Donald Brownlee,“is a line of dirt perhaps 65,200 light­ years across, and 3.832 X 1017 miles long.” Here on earth, dust comes from everything under the sun: minerals, seeds, pollen, insects, molds, lichens, and even bacteria. Its sources also include bone, hair, hide, feather, skin, blood, and excrement. And things of human fabrication, too numerous to mention, also cover the earth and all the atmosphere with dust.”

Joseph A. Amato. Dust.

The idea that we live life in a straight line, like a story, seems to me to be increasingly absurd and, more than anything, a…

Nick Cave, time, narrative, flux, bells

“The idea that we live life in a straight line, like a story, seems to me to be increasingly absurd and, more than anything, a kind of intellectual convenience […] I feel that the events in our lives are like a series of bells being struck and the vibrations spread outwards, affecting everything, our present, and our futures, of course, but our past as well. Everything is changing and vibrating and in flux.”

Nick Cave

Beaches today are where we turn our backs not just on the world at large but also on our inland selves. They are a sanctuary,…

Beaches, sea, the ocean, time, futures, inland selves, NYT

“Beaches today are where we turn our backs not just on the world at large but also on our inland selves. They are a sanctuary, groomed to remove all distractions, sometimes including the other creatures that once made them their home. Beaches are thought of as a place where time stands still, devoid of a troubling past but also of an ever pressing future.”

John R. Gillis, Life and Death of the Beach, New York Times (June 30, 2012)

Why time management is ruining our lives

productivity, work, time, procrastination, inbox-zero

The allure of the doctrine of time management is that, one day, everything might finally be under control. Yet work in the modern economy is notable for its limitlessness. And if the stream of incoming emails is endless, Inbox Zero can never bring liberation: you’re still Sisyphus, rolling his boulder up that hill for all eternity – you’re just rolling it slightly faster. Two years after his Google talk, Mann released a rambling and slightly manic online video in which he announced that he had signed a contract for an Inbox Zero book. But his career as a productivity guru had begun to stir an inner conflict. “I started making pretty good money from it” – from speaking and consulting – “but I also started to feel terrible,” he told me earlier this year. “This topic of productivity induces the worst kind of procrastination, because it feels like you’re doing work, but I was producing stuff that had the express purpose of saying to people, ‘Look, come and see how to do your work, rather than doing your work!’” The book missed its publication date. Fans started asking questions. Then, after two more years, Mann published a self-lacerating essay in which he abruptly announced that he was jettisoning the project. It was the 3,000-word howl of a man who had suddenly grasped the irony of missing morning after morning with his three-year-old daughter because he was “typing bullshit that I hoped would please my book editor” about how to use time well. He was guilty, he declared, of “abandoning [my] priorities to write about priorities … I’ve unintentionally ignored my own counsel to never let your hard work fuck up the good things.” He hinted that he might write a different kind of book instead – a book about stuff that really mattered – but it never appeared. “I’m mostly out of the productivity racket these days,” Mann told me. “If you’re just using efficiency to jam more and more stuff into your day … well, how would you ever know that that’s working?”

via https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/why-time-management-is-ruining-our-lives?CMP=fb_gu

The Brain’s Now

Medium, Long Now, neuroscience, perception, time, memory, David Eagleman

Is “now” expandable? Why do you seem to experience time in slow motion in a sudden emergency, like an accident? Eagleman’s (terrifying) experiments show that in fact you don’t perceive more densely, the amygdala cuts in and records the experience more densely, so when the brain looks back at that dense record, it thinks that time must have subjectively slowed down, but it didn’t. “Time and memory are inseparable.” This also explains why time seems to speed up as you age. A child experiences endless novelty, and each summer feels like it lasted forever. But you learn to automatize everything as you age, and novelty is reduced accordingly, apparently speeding time up. All you have to do to feel like you‘re living longer, with a life as rich as a child’s, is to never stop introducing novelty in your life.

via https://medium.com/@stewartbrand/the-brains-now-ec0440c7fcdb

Live asynchronously.

Medium, attention, process, collaboration, work, time, asynchronous, availability

Last year I turned off all my notifications. I stopped booking meetings. I started living asynchronously. Now instead of being interrupted throughout the day—or rushing from one meeting to the next—I sit down and get work done. I work a lot. I communicate with hundreds of people a day. I collaborate extensively. But I do so on my own terms, at my own tempo. You can live more asynchronously, too. I’ll explain the benefits. I’ll show you how.

via https://medium.freecodecamp.com/live-asynchronously-c8e7172fe7ea

The spatial implications of chronophotography—which visually shatters the passage of time into a series of discrete moments…

photography, time, chronophotography

“The spatial implications of chronophotography—which visually shatters the passage of time into a series of discrete moments extracted from an event-sequence of otherwise unfixed length and duration—leads to a reference, in a text on Chard’s website, to the fact that criminologists, physicists, and even paranormal investigators all also began to use “the emerging potential of photography to further their research.” In the process, those researchers “developed new sorts of architecture particular to the demands and opportunities of the medium and the way they were using [them]. There are many research institutions that display the emergence of a new architecture with very little typological precedent.””

Time, Photography, and Spatial Devices (viaiamdanw)

Does Language Influence Culture?

Language, culture, thought, time, causality, WSJ

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world’s languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front. In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality.

via http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868

Scientists find evidence for ‘chronesthesia,’ or mental time travel

neuroscience, time travel, chronesthesia, mental imagery, time, perception

The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person’s decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as “chronesthesia,” or mental time travel, although little is known about which parts of the brain are responsible for these conscious experiences. In a new study, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of mental time travel and better understand the nature of the mental time in which the metaphorical “travel” occurs.

http://phys.org/news/2010–12-scientists-evidence-chronesthesia-mental.html

Version control, collaborative editing and undo

eve, programming, versioning, dvcs, editing, collaborative editing, time

Eve is designed for live programming. As the user makes changes, the compiler is constantly re-compiling code and incrementally updating the views. The compiler is designed to be resilient and will compile and run as much of the code as possible in the face of errors. The structural editor restricts partially edited code to small sections, rather than rendering entire files unparseable. The pointer-free relational data model and the timeless views make it feasible to incrementally compute the state of the program, rather than starting from scratch on each edit. We arrived at this design to support live programming but these properties also help with collaborative editing.

http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2015/04/22/version-control/

Interview with a fungus

Diane Brooks Pleninger, fungi, plants, biosphere, humans, ecology, history, time, fermentation

“Our members do not recoil from the future. We believe that life on earth is embarked on a unique trajectory, one that will not be repeated. We believe that the outward journey has entailed a long and intricate interweaving of the interests of all living things. We believe that the homeward path will entail the systematic unweaving of those threads. We believe we are eminently suited for a role in this process.”

http://www.southsoundchapterwnps.org/fun/interviewfungus.htm

What Is Ritual?

ritual, culture, society, religion, rationality, irrationality, time, sacrifice, performance, bondin

Time is the default sacrifice. It is the measure of sacrifice that underlies our complex economic order, so it is no surprise that it also underlies our ritual order. In religions that have a Sabbath, an entire day of productivity is sacrificed to God every week. Every ceremony involves the sacrifice of the time of participants; often, ceremonies involve the sacrifice of time by high-status persons. An arraignment is a ceremony in which the legitimacy of a person’s incarceration is established; not much information is exchanged, but the ceremony requires sacrifice in the form of a grand courtroom built for the purpose, as well as the time of grand personages such as the judge and two attorneys. Ritual attendants such as court reporters and bailiffs are required as well. The sacred value of “justice” is understood to be the target of these sacrifices.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/02/11/what-is-ritual/

Overwhelmed | Brigid Schulte

overwhelmed, book, doing nothing, time pressure, time, work, play, leisure

Overwhelmed is a book about time pressure and modern life. It is a deeply reported and researched, honest and often hilarious journey from feeling that, as one character in the book said, time is like a “rabid lunatic” running naked and screaming as your life flies past you, to understanding the historical and cultural roots of the overwhelm, how worrying about all there is to do and the pressure of feeling like we’re never have enough time to do it all, or do it well, is “contaminating” our experience of time, how time pressure and stress is resculpting our brains and shaping our workplaces, our relationships and squeezing the space that the Greeks said was the point of living a Good Life: that elusive moment of peace called leisure.

http://www.brigidschulte.com/books/overhelmed/

How To Waste Time Properly

time, inspriation, distraction, procrastination, doing nothing, hedonic adaptation

Brent Coker, who studies online behavior at the University of Melbourne in Australia, found that people who engage in “workplace Internet leisure browsing” are about 9 percent more productive than those who don’t. Last year, Jonathan Schooler, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara published with his doctoral student Benjamin Baird a study called Inspired by Distraction. It concluded that “engaging in simple external tasks that allow the mind to wander may facilitate creative problem solving.”

http://nautil.us/issue/7/waste/how-to-waste-time-properly

Panarchy and pace in the big back loop

panarchy, time, pace layering, reflection, turbulence, innovation, revolt

What can we learn by mapping pace against panarchy? Picture a stack of adaptive cycles, with frantic fashion at the bottom, and nature’s biophysical processes, broad and slow, at the top. Reaching from each cyclic layer down to the next is an arrow labeled “remember,” for memory is an important influence that slower cycles exert on faster ones. And stretching from each cycle up to the next is the arrow “revolt,” representing the actions that, in the time of the back loop – of release and subsequent renewal – can enact structural shifts in the cycles above.

http://www.solvingforpattern.org/2012/10/27/panarchy-and-pace-in-the-big-back-loop/

The Challenge of Photography

photography, time, ostranenie, defamiliarization, art, perception

Photography does not lend itself to defamiliarization easily, thus making it the unlikeliest of all art forms. As it happens, the challenge plays out on both sides of the process, for photographers and viewers. What happened to be in front of a camera lens can be found depicted in the resulting photograph. However, given the process itself and its myriad of choices, the photograph is little more than a manipulated two-dimensional representation of what previously existed in four dimensions (three spatial, one – often forgotten – time).

http://cphmag.com/challenge/

How Music Hijacks Our Perception of Time

time, perception, music, neurophysiology

The human brain, we have learned, adjusts and recalibrates temporal perception. Our ability to encode and decode sequential information, to integrate and segregate simultaneous signals, is fundamental to human survival. It allows us to find our place in, and navigate, our physical world. But music also demonstrates that time perception is inherently subjective—and an integral part of our lives. “For the time element in music is single,” wrote Thomas Mann in his novel, The Magic Mountain. “Into a section of mortal time music pours itself, thereby inexpressibly enhancing and ennobling what it fills.”

http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/how-music-hijacks-our-perception-of-time

The Quantum Mechanics of Fate

retrocausality, time, past, presetn, future, QM, physics, spacetime, arrow of time

As with so much else in quantum mechanics, this concept of retrocausality is limited in scope. Only in certain circumstances can we see the future influence the past. Although individual particle processes can move backward or forward in time, the universe as a whole is skewed in the forward direction, because its past endpoint was highly ordered, and its future endpoint is highly disordered. Our mortality is this asymmetry in microcosm.

http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/the-quantum-mechanics-of-fate

Visualizing Cyclical Time – Hour of Day Charts

Doug McCune, visualisation, visualization, time, cyclic time, graph, plot, ringmap, 12h, 24h, day, n

This is the first part of a few blog posts on this topic. Apologies ahead of time if you don’t find the topic of visualizing the 24 hours of the day as fascinating as I do, but I’m going to take the time to fully geek out and focus in on this very specific problem in depth. This is Part 1: Explaining the Challenge and Reviewing the Status Quo. This is sort of like a lit review; it’s my attempt to consolidate everything I can find about how people are currently representing 24-hour cyclical data.

http://dougmccune.com/blog/2011/04/21/visualizing-cyclical-time-hour-of-day-charts/

Homage to the Idols of Idleness

NYT, idleness, doing nothing, time, perception, structure, order, GTD, curiosity

Over the centuries, the illusion of mastering time through obedience to it came into acceptance. Across Europe, the medieval monastery’s bell tolled as a reminder to eat, sleep and pray. But while there must have been some soul’s release in relinquishing earthly sovereignty to that sound, as the clock’s authority spread, we sealed all the gaps through which curiosity might seep into our days. Curiosity, after all, could lure the susceptible way off track, as the Italian poet Petrarch learned in the spring of 1336, when he famously climbed Mont Ventoux, motivated by “nothing but the desire to see its conspicuous height.” One of the texts he carried along was Saint Augustine’s “Confessions,” detailing the moral dangers of such expeditions, when men “go out to admire the mountains,” or the course of the stars, and therein forget themselves. Chastened, Petrarch made his descent in silence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/opinion/homage-to-the-idols-of-idleness.html?ref=international&_r=2&_r=2&

Three Seconds: Poems, Cubes and the Brain

time, perception, medecine, neurophysiology, Jalees Rehman, Ernst Pöppel

The central, unifying theme of the institute was time. Not physical time, but biological and psychological time. How does our brain perceive physical time? What is the structure of perceived time? What regulates biological oscillations in humans, animals and even algae? Can environmental cues modify temporal perception? The close proximity of so many disciplines made for fascinating coffee-break discussions, forcing us to re-evaluate our own research findings in the light of the discoveries made in neighboring labs and inspired us to become more creative in our experimental design.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/07/three-seconds-poems-cubes-and-the-brain.html#more

Creative People Say No

creativity, time, focus

Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation. The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time. No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.

https://medium.com/design-thinking–1/bad7c34842a2

Changing the past in open systems

programming, live coding, retroactive update, self adjusting computation, liminal, time, counterfact

One important step towards a more systematic approach to online update is to make the dimension of interaction explicit. This is one of the things I’ve focused on in my own research, which I call interactive programming, although that term has probably already been laid claim to. I allow the user to step sideways in time, into a “counterfactual” execution where it is “as though” the program had been written differently from the outset. Inspired by Demaine etal‘s retroactive data structures, which are imperative data structures which permit modifications to the historical sequence of operations performed on them, I’ll refer to this notion of online update as retroactive update. Retroactive update allows the “computational past” to be changed. Self-adjusting computation (SAC) is another system based on retroactive update. SAC explores another crucial aspect of online update: efficient update, via an algorithm called change propagation. SAC’s commitment to retroactivity appears in the correctness of change propagation, which is defined as consistency with a from-scratch run under the modified code.

http://dynamicaspects.org/blog/2012/08/15/changing-the-past-in-open-systems/

Time’s Inverted Index (Ftrain.com)

time, history, digital, archives, mairix, search, stories, context

I was biasing the results by using full-text search to explore my email. I would look for the things I found interesting that day—searching on terms like “Google” or “literature” or “e-reader”—and see a chronological list of exactly what I said about those very terms. The pattern-seeking engine in my brain would fire on all cylinders and make a story of the searches, creating an unintentional email-chrestomathy, a greatest-hits collection of ideas I’d had around a single word or phrase. The results seemed weirdly definitive. I thought I was doing history in a mirror, but because the emails were pure matches for key terms, devoid of all but a little context, I fell for the historical fallacy

http://www.ftrain.com/times-inverted-index.html

13.0.0.0.0.4

calendar, maya, 2012, time, date, timekeeping, BCE, CE

Joseph T. Goodman successfully deciphered the complicated system of the Maya calendar. He published his results in 1897, describing a “Long Count” system of a “count of days” based on several units or periods of increasingly larger size: the k'in (1 day), winal (20 days), tun (360 days), k'atun (7200 days), and bak'tun (144,000 days). The ancient Maya kept track of time using this system, which was combined with additional counts of 260 days (the tzolk'in) and 365 days (the haab) to produce Long Count dates. Goodman believed there was also a larger “Great Cycle” of 13 bak'tuns (1,872,000 days) and determined that the start of the present Great Cycle was on 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Cumk'u (that is 13 bak'tunob, 0 k'atunob, 0 tunob, 0 winalob, and 0 k'inob, followed by counts on the tzolk'in and haab). Later scholarship showed that this was a sacred “Creation” date for the ancient Maya, who referred to it in their mythology as a kind of “birth” of the present world. The Gregorian equivalent of this date is August 11, 3114 BCE. The next day was 0.0.0.0.1, with each day clicking another unit in the count. According to scholars who support Goodman’s idea of a 13-bak'tun Great Cycle, the current period will conclude on 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 3 K'ank'in, the Gregorian equivalent of which is December 21, 2012 (or possibly December 23, or yet something else…)

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reality-check/201112/what-you-should-know-about–2012-answers–13-questions

Falsehoods programmers believe about time

fallacies, code, programming, time

“I have repeatedly been confounded to discover just how many mistakes in both test and application code stem from misunderstandings or misconceptions about time. By this I mean both the interesting way in which computers handle time, and the fundamental gotchas inherent in how we humans have constructed our calendar — daylight savings being just the tip of the iceberg.”

http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time

Will the techno-optimists save the world? - Paul Gilding

optimism bias, optimism, time, environment, technology, TED, techno-optimism, sustainability, climat

Driven by their optimism bias, people use the clearly huge opportunity of technology to reassure themselves we won’t face a crisis. They believe any serious limits in the system will be avoided because technology will intervene and we’ll adapt. There are two reasons I think this is wrong and may actually be dangerous. Firstly, while technology has huge potential to address the issues we face, without strong price signals and other government support, large-scale technology change takes a very long time. We see this today where, though there are many programs supporting clean technology around the world, it is taking a long time – many decades – for this technology to have scale impact. This is the second reason the techno-optimists view is wrong, the science says we simply don’t have a long time. In fact we’re completely out of time, with the evidence clear that the ecosystem limits have already been breached. This is no longer forecasts but rather the measurement of today’s reality.

http://paulgilding.com/cockatoo-chronicles/will-the-techno-optimists-save-the-world.html