Research on the Experience of Time saving time, making time, understanding time
Wednesday, September 05, 2001
I watch t.v. about once every two months. Flipping on the tube and catching a NOVA special on time travel was serendipity. The glossary...
the book from which we excerpted this glossary: Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, by Kip S. Thorne (Norton, 1994).
absolute space: Newton's conception of the three-dimensional space in which we live as having a notion of absolute rest, and as having the property that the lengths of objects are independent of the motion of the reference frame in which they are measured.
absolute time: Newton's conception of time as being universal, with a unique, universally agreed upon notion of simultaneity of events and a unique, universally agreed upon time interval between any two events.
chronology protection conjecture: Stephen Hawking's conjecture that the laws of physics do not allow time machines.
curvature of space or spacetime: The property of space or spacetime that makes it violate Euclid's or Minkowski's notions of geometry; that is, the property that enables straight lines that are initially parallel to cross.
event: A point in spacetime; that is, a location in space at a specific moment of time. Alternatively, something that happens at a point in spacetime, for example, the explosion of a firecracker.
exotic material: Material that has a negative average energy density, as measured by someone moving through it at nearly the speed of light.
field: Something that is distributed continuously and smoothly in space. Examples are the electric field, the magnetic field, the curvature of spacetime, and a gravitational wave.
freely falling object: An object on which no forces act except gravity.
general relativity: Einstein's laws of physics in which gravity is described by a curvature of spacetime.
geodesic: A straight line in a curved space or curved spacetime. On the Earth's surface the geodesics are the great circles.
gravitational time dilation: The slowing of the flow of time near a gravitating body.
gravitational wave: A ripple of spacetime curvature that travels with the speed of light.
hyperspace: A fictitious flat space in which one imagines pieces of our Universe's curved space as embedded.
mouth: An entrance to a wormhole. There is a mouth at each of the two ends of the wormhole.
Newtonian laws of physics: The laws of physics, built on Newton's conception of space and time as absolute, which were the centerpiece of 19th-century thinking about the Universe.
perturbation: A small distortion (from its normal shape) of an object or of the spacetime curvature around an object.
Planck-Wheeler length: The Planck-Wheeler length (1.62 x 10-33 centimeters) is the length scale below which space as we know it ceases to exist and becomes quantum foam.
principle of absoluteness of the speed of light: Einstein's principle that the speed of light is a universal constant, the same in all directions and the same in every inertial reference frame in the absence of gravity.
quantum foam: A probabilistic foamlike structure of space that probably makes up the cores of singularities, and that probably occurs in ordinary space on scales of the Planck-Wheeler length and less.
quantum gravity: The laws of physics that are obtained by merging ("marrying") general relativity with quantum mechanics.
quantum mechanics: The laws of physics that govern the realm of the small (atoms, molecules, electrons, protons), and that also underlie the realm of the large, but rarely show themselves there.
reference frame: A (possibly imaginary) laboratory for making physical measurements, which moves through the Universe in some particular manner.
relative: Dependent on one's reference frame; different, as measured in one frame which moves through the Universe in one manner, than as measured in another frame which moves in another manner.
simultaneity breakdown: The fact that events which are simultaneous as measured in one reference frame are not simultaneous as measured in another frame that moves relative to the first.
singularity: A region of spacetime where spacetime curvature becomes so strong that the general relativistic laws break down and the laws of quantum gravity take over. If one tries to describe a singularity using general relativity alone, one finds (incorrectly) that tidal gravity and spacetime curvature are infinitely strong there. Quantum gravity probably replaces these infinities by quantum foam.
spacetime: The four-dimensional "fabric" that results when space and time are unified.
spacetime curvature: The property of spacetime that causes freely falling particles that are initially moving along parallel world lines to subsequently move together or apart. Spacetime curvature and tidal gravity are different names for the same thing.
spacetime diagram: A diagram with time plotted upward and space plotted horizontally.
special relativity: Einstein's laws of physics in the absence of gravity.
tidal gravity: Gravitational accelerations that squeeze objects along some directions and stretch them along others. Tidal gravity produced by the moon and sun is responsible for the tides on the Earth's oceans.
time machine: A device for traveling backward in time. In physicists' jargon, a "closed timelike curve."
warpage of spacetime: Same as curvature of spacetime.
world line: The path of an object through spacetime or through a spacetime diagram.
wormhole. A "handle" in the topology of space, connecting two widely separated locations in our Universe.
Yesterday turned out to be next day. In the morning, I read the parts of Michael Lewis's new book that had not already appeared in the Sunday NY Times magazine. In the evening I watched a documentary on the same material on A+E. Purportedly about change wrought my the net, Lewis' major theme is how children have an advantage over adults in today's world.
Children are adventurous, inventive, and playful. We visit a bunch of kids making movies of their Legos with equipment they only received that morning. Everyone agrees it would have taken a lot longer for their parents to figure this stuff out. A scientist comes on to give us the bad news, that we close out options as we age. If you haven't got a tongue-stud by age 23, the odds are that you never will. This is hard-wired. Rats go through the same sort of cycle. No holds barred in infancy, wild experimentation in adolescence, limiting one's choices to the familiar as we age. A hereditary peer is interviewed as he leaves the House of Lords for the last time, decrying the loss of ties to history. History repeats itself, he says.
Lewis says that the net is erasing the boundary between professional and just us folks. His father is an old-time gentleman lawyer in New Orleans. Quite the contrast to a 15-year old dispensing legal advice on the net. The teenager is rated #1, ahead of 141 other legal eagles on the site, many of them attorneys. Then there's self-taught Jonathan Lebed, boy investor, who pulled $800,000 out of the market. He's doing the same thing as Michael's previous colleagues at Goldman Sachs. Playing the role. Is that the same as being the role? Lewis puts on the regalia of an African ruler and feels empowered. He wears a pin-striped suit and bowler while walking in London to question whether clothes really make the man.
The net speeds things up. And that's significant. It's not something that will be erased by the dot-com disaster.
A Hot Time In the Town of Berlin by Bing Crosby & the Andrews Sisters Shoo-Shoo Baby by Andrews Sisters I'll Get By by Harry James Mairzy Doats by Merry Macs Swinging On a Star by Bing Crosby I Love You by Bing Crosby Don't Fence Me In by Bing Crosby & the Andrews Sisters Besame Mucho by Jimmy Dorsey You Always Hurt the One You Love by Mills Brothers San Fernando Valley by Bing Crosby
To understand what’s most important and distinctive about the Web, look no further than time itself
July 24, 2001 — I recently embarrassed myself in front of a world-class astrophysicist at MIT by proposing an explanation of indeterminacy, a concept that not surprisingly has had me puzzled ever since I read my first book on The Universe Explained for People without the Math to Understand it. (I read about one such popularization a year, occasionally alternating with explanations of economics that make just as much sense to me, i.e., none.)
I suggested that the reason you can't know both a particle's momentum and its position isn't because particles are oddly probabilistic. No, I pronounced, it's because time doesn't come in moments.
The threaded nature of time helps explain some of what's most important and distinctive about the Web. The Web consists of billions of threads of conversation, from e-mail exchanges to discussion boards to mailing lists to websites where people proclaim their views and wait for responses.
We weave our lives out of threads. The richness of the Web as a threaded medium — actually as a type of threaded time — has much to do with why we’re finding it so attractive.
Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving But how can they know it's time for them to go? Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming I have no thought of time
For who knows where the time goes? Who knows where the time goes?
Sad, deserted shore, your fickle friends are leaving Ah, but then you know it's time for them to go But I will still be here, I have no thought of leaving I do not count the time
For who knows where the time goes? Who knows where the time goes?
And I am not alone while my love is near me I know it will be so until it's time to go So come the storms of winter and then the birds in spring again I have no fear of time
For who knows how my love grows? And who knows where the time goes?
“You say yes, I say no I say yes, but I may mean no You say stop, I say go, go, go I can stay 'til it's time to go Oh, oh no.”
Hello Goodbye The Beatles
“Yes, time, time, time is on my side, yes it is”
Time Is On My Side The Rolling Stones
Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping Into the future
Fly Like An Eagle The Steve Miller Band
Well, I told you once and I told you twi-ice But you never listen to my advi-ice You don't try very hard to please me With what you know, it should be easy
Refrain: Well, this could be the last time, this could be the last time. Maybe the last time, I don't know Oh no Oh no
A few thoughts from Unwinding the Clock, ten thoughts on our relationship to time, by bodil jõsson, a marvellous little book on how to think about time.
“I circle around the arguments, coming back to them again and again, from slightly different angles, touching on them in slightly different places. I do this partly because it’s often the best way to learn—not through single events, and not through strict repetition either, but though variation. And partly because it’s impossible to resolve your relationship with time once and for all.”
Dynamic properties are not revealed in the static state. Discovering the dynamic properties of an individual you’ve met before only in static situations is like meeting an entirely different person.
All our imaginings about how things will be in the long run may turn out to be irrelevant, because the long run may not be particularly far off after all.
Chronos = clock time. Kairos = experienced time.
Setup time. In order to concentrate, you need to be without interruptions. Undivided time is for many of us much more valuable than time divided up.
Concentrated, inspired conversation is a widely undervalued source of new knowledge, new feelings, new impulses. Thoughts take time.
When the rate of change becomes too great, when our patterns of interpretation become increasingly outmoded, it may be better to question the old ways of thinking rather than try to interpret each new situation with old eyes.
Regard groups that are uniformly one age or one sex as warning signs.
Time is mirrored not only in clock time, in intervals of time, and in speeds but also in rhythms. And there are many kinds of rhythm: biological, social, intellectual, musical, and so on. The physical concept that is associated with rhythm is frequency, which means how often something is repeated during a specific interval of time. Social and intellectual rhythms are significantly different. It’s fascinating to meet people whose rhythms agree with your own.
In education it’s particularly important to look forward. it’s strange that we so often concentrate on previous knowledge. knowledge that precedes us is, of course, important, but it deals only with things as they once were. it’s just as important to consider things that point forward: expectations, hopes, objectives.
…the past is continually being reshaped. this means that memory is not merely a contemporary record of events but also something that undergoes constant change.
it can’t be emphasized enough that variation rather than repetition is the mother of all learning. but the old ways are also needed for the sake of variation, as something to inspire variation or as something to which the new can be compared.
what if you could learn differently by looking for purposes rather than just for causes? all new knowledge, from the outermost reaches of the universe down to the smallest detail of the microcosm, surprises us by pointing out how functional, how incomparably purposeful the design of nature appears to be.
If I can fool myself into thinking that I don’t have enough time, couldn’t I just as well fool myself into thinking that I have plenty of time?” So I decided to have plenty of time.
"There is no correlation at all between success and hours worked."Seth Godin, Fast Company, June 2001.
There's a huge difference between working in a mine or a factory and doing what you do for a living. In the old days, people made stuff. You don't make sutff. You make decisions.
And the thing about making decisions is that you don't make better decisions when you work longer hours. You don't write bettwer coe when you work longer hours. You don't create better busines-development deals, make better sales ptiches, or invent cooler interfaces when you work longer hours either.
Let's face it: The marathon cultrue of "I work harder than you do" is nothing but an excuse to avoid making the hard decisions.
I am reading Long Strange Trip a 100 year timeline of drug lore and legislation in America.
1906 Coca Cola takes cocaine out of their product.
1909 Congressional Act prohibits importation of opium for other than medicinal purposes.
1920 Ratified in 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment takes effect: Prohibition begins in January. Nonalcoholic "near beer" and soft drinks are frequently spiked with ether.
1921 14 states have laws prohibiting cigarettes
1938 LSD synthesized by Albert Hofman in Switzerland
1959 CIA experiments by giving prison inmates increasing doses of LSD for 75 consecutive days.
Valium (diazepam) is first synthesized (and marketed by Roche Laboratory in 1963).
1964
1974 "Joe Camel" is born.
1977 Elvis dies of a drug overdose
1983 Nancy Reagan begins the "Just say NO" campaign.
Come gather 'round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown And accept it that soon You'll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you Is worth savin' Then you better start swimmin' Or you'll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin'.
Come writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen And keep your eyes wide The chance won't come again And don't speak too soon For the wheel's still in spin And there's no tellin' who That it's namin'. For the loser now Will be later to win For the times they are a-changin'.
Come senators, congressmen Please heed the call Don't stand in the doorway Don't block up the hall For he that gets hurt Will be he who has stalled There's a battle outside And it is ragin'. It'll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times they are a-changin'.
Come mothers and fathers Throughout the land And don't criticize What you can't understand Your sons and your daughters Are beyond your command Your old road is Rapidly agin'. Please get out of the new one If you can't lend your hand For the times they are a-changin'.
The line it is drawn The curse it is cast The slow one now Will later be fast As the present now Will later be past The order is Rapidly fadin'. And the first one now Will later be last For the times they are a-changin'.
MOMA has a sequel to its design shows called "Worksphere"
The Times says, "It does not focus sharply enough on the extravagent theme represetned by the best of its displays: the concept of time as an elastic dimenison that can be stretched by design. But it lays out the evidence that a new perception of space-time is fast becoming a reality of working life."
"Inside the show the focus shifts from the scale of space to the scale of time. We may not become fully conscious of this until we reach the displays of familiar communications products: cell phones, pocket organizers, laptops. What is stunning about these products is how quickly they pass from Hot to Not. Wasn't it only yesterday, for instance, that we thought that we couldn't live without the Apple Power Mac G4 Cube computer? And now all we can thik is: what is this dumb dinosaur doing here?
:The shapes of time," the art hisotrian Geroge Jubler's phrase, perhaps best describes these collected tools of yesterday, today and tomorrow. And it is hard to know, from moment to moment, just what shape we're in.
To see the work environment in temporal terms is to experience it as an event more than a place. This experience may be the most profound idea at the show. The electronic applicances are tools for creating events out of relationshipos in space, time and sensiblity.
Life's too short for the god-awful Timex alarm clock on my bedstead. Tiny switches to cut the alarm on and off. Radio picks up only static most fo the time. Sony must have outsourced manufacturing of this unit to Elbonia.
So today I'm ordering a SunRise Clock that promises to gently awaken me with a glowing light that becomes more intense over a one hour cycle.
Correction. Out of stock. And costly. (I bought a $20 SONY instead.)
It's not sound to evaluate creative work on the same basis as routine work.
With routine work, the expectation is constant output per unit time. Therefore, the more time the more output. Less time on the job translates into less production. (The brown line)
My work, which is increasingly creative in nature, relies on bursts of inspiration. A thought that rises to the surface in two minutes may have been in gestation for months. For me, relaxation and goofing off will generate more intellectual capital in a year than 12-hour days of drudgery. (The blue line)
"No matter how original your idea, no matter how many hours you devote to realizing it and no matter how unquenchable your ambition, the moment you succeed in offering a new search engine or a clever Web site, someone will be right behind you working on something better. Once, the cycle that began with invention and ended in obsolescence took generations to play itself out; now it takes weeks."
Some Guiding Principles from Blown to BIts, p. 223
In Internet time, everything is a sprint. It is easy to deny deconstruction by pointing to a history of failures by those who have tried. This is really dangerous. When preemption matters and new businesses evolve at breakneck speed, then the first competitor to get it right wil have an enormous advantage. By definition, that first competitor ignored the evidence of a prior, unbroken series of failutres.
"Fast follower" strategies may work in marathons, but not in sprints.
From the September 12, 2000 issue of Business 2.0 Clay Shirky
And if the present is hard to predict, what of the future? I see a lot of business projections in which revenues become staggeringly large by year five, and I always point out that we are currently living in the fifth year of every five-year plan written in 1995. Does anyone think that any projection from 1995 (Netscape Navigator 2.0 was the browser of choice, CD-ROMs were still "multimedia," Microsoft didn't get the Internet, and America Online was an online-only service) could have predicted this, now, today? This is not to say that the business climate is as hazy as it was then, when there were still people who thought that the Internet might not catch on, but it's not all that much clearer.
The allure of oversimplification is easy to understand: People don't like admitting ignorance, so they not only rewrite history, they prewrite the future.
There are two big problems with this attitude. The first is that contrary to the cozy feelings created by believing in a logical past, a 500-mogul present, and a predictable five-year future, the reality is that the Internet is still a place where the game can change between board meetings.
Given my belief that learning comes about when the mind churns over uncertainly, oversimpllification -- and the confidence it generates -- are enemies of learning. Who needs to learn more history if they've already boiled it down to Plymouth Rock, Revolution, Civil War, industry, immigrants, Beat the Germans, and Beat the Ruskis? Been there, done that.
Yesterday at eLearningForum, I posited the need for continuous unlearning. Force those mistaken concepts out of the unlearners' heads. Confront them with new uncertainties. Wag the dog. Tell them that the Pilgrim were philanderers, our Civil War was really fought by conscripts in Mexico, and the whole Cold War thing was a vast Nepalese conspiracy foisted on an unsuspecting public by Michael Milken and Walt Disney. Gonzo learning! That's right, isn't it? What would you put in its place?
There are millions of voices on the naked web. This is just one of them.
Does Internet time march on? By Kevin Maney, USA TODAY November 29. 2000
In high school, my best friend, Paul, and I adopted a philosophy, ransacked from somewhere that now escapes us, that carried us through those difficult years. It went like this:
Never eat anything bigger than your head.
You could buy into that. It's fundamental. It's ageless. It gives you focus.
About five years ago, the technology industry adopted a philosophy, which, if I'm not mistaken, it ransacked from Jim Barksdale, who always had more down-home philosophies than a long-tailed cat in a swimming hole full of dogs eating their dog food ...or whatever. It went like this:
You have to run on Internet time — or die.
Everybody in the industry bought into it. Then they persuaded lots of people in other industries to buy into it, too. It seemed fundamental and ageless and so on.
But then, the other day I was in the office of Justin Kitch, CEO of Silicon Valley company Homestead.com, and we were talking about the sour market for tech stocks and the dot-coms going out of business, and he said: "It's the death knell of Internet time. Thank God. It was the worst thing. That's all gone, and it'll never be back."
Then he rationalized his attitude a bit, saying something about being from Kansas.
Could it be, though? Is Internet time kaput? And then what?
The concept of Internet time started when Netscape, under then-CEO Barksdale, woke everyone up to the potential of the Web and launched a rush to get there first.
Its adherents believe that Internet time is roughly seven to 10 times faster than your basic frenetic business time. For some reason, they seem sure this is measurable.
So, think of it this way: If you are now so hurried that you drive 60 mph on roads built to handle cars going 30 mph, to keep up with Internet time you'd have to go at least 420 mph. Of course, at that pace, if you were to turn your head for a split second to look at the pretty autumn leaves going by, the next instant you'd be hamburger.
"The implication is that if you don't run fast, you will have your lunch eaten by somebody else who does," says venture capitalist Tom Cole, who believes Internet time is alive and well. "There is a flood of venture-capital dollars and legions of erstwhile entrepreneurs, so the window of opportunity is always fleeting."
But others say that's exactly what's going away. Now that Internet euphoria is wearing thin, it's looking like being first through the window of opportunity isn't nearly as important as being best. And being best often isn't a rush job.
"I actually heard the phrase, 'If you don't establish the leading e-brand in your space by the end of 1999, you're dead in the beginning of 2000,'" says Royal Farros, CEO of iPrint. Well, Pets.com established itself as the leader in Internet pet supplies. Didn't do any good. The company went paws-up earlier this month. E-Stamp won the lead in online postage. This week, it said it will abandon that business. "What a difference a year makes," says Farros, who happily believes Internet time is a goner.
There's been another deflator of Internet time: real people. The Internet folks have been running way ahead of us, like a hunter's hounds chasing a fox. But eventually, they and their wagging tails have to wait for us hunters to catch up, and we can only ambulate through technological change so fast.
"The real pace of change for the masses is still limited by our nature as humans," observes Great Plains Software CEO Doug Burgum, who also is ready to bury Internet time.
So in a lot of ways, Internet time seems destined to become another quaint mind-set from a specific moment in history, such as "détente" or "punk rock" or "free love."
But — and this is a big but — Internet time, minus the excesses, will probably have its lingering effect, very much like détente, punk rock and free love.
Major new technologies often change the general concept of time. Burgum points out that the transcontinental railroad permanently changed time. Before, moving anything from one coast to the other took six to eight months. After, it took five days.
To people living then, Burgum says, "It would have seemed like rocket travel."
Likewise, the Net has cut down the time it takes companies to do anything from roll out software to create whole new businesses.
Using the Web, Lands' End launched businesses in France, Italy and Ireland within a year, says Bill Bass, the company's Internet chief. Before the Web, it had taken Lands' End and its catalogs 10 years to launch its first three international businesses.
"While it is true that the frenzy that permeated most companies last year has abated, it's most definitely not true that companies are back to business as usual," Bass says.
The Net, like the railroads, has become a way to pack a little more time in a little smaller box.
Still, there's a seed of trouble here for the tech industry. If Internet time as an organizing philosophy is on its way out, what will replace it? This might be, in fact, the core reason the tech sector is in such disarray. The focus and fury that came from "run on Internet time or die" is fading out, leaving confusion in its wake.
Now the industry's philosophy is ... what, exactly? Live free or die? You can pick your nose, and you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your friend's nose? Sock it to me?
Obviously, the industry is adrift. So in that case, as a public service and maybe as a way to regain trillions of dollars in lost market value, I'm happy to offer up the philosophy that so beautifully guided Paul and me through all kinds of crises.
1700-1820 People used the moon's waxing and waning, as well as the sun and the stars to mark time.
1820-1880 As clocks became commonplace, more people began to think about the hours (and minutes) ticking by. The Industrial Revolution profoundly altered the ways of work and perceptions of time. The seasonal nature and irregular hours of farm and craft tasks were supplanted by the strict regularity of factory work--organized, measured, and paid for in terms of time. A clock, controlled by factory managers, ticked out the hours and synchronized the days. A bell awakened workers, summoned them to the factory, called them to and from meals, sent them home, and tolled curfew. Days were long, often twelve to fourteen hours, sometimes beginning before sunrise and stretching past sundown. Some workers appreciated the discipline required of them; others resented the relentless demands of the clock.
1880-1920 Like it or not, people had to synchronize their watches (and their lives) to a system of time zones. On November 18, 1883, local times across the nation--determined by the position of the sun overhead--were consolidated into standardized time zones. Each zone had a uniform time within its boundaries. The railroads implemented the change for their own benefit. But gradually, despite scattered resistance, standard time became the way everyone kept time.
1920-1960 People felt pressured to make every minute count--at work, at home, even at play. Managers sought to save time by measuring and controlling the amount of time a worker spent on any task. Frederick Winslow Taylor began a series of pioneering stopwatch studies in the 1880s. After timing each component of a given task, he streamlined them to speed completion in the name of efficiency. His work inspired generations of industrial engineers, who used the stopwatch in their research until the 1960s. Stopwatch studies often antagonized those being timed.
1960-now Splitting time into billionths, even trillionths, of a second gives the illusion that we have more of it. In the early 20th century, "scientific management" spread from factory floors to offices. Businessmen and professionals sought to increase their efficiency by mastering their use of time. The first personal organizers--loose-leaf binders with calendars and time-notation systems--appeared in the 1910s and 1920s. Beginning in the 1950s, time management became a big business as well as a focus in business-personal organizers proliferated, and time-management texts and training programs appeared.
There is no such thing as "Internet time." Lunging headlong into uncharted territory, the B2B exchanges were, of course, merely taking to heart another new-age shibboleth: that industrial transformation would henceforth occur at the superfast pace known as "Internet time." Yet as tech investor McNamee observes, this concept had problems too. As he sees it, technological change happens in three phases: the creation of infrastructure, the arrival of enabling technologies, and, finally, companies built on the previous two. "A lot of folks jumped the gun," he says. "They tried to skip the first two phases." While relatively simple businesses like eBay could prosper, streaming-media companies found an unready audience, and B2B companies ran into serious technical speed bumps. "The idea that it was all going to get done in two or three years was complete crap," says Joe Costello, CEO of software company Think3.
Certainly, the dot-com explosion has changed our perception of what fast is in business. But "Internet time" now seems less an expression of commercial reality than the confection of people with vested interests: venture capitalists who wanted a quick exit from investments; consultants who wanted to spook clients into buying advice; ordinary investors who wanted to be romanced by it all; and executives who felt pressured to live up to the hype the financial bubble had created. "Venture capitalists, the stock market, day traders--they colluded to create a rush that was not called for," says Broadview's Paul Deninger. Says McNamee: "People used 'Internet time' as a justification for lack of discipline. They got looser and looser in their behavior and got more and more rewarded for it.... In retrospect, 'Internet time' will prove to have been a hormonal thing."
Most non-ADD people describe time as a faily consistent and linear flow. ADD invidiausl, on the other hand, have an exaggerated sense of urgency when they're on a task, and an exaggerated sense of boredom when they feel they have nothing to do.. his sense of borecom sometimes leads to the increased consumption of substances such as alcohol and drugs, which alter the perception of time, whereas the sense of fast-time when on a project often leads to chronic impatience. This elastic sense of time also causes many ADD adults to describe emotional highs and lows as having a profound impact on them. The lows, particularly, may seem as if they'll last forever, whereas the highs are often perceived as flashing by.
A good programmer can be a hundred times more productive than an average one, easily. The gap has little to do with technical or mathematical or engineering training, much to do with taste, good judgment, aesthetic gifts, -- and also, to be fair, a quality that has nothing to do with aestetics: sheer intellecutal agressiveness. And brains don't hurt. But the fact that software's biggest hits are exactly the systems that are repeatedly praised for elegance --the Algol 60 language, from which so much modern practice derives, the "object-oriented" programming technique that emerged from Algol in 1967; the Apple desktop, on which the vast majority of computer users rely, in one form or other, today -- ought to be a clue to the flummoxed industry that elegrance has something to do with good software, that there is a conneciton somewhere between aesthetics and success.
The paradox is this: beauty inspires the best technologists and confuses or outright repels everyone else -- at least to begin with.
A beautiful woman once approached Pablo Picasso in a Paris cafe. She asked him to sketch her and offered to pay him fair value. In a few minutes, the artist created a drawing--and asked for 500,000 francs.
"But it only took you a few minutes," the tourist protested.
"No," Picasso supposedly replied, "it took me about 40 years."
THE CONCEPT OF TIME <<< It takes plenty of time to form solid relationships, be they personal or business relations. In some countries, the divorce rate is as high as 50%. If people took the time to get to know each other well, that rate would most likely be dramatically lowered. This goes for the business world, too. It takes time for the human brain to understand new concepts, to form new ideas, and to act on these ideas. Far too often, many of us are forced to rush - not given (or taking) enough time to digest our thoughts and feelings.
People may assume that an art director (or a creative director, or a system developer) who idly stares at the ceiling for 60% of the day is nothing but an overpaid slacker. We have to bear in mind that the actual productive time of a day of an employee in our industry—an industry based on immaterial values—is quite small in comparison with the total working hours. From A List Apart
In an interview, Gene Na—founder of Kioken—said: "Our Senior Design Technologist spends 85% of his time working on personal projects, but in the process of doing so he discovers incredible applications and techniques which we can use on our work. It's all about giving people the freedom of ownership." A talented Swedish woman—Bodil J(root)(delta)nsson—coined the term "TTT", meaning Thoughts Take Time. It's rather self-explanatory.
Everything takes time. Could it be that we're moving from the time-based economy to a quality-based economy? Maybe this is what is actually happening instead of a shift from the industrial economy to the network economy? Is it worth waiting a month or two more if the economical life span of the resulting product or solution is many times longer than the quick and dirty solution? Maybe it's a shift from a short-term economy to a long-term economy? Does the market actually afford the solutions that we want to provide, and if it doesn't, how and where do the buyers and sellers meet?
In any economic theory—or reality for that matter—time is always the scarce resource. Even if and when we reach an ecologically balanced economy—an econology—time is the limiting factor in terms of regrowth. Any consumption above the limiting factor means "stealing time" from coming generations—and yes, we've stolen a few generations' worth of time already.
So taking this into account, the time-consuming art of creating economic and cultural values in networks is great because we are actually buying and selling time from each other. "Producing" or "buying" time is quite environmentally friendly. The problem is that our consumption needs are constant or even accelerating.
What reaches the user is what is visible on the screen. The user doesn't care about the backend. The user mostly cares about function. And function is helped by good designs and smart, but invisible, technical solutions. A few minutes ago, I stated that the best interface is invisible and simple. Simplicity takes time. A modern paradox is that it's simpler to create complex interfaces because it's so complex to simplify them. Information architecture is the challenge of our time.
Snubbing Chronology as a Guiding Force in Art in today's NYT describes how museums are breaking free of organizing their collections by periods and movements charted by Alfred Barr for MOMA in the 30s. (The dead-tree version of the article shows Barr's flowchart: a genealogy of modernist movements.)
"A little war against time has begun," as exemplified by a 1885 Cezanne hung adjacent to a 1993 photograph of a similar subject. The problem wasn't mixing media or style; rather, it was mixing time periods. "As Jed Perl, an American art critic, put it in The New Republic, "Chronology, that backbone of the historical sense, has been collapsed into some kind of postmodern time warp."
David Sylvester, a British art critic, wrote in The London Review of Books that "chronology is not a tool of art-historical interpretation which can be used at one moment, discarded at another." Rather, he said, "It's an objective reality, built into the fabric of the work."
Despite the criticism, antichronology is now the rage.
The one thing curators seem to agree on about antichronology is this: Chronology and time are only the surface issues. The deeper issues are genealogy and history, whether there is a great lineage of art, a natural progression of one art movement after another leading up to the grand finale, abstraction.
The chart Barr created for MOMA's cubism show "was the religion of modern art, like the chart of the House of Windsor," said Robert Rosenblum, a professor of fine arts at New York University. "It represented truth. This one married that one and begat that one." It was neat, easy to absorb and difficult to eliminate. Floor plans were designed with the diagram in mind. As Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, wrote in "Experience or Interpretation," the modern art museum became a one-way narrative, "a single path with no byways and only occasional opportunities for exit."
The folks at the Tate, a museum I long to visit, say,
There is no natural order, no objective truth.
And there is no one modernism. The word "modern," Ms. Blazwick said, "is so flexible and multivalent that we think of it in terms of modernisms: plural not singular." So modern has become postmodern, a potpourri of choices. Or as John Elderfield, chief curator at large at the Museum of Modern Art, put it: "We're not replacing one orthodoxy with another. We want to show that what was happening until now was an orthodoxy." It is a process of defamiliarizing the familiar.
"Arranging paintings in terms of schools and countries was a 19th-century invention," Mr. Elderfield said. "There was a "passion to systematize." So the resurrection of genres in installations is a way of leapfrogging backward over the 19th-century obsession with linear progress and evolution.
"There is no natural way to hang things," he said, just as in biology there is almost no natural way to categorize things. "All taxonomies are subjective except species." And in art history there are no species.
I wonder what an antichronological history lesson would look like. At what point, in the absence of a chronological framework, do things become such a jumble that they lose meaning. Should we pursue expanding people's default frames of organization to make it easier to shift from one frame to another?
Zimbardo, interviewed by Psychology Today September/October 2000
My research on time perspective, begun in 1971, comes out of my childhood where my father was totally present-oriented and lived for the moment, which meant no goals, no achievement focus. Through my schooling, I became very future-oriented, and te research that I've done since then -- including developign the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, recently pubished in the Uournal of Personality and Social Pscyhoollogy -- points to the fact thtat time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior -- the jobs you seek, the grades you get in school, the risks you take, the addictions you develop, whether you take care of your health, whether you floss your teeth, and much, much more.
And it happens without our awareness, almost at a subconscious level of functioning. So we're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented. We're tryinng to promote a sense of a balanced time perspective, in which you flexibly shift your time orientation depending on the situation and the tasks at hand, rather than act as a slave to a restricted time frame.
TIME Zimbardo's current research on the psychology of Time Perspective focuses on the ways in which individuals develop temporal orientations that parcel the flow of personal experience into the mental categories, or time zones, of Past, Present, and Future, and also a Transcendental Future (beliefs about a future life after one's death). Zimbardo and colleagues are interested especially in temporal biases in which these learned cognitive categories are not "balanced" according to situations, contexts and demands, but one or another are utilized excessively or underutilized. They have developed a new reliable, valid questionnaire instrument to assess individual differences in this subjective time perspective, called the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, ZTPI. This research benefits from Zimbardo's research associations with: John Boyd, Kelli Keough, Kent Harber, Alex Gonzalez, Christina Maslach and Alison Holman.
Time fundamentals. I wrote this last month and I'm using it to see whether blogger links it as expected. If yes, I will set up a page to link graphics I often use into my blogs.
book review: Off the Clock, A Lexicon of Time Words and Expressions, by Kimberly Olson Fakih
This simple little book was on sale for $3.98 at Half Price Books. How could I resist?
Written for young people, the 122 pages of Off the Clock define a variety of time concepts alphabetically with no attempt to stitch them all together, which is probably a good thing. Every now and again, I appreciate an easy read.
Aion. A Greek child god. One of the earliest mentions of time. Way before the concept of clocks or even of months, Aion, now "eon", was a child building sandcastles on the beach. Eons are unbounded. Aion lived eons ago but only yesterday I had to wait eons for my turn in the bathroom.
Canonical hours. In 500 AD, prayer-time called the shots. Matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline.
Day keepers. Among the Qiche Indians of Guatemala, the day keeper tells others how to use their days well, the same way a good coach might show players how to play well by enjoying the game and putting their hearts and souls into it, or the way a good teacher might get students to read more or to love a certain subject, rather than just memorize facts and do homework. Day keepers help others live a "full life" by guiding them to spend each day as if living were an art -- the euivalent of painting, composing music, or making a poem. Any activity, no matter how dull, can be done from the heart, with joy, and every task performed as if for a loved one, in step with the earth and the pace of the seasons.
Ecological time. A rose blooms when it blooms, on its own schedule, not by the calendar or clock.
Kairos. = sacred time. The right time for decisive action. The moment of truth.
Give a dog a watch and he will probably slobber on it. Plants and animals may not be able to tell time, but they are better at tuning into nature than people are.
Ma. Japanese expression for a meaningful pause in conversation. Also applies to time "off the clock." Also, the empty space between to cherry trees.
Nemawashi. Another Japanese concept. This is now long it takes a group to agree on something. It ain't over till it's over.
Chronos (AKA Saturn), the son of Uranus, known for eating his children.
"The years teach much which the days never know." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of." - Benjamin Franklin
"Time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial." -Richard Ben Sapir
"There is no such thing in anyone's life as an unimportant day." - Alexander Woollcott
"Why kill time when one can employ it." - French proverb
"You wake up in the morning, and your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No one can take it from you. And no one receives either more or less than you receive." - Dr. Thomas Arnold Bennett
"Time invested in improving ourselves cuts down on time wasted in disapproving of others." - Author unknown
"Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time, which every day produces, and which most men throw away, but which nevertheless will make at the end of it no small deduction for the life of man." - C. C. Colton
"The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation. I never yet talked to the man who wanted to save time who could tell me what he was going to do with the time he saved." - Will Rogers
"If, before going to bed every night, you will tear a page from the calendar, and remark, 'There goes another day of my life, never to return,' you will become time conscious." - A. B. Zu Tavern
"This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Time ripens all things. No man's born wise." - Cervantes
"It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves." - Thornton Wilder
"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." - Henry David Thoreau
"Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no delay, no procrastination; never put off till tomorrow what you can do today." - Earl of Chesterfield
Stuart Brand reports that ecological systems manage change and absorb and incorporate shocks by incorporating components that have different rates of change. Instead of breaking under stress like a brick house in an earthquake, they yield, like a wooden house in a quake. The combination of fast and slow components makes the system resilient. Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous.
Brand proposes six significant levels of pace and size in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilization. From fast to slow, the levels are:
· fashion/art
· commerce
· infrastructure
· governance
· culture
· nature
Feed community
jay @ 19-Jul-00
Several philosophers argue that this 4D model is more consistent with relativistic Einstein/Minkowski spacetime, and so the old 3D view of time ought to long since have been jettisoned. Others are not so convinced. Anyone truly interested in these puzzles might want to start by reading what philosophers rather than physicists have to say, since the physicists haven't gotten all that far in their debate and, frankly, haven't stated the issues very clearly. Here are the names of some philosophers who've published interesting papers on this topic in the last decade or so: Yuri Balashov, William Craig, Sally Haslanger, Mark Heller, Micheal Rea, Theodore Sider, and Peter van Inwagen. No few of these philosophers have some of their papers available for downloading on their faculty home pages, so you can even skip a trip to the library.
Logophilia "time" words
jay @ 16-Jul-00
cradle-to-cradle, noun
A product life cycle that encompasses not only the design, manufacture, and useful life of the product, but also the recycling of the product into something new. (Cf. cradle-to-grave.)
eternity leave, noun (posted on June 16, 2000)
Paid leave given to a person who needs to provide full-time care for a dying spouse or family member.
face time, noun (posted on September 19, 1996)
Time spent interacting with someone in person, rather than via email or some other electronic link.
just-in-time lifestyle, noun (posted on January 22, 1998)
A modern lifestyle in which people expend only the minimum effort to complete a task and rush from one appointment to another
timesuck, noun (posted on November 9, 1998)
An activity that uses up large amounts of time.
vampire time, noun (posted on May 17, 1996)
A schedule that involves hanging out in clubs, coffee shops, or other nocturnal establishments all night, and then sleeping all day.
if, as i will argue, we can only focus well on a narrow slice of space or time, namely what's directly in front of us, we must admit to a murky past and we already know we have a murky future.
our peripheral vision fills in the rest of our field of view, which we cannot keep in focus. we're only aware of movement, really, and relying on the brain to substitute a mental picture for what's really out there to give us the impression that we're aware of a larger panorama (or span of time.)
for sight, we're talking 3o. and for time? what sticks? the navy found that students couldn't stay focused for longer than...(chech this out...it's less than an hour). As with sight, things that are very far away in time can't be seen. You can look at a picture (consult your memory), but the truth is no longer out there, as shown by a doctored picture or a false memory.
we see what we expect to see. examples: length of lines, show a card. we construct the memories that support our current view of the situation. like putting togehter random thoughts to create a storyline for a dream, we weave of tapestry of time with links that weren't there in the original.
from OneWorldTime...living up to its name
jay @ 24-Jun-00
I was born in Argentina, our programmer did this from the Ukraine and the site design came from Taiwan. A true international collaboration in the spirit of the internet, without ever meeting each other.
America has brought speed to the world. Maybe this is not entirely true but in my American dream it definitely is: Many American movies show speed as a theme. All these car races between teenagers, the car chases of the police....one has the impression that Americans like speed, even so the American authorities say it is a no no to drive at high speed on highways. (I just cannot help thinking about Germany where they don't celebrate speed and where there was no speed limit on the highways for a long long time (probably thanks to the kind influence of the many car manufacturers like Mercedes, BMW, Porsche,VW......). I remember trying my father's new turbo-engined car at high speed - what a feeling....so I can understand this love for speed.)
But speed doesn't stay on highways, it sort of spreads through life. The fast food! Now this is something undeniably American. Fast food means also fast service - this is a point where many Americans come into trouble when they go to other parts of the world. Fast service is not really 'in'-everywhere. I often watched American tourists when they were confronted with slow service - must have been quite some experience for them! But how to help them ? I felt they had to find the solution themselves....
Speed in sports is there any other country in the world who loves speed this much and who celebrates speedy sports this much? I would not know.
Speed in communications - telecommunications, media, internet - now this is American- and speed is a natural part of it. This is something America is giving to the world and helps to integrate it - which is by the way one of the important roles this country has to play - in my humble opinion.
Speed in human interaction - now this is something more complicated. I found that Americans are very open and easy to talk to. It doesn't take as much time as -let's say with the British. But on the other hand I found that this kind of quick interactions often have very little meaning. I found that Americans are curious - which is good - but they always want the new...and again the new quickly....By doing so, they miss things - many things - which one sees and understands only in time, in less speedy meetings and dialogues. Trust, sincerity...all these things need more time but are so precious in the long term. Talking about long term:
Speed in corporations -American corporations live from quarter to quarter - European corporations maybe from year to year....and in Asia it probably is longer...Movies about professionals in America's corporations give the impression that they are under great pressure and stress....it is almost not human how they have to live. Other cultures who don't have this attitude cannot understand this lifestyle at all.
Speed in life - generally one gets the impression as non-American that one has to speed up when dealing with Americans. Like one talks quicker, acts quicker...there is little allowance for time - time is money - as one says! This phrase could never have been created in Asia! Instant photographs, instant coffee, instant repairs,,,,instant love, instant hate...America - when do you take some time off? Speed is great, but it is not a state which is infinite - there has to be equilibrium between speed and non-speed....action and non-action....
'Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.' Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
For nearly 36 years now, I've been thinking about time and trying to understand it at the most fundamental level. If you look at the history of physics, surprisingly few people have really thought about time and what it truly is. Even Einstein only thought about certain aspects about time; he never asked what it means to say that a second today is the same as a second tomorrow. This is a very fundamental question.
BARBOUR: My basic idea is that time as such does not exist. There is no invisible river of time. But there are things that you could call instants of time, or 'Nows'. As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows, and the question is, what are they? They are arrangements of everything in the universe relative to each other in any moment, for example, now.
JB: But where does our experience of the flow of time come from?
BARBOUR: That has always proved to be difficult to attack, because if you try to get your hands on time, it's always slipping through your fingers. People are sure that it's there but they can't get hold of it. Now my feeling is that they can't get hold of it is because it isn't there at all. That what we think is the flow of time — and even seeing motion — is actually an illusion. But I come to that after seeing what the quantum mechanics of the complete universe might be like.
This line of reasoning got so heavy that Windows crashed, and I lost interest.
Investors (and Reporters) Help Firms Rush to Wall St., without a reality check from users
By Nate Zelnick
Being a tech reporter is, all in all, a pretty good job. especially now that the tech sector is infecting and transforming the rest of Western culture into a version of itself. Five-year plans--the apotheosis of the centrally planned industrial approach for corporations and governments--now sound quaint in light of an economy that seems to yo-yo hourly.
One of the central tech tenets is that the thing in front of you is more important for its potential than for its intrinsic capabilities. Like cars, hardware is now obsolete the minute you buy it. Software is never done. The next version will solve [insert your problem here]. The traditional tech sectors have gotten away with this kind of shoddiness because technically astute customers could kludge together workarounds, but the failure to expand the PC market much beyond 50 percent of U.S. households speaks volumes about "potential."
The real harm comes when this acceptance of potential meets venture capital and Wall Street. And it's here that we tech reporters have done terrible harm by not realizing that the world around us has changed drastically.
Tech reporters spend much of their time with vendors because they come to us. Since we're desperately trying to understand an ever-growing set of complex markets composed of complex products that solve complex problems, a sharp marketer can shape a reporter's perception of a marketplace with little real effort. It's easier to find "another view" by asking a competitor than by talking to users, so that's what we do.
What this means is that we tend to push the new thing--or its potential--without getting a sense of whether the new thing is useful to anyone. Since our contact with the actual user base that determines the utility of a new thing is, at best, ex post facto, we don't even know when we're screwing up.
This was annoying when tech was a ghetto. Now that tech styles have moved out to the rest of the world, it's terrifying. VCs, CIOs, and investors face the same struggle reporters do--except they have real jobs, too, so they depend (to some extent) on us. As they invest or buy products, they shape the market.
But the foreshortening of the period between initial investment in a startup and its IPO has removed the actual marketplace--the mechanism that sifts out failure and rewards success. Companies are treated like software: Only their potential matters. This warps the already twisted tech-marketing information loop into even more bizarre and irrelevant forms.
What's needed is a many-to-many communication system that brings the end user into the process. Luckily, we happen to have this many-to-many Internet lying around just waiting to be used more effectively.
Until recently, most web clocks were pretty feeble. Check out Time Ticker, where you drag a bar across a map fo the world to look at local times. You also get sound effects and -- this is really neat -- one-button synchronization of your computer and the correct time.
If you see me at the watercooler, please don't stop and schmooze.
"Deaf Lemon Merinque"
Fast Company, May 2000
DigiGlut
jay @ 06-May-00
"Internet time" has a new meaning: whereas conventional advertising took at least a decade to wreck the promise of TV in its Golden Age, it has taken only five years, from the invention of the browser, to reduce the Internet to blather.
Time has speeded up. Hence, the slowly flowing current seems like white water. It's as if our watches and calendars randomly skip over certain hours and days and months. This rips the foundation out from under our individual decision-making.
Remember in the seventies when inflation got out of control? All of a sudden, it was tough to tell a bargain from a rip-off. The standards changed. A twenty-five cent cup of coffee became a bargain. Was $125 a good price for a three-piece suit? Quick - would you pay a million lire to rent an Alfa Romeo for a week? Or a thousand pesetas? Three hundred quid? What's $10 buy these days? Alice, those hooka-smoking rabbits are measuring things with rubber rulers.
This leads people to make the bad choices when trading off time versus quality. How much time does a given project warrant? Do it now! Timeliness outweighs getting things done right!
Out of sync
jay @ 27-Apr-00
Relationships falter when the parties are in different time zones. No, not Pacific, Mountain, Central and Eastern; I mean the continuum from past through present to future. If party A is focused on getting things this week to the exclusion of all else and party B is seeking credibility that things will be rosy a year from now, neither satisfies the other party.
This is analogous to Eric Berne's schema of Transactional Analysis. He was concerned with status (Parent, Adult, Child), but his charting of what happens when a presumed Parent is dealing with a presumed Adult may be useful for looking into the different time types.
At the very least, people should identify "when" they're coming from.
Last week we stood on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, peering as eons of time sandwiched into a mile of rock layers. Two days later, we were in Vegas, gawking at exuberant castles and palaces that had sprung up from what were parking lots and trailer parks five years ago. I was pondering these differences while commuting to Cisco for a meeting.
Silicon Valley itself was largely orchards when I first lived in this area. Now it's concrete and office parks, producing ideas and inventions and connections instead of apples and peaches.
WebLogue
jay @ 24-Apr-00
This is a test template. (I am making entries in WebLogue now.)
Lately, [Stewart] Brand has been mulling over the rewards and the perils of "Internet time." That's a slogan, to be sure, but it's something real too -- something technological, something physiological, something personal. Money moves around the world at the speed of light. Product cycles are measured in months, rather than in years. People find it unremarkable to spend time on three different continents in the space of a week. And in-the-trenches Web workers feel like God's new chosen people. But Brand is worried. One thing that worries him is Moore's Law. Early doublings of computing power ( and hence of speed ) were manageable, he says. But the doublings of speed and power that are under way now could cause the whole Web fun house to come crashing down. "The Internet is a runaway plague," says Brand. "It's a self-accelerating system that makes itself go faster and faster and faster and faster. And if it's not framed properly, it will overleap itself, as Shakespeare would say."
In Brand's view, the way to ensure sustainability is to learn to go both fast and slow -- to play the game at both extremes. "The new economy is simultaneously more niche-oriented and more global," he says. "So we need to learn to perform effectively throughout that spectrum -- to address not only the urgent and the local, but also the important and the vast."
Without such a balance, Internet time will advance unchecked -- pushing us to go faster, faster, faster, and running away like the plague. At that point, our civilization will come to resemble a creature with one oversize limb, designed for speed, and one atrophic stump, formerly used for practicing patience. It's not a pretty picture. To avoid it, says Brand, we need to embrace a paradoxical truth: "If you want to keep speeding up, you also need to learn how to slow down."
Internet
Time Group
eLearning
visualization
just
Jay
posted by jay cross on 10:34 AM |
