“Like maps, celestial coordinate systems become a reified intellectual construct, a graphical scheme through which human beings create a relation to the phenomenal world.” (Drucker 72-73)
It’s common knowledge that most calendars are abstractions of planetary movement, constructs that ultimately root human routine in the phenomenological. Yet, the abstraction (more than what it represents) is almost too embedded in our everyday lives: I hardly find myself gazing at the information structure of GCal and feeling deeply connected to the position of the stars and moon, the impermanence of my existence, or the cycles of the natural world (maybe just me).
“Errors in early pendulum clocks were eclipsed by those caused by temperature variation” (From Wikipedia “History of Timekeeping Devices”)
We don’t tend to think of clocks as susceptible to messy or imprecise influences like temperature. Time is usually thought of as a dimension on its own, but what if the x-axis was warping and breaking based on some other axis?