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After watching An entire history of time measurement in six minutes, I am most amazed by the concept of relativity and specifically how space and time are so related. I had to stop myself from going down an internet rabbit hole. More related to the timekeeping topic, I was surprised that latitude and longitude were so closely related to time (I think the concept of space being measured by time and just the space/time relationship in general is just so weird to me)

Something that stuck with me from the readings was the water clock because I’ve never considered using water to describe time since it is a fluid medium rather than solid structures. The water clock uses water in a similar way that an hourglass uses sand; however, a viewer looks into a container of water and matches time markers with the water level. I think that looking through water to see time is interesting because it seems like a more mystical way to tell time that is not absolute.

“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?

In the timekeeping excerpt written by Johanna Drucker, the concept of time as subjective became stuck to me because it is interesting how rigid time is set to be perceived while how malleable and ever-changing it seems from the human perspective (e.g. waiting in line for food when you’re hungry makes it seem like time passes very slowly). On another note, I know a close family friend who has a leap year birthday on February 29th so I’ve always had the misconception that leap years would happen every 4 years and was surprised to find out that this is actually false.