An addition that immediately comes to mind is the ancient Egyptian, whose first port of call would be sunrise and sunset, and sundials and obelisks for midday (later water clocks, unsurprisingly as the Nile was the other visible source of life after the sun) and instruments for measuring time by the stars at night (a useful skill if you are in the desert). You only have so much time before the sun comes up and threatens to burn you to a shred (but you also have all the time that there is!)
An attractiveness of this is maybe a sense that we feel sort of 'different' in the morning to how we feel in the evening, and so on, and that knowing the time maybe makes it easier to align oneself with prevailing influence.
I rather liked this bit: "Over in Barundi, India, where the majority of the population are subsistence farmers, natural events entirely dictate the temporal structure of life, and time is tracked according to the passing of the seasons. As Levine relates, “...they set their appointment for the time when the cows are going to drink in the stream. Precision is difficult and mostly irrelevant because it is hard to know exactly at what time people will be leading the cows out in the first place."
So the important thing being not so much what time is it? but, what does this time mean to me/us..? It's an idea also embodied in Dali's melting pocket-watch ("Persistence of Memory") which emphasises time's relativity.
It seems it usually comes back to "relative to what?" and the story about Chile . . . "You might have been invited to a party at 6pm, only to find that none of the other guests show up until 7pm, 8pm or even 9pm." . . . which reminds me of the sense of time in Ro de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, where it is verging on poor manners to arrive at a social event on time (arrive early to "help" and your host might be horrified!)
This is where the article's main thrust ("Every culture has its own unique set of temporal fingerprints") is perhaps easily lost: when it is truncated to a feelgood message on the opening page: "Show up early to your next appointment or meeting today and see what you can do to be of service when you arrive."
It's a nice thought. As long as we remember there is no hard and fast rule. Apply a good idea with sensitivity, rather than dogma. Otherwise we can get caught up in what Paul Simon called the "Myth of Fingerprints."
On Jun 23, 2014 chris docker wrote:
Quite a cute article!
An addition that immediately comes to mind is the ancient Egyptian, whose first port of call would be sunrise and sunset, and sundials and obelisks for midday (later water clocks, unsurprisingly as the Nile was the other visible source of life after the sun) and instruments for measuring time by the stars at night (a useful skill if you are in the desert). You only have so much time before the sun comes up and threatens to burn you to a shred (but you also have all the time that there is!)
An attractiveness of this is maybe a sense that we feel sort of 'different' in the morning to how we feel in the evening, and so on, and that knowing the time maybe makes it easier to align oneself with prevailing influence.
I rather liked this bit:
"Over in Barundi, India, where the majority of the population are subsistence farmers, natural events entirely dictate the temporal structure of life, and time is tracked according to the passing of the seasons. As Levine relates, “...they set their appointment for the time when the cows are going to drink in the stream. Precision is difficult and mostly irrelevant because it is hard to know exactly at what time people will be leading the cows out in the first place."
So the important thing being not so much what time is it? but, what does this time mean to me/us..? It's an idea also embodied in Dali's melting pocket-watch ("Persistence of Memory") which emphasises time's relativity.
It seems it usually comes back to "relative to what?" and the story about Chile . . . "You might have been invited to a party at 6pm, only to find that none of the other guests show up until 7pm, 8pm or even 9pm."
. . . which reminds me of the sense of time in Ro de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, where it is verging on poor manners to arrive at a social event on time (arrive early to "help" and your host might be horrified!)
This is where the article's main thrust ("Every culture has its own unique set of temporal fingerprints") is perhaps easily lost: when it is truncated to a feelgood message on the opening page: "Show up early to your next appointment or meeting today and see what you can do to be of service when you arrive."
It's a nice thought. As long as we remember there is no hard and fast rule. Apply a good idea with sensitivity, rather than dogma. Otherwise we can get caught up in what Paul Simon called the "Myth of Fingerprints."