Clocks, calendars and time ;-)

[Ed Montgomery]

Ah, forgive me for butting in once again...;-)
I just gotta say I love these discussions you're
having.
Apparently the wikipedia clock/stopwatch articles
weren't enough...ok, try this for "today's date and
time":
http://www.ecben.net/calendar.shtml

You both have valid points, there is no right or
wrong.
Write your clock as you wish, and others will write
other kinds of clocks...i.e. you are both right.

By the way, I'm in Japan at the moment, and I had to
fill out an application for a fellowship.  Apparently,
the correct answer here to "Year" when filling in the
date of application is 19, as in Heisei 19, NOT
2007...:-)

(P.S. Woops, hit that Send button too fast before
changing the subject...sigh...;-))

> Bert Freudenberg writes:
>
> > I question the very assumption that continuously
telling
> > the time is even remotely important on a learning
machine
> > for kids in elementary school age.
>
> Dealing with time is a critical life skill that must
be learned.
> Having a clock is thus very important.

Whose time?  Hours minutes seconds?  Days since a
recent feast?  When  
the sun is at a certain position in the sky?  Since I
last saw you on  
the road?  How much do I quantize?  Is quantization of
time even a  
concept I am familiar with?

The notion of time is _highly_ contingent on situated
cultural  
factors.  Just because in the West we measure things
using hours,  
minutes, and seconds, does not mean that the entire
world does so.   
In fact, our conception of time is directly related to
churches and  
clock towers in the middle ages (see Lewis Mumford on
this idea)  
first, and then assembly lines and
educational/disciplinary  
institutions (see Foucault) .  The rest of the world
has not  
necessarily adopted our way of dividing days into ever
smaller  
chunks---perhaps there is no quantization at all!

A clock application, especially given the areas of
deployment, is  
_not_ something you rush into with the assumption that
you can merely  
write a graphic display of 00:00:00.  One must
understand the local  
conditions to know how time is told _on the ground_
and be careful to  
not impose a Western notion of quantization and
temporal division  
that might be entirely foreign.

nick knouf




     
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