There's still ti:me

I've been reading about time. Christopher Butler wrote about his Fifteen Clocks. There's an episode of The Rest Is Science in which Michael Stevens talks about his unusual clocks. I read Craftland, which has a chapter on Roger W. Smith, who makes handmade watches from scratch. Not from components, but from raw metal. Some of his watches take years to make.

I like the idea of showing the passage of time differently. This is my place to play.

Some people judge the quality of a watch by how smoothly the hands rotate. This is how you can distinguish a quartz from a mechanical movement. The only place I saw a smoothly rotating hand was on the pace clock at a public swimming pool.

Is it always darkest just before dawn?

There's the crack of dawn, a false dawn, and the moment it dawns on someone. There are many sayings involving dawn or sunset. Every day has one sunrise and one sunset. They feel consistent, but of course they're not. Even on the equator the length of the day changes through the year. In the north of the UK the change is tangible.

Is it teatime yet?

Sunset and sunrise may change throughout the year, but mealtimes don't have to.

Do I still have time?

I'm not squeamish about how much time I've got left. Statistics say I'll live until I'm 85. They also say that I have less time ahead than behind me.

Days

In 2014 Wait But Why wrote a post about measuring your life in weeks and visualising it. Everyone (everyone who is a nerd) was talking about it. The article was based on the life of a typical American. I wanted to make it more personal and use days, not weeks.

Trying to add significant events, both personal and global, was surprising. How events and time relate to each other in my mind is not what they look like in reality. There are some events I'd like to place but I don't know their specific dates.

This is a work in progress. Playing with how to represent time is more interesting than I anticipated. Regular 12-hour clocks (e.g., ones that represent half a day) are an odd idea. It would have been more logical for a 360-degree rotation of the hour hand to map onto the Earth’s 360-degree rotation. Did 12-hour clocks come from sundials? There is a rabbit hole here.