The Car Clock Curse

At some point in the ’60s or ’70s, the true pinnacle of car clock technology was reached. Vehicles had clocks on their dashboards that accurately told the time and–crucially–could be easily changed by the owner to account for a shift to Daylight Savings Time or a cross-country drive to a different time zone.

Typically, the cars of that era used one of two adjustment methods, both of which were intuitive and easy to use. Cars that had standard clocks had a small knob located next to the clock that could be turned to move the minute hand backwards or forwards to reflect time changes. Cars that had at-the-time futuristic digital clocks had small buttons next to the clock that allowed the digits to move up or down. In either case, changing the time in your car clock was simple and took no more than a few seconds.

Cars stayed at this pinnacle for several decades, because designers presumably were smart enough to leave well enough alone. But at some point, they couldn’t risk adding new bells and whistles, and clocks like the one shown above were inflicted on the car-buying public. That’s not an actual clock, regrettably, it’s a software depiction of one. To change the time, you need to dig out the inches-thick owner’s manual, find the instructions on how to change the time, and then follow a devilishly complicated series of steps that could only have been concocted by an anti-social software engineer. A time change that used to be a snap now takes about an hour and is the source of tremendous frustration.

The result is that this particular car clock has become functionally inoperative. Although the clock indicates it is 4:22, it is actually 9:51 in the real world. Currently, at least, the clock is precisely 6 hours and 31 minutes fast. I keep meaning to try to change it, but it’s one of those unwelcome tasks that keeps getting put off. So whenever we drive somewhere, I see the stupid clock and am painfully reminded of my technological ineptitude and have to do mental calculations to get to the correct time.

Fortunately, perhaps, most new cars come with a clock that is set by the GPS system, which changes time automatically–at least, so long as the GPS system is functioning. If the GPS is on the fritz, though, the car owner is out of luck and out of time.

Car clocks are a good example of how some purported advances in technology really aren’t advances at all.

Spinning The Shortest Day Ever

When you said–as everyone who is truthful about it must admit they did say–that it seemed like August got here faster than ever this summer. . . well, it turns out you were right. August literally arrived more quickly than ever before because the Earth is spinning faster than ever, producing shorter days. In fact, scientists have determined that June 29, 2022 was the shortest day ever, clocking in at 1.59 millisecond shorter than the average day.

Our planet apparently started to rotate more quickly in 2016, and the quicker spinning seems to be accelerating, with 2022 seeing a speedier spin that 2020 and 2021. Scientists aren’t sure exactly why the quicker cycles began, but think it might have something to do with the tides.

The shorter days may require that atomic clocks and other devices be recalibrated to keep precise time. Because all of those lost milliseconds will add up, scientists have floated the idea of a “negative leap second” to account for the reduction in the length of days, employing the same concept that causes us to add a leap day to the calendar every four years. Engineers hate the idea and raise the possibility that messing with the clocks could have a devastating impact on technology and cause massive outages. Their position may remind some of the dire “Y2K” forecasts of what might happen when we hit the year 2000 that didn’t materialize, but I’m with the engineers on this one: if attempting a “negative leap second” could cause mass failures, panic, and the end of the civilization as we know it, I’d rather live with the fact that our clocks are off by a few milliseconds.

None of this should affect the proud reaction of those who admittedly did say (as I did) that August got here earlier this year. Isn’t it nice to know that your finely honed internal chronometer is working more reliably than our atomic clocks?

Losing Clockwisdom

The other day someone asked me about my morning walks around Schiller Park and I explained that, being a creature of habit, I inevitably walk up Third Street and, when I reach the park, I head counterclockwise for my laps around the park. My friend understood exactly what I meant and no doubt visualized the hands of a clock in the process.

It made me wonder whether, if I was using the same expression with a teenager, they would be mystified by the expression, or would understand that “counterclockwise” means to turn right as you begin your laps from the twelve o’clock position. Do they even have clocks with hour and minute hands in schools these days, and how many homes have old-style clocks around–rather than digital contraptions on their microwaves, ovens, refrigerators, and TVs? We’ve got the nifty art deco-style clock shown above on the end table next to our bed, but it was a consciously retro purchase to go with our retro house. Otherwise, our timekeeping would all be of the digital variety.

And “clockwise” and “counterclockwise” aren’t the only concepts or phrases that are at risk in the digital era. Will people still say that something that went well came off like clockwork? Will people still say that they worked (or rocked) around the clock? And will taunting people boast that they will clean your clock?

I’m afraid that the clock is ticking on clock-related phrases, and it’s a shame.

Living In A Time-Free Zone

It’s June 21, which means it’s officially summer.  (Those of us in the rainy, cool Midwest may be forgiven for not recognizing that.)  June 21 also means the summer solstice has arrived and therefore, in the northern hemisphere, it’s the longest day and shortest night of the year.

Some of the northernmost cities of the globe have already been enjoying days where the sun never sets.  In Sommaroy, a Norwegian island that is north of the Arctic Circle, the sun doesn’t set for more than two months — from May 18 to July 26.  And during that period of constant daylight, the islanders don’t exactly follow conventional concepts of time.  In the early a.m. hours, when most of us are abed, Sommaroy residents are likely to be out doing activities that we associate with late morning or afternoon.  In part, that’s to compensate for the fact that, from November to January, Sommaroy doesn’t get any sunlight at all — but the practices of the islanders during this time period also recognize that standard concepts of time, set by a daily sunrise and sunset, really don’t apply when you have 24 hours of constant daylight.

Now Sommaroy residents want the Norwegian government to recognize their practices officially, and declare Sommaroy a “time-free zone” during the constant daylight period, which would allow businesses and schools to have flexibility in their hours of operation.  Visitors to Sommaroy during this period are encouraged to acknowledge the “time-free” concept by leaving their watches on the bridge that connects the island to the mainland.

Many of us live lives that are governed, to a certain extent, by the clock.  We get up, eat, work, watch TV, and go to bed on a schedule that is derived, in large part, from the rhythms established by the sun.  What would it be like to live in a place where there was constant sun — or for that matter, no sun — and therefore no standard concept of time?  Would you still follow a schedule, or would you simply sleep when you wanted, eat when you wanted, and work when you felt you had to, without regard to the tyrannical clock?

Most of us don’t have to think about that, because we don’t live in places where there is constant sunlight, or constant darkness, for any part of the year.  But if humans venture into space, and take years-long interstellar voyages or live underground on inhospitable planets and moons where sunrise and sunset are not daily occurrences, our prevailing notions of time will be put to the test.  In a way, our time-free friends on Sommaroy may be giving us a peek into what human lives might be like in the future.

For Whom The Clock Chimes

We have an old clock in the front foyer of our house that we inherited from Kish’s Mom.  It’s a lovely piece of craftsmanship from days gone by, with careful wooden carvings and delicate clockwork mechanisms.  It’s a bit temperamental, too.  It needs to be wound, pursuant to a yellowed set of instructions kept inside the clock cabinet, and only Kish can do it in precisely the right way.  

But what I really like about the clock is its sound.  On a morning when I wake up early and come downstairs, like this morning, the sounds of the clock fill our quiet, darkened home.  The steady ticking, the whirring made when the hour or half hour are ready to be struck, and finally the hollow gong that marks the passage of another 30 minutes — these are reassuring sounds that are good company for the early riser.

Ask not for whom the clock chimes.  Why, it chimes for me!

A True Clockwork Expert

More than two hundred and fifty years ago — so long ago that America was still a collection of diverse, squabbling colonies — a British carpenter and clockmaker named John Harrison made an outlandish claim.  He contended that he had designed a pendulum clock that, if wound properly and in timely fashion, would keep time so accurately that it would lose only one second of time over a 100-day period.

You would think that Harrison’s claim would have had some credibility, because he had just invented a device that had solved one of the knottiest problems confronting the British Empire of that day — namely, allowing sailors to figure out their longitude on long sea voyages.  Latitude could be determined by looking at star charts and comparing constellations to the horizon, but longitude posed a seemingly impossible problem.  Harrison solved it by creating the chronometer, a device that kept remarkably precise time calculated from Greenwich, England.  By determining the local time, such as high noon, and then comparing it to the Greenwich time kept by Harrison’s clock, sailors could calculate how far away they were and determine their longitude.

But even though Harrison had solved the longitude problem, and won a large prize from the British government for his ingenuity, his claim to be able to build such an accurate pendulum clock was met with churlish derision.  Harrison was ridiculed, his claims were said to involve “an incoherence and absurdity that was little short of the symptoms of insanity,” and his clock design was forgotten for centuries.  But Harrison’s achievements became the subject of interest again in the 1970s, and a clockmaker attempted to decipher Harrison’s plans for the clock and build a replica.

Harrison’s design, called simply “Clock B,” then was tested, and the test results confirmed that Harrison was right all along.  During its carefully controlled 100-day trial, Clock B lost only 5/8 of a second when measured against official Greenwich time, and it was declared by Guinness World Records to be the “most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air.”  Centuries after his death, Harrison was vindicated:  he was right, his critics were wrong, the design of Clock B was an amazing accomplishment for a clockmaker who lived during the mid-18th century,

It just goes to show you — sometimes the conventional wisdom isn’t wisdom at all.

Bad Timing

In case you forgot, here’s a friendly Webner House reminder:  daylight saving time ended at 2 a.m. this morning.

Unless you are one of those nerdy Daylight Saving Time fans who actually stays up on Saturday night until 2 a.m. so you can change your clocks in complete compliance with the time change, the shift back to standard time means you will need to walk around your home, changing every clock that hasn’t already changed by virtue of its connection to a network.  So, make sure you get to that clock radio next to your bed, the clocks on the microwave and the oven, and the clock that is pretty much completely hidden by the books in your TV room.  And don’t forget the clock in your car, either!

This year it seems that the change back to standard time has come later than ever.  That’s because, about 10 years ago, the federal government shifted the change to standard time back a week, from the last Sunday of October to the first Sunday of November, and in 2016 the first Sunday of November falls on November 6.

The time change has two unfortunate consequences this year.  First, it’s going to get dark a lot earlier at night, which means we’re heading into the grim period when it’s dark when we head to work in the morning and dark when we come home at night.  Second, it means we get an extra hour of time to hear about the presidential campaign before Election Day finally arrives.

Just this once, couldn’t we have banked that extra hour until the Sunday after Election Day?

Mean Trick

I’m in  Atlanta for meetings today.  During the wee hours I got up to use the hotel room bathroom, and after I was finished I decided to check the time on the clock radio next to the bed.

It read:  6:20.

Wait, 6:20?  Crap, I’ve overslept!

So I got up and turned on the lights and began doing the work I needed to do before my meetings started, dealing with that jagged surge of adrenalin that you feel when you realize you’ve overslept.  I started reading and answering emails on my iPhone, and then I noticed the time indicated on my phone — which was 4:20.  Huh?  I then went to my tablet as the tiebreaker, and it read 4:20, too.

So somebody had messed with the hotel room clock, moving it two hours ahead.  Why would somebody do that?  The only thing I can think of is that they thought it would be a funny, mean prank to give an unpleasant jolt to an unsuspecting traveler who was checking the time in the morning — because that’s the only time you look at a clock in a hotel room.

What kind of stupid, inconsiderate jerk would do such a thing?  I’m guessing it was a Trump voter.

Losing Track Of Time

I long ago stopped wearing a wristwatch, and when I arrived in Paris my smartphone — which has been my primary time-telling device for some years now — was out of network and not working.

As a result, I’ve spent the last few days wandering this lovely city, happily oblivious to the time. Richard has a wristwatch, and there are clocks in the apartment we’re renting that we can check if we absolutely have to be somewhere by a specific time. There are even occasional clocks along the routes of our travels, like this beautiful clock found on one of the government buildings on the Ile de la Cite.

For the most part, however, we’ve been moving in response to our own internal rhythms, not the dictates of some infernal machine. We’re eating when we’re hungry, drinking when we’re thirsty, and resting when we’re tired. We know the sun goes down around 5 p.m. (We don’t really know what time the sun rises, because we’ve been sleeping late.) And we know when, after a long day of sightseeing, strolling, and eating some fine meals, it’s time to go to bed.

One of the real pleasures about this kind of trip is not being slave to a clock.

Fall Back, The Clocks Are Attacking!

You never fully realize how many clocks you have in the house until it’s a “time change” Sunday and you have to patrol the household and make sure that every time-keeping instrument is set to the correct hour.

It’s a day that shows how beholden we are to time.  We’ve got clocks on our phones, on our computers, on our stoves, on our microwaves, and on our TVs.  There’s a clock on the dashboard of my car.  We’ve got standalone clocks and alarm clocks and clock radios.  We have more than a dozen clocks in our two-person, two-dog household — and that’s without any wristwatches, because I stopped wearing one years ago.  It’s hard to believe that our ancestors lived for generations without having any kind of timepiece telling them it’s 6:56 a.m.

When it’s time to actually change the time, I develop a special appreciation for computers and smartphones that automatically adjust to Standard Time.  The Sunbeam alarm clocks are next on the simplicity appreciation meter, because you can quickly change the position of the hands on the clock with a twist of a knob on the back.  The clock radio and the microwave are a little bit tougher, because you have to hold down a button and hit another button until the time adjusts to the new normal.

And then there is the clock on the oven, which was designed by some sadistic engineer who wanted to torment sleepy people on a Sunday morning in November.  I can never figure out how to change the clock, so after a few half-hearted attempts and some well-chosen epithets I give up.  After all, it’s only a few months until Daylight Savings Time rolls around again.

Like Clockwork

I like clockwork.  We have a bunch of old clocks, pocket watches, and wall clocks in our home, and I treasure every one.

I love the intricacy of the clocks.  I love the brass fittings, the old glass, the differently sized gears, and the precisely calibrated, finely polished pieces of machinery that allow you to accurately account for time if you just keep the clock wound properly.  I imagine the clockmaker and watchmaker sitting at a cluttered desk, wearing some kind of magnifying glasses, scrupulously putting the pieces together and carefully tightening the screws.

Whenever I see an old clock, I think of baroque music.  The intricacy and precision of Bach and Boccherini and Albinoni seem well suited to provide the soundtrack for clockwork.

Looking At The Leap Second

We all know about leap years, but did you know that there are “leap seconds” — and that scientists are arguing about whether to keep them?

Leap seconds exist because the Earth doesn’t rotate with absolute precision.  It speeds up and slows down as it spins, making some days a few milliseconds faster or slower than others.  The problem is that these little spurts and slowdowns put the Earth out of phase with the precise measurement of atomic clocks.  Leap seconds were added in 1972 to try keep Earth and atomic clocks in sync.  The leap seconds get added here and there, whenever the discrepancy reaches .9 second.

The randomness of the leap second poses problems for systems that require a continuous time reference, like navigation and telecommunications systems.  So, some countries — like the United States, Japan, and France — want to get rid of it.  Others, like the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada, want to keep it because they don’t want the Earth and atomic clocks to get too far out of phase.

After vigorous debate, a typical modern resolution occurred:  we’ll just defer a decision until 2015.  Seems fitting to delay a decision about time, doesn’t it?  In the meantime, enjoy well those magical leap seconds — whenever they occur.

 

Technology, Timekeeping, And The King’s English

Big Ben

The standard clock — with its hour hand and minute hand, its twelve Arabic or Roman numerals, and its soothing metronomic ticking — is quickly becoming an endangered species. Think for a moment about how often you see a standard clock face any more. To the extent that commercial establishments have any kind of timekeeping device (and many of them don’t any longer) it is as likely to be a digital device as a clock. Many younger people don’t wear wristwatches; they use their cell phone, or I Phone, or Blackberry to tell the time. No doubt digital clocks are more precise than old-fashioned clocks.  They don’t need to be wound and there is no doubt what the exact time is. With a digital clock the time is not “about 7:30,” it is 7:28, or 7:32.

This is one of those small cultural intersections where technological changes are altering society in subtle and unexpected ways. We are quickly becoming a country in which different generations talk about time in different ways. Every person above, say, 25 years of age learned to tell time by the hands of clock and describes the time through that frame of reference; many younger people didn’t learn those same lessons and don’t give the time in that way. Tell a teenager that you will meet them at a quarter till 8 and you may well get a puzzled expression and a follow up question asking you to explain what the heck you are talking about. If you meant 7:45, why didn’t you just say so?

We may be seeing he passage of the standard clock into the mists of time, but we can salute it for having left our language a bit richer. “Clockwise” and “counterclockwise” are very useful concepts if you want to tighten or loosen a bolt. Who hasn’t said some hyperactive person was “wound up,” or that they wished they could “turn back the clock”? We wonder what “makes something tick,” and we marvel at a well-built car that “runs like clockwork.” Would Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon be as memorable without the ticking clock or the rich, resonant gong of Big Ben?