The town's so full of these confounded dials (195 BCE)

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/time/hacked-days

by apsec112 • 7 years ago

248 55 7 years ago

keithwhor• 7 years ago

I love this. I remember reading an anecdote of Gates discussing his relationship with Buffet — there may be a video interview — where Gates was astounded at how empty Buffet’s calendar was.

As a founder, I’m more of a Buffet. I schedule time when and where necessary (which is, admittedly, most of my time most weeks) but I hate feeling as if I’m restricted to obeying numbers in a database in order to function.

It fills me with an inordinate amount of joy to imagine the simplicity of a world in which you’d only return home to eat. I think that’s how I operated as a kid in the summers, riding bikes and walking around town with friends until we needed to eat. I feel like those moments are underrated and very visceral, instinctual parts of the human experience.

Wild how only a few lines of prose from people that existed thousands of years before us can evoke these sorts of feelings.

[Edit] Apparently, this anecdote is very famous and very Google-able:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/07/warren-buffett-taught-bill-g...

ehnto• 7 years ago

I think that’s how I operated as a kid in the summers, riding bikes and walking around town with friends until we needed to eat. I feel like those moments are underrated and very visceral, instinctual parts of the human experience.

This is exactly how I spent my youth, and I try to use how I felt those moments as a comparison for how engaged I with the real world at any point. If I find myself too decoupled from real life and too deep into work, I will extract myself by leaving the house without any devices or any place to be. I love those moments. I no longer carry a smartphone with me, just a standalone smartwatch for incoming calls, so that's actually made those moments to be any moment I'm not at my desk.

It's why travel, even local travel, is so important to me. I can live moment to moment, experiencing life in simple visceral terms. How do I feel right now, and what does that make me want to do? Well, let's do that then.

saiya-jin2• 7 years ago

Backpacking is the essence of travelling you describe. Just buy a return ticket, some guidebook (not necessary but usually more help than harm), maybe a local phrasebook. Ideally avoid most touristic places or zoom through them quickly.

Living in the moment, many unplanned unique experiences every single day, 2 week vacation feels like a month or two passed by.

I did that in India&Nepal twice, each time 3 months, and I literally forgot about reality back home, it felt like 5 lives before, memory of a distant dream. Submersion was absolute, same for my partner back then. It helped it was 2008 & 2010, we didn't have phones with us.

These days, I can afford to travel in much more luxury but I will always revert to backpacking. It is simply better, more rewarding and intense experience. But sometimes I need to rest after such a vacation :)

alexpotato• 7 years ago

Wild how only a few lines of prose from people that existed thousands of years before us can evoke these sorts of feelings.

I remember reading a couple first hand account books ranging from the 1880s to the 1920s and I remember being surprised at how modern the English was. It felt like I was reading a book written yesterday.

Working in technology sometimes feels like things are changing too quickly to keep up. Reading a 100 year old book and thinking, "This guy is totally understandable and relatable!" was a nice reminder that some things stay the same.

BiteCode_dev3• 7 years ago

To me a calendar is not a constraint. It's a god send. I don't feel trapped with all the things on my calendar: I chose to put them in there so I want to do them.

The reason I have a calendar is not to structure my life at all. It's just so I can forget all that stuff while I have no reason to think about it. Set it in the calendar, forget it. It will pop up in the morning, when I need it.

It's so relaxing.

Jagat• 7 years ago

This. Calendars, TODO lists, reminders, alarms.

These things free up my mind so I can focus on other things instead of worrying about what I should be doing right now because I don't have it written anywhere.

Spooky232• 7 years ago

Keep in mind that Buffet is a different kind of manager.

Gates is a notorious micromanager (in the early days of MS he memorized employee license plates to keep tabs on comings and goings). Buffet is a macro kind of guy. He buys companies, leaves management in place and skims the cream.

tim3332• 7 years ago

Impressive given Berkshire had 300k+ employees. I guess he's good at delegating.

gshubert17• 7 years ago

I think the number of staff at BRK's Omaha headquarters is around 30. He is indeed good at delegating. Buffet mentions this quite a lot in his annual letters.

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

esotericn• 7 years ago

I really try to live up this mindset but I find it very different.

The crucial thing really is that as a child everyone else is in the same boat.

As an adult? Pretty much all of my friends are either at work or plan their calendars to the gills. Even if you try, I'm not sure you can 'go back', unfortunately.

I can't remember the last time I was able to call someone and say 'yo, wanna do X?' and they actually could without advance planning.

ubertakter2• 7 years ago

Take a cue from what my friends and I do: we generally agree to do whatever in general terms, say, visit a place Saturday after lunch. That's it. We might coordinate on a start time, but after that, it's whatever we feel like, no set schedule. We occasionally do this for longer trips, where we rent a cabin somewhere for a few days and then just do whatever we feel like. There's some planning involved in order to get to the correct area with the correct equipment (whatever is needed for the activity), but there's no strict timeline.

By the way, my wife is a "planner", so this drivers her crazy, not that she is going with us anyway. So a conversation might be like this: Wife:"What time are you going to the brewery?" Me:"Eh, after lunch" Wife:"So what time?" Me:"Maybe 1300?" Wife:"After that?" Me:"We'll get dinner somewhere" Wife:"Where? When?" Me:"Somewhere, whenever we get hungry. We'll decide on-the-fly." Wife:"Arrrggghhh!!" I have to confess I get a lot of amusement out of her reactions.

pmontra3• 7 years ago

That web site is Forbidden now. Here's the text from Google cache

The gods confound the man who first found out

How to distinguish hours! Confound him too

Who in this place set up a sundial

To cut and hack my days so wretchedly

Into small portions! When I was a boy,

My belly was my sundial: one more sure,

Truer, and more exact than any of them.

This dial told me when it was time

To go to dinner, when I had anything to eat;

But nowadays, why even when I have,

I can’t fall-to unless the sun gives leave.

The town’s so full of these confounded dials,

The greatest part of its inhabitants,

Shrunk up with hunger, creep along the streets.

blunte3• 7 years ago

Forbidden to whom? It worked fine for me.

pmontra3• 7 years ago

I can only see this

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /time/hacked-days on this server.

blunte3• 7 years ago

Now it's not the sundials, it's the smartphones. When was the last time anyone left their home without their phone? (And when you accidentally do, you feel something terrible could happen!)

This "always knowing" (the time, the weather, one's email, the status of one's friends, and so on) must be some mental burden. I think like any other information pusher, it presses against the natural tendency of the mind to wander and to spontaneously create.

buzzkillington• 7 years ago

Alternatively it's part of the human condition.

I can imagine someone complaining about the phases of the moon and how they are hacking up their month in 10,000BC.

Why do I need there wretched months to know when it will be cold and when hot? The snow on the ground is all the time keeping I need.

VBprogrammer• 7 years ago

I would almost guarantee you that people before the advent of modern time pieces had a much better sense of what the "time" was because they'd have been more reliant on it.

blunte3• 7 years ago

Indeed, but it's a very, very different human condition from that of 50 years ago. It's quite a drastic change for such a tiny slice of human existence.

I'd wager that never before in human history have people been so inundated with information. It may take some time, but I someday people will study this period and identify significant changes in what people created and the way they created it (in relation to the sudden lack of mental wandering time).

calgoo• 7 years ago

My wife’s family is from Puerto Rico, but we live in Spain. When the hurricane hit and the comms where knocked out, we where not able to talk with them for weeks. One of the things I told my wife was to remember when we where young, and it was normal to not get an update on everyone’s life on a daily basis. It was a bit of a wake up call to me of how used we are to instant comms.

hvidgaard• 7 years ago

That doesn't fundamentally relate to instant communication. Back then, you'd be worried as well - after all you probably knew a hurricane just landed.

tapland2• 7 years ago

I don't know if it is the phone.

The iPhone was released when I was in high school and before buying one it was very stressful knowing there might be emails I really need to respond to asap, but I can't even know if they exist.

With physical mail it didn't matter since there were big delays and no expectations of fast responses.

I don't think the phone is the issue, but the bad habit of signing up for services that will give you notifications the importance of which is impossible to tell until you've checked (is this a like on a photo or an important message from a relative?)

workthrowaway• 7 years ago

...I was in high school and before buying one it was very stressful knowing there might be emails I really need to respond to asap

that's an interesting anecdote. it was the opposite experience for me. friends and i had yahoo and hotmail emails back then but no one cared about sending emails or replying to them.

yahoo messenger and msn messenger were the reason those were created. i can't recall anyone stressing about it because the person you'd be messaging was with you most of the time...

rimliu• 7 years ago

I pretty much always have my phone with me, but I have almost all notifications disabled. I do use facebook, but I don't have an app for it, just go to the website, so no notifications here. I do have the messenger app, but I do not communicate much on it, so if I get a notification there it's probably important, not some random chat. I do not have my work email on my personal phone. All-in-all I get maybe a dozen notifications a day.

After all, you are right, most of the things are not that important that you should know about them right at the moment they happen. It's just a noise pretending to be useful information.

mattr47• 7 years ago

My wife and I just returned from our first cruise. We elected to not purchase any internet and also left our phones in our stateroom about half the time. We wore no watches, and just wandered on the ship, reading, watching the ocean, watching people, sleeping in the sun. It was marvelous!

iso16312• 7 years ago

stateroom

So what's the difference between "stateroom" and "cabin"?

ubertakter2• 7 years ago

This reminds me of a saying I picked up from some (very much) older engineer: Segal's Law: A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.

I feel like information overload is like this sometimes. Which is probably why I try to reduce information that shows up automatically on my phone...

dr_dshiv• 7 years ago

Also from Attic Nights, which is essentially a collection of trivia, here is a discussion of the first flying machine, as devised by Archytas the Pythagorean and "father of mechanical engineering" :

"For not only many eminent Greeks, but also the philosopher Favorinus, a most diligent searcher of ancient records, have stated most positively that Archytas made a wooden model of a dove with such mechanical ingenuity and art that it flew; so nicely balanced was it, you see, with weights and moved by a current of air enclosed and hidden within it. About so improbable a story I prefer to give Favorinus' own words: “Archytas the Tarentine, being in other lines also a mechanician, made a flying dove out of wood. Whenever it lit, it did not rise again.“"

classified2• 7 years ago

I would have loved a link to the original text fragment. noctes atticae is quite long:

https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/gellius.html

dmurray• 7 years ago

It's here under Boeotia, starting "ut illum di perdant".

https://www.loebclassics.com/view/plautus-fragments/2013/pb_...

bnjmn• 7 years ago

Thanks!

classified2• 7 years ago

Found it in chapter 3 of book 3 in Aulus Gellius:

https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/gellius/gellius3.shtml#3

bloak• 7 years ago

Anyone have a picture of one of those confounded dials?

I was told that the Romans, traditionally, and still at the time of Julius Caesar, divided the day, from sunrise to sunset, into twelve hours, so the "first hour" would be just after sunrise, but what astronomical local time that corresponded to would depend on the time of year. An ordinary sundial gives you astronomical local time. So I wonder how that worked in ancient Rome. Did they convert between the two systems, or did the two rival systems coexist? Did people have to say "the third hour, old-style" or "the third hour according to the sundials" ("hora tertia secundum solarium"?) to make it clear what they meant?

CGamesPlay• 7 years ago

I can’t imagine it mattered much, anyone they were sharing times with would be in the same city.

Spooky232• 7 years ago

Coordinated time has really only existed since railroads and telegraphs appeared.

Prior to that, at least in the early 19th century, you used a local meridian (ie. local noon) to set midday. This automatically created time mismatch, as theres a ~4 minute difference for each degree of longitude. It didn't matter in antiquity as there was no way to communicate with that level of speed/precision! (1 degree is ~70 miles)

There were multiple systems, for example the Hebrew day started at sunset. I'm not sure what that meant in Rome itself, but I'm sure it was a mess in the provinces.

tim3332• 7 years ago

A couple of pictures of Roman dials from around that time:

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/roman-sundial-pompeii-sc...

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/515149/rare-2000-year-ol...

ginko• 7 years ago

Did people have to say "the third hour, old-style" or "the third hour according to the sundials" ("hora tertia secundum solarium"?) to make it clear what they meant?

As opposed to what?

projektfu• 7 years ago

The third twelfth of the day between dawn and dusk.

cwmma• 7 years ago

the sun dials they used were less sophisticated then modern ones and didn't give uniform hours throughout the year, according to Wikipedia, those types of sun dials date to the 13th century.

teddyh• 7 years ago

Back in in 2014, I quoted this exact text as a comment on the “Durr” wristband:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7007731

DoctorOetker• 7 years ago

The author writes as if for adults it was far in the past (their youth) that they ate simply when they were hungry, not regulated by clocks. But what did the adults and roman society do on cloudy days or dark seasons? Did they have some kind of more expensive or less accurate back up technology for darker or cloudy days? Did cloudy days imply a group of "clock people" turning hour glasses?

Perhaps water clocks? Perhaps people working in the roman baths also ran water clocks? Was entrance to roman baths free? How long could one stay in the roman baths? Perhaps their aquaducts was more important to them than only for roman baths and sanitary infrastructure, but also for timekeeping on cloudy days?

dbatten• 7 years ago

I sympathize with this a lot.

"A Severe Mercy" by Sheldon Vanauken is one of my favorite books, if not my favorite. A significant theme of that work is "moments made eternity," where eternity is used to connote both a sense of timelessness and of heaven. The author finds that his (and his wife's) most joyous times were precisely those moments where they lost track of time and simply enjoyed something (e.g., gazing at the night sky stretching out above the ocean) as long as they cared to. When they were done, they couldn't tell if minutes or hours had passed, but it didn't matter. In fact, that was part of the joy of the moment. Ultimately, they find themselves longing for the Christian ideal of heaven, where eternity will be all they have and they'll no longer be constrained by time.

I too find that I enjoy such moments of timelessness... one in particular sticks out in my head. I had hiked with my 2-year-old son down to a creek in a local state park. I sat in the grass and watched while he threw pine cones and sticks into the water, splashed around, and just had a blast doing what boys do. When I checked the time, I realized that we had been there for nearly 3 hours, though I could have sworn it was only a few minutes.

I find clocks as useful as anybody else, but I also find escaping them for a bit to be a delight...

everyone• 7 years ago

Its funny that the writer also had to awkwardly jam in the fact that they didnt always have food. The timeless 'life was so hard back in my day' routine.

alejohausner• 7 years ago

Could there be an etymological connection between Latin "Cronus" (the god of time), and Latin "grano" (corn or grain)? Today, we measure time in seconds and minutes, but the in old agrarian societies there were no clocks, and the pace of time was measured by the seasonal rhythm of the crops.

According to wikipedia, the name Cronus is of uncertain origin, while grano comes from proto Indo-European.

The town's so full of these confounded dials (195 BCE)

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