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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 26 Nov 2017

Taken: 27 Jul 2017

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In Search of Time •
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Dan Falk •

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SUN DIAL

SUN DIAL
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
By the time of the Roman Empire, sundials had become both sophisticated and common. In the first century B.C., an architect named Vitruvius could list thirteen kinds of sundials. They were placed in public squares and private courtyards. They soon became integral to Roman society, allowing people to structure their days, which could now be mapped out into hours, and hours cut into halves and quarters.

Not everyone was pleased. "The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours" the Roman playwright Plautus lamented in the second century B.C. "Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my days so wretchedly into small portions!" ~ Page 57
6 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
We can’t directly estimate time the way we can directly (if erroneously) estimate space, by eye. Time isn’t visible. We can only measure the effects of time, processes that occur in time and that go hand-in-glove with the passing of time. We can count seconds silently: one one thousand, two one thousand, but we wouldn’t use the heuristic for hours much less for days. Sundials, water clocks, hourglasses, the burning of oil or a candle (“Out, out brief candle”) have all been used to measure time by observing the visible consequences of processes that occur in time. T.S.Eliot’s J.Alfred Prunfrock: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” More recently the decay of radioactive substances. What’s especially elegant for these is that they are self-measuring. Time is correlated with visible changes we can read. In egypt, obelisks were not only monuments to the sun god but also sundials, providing the approximate time of day and year to those at the distance. Undoubtedly, because of the significance of agriculture in our lives, Stonehenge and Mayan temples are aligned with the solstices and equinoxes. Capturing the movement of water, sand, or shadows captures time. These are self-illustrating instruments; they visualize time directly. On a larger scale, the phases of the moon, the rotation of stars, and the angle of the sun all can be used to indicate time. `Page 213 "Mind in Motion" - Barbara Tversky
4 years ago.

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