time

The Search Decade

What to call the ten years we’re now clos­ing down? I am unmoved by “the Naughts” and even by “the Naugh­ties,” which is clever but (it seems to me) wish­ful. I mean, come on. They weren’t that naughty.

Over in the St. Peters­burg Times, Michael Kruse sug­gests the Search Decade. It might not grab you imme­di­ately, but go read his pitch. Even if you walk away still call­ing it the Naugh­ties, it’ll help you appre­ci­ate just how long a decade is:

Back in May 2000, which wasn’t that long ago, which was for­ever ago, the New Yorker’s Michael Specter wrote a piece partly about Google in which he felt it nec­es­sary to define search engines: “pro­grams that hunt for Web pages in response to spe­cific words or phrases.”

I like the style and pac­ing of Kruse’s piece. I also like, of course, the fact that he uses EPIC 2014 as a hook!

 

Time, space, and warehouse robots

Alexis Madri­gal has a great piece about ware­house robots over at Wired Sci­ence. Here’s a nuance I would not have predicted:

The sys­tem adjusts to the nature of the prod­ucts and work­ers, too. In a typ­i­cal [robot ware­house], the humans are placed around the edges of the room. As the robots pick up loads of prod­ucts and put them back, they adjust the ware­house for greater effi­ciency. More pop­u­lar prod­ucts end up around the edges of the ware­house while more obscure prod­ucts, like those acid-washed bell bot­toms, end up buried deep in the stacks. The self-tuning nature of the sys­tem cre­ates big efficiencies.

How cool is that? The ware­house adapts. The phys­i­cal space becomes a map of the under­ly­ing cost of time—which isn’t just about raw dis­tance in this case, but about rep­e­ti­tion, too.

I real­ize this sort of map­ping exists else­where; I just can’t think of any­where else where it’s so flex­i­ble. For instance, I’m think­ing about this view of Lon­don that paints both hous­ing cost (in dol­lars) and travel cost (in min­utes) onto the map. Now if only bits of the city could scoot around on robot wheels and rearrange them­selves for max­i­mum efficiency…

See also: Matt Jones’ recent talk on time as a mate­r­ial that can be manip­u­lated and designed.

 

Counting, and things other than counting

Car­o­line McCarthy chose exactly the right pic­ture for the occa­sion. I posted the tweet with an ID of 5,000,000,000—not nec­es­sar­ily the five-billionth tweet, but I’ll take the zeroes how­ever I can get ‘em—and it’s got me think­ing about count­ing schemes.

Think of the total arbi­trari­ness of some­thing like the year 2000—and how even under­stand­ing that arbi­trari­ness didn’t make it feel less momen­tous. How totally unmomen­tous it really was in ret­ro­spect. The sense­less power of round-number birthdays—I’m turn­ing 30 this Decem­ber! Thirty what? Units of orbital wisdom?

That, in turn, makes me think—and I’ve linked to this sev­eral times before—of Matt Webb’s sub­lime per­sonal light cone cal­cu­la­tor. He describes it succinctly:

From the moment of my birth, light [that I could have influ­enced] has been expand­ing around the Earth and light [which could influ­ence me, from an increas­ing dis­tance of ori­gin] reach­ing it—this ever-growing sphere of poten­tial causal­ity is my light cone.

I’ve been sub­scribed to my per­sonal light cone RSS feed for a few years now, and I always enjoy see­ing that the pho­tons bounced back by our planet on Decem­ber 19, 1979 have reached a new star. They just passed—literally just yes­ter­day—Beta Comae Berenices.

Even beyond its obvi­ous sci-fi appeal, I appre­ci­ate the light cone’s non-annual nature. Progress doesn’t come at an even pace. Another thing Matt Webb and his col­leagues at BERG do is give evoca­tive code-names to big, chunky phases of their col­lec­tive life, marked by expan­sion or shift­ing focus. The phase they’re in now, they’ve dubbed the Escalante. How cool is that?

Per­sonal epochs are infi­nitely prefer­able to pre­ex­ist­ing schemes. This NYT fea­ture about life phases is charm­ing and well-designed, but let it not go unsaid: It’s also totally oppres­sive. I know, I know, it’s tongue-in-cheek, but even so. These things sneak in.

We mea­sure every­thing these days by, er, mea­sur­ing. It’s all clocks and coun­ters. Even things that don’t func­tion as clocks or coun­ters are tick­ing away inside. My printer is tick­ing away inside. This blog is tick­ing away inside.

Con­trast it all to my lit­tle vir­tual athan, which I’ve still got run­ning. That’s another way of sub­di­vid­ing time, but it seems to me it’s a more sen­si­tive one. Rather than, you know, very sci­en­tif­i­cally count the sec­onds and then cel­e­brate some­thing arbitrary—OMG 12:34:56 P.M.!!—we come up with some­thing arbi­trary to start with and then lay it over the day. More sen­si­tive, and more honest.

What would life be like with­out a clock? I mean, really dili­gently clock-free. Would you be more or less tuned into the sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence of time? That is, when you’re really jam­ming, really flow­ing in a Csíkszentmihályi-ian sense—without a clock to look up to and go “What the…! Five hours have passed,” is the expe­ri­ence still remark­able? Or does it just feel nor­mal? Maybe the sun just steps in as a sub­sti­tute timepiece—“Heavens, ’tis dusk already!”—and it’s impos­si­ble to be truly clock-free, at least as long as you’re still on this planet, and still have a window.

This is all to say, think about what, and how, you count.

Kappa-1 Ceti, here I come.