
The town's so full of these confounded dials (195 BCE) - apsec112
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/time/hacked-days
======
keithwhor
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...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/07/warren-buffett-taught-bill-gates-
about-time-management-by-sharing-his-blank-calendar.html)

~~~
BiteCode_dev
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
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.

~~~
gerbilly
I don't have anything to do right now, and that's even better than needing to
be reminded.

I make sacrifices to keep my schedule as slack as possible.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
On my calendar today:

\- Lunch with some friends.

\- A call with a client this afternoon.

The first one is not "a sacrifice". The second is potentially going to make me
earn one month of salary in a day of work.

So yeah, I want that to be reminded to me.

But even if you don't want a schedule (you are rich or don't work much, don't
plan things with your friends, etc), well, a calendar is not just for what you
do.

E.G: I'm visiting my mother this week. Tomorrow though, I have an entry saying
she is out of town. She told me that 2 days ago, and that's useful information
for many reasons, but not something I want to keep in my head. Tomorrow
morning, I will read it, and just integrate the information into my day.

Now you might argue: friends and family or a big clients are important enough,
you should not need a calendar to remember that. Or, you should not plan
things with your friends, it's spontaneous. Or you should communicate with
your mother.

But that's not the point. I don't have a calendar because I have to. Nobody
cares that I have one.

I have one because it frees my mind of all those informations. This way I can
focus in the now. When I'm having lunch with my friends, I'm not thinking
about the client call, and yet, there is no chance for me to miss it.

It's fantastic, given the price is a few seconds to add entries, and a few
more to review them.

------
dbatten
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...

------
bloak
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?

~~~
ginko
>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
The third twelfth of the day between dawn and dusk.

------
blunte
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.

~~~
calgoo
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
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.

------
pmontra
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.

~~~
blunte
Forbidden to whom? It worked fine for me.

~~~
pmontra
I can only see this

Forbidden

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

~~~
kupiv
For me it also works fine. Maybe, it is because of your geolocation? I know,
that some websites ban special places :(

~~~
pmontra
Maybe it's a GDPR cage: I'm in Europe.

~~~
iso1631
Works fine for me in UK

------
dr_dshiv
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.“"

------
DoctorOetker
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?

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

[https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/gellius.html](https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/gellius.html)

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

[https://www.loebclassics.com/view/plautus-
fragments/2013/pb_...](https://www.loebclassics.com/view/plautus-
fragments/2013/pb_LCL328.433.xml)

~~~
bnjmn
Thanks!

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

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7007731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7007731)

------
alejohausner
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.

------
everyone
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.

