i’m writing this on the train on the way home, and it’s one of those that i’ve been thinking about for a while. i’ve been pondering compartmentalization and how much it’s a need for humans. there’s a scene in the movie iq where a man is being used as part of an experiment, and during this test he’s kept in a room where the lighting and atmosphere is constant, so there’s no sense of time passing (no lights dimming at night, it doesn’t get colder), and the subject of this test is raving wildly, completely unable to cope with the loss of some kind of marker by which to measure time. this makes me think about the human need to put things in ‘boxes’, if you will excuse the crudity of that term. not just time, although that is the example that pops immediately to mind. we feel the need to break up time into little chunks, manageable chunks, of days, weeks, years, and down to minutes, seconds. i have several peers who can’t move more than 5 feet away from their pim devices, and they have their entire lives (at least as far as they are concerned) broken down into 15 or 30 minute intervals. go to a meeting, have lunch. drive home. work out. watch tv. as much as people may think it is a necessity to know what they are doing, why is such granularity needed? the need to always know, or to quantify not just where we are, but when we are has become a defining characteristic of our modern society. and although everyone can own a watch and know when they are down to any minute, meaningless fraction of a second, the knowledge of where we are has lagged behind in scope. you can know where you are, relatively, simply by looking around. i’m on a train, i’m in san jose, i’m near first street. but how does that break down on a global scale? how does it relate to latitude or longitude? who really cares? how many people carry a device that can show them exactly where they are? even though gps devices are becoming more and more common, they still lag much behind ownership of a wristwatch. i don’t own a gps, or a watch, and although i don’t always know what time it is, i can get pretty close, and i don’t ever know where i am in the grand scheme of things, i’m still pretty sure that i can get home at night. last weekend i went camping in the wilderness, and we drove all night, set up tents as the sun rose, then took a nap. when i got up, the first thing that came into my mind i asked my friend andy, the captain: “dude, what time is it”. suddenly i caught myself and told him: “belay that order. for the next four days, if i ever ask what time it is, the only response i want to hear is: ‘it’s time for a beer.'” it was the most relaxing four days i’ve had in years.

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