This week’s theme was the “scale of time increments”; that there are “approximately 365.242199 days in a year. But that number is changing…constantly. Atomic clocks count 9,192,631,770 cycles per second of the cesium-133 atoms to maintain a precise second. Time operates differently depending on the scale of the time increment. Our perception of time is often bound by measurements of time that we cannot perceive. How can we reinterpret these out-of-scale increments into increments we can understand?”
Our assignment was to imagine a relational clock that corresponds to a time scale that is not normally perceivable to humans. How can we visualize an imperceivable increment in relation to a perceivable increment?
After going for a walk in Union Square and recently through Times Square I thought of the National Debt and Atomic Clocks in these areas. While we all understand that the national debt affects our lives and the stability of the country, what does the astronomical number ($12 trillion and counting) really mean on a day-to-day basis? What if we could combine these two almost imperceivable yet visible increments in a combined way? What if we had a clock that calculated national debt by the day, hour?; or, perhaps by the amount of lives we could impact, or neighborhoods we could rebuild? Would it make more sense; would we be more inclined to action?
