A village builds a clock tower so everyone can glance up at it and know what time it is. The tower helps as people meet more easily, work schedules align, and meals are shared. Over time, fewer people watch the sun and the clock becomes authoritative. When it stops working, nobody knows what time it is.
Discord ensues and arguments follow as meetings are missed and people wait impatiently for repairs.
An older woman in the village kept baking at dawn and never stopped watching the sun. She never relied on the clock. Villagers gathers at her door and call her wise, for her practice ends up inadvertently helping to re-calibrate the clock once it is repaired. She replies that she is not wise or special and was just going about her usual baking routine.
This assumes the people fixing the clock know how to tell time based on the movement of the sun.
In the story, the baker was the only one left with that ability, as others left the skill behind when the clock became the authority.
This problem has been seen when missionaries, or whoever else, try and bring tribes into more modern civilization. They have trouble adapting to modern civilization, but the skill loss during that process makes it almost impossible to go back to the jungle.
When skills are lost due to modern technology, it isn’t so trivial to get them back. Look at how much time people have spent trying to figure out how stone was moved in ancient Egypt, for example.
I am not implying that skill loss does not happen in other situations, but I don't understand how someone would be able to calibrate a clock by the time a baker starts her work day, but not by the time the sun comes up. What am I missing?
Maybe the baker got up and started baking every day at 4am, year-round.
Sunrise changes throughout the year. Sunrise in December and July are not the same thing.
To set the clock, they’d need a reference for the solar time to clock time for the current day.
I ran into this in Rome when I visited last year. A church there has a giant solar clock where the sun shows up on a line on the floor at noon (or so I was told). At noon, nothing happened. After thinking for a second, I realized I would need to find solar noon, and went to Wolfram Alpha to find that solar noon, in Rome, on that day, was 1:19pm.
The other option would be for the town to arbitrarily set the clock to solar noon one day, and just go with it, letting the drift be the drift. But the time would not be the same as it was before the reset. It could be an hour or more off.
Relevant talk about preventing the collapse of civilization <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
retrocog · · focus · HN ↗
falcor84 · · focus · HN ↗
al_borland · · focus · HN ↗
In the story, the baker was the only one left with that ability, as others left the skill behind when the clock became the authority.
This problem has been seen when missionaries, or whoever else, try and bring tribes into more modern civilization. They have trouble adapting to modern civilization, but the skill loss during that process makes it almost impossible to go back to the jungle.
When skills are lost due to modern technology, it isn’t so trivial to get them back. Look at how much time people have spent trying to figure out how stone was moved in ancient Egypt, for example.
falcor84 · · focus · HN ↗
al_borland · · focus · HN ↗
Sunrise changes throughout the year. Sunrise in December and July are not the same thing.
To set the clock, they’d need a reference for the solar time to clock time for the current day.
I ran into this in Rome when I visited last year. A church there has a giant solar clock where the sun shows up on a line on the floor at noon (or so I was told). At noon, nothing happened. After thinking for a second, I realized I would need to find solar noon, and went to Wolfram Alpha to find that solar noon, in Rome, on that day, was 1:19pm.
The other option would be for the town to arbitrarily set the clock to solar noon one day, and just go with it, letting the drift be the drift. But the time would not be the same as it was before the reset. It could be an hour or more off.
vinyl7 · · focus · HN ↗