3 ms·
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 abilit
by al_borland 5d ago
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.
- falcor84 5d agoI 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?
- al_borland 5d agoMaybe 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.