Our tools for measuring, recording, remembering, and reasoning about time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an excruciatingly detailed 22-page pdf article by Kensy Cooperrider at Topics in Cognitive Science on April 29, 2025 (Volume 18, Number 1, pages 147 to 168) titled Time Tools. He concludes:

 

“We humans come into the world with basically the same biological equipment for managing time as many other animals, and probably all other primates. But we nonetheless end up with an understanding of time that is unlike any other in the natural world. This is because we alone have developed cognitive technologies to help us grapple with temporal structures - and helpful they are. They allow us to tally, coordinate, predict, measure, record, remember, and reason; they allow us to deal with time in new, powerful ways. Though some of the consequences of time tools are quite recent, others are far older: some scholars have proposed that early time tools like seasonal calendars may have already begun to improve our foraging success in the Upper Paleolithic.

 

Our cognitive technologies for thinking about time have now become so deeply internalized, so woven into our understanding of the world, that we can barely imagine a world without them. Clocks, calendars, and timelines; seconds, minutes, hours; shared ways of talking about time as something to be saved and ‘budgeted’; ideas of time zones and deadlines and setting clocks back - these ideas are now utterly banal. Today, to not know the day of the week - an arbitrary convention par excellence—is to experience deep disorientation. Physicians check on patients’ faculties by asking them what year it is, and a common formal screening for cognitive impairment involves reading an analog clock. One of the most remarkable aspects of our time tools - and of human cognitive technologies in general - is that we grow so dependent on them that they become almost invisible.

 

Here, I have tried to shake up this feeling of invisibility - to remove, as it were, the glasses we had forgotten we were wearing. By focusing on earlier, less familiar time tools - in particular, those that came before the rise of ubiquitous ‘clock time’ - I have tried to bring into focus: first, the diversity of concepts, practices, and artifacts humans have developed for dealing with time; and, second, the universality of the practical problems that humans have used time tools to solve. The importance of our time tools is hard to overstate. Much is made –understandably - of our species’ ecological dominance, of the fact that we were able to spread over a vast swath of space, occupying niches that are completely inhospitable to other primates. Less is made of our species ‘temporal dominance,’ of the fact that we alone have learned to navigate and master - and, arguably, construct - a fourth dimension of the world. Without time tools this would have been, quite literally, unthinkable.”

 

An image of Big Ben came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

An excellent comprehensive monthly calendar for planning to improve your public speaking this year

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On January first I blogged about In 2026 only you can prevent bad presentations, and mentioned an article by Maurice Decastro at Mindful Presenter on December 28, 2025 titled 10 Ways to Develop Strong Public Speaking Skills in 2026. He has another article on January 1, 2026 titled Transform your public speaking skills: a comprehensive yearly growth calendar. It has the following categories organized by months, each of which is briefly discussed:

  

January – Prioritise what matters most

Identify your ‘why”

Focus on your strengths first

Find a trusted friend or colleague

 

February – Clarity is king

Start small and clarify one core message

Know your audience and shape the message around them

Pressure-test your clarity

 

March – Create a strong, impactful opening and closing

Begin with a compelling quote or question

Share a fascinating anecdote, statistic, or fact

Create an image

Close with impact

 

April – Managing your nerves

Ground your body to calm your mind

Shift focus away from yourself

Build confidence through preparation, not perflection

 

May – Could you listen to yourself?

Record yourself practicing

Slow down and pause

Experiment with volume and emphasis

 

June – Practice mindful movement

Connect with the ground and your hands

Connect through eye contact

Connect with yourself before speaking

 

July – Manage your bad habits

Fire, aim, read

One size fits all

The curse of knowledge

Avoiding mud at the wall

Avoiding PPI (Preparation, practice, internalization)

The tornado effect

Looking good

Avoiding the bush

The ostrich syndrome

Speed of light

Energy is key

The corporate spokesperson

The comforter

Motion sickness

Let’s count

You don’t sound so sure

 

August – Share stories

Create a personal story bank

Structure your story and make it emotionally engaging

Enhance your story delivery skills

 

September – Focus on engagement and interaction

Ask questions

Encourage reflection and gauge the atmosphere

Boost audience participation

 

October – Get out more

Attend live events

Look for opportunities to learn

Ask for help when needed

 

November – Mastering questions

Listen fully and clarify

Pause, smile, and breathe

Stay focused and strategic

 

December – Spend time reflecting

Reflect on your learning and add new techniques

Demonstrate your skills in practical situations

Create a personal development plan

 

His monthly titles had dashes for January, February, March, April, May, September, October, and November; But he used colons for June, July, August, and December. I edited to make them consistent.

 

There are three categories in each month for January, February, April, May, June, August, September, October, November, and December. But there are four categories for March, and sixteen categories for July. That is a total of 44 categories! Those 16 from July might better have left four there, and spread the remaining dozen as two each over six months.

 

The calendar was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.  

 

 

An excellent blog post on how to rehearse a speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an excellent post by Nick Morgan at his Public Words blog on February 6, 2024 titled How to Rehearse a Speech which has the following half-dozen useful suggestions:

 

As soon as you can, ‘freeze’ the script.

 

Record the speech and play it on walks, runs, drives, and anything else repetitive you do before the event.

 

Break the speech into chunks and rehearse them out of order.

 

Spend time connecting your motion on stage with the moments of your speech.

 

Memorize the flow of the speech, not the specific words.

 

Practice the speech with different emotional tones.

 

The image of Brittney Marie came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Four portmanteau words with less and more; never and ever

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wikipedia says that:

 

“In linguistics, a portmanteau (also known as a blend word, lexical blend, or simply blend) is a word formed by combining the meanings and parts of the sounds of two or more words.”

 

The 2x2 table shown above lists those for combinations of less and more; and never and ever. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says that nevertheless is an adverb meaning “in spite of that; however”, nevermore is an adverb meaning “never again,” and evermore is an adverb meaning “forever, always.” Everless isn’t in the dictionary; but instead is the title for a 2018 book by Sara Holland: Everless: A New York Times Bestselling YA Fantasy Romance of Time and Dangerous Secrets.

 

On January 19, 2024 I blogged about The Joy of 2x2 tables, or charts, or matrixes.

 

 

An xkcd cartoon about hazardous male-to-male extension cords

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The xkcd comic for January 23, 2026 is titled Double-Pronged Extension Cord. My colorized version is shown above. It was discussed at Explain xkcd. A Wikipedia article titled Gender of connectors and fasteners has a section on Safety that explains how this is a tragedy waiting to happen:

 

“A double-ended male connector for utility-supplied (mains) electrical power is extremely dangerous, and sometimes is called a ‘suicide cable’ or ‘widowmaker cord’. Some hardware shops explicitly refuse to make or sell them when asked by customers who have mistakenly hung a string of Christmas lights backwards and wish to connect the socket end to a wall socket, or who intend to connect a generator or inverter to their home's electrical circuit in the event of a utility power outage. The exposed prongs on the live end of the cable pose serious electrical shock and fire hazards, and when improperly used in a generator setup may cause the equipment to burn out when utility power is restored. It can also backfeed power into the grid, potentially damaging utility equipment or even electrocuting linemen attempting to restore power.^”

 

There is an article at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) web site on September 15, 2022 titled CPSC warns consumers to immediately stop using male-to-male extension cords sold on Amazon.com due to electrocution, fire, and carbon monoxide poisoning hazards. A follow-up article at Consumer Reports by Tobie Stanger on September 16, 2022 is titled Don’t Use Male-to-Male Extension Cords Sold on Amazon – or Elsewhere.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For photography male-to-male extension cords sometimes were used to synchronize a pair of electronic flashes for cameras, like the suicide cable shown above. Of course, this was potentially dangerous because someone else might instead plug one end into an AC wall socket and destroy your flash. See an article at STROBIST in April 2006 titled Lighting 101: Build a Pro Synch Cord, Pt. 1.

 

The image of a suicide cable came from Wikimedia Commons. 

 

 

Before bows and arrows, hunters used spear throwers called atlatals

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a 2025 book by Sam Kean titled Dinner with King Tut: How rogue archeologists are re-creating the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of lost civilizations. I blogged about it in a post on January 26, 2026 titled What did Egyptian laborers who built the pyramids eat? That book has eleven chapters that cover the following dates:

 

Africa – 75,000 years ago

South America – 7500 BC

Turkey -6500s BC

Egypt – 2000s BC

Polynesia – 1000s BC

Rome – AD 100s

California – AD 500s

Viking Europe – AD 900s

Northern Alaska – AD 1000s

China – AD 1200s

Mexico – AD 1500s

 

Chapter 2, South America – 7500 BC, has a section starting on page 67 about a spear thrower (shown above) called an atlatal:

 

“The atlatl is a two-foot-long stick with a hook or spur on one side. The darts are wooden shafts with a stone point hafted to one end and a concave cup carved into the other. (Asana prefers shorter darts, a yard or so long, since they can double as spears in a pinch). To load an atlatl, you hold it at shoulder-height, parallel to the ground, and fit the cup end of the dart into the spur-hook. To fire the dart, you step forward and snap the atlatl down with your wrist. Imagine flicking paint off a paint-brush – same motion. Overall, your thigh and core generate the power, which gets channeled into the dart via the arm and snapped wrist.

 

To the uninitiated, the atlatl probably seems baroque. Why not just hurl a spear, instead of using a stick to fling it? A detailed answer would require a long digression into the physics of levers and rotational velocity, but the basic idea is this: the longer your arm, the faster you can throw something. (Think of those long plastic ball-throwers for playing with dogs.) Atlatals effectively lengthen your arm by a foot or two and therefore provide a huge speed boost: experts can fling the darts 80 mph, while spears alone top out around 50 mph. Speed is a major factor in a weapon’s penetration ability and knockdown power, so atlatl darts are pretty darn deadly.

 

Despite their obscurity nowadays, especially compared to spears or arrows, atlatls were probably the most widely used hunting weapon in prehistory, in climates from the tropics to the poles. As a result, there’s a serious contingent of atlatl enthusiasts within experimental archaeology.

 

I get to try atlatls myself during an undergraduate class that Mein Eren teaches. We meet at a frisbee golf course near campus, where he unloads several dozen atlatl darts from his pickup. Each is around six feet long and a bit less than an inch thick, and they’re fletched with fake feathers – neon, green, black-and-blue, crimson. I’m surprised how bendy they are, quite flexible. Atlatlists debate why that flexibility matters, but rigid darts simply don’t fly as straight or true: darts need spring.

 

The atlatls Eren hands out are pretty basic – wooden sticks with hooks. Most people throughout history used something similar, but the inhabitants of the treeless altiplano would have saved their wood for darts and made atlatals from the leg bones of vicunas. (I actually stumbled across one such bone on a walk in Peru. It was bleached white, and differed from traditional atlatls in that it had a kink in it. But when I whipped it downward with my wrist, it felt perfect.)”

 

And Chapter 7, California – AD 500s. has another topic starting on page 270:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Bows and arrows were the single most complicated piece of technology in prehistoric times, incorporating nearly every material used by our ancestors – wood, stone, sinew, antler, resin, rope, feathers. And while atlatals long predated them, bows and arrows eventually replaced atlatals on nearly every continent. There are several reasons why.

 

The big advantage of atlatals is that their heavy darts pack quite a punch; you can really wallop game. But as megafauna went extinct on continent after continent, the importance of landing a big blow waned in tandem. Hunting smaller game requires stealth and precision, and bows and arrows allow you to hide in a blind and snipe at game instead of scaring them off with the big clumsy movement of an atlatl toss. You also stand still while shooting them, and can sight down an arrow and take aim, something that’s impossible with the side-armed atlatl. Arrows offer a superior rate of fire, too. With atlatals, you usually get one throw before an animal flees, but it’s possible to fire several arrows in quick succession. (Some Plains Indians could keep eight in the air at once). All in all, after the decline of the megafauna, arrows proved more superior in most hunting scenarios.

 

But as with all technological advances, the switch to bows and arrows was accompanied by social upheaval. For one thing, bows and arrows seemingly favored individuals over groups. When everyone used big, slow atlatals and got just one shot at game, hunting in groups was necessary to hedge bets. In contrast, the precision and stealth of bows and arrows encouraged solitary hunting. The group became less important.

 

Arrows might also have upended the relations between the sexes. Recall from Chapter 2 that women often throw atlatals better than men. Bows and arrows, however, tend to favor males. That’s partly because men are generally taller and generally have more upper body strength, bothof which provide an advantage when shooting bows. (Arm length and arm strength allow an archer to use a stiffer bow and pull the string back farther, generating more snap). That said, it wasn’t all biology; cultural factors favored males as well. However clumsy atlatals seem at first, people could master them reasonably quickly; children as young as seven can take down deer with them. Proficiency with arrows takes more practice; few children can reliably kill game with arrows until their mid-teens. And for whatever reason, most cultures in the ancient world – in Africa, in Asia, in Europe, in the Americas – denied young females the chance to develop this skill, shunting them off to gather plant food instead. As a result, bows and arrows became a male-dominated weapon.”

 

Images of an atlatl and bow hunter came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

What did Egyptian laborers who built the pyramids eat?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a 2025 book by Sam Kean titled Dinner with King Tut: How rogue archeologists are re-creating the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of lost civilizations. It has eleven chapters that discuss the following dates:

 

Africa – 75,000 years ago

South America – 7500 BC

Turkey -6500s BC

Egypt – 2000s BC

Polynesia – 1000s BC

Rome – AD 100s

California – AD 500s

Viking Europe – AD 900s

Northern Alaska – AD 1000s

China – AD 1200s

Mexico – AD 1500s

 

There is also an article by Sam Kean in Nautil Us on July 9, 2025 titled How to Make the Bread That Fueled the Pyramids. Similarly, beginning on page 128 of the book he says about Egypt in the 2000s BC:

 

“From the most wretched servant to the most exalted prince, people in ancient Egypt ate bread and drank beer with every meal. These staples were so vital to their diet that, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the combined symbols for bread and beer actually meant meal or sustenance.

 

During pyramid construction, bakeries the size of football fields stood near the worker villages. Every morning, battalions of men and women would grind up bushels of emmer – the main grain eaten in Egypt – into flour on stone hand mills called querns. Still more bakers mixed and kneaded the dough, probably with their feet. To bake the bread, rather than waste time making thousands of mud ovens, crews used conical clay molds. They’d dig holes in the ground, fill them with glowing embers, drop the molds in upside-down, plop some dough in, then cap each mold with a second one and heap hot ash over the top. The endless rows of these devices made the lot behind the baking huts look like giant egg cartons.

 

Timing was critical. The glowing embers had to be ready the same time as the dough was, and the bread had to finish just as the construction crews and other laborers were lining up for meals. Given the immense scale, there was a factory feel to the operation, and someone like Amon was as much a foreman as a baker, equally concerned with workflow and worker training as he was flour quality or seasoning.

 

….Blackley shows me his replica mold. It’s scorched black and much heftier than I expect – fifteen inches across and probably twenty pounds.

 

As a treat, Blackley has also baked a loaf for me to sample. It’s a foot wide and sand colored with a springy crust. It consists of just a handful of ingredients – salt, yeast, coriander, emmer flour – and its blunted shape reminds me of NASA space capsules [like the Apollo] from the 1960s.  

 

….Beyond bread, Egyptian laborers were paid in beer as well – 1 1/3 gallons daily, roughly ten pints, which they happily sucked down given that temperatures on the hot sands could reach 130^oF. (One scholar estimated that it took 231 million gallons of beer to build the largest pyramid). Even children drank beer, largely because the alcohol killed microbes and rendered it more sanitary than the water in rivers (a.k.a. their sewers). Egyptian doctors also prescribed beer as medicine to remedy coughs, constipation, swollen eyes, and upset stomachs.”

 

The Giza pyramid image came from Wikimedia Commons.