The town's so full of these confounded dials (195 BCE)

As a founder, I’m more of a Buffet. I schedule time when and where necessary (which is, admittedly, most of my time most weeks) but I hate feeling as if I’m restricted to obeying numbers in a database in order to function.

It fills me with an inordinate amount of joy to imagine the simplicity of a world in which you’d only return home to eat. I think that’s how I operated as a kid in the summers, riding bikes and walking around town with friends until we needed to eat. I feel like those moments are underrated and very visceral, instinctual parts of the human experience.

Wild how only a few lines of prose from people that existed thousands of years before us can evoke these sorts of feelings.

[Edit] Apparently, this anecdote is very famous and very Google-able:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/07/warren-buffett-taught-bill-g...

"A Severe Mercy" by Sheldon Vanauken is one of my favorite books, if not my favorite. A significant theme of that work is "moments made eternity," where eternity is used to connote both a sense of timelessness and of heaven. The author finds that his (and his wife's) most joyous times were precisely those moments where they lost track of time and simply enjoyed something (e.g., gazing at the night sky stretching out above the ocean) as long as they cared to. When they were done, they couldn't tell if minutes or hours had passed, but it didn't matter. In fact, that was part of the joy of the moment. Ultimately, they find themselves longing for the Christian ideal of heaven, where eternity will be all they have and they'll no longer be constrained by time.

I too find that I enjoy such moments of timelessness... one in particular sticks out in my head. I had hiked with my 2-year-old son down to a creek in a local state park. I sat in the grass and watched while he threw pine cones and sticks into the water, splashed around, and just had a blast doing what boys do. When I checked the time, I realized that we had been there for nearly 3 hours, though I could have sworn it was only a few minutes.

I find clocks as useful as anybody else, but I also find escaping them for a bit to be a delight...

I was told that the Romans, traditionally, and still at the time of Julius Caesar, divided the day, from sunrise to sunset, into twelve hours, so the "first hour" would be just after sunrise, but what astronomical local time that corresponded to would depend on the time of year. An ordinary sundial gives you astronomical local time. So I wonder how that worked in ancient Rome. Did they convert between the two systems, or did the two rival systems coexist? Did people have to say "the third hour, old-style" or "the third hour according to the sundials" ("hora tertia secundum solarium"?) to make it clear what they meant?

This "always knowing" (the time, the weather, one's email, the status of one's friends, and so on) must be some mental burden. I think like any other information pusher, it presses against the natural tendency of the mind to wander and to spontaneously create.

The gods confound the man who first found out

How to distinguish hours! Confound him too

Who in this place set up a sundial

To cut and hack my days so wretchedly

Into small portions! When I was a boy,

My belly was my sundial: one more sure,

Truer, and more exact than any of them.

This dial told me when it was time

To go to dinner, when I had anything to eat;

But nowadays, why even when I have,

I can’t fall-to unless the sun gives leave.

The town’s so full of these confounded dials,

The greatest part of its inhabitants,

Shrunk up with hunger, creep along the streets.

"For not only many eminent Greeks, but also the philosopher Favorinus, a most diligent searcher of ancient records, have stated most positively that Archytas made a wooden model of a dove with such mechanical ingenuity and art that it flew; so nicely balanced was it, you see, with weights and moved by a current of air enclosed and hidden within it. About so improbable a story I prefer to give Favorinus' own words: “Archytas the Tarentine, being in other lines also a mechanician, made a flying dove out of wood. Whenever it lit, it did not rise again.“"

Perhaps water clocks? Perhaps people working in the roman baths also ran water clocks? Was entrance to roman baths free? How long could one stay in the roman baths? Perhaps their aquaducts was more important to them than only for roman baths and sanitary infrastructure, but also for timekeeping on cloudy days?

https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/gellius.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7007731

According to wikipedia, the name Cronus is of uncertain origin, while grano comes from proto Indo-European.