Reflecting on how we measure time

 While reading the articles, I related with the Egyptian usage of the sundial as a way to measure time and divide the day into smaller parts in a circular format. In particular, when I picture time, such as hours or minutes, I always have the mental image of the round, analog clock in mind. Additionally, I even picture the year split into months and seasons in this circular form, split into 12 sections. However, in my conceptualization, September is at the top in the 12-o-clock position. This is likely influenced by many years in school, causing me to view September, the start of the academic year, as the ‘top’ or starting point, rather than the typical new year in January. My conceptualization of the seasons is simply layered on top of this mental image, by portioning off 4 quadrants aligning with the quarters of the hour. In my mind, these months and quadrants also have a general color assignment, influenced by the physical colors or mental color hue (due to association with heat v.s. cold) I perceive in the world around me at the time of each season. 

When I compare the two articles, I did notice there may be an inconsistency in the discussion of the historical usage of base 12. While the MacTutor site states no major civilization used base 12, the article written by Lombardi for Scientific American states that civilizations, like the Egyptians, used the duodecimal system rooted in base 12, likely in connection to their usage of the sundial. While I knew of the use of the cesium atom to define the second, something that surprised me was the need to have a small handful of minutes each decade that have an extra second, to maintain the agreement between atomic and astronomical time. This made me reconsider how we measure/view time, as it contradicts the idea that time is something completely objective and unalterable. Requiring this manual addition of a second to maintain the agreement shows that even time has its exceptions and is ultimately still an arbitrary assigning of rules and definitions by people.