1.16 Time//The One-Million-Hour Life

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⑯The Management of Time 
 Update 29 Octr 2021.

Time dilation and time constriction

   Life Time 

  Using the hour to prevent impulsiveness

Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity

Management of boring time

Medication-assisted passing of boring time:

  The Measurements of time. 

Time Notation

A lifetime based on the hour comes from 1-million hours being c.114 years. A human age of 114 years and higher has been achieved but all such cases have been badly affected by the aging. We here strive for the one-million-hour life that is fully achieved on one's feet with wit and wits

Time dilation and time constriction: Here I refer to the psychological feeling that your time sense is awry. Time dilation, I note, as an immediate effect of some medications or behavior. It feels to you like more than actual time has passed maybe 30 minutes, but when you look at the clock you find it is only 1 minute. This is why people who take opioids before they get tolerant feel they are more efficient. They seem to be squeezing a lot more time to do things into their actual time. Time constriction is the opposite effect. Most obvious, one gets involved in some very pleasant activity like a fascinating conversation with a best friend. It seems to us that almost no time has passed but when we look at the clock we see that maybe an hour has passed in this pleasant conversation. These are interesting observations that can sometimes be manipulated to deal with boring time. The extreme is what I call "time zero".  This is when an anesthesiologist injects a consciousness-losing drug. One instant you see his smiling face above you; the next it is several hours later in recovery room waking up and seeing by the clock on the wall that several hours have passed yet it seems a zero time interval.
Life Time Clock: Using one million hours as an ideal, one can estimate a life in decimal on a life clock. So on 10 January 2013, my 80th birthday, I was 700,800 hours old or 70% ideal life or a little more than 2/3 of the clock, or you may say I had passed 4 PM of my ideal life. 
Using the hour to prevent impulsiveness:
The hour is a practical basic interval for chores and sleep.
   If I have a decision, I delay it by that interval. It prevents acting on impulse. Also, a repose limited to one hour by my mobile alarm prevents deep, dangerous sleep.
   To start a new activity or just pass the boring time, I set my alarm for the first minute after the hour; for example, to start an evening hour interval, I do 6:01 PM. This attention to begin an hour for new activity is good for delaying a type of behavior I do too often or too impatiently immediately I feel like it. So if I feel like eating or taking a drink or a pleasure pill I set my alarm for the next hour ahead to delay gratification and to be sure I do not eat or drink or take the pill too often or too much.  

We understand from Einstein's Special Relativity that time's passage is not a constant.  Experiment confirms, at speeds approaching the speed of light (300,000 kilometers or 186,000 miles per second), the time for a clock ticking in a speeding-up vehicle (and the person's body clock in the vehicle) moves more slowly than a same-set, immobile observer's clock, and the time-slowing would get more as the moving vehicle would approach the speed of light. In actuality, at present and the near future, a man-made vehicle could not attain even 0.1% of the speed of light so this effect is not noted in our own experience. But it has been shown by the use of ultra-fine time-telling clocks in high-speed jets and in subatomic particles. 

Management of Boring Time: When time weighs on you, do necessary chores like cleaning. When you feel blah and just can’t do anything useful and healthful, it is best to sit back, set your alarm for 30 minutes or an hour and try to repose whilst thinking pleasant constructive thoughts like “What is my plan for the rest of the day, the week, the month?” In my own case, as a Bronx expatriate physician in Japan with legal, low-cost access to opioids in the form of 25 mg pentacozine (Sosegon in Japan; Talwin in U.S.A.) pills, I put a quarter pill under my tongue (tolerably bitter taste) to help my repose thinking.

Medication-assisted passing of boring time: I experimented with zolpidem (Ambien). I find that 2.5 mg (obtained by pill cutting) under tongue can give c.2 hours pleasant time passing, mostly in light sleep. To be effective one must place one’s self in condition for sleep or repose, in bed or on futon with eyes covered to block light. It may work (for some a 5 mg dose) within 10 minutes and no groggy side effects. One may sleep an hour and then relax for an hour in light repose, and resume preferred activity. I call it “surgical scalpel medication management” of boring time.

Time Passers

In one's life, time passers can be useful, like when you have boring moments or hours or when you cannot sleep at night. Certain activities are useful. I exclude here health-harming ones like eating or drinking or harmful drug, or money-wasting ones.

Jigsaw Puzzles: are cut-out pieces that fit together to form a picture. They are usually sold in gift shops especially in botanical gardens or zoos. Since a jigsaw puzzle can take a year to complete, and since it takes up space, it is best to start in a place where you can come back to fairly permanently when you need to pass time. I find that setting it up on my bedroom floor (or desk for those who do not sleep on the floor as I do) is ideal. Then I can start working on it and whenever I cannot sleep I spend an hour or two on it. Doing a jigsaw puzzle is intrinsically fascinating, and most of the people will find they forget about the time in an enjoyable way. 
Listening to certain melodic, tuneful, lyrical CDs—-Judy Barnett’s Too Darn Hot, anything by Gordon Jenkin’s, Blossom Dearie’s Planet.

There are many more time-passers like good internet movies, fascinating reads but I'll stop here.  Each person has an individual taste.

  These effects tell that time is a complex of consciousness, a mix of sensory input and working memory and pleasure/pain effects played back against the metaphoric clock-ticking, time-telling cells in the brain. And time based on Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity is also a mysterious relativistic dimension related to our physical world in that at accelerations of a body approaching the speed of light, time’s passage for that body slows compared to the stationary observer.

   The Measurements of time. 

Time: First, the angular system from which seconds in time derive. Take a circle: Were you to start at point A and continue around to return to the same point A, it would be 360-degree units of circle arc, written 360⁰. Each degree is divided into 60 minute-units and each minute into 60 second-units and the seconds-units may be made into a decimal according to metric system: deci for tenths, centi for hundreds, milli for thousandths, and so on.

  Our time measurements are based on astronomical circles made by Earth orbiting the Sun, and Earth revolving in a 360⁰ arc around its own axis. For the former, we have 1 year, c.365 1/4 days. Note that the hour is a 15⁰ of the arc.

The day measurement or “mean solar day” is an averaging out of the time it takes Earth to make one full revolving on its axis in relation to the astronomers observing the Sun’s fixed position in the sky. Actually, if we site by a fixed star we correct for the Sun’s movement, which is not apparent when it is used as the fixed point. The true day in terms of one complete Earth revolving turns out to be 23 hours 56 minutes. So each new day, the same time-point in the sky at night (star positions) is 4 minutes advanced. In one month, the advance computes to 2 hours, in 12 months it computes to 24 hours after bringing the sky positions a full circle back to where they were exactly 360 days before. Note that this 24-hour 4-minute difference does not affect our calendar which is set by definition to a precise 24-hr day but it does affect where astronomers see a star or planet in the evening sky, which, independent of its own movement, changes by 4 minutes each day of the month and after 1 year returns a full cycle to where it was every 29^th day.

It takes Earth 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds (averaged) to make one revolution around the Sun. From the time-second interval to the 24-hour-day interval we deal with whole number multiple. But to get the year into scientific measurements we must make it a decimal in terms of the day, using the basic second interval. It means converting the 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds excess over 365 days into seconds and then dividing its seconds by the 23-hr, 56-minute seconds to get the decimal part of the partial 366^th day. When done, it gives the year as 365.256… days

  Because astronomers determined that the Earth is slowing in its revolution, the second has been redefined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of a cesium-133 isotope atom. This makes the second not dependent on astronomical changes. So all passage of time is referenced to that second. It should be noted, according to that reference, there are 31,557,600 seconds and 8,766 hours in the year.

The Julian Day is a system used exclusively by astronomers to pin down date without reference to the year. Its need can be understood by considering the problems of calculating exactly how much time has passed since a particular major astronomical event that occurred in the Before Christ (BC) period. Forgetting about historical accuracy, just that there is no 0 (zero) A.D. introduces one problem. Then there is the skipping of 11 days in October 1582 when the Gregorian calendar system started. To avoid these difficulties Joseph Scaliger, suggested counting days, without reference to months or years. To make this scheme workable one had to start at an early arbitrary date and Scaliger chose 1 Jan. 4713 B.C. He also suggested calling the days counted from that date, the Julian Days, not because of admiration for Julius Caesar but to honor his father, Julius Scaliger. The Julian Day for 1 January 1940 was J.D. 2,433,283 and exactly a decade later, 1 January 1950, it was J.D. 2,437,301. The J.D. begins at noon because that's when most astronomers are sleeping. If it began at midnight, it might need changing a J.D. in the middle of an observation.

The Sidereal Year is the time it takes Earth to make one full revolution about the Sun as determined precisely by star sighting. In 1900 the year was determined as 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 9.5 seconds. Exactly a century later the year had shortened 0.5 sec. to 365/6/9/9. Actually this difference is within range of error of the measuring instruments so no conclusions can be drawn but a series of very exacting measurements over many years prove the Earth is slowing (Expected by gravitational friction theory) at a rate of about 0.0001 sec (1/10,000^th second) each year, so slowly that it will take 10,000 more years for our Earth year to increase by merely 1 second and in 1 million years our year (If Earth still exists) will be 1 minute and 40 seconds longer than today, and in 1 billion years it will be almost 3 days longer.

EndNote

Telling time by your body. Counting the carotid pulse rate at rest in good health normally should give around 60 per minute or like reciting "one little beat" a second. And by pacing yourself to recite "one little beat, 2 little beat, 3 little beat ..." you may count off seconds and other short periods of time rather accurately. If you do it enough, your brain will become conditioned to act as an alarm clock in your head up to one hour.
The clock in our brains: In the hypothalamus at the base of the brain, a set of neurons called the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCM) ticks time away for our bodily functions on an approx. 24-hour cycle that got originally (in early human evolution) stabilized by the light-dark intervals each day. Click 9.(38-40) Hypothalamus -Body Clock,Glands, Sexual...for details.
 I have trained my brain to tell a very accurate time without constantly looking at a clock. For example, if I decide to lie down and rest for an hour at 12 midnight, I will, without an alarm, get up and, looking at my clock, it is 1:00 AM. This developed recently due to the constant setting of my cellphone alarm for short hourly
 Time Notation: Noting the exact moment of finishing a chore is sometimes useful. I favor the following: Year.Month.Calendar Day of Month.Day of Week (Digital, e.g., 1 is Monday).Time of Day to Current Minute. So on Monday 7 Sept. 2020, right now would be, 2020.09.07.1.07:40 (And one may add the place, e.g., San Marco Cafe, Higashi Kanagawa JR Station.

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