Relative Time

When two sisters spend time together with mad dogs and Englishmen and talking about work projects in far away China, philosophical challenges can emerge.

Lisa and I recently spent three spectacular weeks sharing a common living space (our home in Red Hook) and interleaving various projects in our lives. (The outlaws—Peg and Jay—were also present but are incidental to this "relative drama".) One involved an interesting debate about how far it was—time-wise—to China. China is the scene of my most recent conference calls with teams setting up supercomputers.  I said “I think it's more than 12 hours.”  Lisa insisted that that was geographically impossible. After a lot of to and fro I produced a meeting notice identifying at least one case where “I was right” (a thirteen hour difference for some phone conference I had to attend).  This concrete example (isn't it great how concrete can cement a debate!?) allowed us to get to the nub of the confusion.  Lisa was referring to relative time; me to clock time.  So, conveniently, we were both right.

The importance of knowing which is which was evidenced last night at one a.m. when brother-in-outlaw Mark received a call from his son who has just gone on a semester abroad in New Zealand.  Lisa remarked “it may be sixteen hours later on the clock, but his body thinks it's 8 hours earlier.”  So since at 1 am in western New York, it is 5 pm in New Zealand (a rather civilized time to be calling your parents if you use Lisa time and think that it must be 9 am instead of 1 am if you allow for thinking about it backwards), Daniel was being perfectly considerate.

You may recall that, in the Winter 2003-04 issue, Lisa attempted to suggest that Phil on Hol was a quarterly ‘zine—if you use the year on Jupiter as your measure. I submit that something similar is afoot here.