Clock Speed

Passing a newsstand, I noticed the headline emblazoned on the cover of one of the personal computer magazines--"400 MHz!" it screamed. I was undecided whether to gasp or yawn. In a few years that magazine cover would look antiquated and quaint. We all know that the clock speeds keep escalating according to Moore's Law. We also know that computers are still going to take forever to boot, and that all the application programs will get correspondingly bigger and more bloated with features, and will still seem as sluggish as ever.

Still, I wanted one of those 400-MHz jobbies. What is wrong with me, I wondered. Maybe I want to feel the wind in my face, the swoosh of 400 MHz. Maybe I'm worried that people will ask me what kind of machine I use, and I'll have to mumble an inaudible "233 MHz." They'll look at me with amused contempt, and say, "But I thought you were a high-tech person." It is getting difficult to keep up pretenses.

My ambivalence about the magazine story isn't my main problem, though. What really bothers me is my own clock speed. Nobody is speeding up the neurons in my brain. There is no Moore's Law for humans. Here I am, stuck in the Dark Ages, back at 3 MHz or whatever. Nobody is going to put out a magazine with my picture on the cover and a big headline--"5 MHz!"

There is a disparity here that someone should worry about. I'm not concerned about computers catching up with human intelligence--I'll leave that to media hype. My concern is that while computers hurry their administrative chores, we humans still proceed at our own leisurely pace. Business meetings still take 2 hours, and we still talk, read, and listen at the same historic rate. Studies show that we process information at a speed of only about 50 bits per second, and we aren't getting any faster. We still sleep the same amount. There are still only 24 hours in the day.

Ah, but maybe this is the key! Why are there only 24 hours in the day? Surely this is an arbitrary number. While we're stuck with the actual length of the day itself, we can chop it up however we want. Suppose some international tribunal periodically assessed the situation, and issued a world command to divide the clock differently. "Beginning January 1, 1999, all clocks will be divided into 25-hour days," the announcement might say. Just like the computer, our own clocks would be speeded up.

"Wait a minute," you say. "This is trickery. You haven't changed time itself!"

But think what you have just said. That minute you asked me to wait is now only 57.6 of the old seconds in duration. Efficiency has already been increased.

One-hour meetings will now last only 57 of the old minutes. Television shows will be shortened. Commercials will be slightly shorter. Basketball games and other timed sports will be faster, possibly with fewer time-outs. Speed limits on the highways will translate into higher speeds when based on the revised concept of the hour. Traffic will move more frantically. Dentists will drill faster to keep their next appointment on the hour. Business executives will have more slots in their hour-by-hour calendars to fill. There is no end to the ramifications. We are locked in so many ways to the psychological standard of the "hour."

In these days of throw-away electronic clocks, this relabeling would be trivial to implement. One morning you would notice that the LCD face of your wall clock had more hours than it did previously. Big Ben would possibly be a problem, and difficulties would certainly occur over keeping the clocks at large sports stadiums updated.

I've never been able to understand myself why, for example, when the referee says, "Please reset the clock to 38 seconds," all the millions of viewers have to wait indefinitely as the clock-keeper fumbles step-by-step forward and backward trying unsuccessfully to get 38 seconds on the clock. Why doesn't he or she just push a button to do this? And how often does the clock at the stadium go out of commission? "Official time will be kept on the field," a stentorian voice announces. I mean, what is this? Can't these stadiums afford a clock chip?

Even the length of the day might not be immutable in spite of the earth's rotation. I've always thought myself that the day isn't quite long enough. Someone made a mistake here. I'm not always ready to go to bed at night or excited about getting up in the morning.

I have a theory that life would be much more pleasant if we could travel one time zone westward every day. That would give us a 25-hour day in today's minutes. Just think; you could sleep in for an extra hour every morning, or you could get in an extra hour of work. The sunlight would last longer every day. Perhaps this would better match our circadian rhythm.

There might be some small problem when we crossed the international date line. Even that, however, is not immune to change. I am told that when the anti-ballistic missile tests were being conducted on Kwajalein Island, some awkwardness arose over the missiles crossing the date line on their way to interception--sort of a miniature year-2000 problem where the missiles would arrive a day before they were launched. Simple fix, however--they just redrew the date line. (Maybe there is a lesson here.)

There was a one-time glitch, because during the changeover the island enjoyed a day that didn't exist on the calendar. The thought of a holiday like this makes me think that we could move the date line every now and then just for the fun of it! Precautions were taken--consisting mostly of doing a lot of hoping--to ensure that no babies were born on the island during that non-day.

My search for the elusive 25-hour day stems from my enchantment with the old movie Endless Summer. This was a quasi-documentary about surfers who followed the sun around the world. As summer moved, so did they. Surf was always up, and they enjoyed perpetual summer. Similarly, a skier could move around the world in the opposite season. All I'm looking for is an extra hour in each day.

I'm staring at my wall clock and watching its inexorable, unchanging pace. I'm not going to stay stuck at 3 MHz, or whatever it is, while those computers boast increasingly higher clock rates. There has to be something in this for us poor humans. We need to get on magazine covers, too.