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From: Jasper
Date: 10/28/03
Time: 10:39:54 PM
Remote Name: 68.73.200.33
Jean,
I think you realize that your highly developed sense of time is exceptional. Because of the type of work I did for my entire adult life, I can do the same thing with small measurements of distance. Some people have a keenly developed sense of direction.
Even if you are terrible at measuring the length of physical object with your eyeballs, you can tell the length of a 5-inch pencil if it is lying close to and parallel to a 3” x 5” index card. If you have a hideous sense of direction you know when you are going south of you live on a street that you know runs north and south and you know that you have to go south to get to work every morning.
The same holds true with estimating time. Charlie might be so good at it that she can’t imagine most people being as bad as they are, but without a solid point of reverence (a clock, a factory whistle, a particular TV or radio program, etc.) most of us can be off by a considerable amount. That’s why Donald Freed’s Killing Time is so important and why I told him that I thought his “clock” approach should be required teaching in all law schools and law enforcement academies in the world.
You don’t need to rely on anyone’s estimate of time if you know how to find a “clock” nearby to measure it. –Jasper