"<i>Zeitgeber</i> (from German for "time giver," or "synchronizer") is any exogenous (external) cue that synchronizes an organism's endogenous (internal) time-keeping system (clock) to the earth's 24-hour light/dark cycle. The strongest zeitgeber, for both plants and animals, is light. Non-photic zeitgebers include temperature, social interactions, pharmacological manipulation and eating/drinking patterns. To maintain clock-environment synchrony, zeitgebers induce changes in the concentrations of the molecular components of the clock to levels consistent with the appropriate stage in the 24-hour cycle, a process termed entrainment."

"...your equivalent to a computer looking up data from a chip is remembering a fact from your own brain. Your equivalent to a computer looking up data from a disk is fetching that fact from Pluto. Computers live in a world of commonplace interactions not the size of a house, like us, but the Solar System. On their own terms, they are long, long lived, and vast."

"In the process I came up with “Network Realism” which may or may not have legs, but I think it does and I like it. What it was, of course, was what I’d actually been talking about all year: time, and how it’s just as broken right now as our business models—broken by the network—but what’s interesting is how we’re coming to terms with it, artistically, culturally, and technologically, and what that might mean in the future. 2011 is going to be all about time."

James has had a good year.

"The book — by which I mean long-form text, in any format — is not a physical thing, but a temporal one. Its primary definition, its signal quality, is the time we take to read it, and the time before it and the time after it that are also intrinsic parts of the experience: the reading of reviews and the discussions with our friends, the paths that lead us to it and away from it (to other books) and around it." James, as ever, is very, very sharp. This is good.

Fascinating: GPS satellites are both high enough, and travelling fast enough, that you need to correct for relativistic effects in order for them to be effective.

"This is a list of old game releases. These games were priced at nearly $50 a year ago, now probably a lot less. Why buy a new game when there are plenty of fun games out there worth renting or buying for less?" Games released twelve months ago this week, by Andre Torrez. He's right, you know - games don't have to be about nowness all the time.

"F.lux fixes this: it makes your computer's lighting adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. It's even possible that you're staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better." Perhaps not right for things that need to be color-managed... but might be good for everything else. And healthier.

"Warning - this is a collection of half-formed thoughts, perhaps even more than usual." They seem pretty well-formed to me, even if the blogpost is a dense infoburst. Lots of solid gold in here, worth reading twice, slowly, and thinking on. And then working out what the conclusions are.

"MagiCal is a FREE menu-based clock and calendar. It features a huge range of configuration options for how the time and date are displayed, and can operate either in conjunction with, or as a replacement for the built in system menu clock." Quite pretty, and makes a nice companion for FuzzyClock.

"On June 17th, every year, the family goes through a private ritual: we photograph ourselves to stop, for a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by." Perfectly executed.

"Introduced by Dr John C.Taylor, Invenit et Fecit" - or, to translate, he invented it, and he built it. Video explaining some of the finer points of the chronophage. Stunningly beautiful.

Gosh. Long, detailed, smart, wonderful interview with Jonathan Blow. I can't even begin to find a suitably quote for this box so: please, just *read* it.

"What about “the big now,” though? It’s shorthand for the enhanced and deepened sense of simultaneity - of the world’s massive parallelism - that certain digital artifacts lend us. "

"Click-draggable. Range-makeable. A better calendar." No IE6 support, but it's not half bad so far.