tl; dr: I have a weird way of thinking about weeks and years as a circle and I made some pretty pictures, and Id like to hear if this matches anyone elses mental picture, or if they have a different oddball way of thinking of time spatially. Over the past few years Ive realized that I use an idiosyncratic visualization for certain kinds of time; I see the cyclic nature of the twelve months of a year and the seven days of a week in the form of a circle, both going counter-clockwise. I spent some time today generating images reflecting this view. The gray and blue is a reflection of what a week is like for me. I guess the specific rotation and counter-clockwise direction reflects a dash of synesthesia, and also how important physical layout is to my sense of recall -- if Im trying to do a week-based day calculation, Ill often use my hand to as an arrow to mark my place in the week, in the same way Ill still unconsciously shape an L with my left hand to recall which direction is which. Im less certain why I place the weekend down. My best guess is see that as the start and stop of a week, and is either heavier or where the week meets the road (to stretch the physical metaphor, since I view myself as moving in the fixed week-wheel rather than it moving to accommodate me.) The counter-clockwise motion then springs from that - I read left-to-right, so the Saturday-Sunday start to the week is in that forward direction, and thus drives the rest of the loop. Years are even more strongly laid out in my minds eye, the multicolor one... Here the calendar starts at the top, as one might expect, but I think thats because I view a year as progressing from school year to school year, with the loveliness of summer vacation anchoring as the base (though a separate desire to have the numeric transition be straight up tilts the thing a bit.) Neither visual is strongly color-coded for me, but week vs weekend and the various seasons have a different ephemeral feel, here color-coded for grins. As a side note, I used a new technology for this, p5.js -- the same processing.js Ive used for years, but now as pure javascript, rather than going through some weird java-to-js convertor. Highly recommended! You can check out the working page and source code if so inclined, alienbill/kirkdev/hooptime/ Anyway, let me know if you happen to share the same or similar way of thinking about time spatially, or if you have your own odd way of thinking about it...
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 00:27:49 +0000
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