What, Exactly, Is a Clock? To understand atomic time, we must first understand something about clocks.

A clock is, at its core, a marriage of two components: a mechanism that oscillates, or ticks with a steady beat, and a device that counts those beats and displays the time

Yeah but more deeply time is a property of the universe that the clock including atomic clocks are tracking. Kant said it is 'schema' i.e. without understanding time we wouldn't even understand causality so it is the purest possible a-priori concept that doesn't rely on sensory input to learn about

This is why I like using my Alphadec system that splits the year into 26 chunks from A-Z <https://github.com/firasd/alphadec> as my working dir; eg. right now the current Alphadec is '2026_P5M7_200286' so my working dir is Documents/work/2026_P. That way there is a folder system automatically imposed on various .js or .py stuff without having to pre-create a taxonomy since 'time is schema'--I can estimate "that ffmpeg project was in Spring so it must be around 2026_F.."

> Yeah but more deeply time is a property of the universe that the clock including atomic clocks are tracking.

I'll quote Einstein who said "time is what the clock says".

Not sure I get what is better about this than simply using the month, like Documents/work/202606 (which also sorts nicely and does not need a conversion in my head to know what time of the year that must be)