It's time for a breakdown.

For fairly obviously reasons, I'm thinking about time tonight. I've been looking at my clock, one of those standard LCD type deals where the digits are made up of a grid of bars. I realized that you could completely remove the bottom line of horizontal bars and still be able to read the clock. I put a piece of tape over the bottom line. I'm not entirely sure why this is comforting. I guess it seems that something made up of simple bars should be made as efficient as possible.
I keep thinking about how our minds have to change just so much to account for daylight saving time. It requires a certain unmeasurable leap in the way we think about things. Is it really 4am right now? Why does it feel like 3? How does 3 feel different from 4? Time is an artificial construct in society, yet the sun still sets, and a certain time after that it rises again. So time is both very real and artificial. And in fact, since the rotation of the earth around the sun is actually 365 days and one quarter (hence the 'leap year'), the time that we perceive right now is not technically correct. I went to the national time server tonight (nist.gov) to get an accurate read on the time since I am studying historical navigation and it requires that I use an extremely accurate time for observing star positions and I read about how the steel and iridium rod used as the official standard for one meter is actually decaying at a steady rate. Of course this is taking place at a microscopic level and can only be measured with unbelievably precise instruments it is not exactly a national crisis. But it made me think about how, if time changed, if it decayed, we wouldn't ever know, since we're linked irrevocably to our perceptions of time. What if an hour right now was only 15 minutes in, say, 1650. What if an hour took an hour and a half in 1979? We would never know since the dilation or contraction can't be measured by an outside device. What if, right now, we are trapped in an hour that is taking 3 million years? There is no such thing as an absolute hour, or a separate and perfect second. Which means that, all things measured by time are subject to its influence. The speed of light is not absolute, because that 186,262 miles per second may take a different length of second in this instant than in that instant. I believe this is the boundary of the unknowable. And now I have a headache. Whatever time it might be, I can certainly define now as bedtime.