Time

We attacked the start of first grade with military precision. Up at 6:15, with pretty purple dress at the ready. Pancake served, teeth brushed, sandals cinched -- with time to spare. We were a Swiss watch. But this isn't Switzerland. The school bus didn't arrive at 7:20, as scheduled. Or at 7:30. Or 7:45. The van finally pulled up at 7:54. But the driver gave no sign anything was wrong. She was all grins and big waves, as pleased as if she'd nailed an especially difficult dismount.

In warp-speed modern America, time has become one of our most precious resources. We manage it, and we expend it carefully. Ironic, then, that a resource as precious as seconds, minutes and hours is so poorly understood and so routinely misestimated by modern humans -- by 15% to 25% in either direction, depending on the individual and the acuity of his or her time perception.

Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month's Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat down recently at Caltech to explain his theory. What's the problem with time?

U.S. airlines' on-time performance in November was the worst in six years, resulting in more service and baggage-related complaints, U.S. government data show. Atlantic Southeast Airlines, a unit of SkyWest Inc., ranked last among the 20 carriers tracked by the Transportation Department, with only 65.7% of its flights arriving no more than 14 minutes later than scheduled. Industrywide, 76.5% of flights were on time, the worst performance in November since 2000.

IN 1998, 22-year-old Jonathan Keller of Detroit began taking pictures of his own face. Two years later, Noah Kalina started doing it in Brooklyn. Then it was Ahree Lee in San Francisco. One picture per day, same angle. No smiles, no frowns, and definitely no blinking. These three visual artists pioneered a new type of time lapse photography: When thousands of days of the self-portraits are shown in a high-speed sequence, the subject appears to age before your eyes.

Thanks to a quirk of the calendar, the wedding industry is about to experience its very own harmonic convergence. Across the country, tens of thousands of couples wanting to marry on 07/07/07 -- for luck, or perhaps because bridegrooms will stand a better chance of remembering their anniversaries -- have booked a corresponding number of photographers, caterers, cake makers, hair stylists and vintage Rolls-Royces months, or even years, in advance.

It's the end of time, at least as far as AT&T is concerned. The brief note in customers' bills hardly does justice to the momentousness of the decision. "Service withdrawal," it blandly declares. "Effective September 2007, Time of Day information service will be discontinued." What that means is that people throughout Southern California will no longer be able to call 853-1212 to hear a woman's recorded voice state that "at the tone, Pacific Daylight Time will be . . ."

Venezuelans turned their clocks back 30 minutes Sunday in the latest measure introduced by President Hugo Chavez. The time change is intended to optimize use of daylight hours and keep schoolchildren from having to wake up before dawn, Chavez has said. But critics called it an arbitrary move by the socialist leader, who has redesigned the national flag, renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and plans to launch a new currency, the "strong bolivar," in 2008.

At the grand opening of the Echo Park Time Travel Mart on Dec. 15, the Robot Emotions were going like hot cakes (happiness and schadenfreude were the top sellers). The mystery product Chubble, on the other hand, available in more than 50 different varieties, wasn't really moving. A worker dressed like a cowboy shrugged. "It's really hot in the future."

This story will take you approximately 11 minutes to finish. If you skip every other line, it will only take 5 1/2 . Once measured by the arc of the sun through the sky, by the changing of the seasons, life these days is measured by an increasingly complex and exacting system of timers. There it is, on the Caltrans signs dotting Southland freeways: "25 min to downtown LA." Walk signals count down until the light changes.