MY FIRST BEEF about James Gleick’s new book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything has to do with a passage near the end, about the mind’s ability to discern patterns in strings of numbers (part of a discussion on short-term memory and people’s ability to receive information at accelerated rates).

Gleick mentiones several such sequences of numerals (prime numbers, numbers divisible by seven, etc.), then gets to a sequence “any New Yorker, for instance, will recognize.”

He never bothers to tell non-New Yorkers what “14, 18, 23, 28, 34, 42, 50, 59, 66, 72” is supposed to represent. He just assumes everybody in North America’s so into NYC local lore that they’ll recognize these as the street numbers of Manhattan subway stations.

Of course, the fact that I (as one who’s only been to NYC twice) was able to guess this answer (which Gleick confirmed to me in an email exchange) may be part of Gleick’s intended lesson–that human minds can figure out puzzles like this with only minimal clues.

The rest of Gleik’s story is pretty much what you (if you’ve got the nimble mind he thinks you’ve got) could predict it to be. For those of you whose lives are too hectic to even read the book (a briskly-paced tome, with short paragraphs and lotsa chapter breaks), a summary:

• At one time, time didn’t matter much. Governments, armies, landlords, and bosses ruled by brute force, not by the clock.
• Then clocks were invented.
• Then came railroads, telegraphy, pocket watches, wrist watches, and the whole of industrial culture. People’s lives were ruled by the factory whistle, the school bell, the train timetable, standardized time zones, the eight-hour day with the ten-minute break.
• Not long after that (at least by the timetables of history) came wireless telegraphy, radio, talking pictures, airliners, radar, and, soon enough, the sped-up work output associated with making and running the machinery of WWII. Joseph Patterson devised the NY Daily News to be read in a single subway ride. Henry Luce proclaimed Time magazine would enable readers to understand the world in a half-hour per week.
• Then came early TV, TV Dinners, Interstate highways, suburban commuting, “one-stop shopping,” the ’50s Organization Man, Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, advanced time-and-motion studies (designed to more fully regiment workers’ lives), atomic clocks, the 24-second basketball clock, and the first primitive computers.
• Then came electronic videotape editing (which enabled faster-paced TV shows and even faster-paced commercials), microwave ovens, containerized cargo, and computers running everything from payrolls to inventory control.
• Then came PCs, 24-hour cable news channels, just-in-time corporate supply systems, The One-Minute Manager, The 59-Second Employee, FedEx, the Internet, and movies paced like music videos.

But there are exceptions and caveats in Gleick’s oh-so-linear timeline.

Movies and novels these days can be frighteningly long. The new Star Wars runs a whole half-hour longer than the original. Passions, that new “youth oriented” soap opera, is decidedly leisurely-paced (one day in the story can take up to two weeks of episodes). Net-browsing and video-gaming might seem exciting, but can be among the greatest time killers ever invented. Rush-hour freeway speeds in many metro areas are slowing down to bicycle rates. Today’s most heavily-hyped fantasy vehicle isn’t the sports car (promising mastery of the clock) but the SUV (promising a make-believe world outside the clock’s reach).

Gleick might say these are fantasy-realm counterparts to an ever-faster reality. I’d say they’re parts of a more complex set of figures than Gleick’s ready to deal with.

Stuff involving (directly or indirectly) electronics and computers is indeed always getting faster, smaller, cheaper, etc. Everything else in life still runs by basic scientific laws. Faster-than-sound flight is possible, but usually impracticable. Puberty, gestation, digestion, alcohol absorption, clinical drug trials, falling in and out of love, pretty much take as long as they always have.

As that favorite old computer-geek bumper sticker used to say, “186,000 Miles Per Second. It’s Not Just A Good Idea, It’s the Law.”