Gilligan’s Island theme song.
With the blood pressure meds I take, my pulse is extremely predictable.
according to Big or small, animals take 20 seconds to pee - Futurity , just get three animals to pee in turn.
I remember some 20 years ago when I got arrested for DWI. When they got me to the station, they took a video of me asking me to do all of their dog tricks. (Stand on one leg, touch your nose, etc…)
One of the tricks he asked me to do was silently wait and let him (the officer) know when I felt 30 seconds had gone by. I NAILED it with in a hundredth of a second. I know this because there was a timer on the bottom of the video.
Still have that video.
You da man! What was your trick?
Slight nitpick to the OP: how are you defining ‘exact’? Do I have a one-second margin of error, or half a second? (That is, it can be anywhere from 59 seconds to 60, or 60 seconds to 61, but not 59 to 61?)
Even with a clock AND a timer, most people, (except Shakes perhaps,) couldn’t get it within a hundredth of a second. 
Well, my job at the time, I’m surrounded by these machines that all have timers on them. And I was constantly waiting for these timers to go off so I could do whatever I needed to do to the machines.
So after staring at these timers for umpteen hours a day every day, I just got really good at counting shit down in my head.
Well if you were a band nerd…
John Phillip Sousa marches go at 120 beats per minute.
Count 30 bars of one of those and you should be damn close. (if you can keep a steady tempo)
Perfectly reasonable question to which I have no preference for an answer. I would hope that in the hypothetical situation of your having to …
there would be zero tolerance allowed.
But whatever works for you works for me.
I just hummed my way through about 30 seconds of some random Sousa march and those bass drum beats in my head really do count off seconds quite well.
Got “The Gallant Seventh” playing in my head now.
I can keep a steady tempo, but it’s a relative tempo, like relative pitch. Hence I can’t guarantee that I will start with the exact right tempo, just like I can’t be sure that I get the exact right pitch. I’d actually say my perfect tempo accuracy is worse than my perfect pitch, which I can do with some songs if I hear them in only one key for a long time.
Like, I just got middle C by remembering that Heart and Soul duet everyone does. Yet my attempt at remembering a Sousa march was 16 bpm fast.
It used to be that I could hold my breath for 2 minutes, give or take 10 seconds, but with a wristwatch to stare at until my lungs would have given up already. We (my brother or a friend) would pass time in church that way. I just don’t remember ever trying to get to some exact time without the watch, though. Counting while visualizing a clock (analog or digital) going through a minute’s worth is about all I would have tried before some of these great alternatives.
I just hope I don’t have to use any of them in real life! :eek:
Then there’s no hope, assuming time isn’t quantized. Even if it is, the odds of even an atomic clock being exact are vanishingly small.
I’m usually good to 2 seconds in 60. I count (with four subdivisions, like “one thousand one, one thousand two”), but playing “Anchors Aweigh” in my head might work better. I’ll try that. I frequently count off time, such as when a timer is running or when I’m brushing my teeth with my Sonicare (which beeps every 30 seconds). It’s an odd little habit I’ve had for a long time, and I really should be a lot better.
I worked in broadcasting long enough that I know, from my body clock, exactly, within a second, how long a 30-second commercial is, or a 50-second news clip, without even consciously thinking about it.
I imagine a digital stopwatch counting up to 60. I would die in the OP’s scenario, as I’d probably be out by one or two seconds. With practice, I reckon I could get within half a second.
There was actually a British gameshow recently (I forget which but I think it may have been one of the ones associated with the Lotto programme on Saturday nights) which did something like this - not life or death, obviously, but to win the money at the end contestants had to estimate when 30 seconds had passed, then press a button. If they were early, they lost, but they had a window of between 1 and 3 seconds after the 30 to win. Part of the preceding game involved the possibility of giving up some of their prize money in order to get an extra second of leeway. Most contestants stated they hummed a well-known tune to themselves to try and keep the time.
Cool! My wife mentioned an American TV show (one of Art Linkletter’s, she thinks) where a similar gimmick was employed. Her memory is that while the contestant was counting aloud in the “one-one-thousand” vein, Happy Art kept pestering the dude with questions. The dude wasn’t fazed and kept right on. It was like 30 seconds of dead air, and they never used that stunt again.
I certainly remember a game show where being able to estimate closely when 30 seconds passed was the means to a prize. 50 years ago, I’d say, maybe more. American.
I’ve always been fascinated with whether I could accurately measure 30 seconds or 60 seconds just by ‘counting’. I’m always within a second, but if “exact” accuracy is required, no one could do “exact”. Maybe once as a fluke, but not every time for several tries.
and, I see above, it might have been linkletter, and, yes, they tried to distract the estimator by asking questions. Many people were off by at least 10 seconds, long and short.