My motivation for posting thoughts here is selfish - when I'm right, I
can say "see, I got there first" and when I'm wrong, no one will notice
:)
More seriously, I've gone through multiple computers, phones, and
storage systems and this site is still online. So, as long as I feel
like sharing, this seems like a very good way to back my ideas.
Also see:
My Github repo
Straying from the Google-able [blog]
Me on twitter
Friday, August 16, 2013
Time is on my side, yes it is
Ah
I love time. Good subject. Twice every year most of America thinks
about it and once every four years the world gets warped (at least those
on the Gregorian calendar do).
It would be ok if these were
our only flaws with time - they're not. If sophisticated aliens ever
learn of our time system, they'll be making jokes about it for thousands
of years.
We have 10 fingers and 10 toes, so a base 10 time
system is appropriate (and it goes with the rest of our math) no? Nope.
We live on a sphere with a spherical orbit (not being exact here) so a
2*pi based time system maybe? No again. It's the 'fear of commitment
time system'.
We stuck witb 360* base system for a while but
then if we count days per year correctly, the product of days per
month doesn't work exactly. And then there's the base 7 week, an awesome time
trick because weeks dont fit inside months or years, and are not base 360
nor base 10. And, what did we do for sub second time? We made it base 10
of course. Which makes a light year - how many times light could go
from Earth's equator to a pole in one earth year - a nice round number
of 9.4605E15 (yeah, I looked that up and google and Wikipedia disagree
on this - go figure).
So, marvel over inserting days and complain about loosing
hours if you want. We started screwing ourselves with time keeping
mellenia ago and it's not likely to change any *time* soon.
It would seem that time keeping is like computer programming languages in a way, you can add features to them - ie, Franklin's daylight saving, leap seconds (thank our modern grasp of physics and percise clocks for that one), etc - but removing or charging fundamental parts is off limits. Too bad, because a thousand years after most of humanity lives on a different orbital plane, we'll still be stuck with time keeping principles from time immorial on Earth.
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I believe that this forum will help me with my writing in a couple of ways. Firstly, it will help me get the documents that I have prepared on this subject off of my computer which i think will help to better preserve them. Second, it will give me the incentive to make much needed spelling and grammar corrections to them. As I hope to present a bit more than 'fluff' - what an english teacher referred to writing that I think she would have preferred to call 'crap' - and something that people might enjoy reading versus being turned off by countless grammatical and spelling errors (as I often am when reading well thought but poorly written articles. Third, I would hope to get *thoughtful* feedback.
I think that my third incentive needs a bit definition when concerned with the loose term thoughtful. I don't expect Hubble, Dirak, Einstein, Newton, or Galileo to be reading my writing - as they're dead. Though, I doubt that Hawking, Tyson, or any other - still alive - great minds to read my work. What I would expect is that if you wish to give me feedback, you abide by a couple of 'rules', so please:
Last, the pictures on the slide show may or may not have been taken by me. Most were taken on family vacations and since we only had one (fairly) high end camera - the talented photographers that we all are - had to share. So I can't say which of these pictures I took and which I didn't (unless I was in it - and that is rare).
I think that my third incentive needs a bit definition when concerned with the loose term thoughtful. I don't expect Hubble, Dirak, Einstein, Newton, or Galileo to be reading my writing - as they're dead. Though, I doubt that Hawking, Tyson, or any other - still alive - great minds to read my work. What I would expect is that if you wish to give me feedback, you abide by a couple of 'rules', so please:
- Say more than five words - "You're an idiot" "Love your writing" - I DON'T CARE
- Unless you are pointing a unbiased and blunt untruth I have stated, take more than five minutes to think about what you are saying.
- Make your point and be done with it - don't keep reiterating a point you've already made, don't put incessant carriage returns (aka - 'enter') like a teenage chat room.
- Don't type everything big and bold, small and blending in with the background, or using all caps.
Last, the pictures on the slide show may or may not have been taken by me. Most were taken on family vacations and since we only had one (fairly) high end camera - the talented photographers that we all are - had to share. So I can't say which of these pictures I took and which I didn't (unless I was in it - and that is rare).