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.
Posted by at
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:
  1. Say more than five words - "You're an idiot" "Love your writing" - I DON'T CARE
  2. Unless you are pointing a unbiased and blunt untruth I have stated, take more than five minutes to think about what you are saying.
  3. 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.
  4. Don't type everything big and bold, small and blending in with the background, or using all caps.
As I'm sure this doesn't cover all of what I mean about being 'thoughtful', I think I have made my point; hence won't say anything more on the subject. And I really do want feedback.

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).