What is Time?

Time has been called the fourth dimension. Your car is sitting somewhere. It has a location relative to a reference point at x, y and z coordinates. Your GPS can show it’s x-y (latitude and longitude) as well as z (elevation for aircraft GPS). But at 7am tomorrow your car will disappear from that location when you go to work. It will return to about that same location at 5pm. So we have to add a time to the xyz to insure the car is really there when we observe the location.

A Physicist said “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” I suppose that was a tongue in cheek answer but it does make sense.  We cannot all occupy the same space at the same time.  As the Bible says, there is a time to sow and a time to reap,  you cannot do both at the same time.  Can time be tinkered with? Einstein’s equations predict that if the velocity of a spaceship approaches that of light, time slows down for those on-board relative to a stationary observer. There are other effects such as an increase in mass and decrease in length of the spaceship.  Weird stuff! The word spacetime was created to describe the interaction.

I have tried to think of a Time as a river as have others ("The river of time") but I cannot make it work. If we are floating down the river, does the shore represent history after we pass? Time is hard to think about in isolation.

There is a time for everything,

and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

              a time for war and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes

Songs about time:

Right Place, Wrong Time...Dr. John 

As Time Goes By...Natalie Cole 

It's Just A Matter Of Time ...Brook Benton

Face Measurements

But is she as pretty inside? I hope she is a good person. I notice she has the caucasion 'peaches and cream' complection I find so attractive.

Florence Colgate: Girl who has 'Britain's most beautiful face' | Mail Online

Saturday, April 21, 2012

A woman's face is said to be most attractive when the space between her pupils is just under half the width of her face from ear to ear. Florence scores a 44 per cent ratio. Experts also believe the relative distance between eyes and mouth should be just over a third of the measurement from hairline to chin. Florence's ratio is 32.8 per cent.

Inserted from <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2132896/Florence-Colgate-Girl-Britains-beautiful-face.html>

Kindle E-Reader and Other Stuff

I sit here with my morning coffee thinking about my Kindle e-book reader and (paper) books. It occurs to me I am living through another change caused by new technology. Being born in 1942, I have seen  several such changes. I have purchased several e-books on-line from Amazon and borrowed e-books on-line from my library. In the Internet age  distance means nothing but I still wonder at receiving books from an Indiana library while sitting here in Florida. Once selected from the on-line site the books usually appear on my Kindle in less than 60 seconds. Wow!

The e-books cannot be put on your shelf for future use...but they will exist in your e-book memory and the “cloud “ storage maintained for you by Amazon. My early model Kindle does not handle pictures and drawings well…but the e-print is expandable and easier to read than paper print. Graphics can be beautiful on PCs or an IPAD if you use them as your e-reader. E-readers with full color graphics are already here but the publishing industry is still working on a e-book business model that can survive.

Looking back to my youth I remember our home before TV. My parents used radio like we use TV today. The programming was the same type as today…drama, music, news, etc. but the pictures were in your imagination. When I was about eight (1950) we got our first black and white TV. I think color TV came to our house about 10 years later. Vacumn tubes powered our TVs. Stores had tube testers that you could use to find out which tube should be relaced. The transistor was a nerdy thing unknown to the public at the time that was to change the world.

The first transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories on December 16, 1947 by William Shockley (seated at Brattain's laboratory bench), John Bardeen (left) and Walter Brattain (right). This was perhaps the most important electronics event of the 20th century

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My first hands-on contact with computers was in the Navy. I was one of the first group  of Data System Tech ratings in the Navy. Our computer was a refrigerator sized box. It was made up of circuit boards with individual transistors in pencil eraser size cans with three legs (wires). The memory was a 32Kbit magnetic core type that was unreliable. We used front panel buttons laid out in binary and octal (based 8 number system) format to control the computer. My cheap digital wrist watch today has more power.

At IU (1960-61) a class I had covered FORTRAN, one of the early programming languages. We wrote some simple programs which were then put on punch cards. We took the cards over to the temple (the climate controlled computing center) where priests (operators) would feed out cards into the machine and the Gods (big main frame computers) would print out our fate (error! Invalid command!).

Fall registration at IU was a nightmare for some, especially Freshmen. Students gathered in the big gymnasium on 7^th street with class schedules in hand. No computers were used until after registration to sort the punch cards. Each department had tables set up and you lined up to wait your turn at the table. Then you find that the class (e.g. English 101 at 9:30 MWF)  is full so you have go back to other tables to change class times you already have in order to get the required classes at non-conflicting times. This led to un-workable situations for some kids as the classes filled up. The university figured on a 50% drop-out rate so they never had enough freshman classes. I saw kids sitting on the gym floor crying in frustration.

My first PC at work (1970) used the Microsoft DOS operating system. MS-DOS  is how Bill Gates began the road to become the wealthiest man in the world. This was command-line input…type in an instruction on the black and white monitor, hit return and see what happens. We also wrote programs in FORTRAN or BASIC to control test machines and analyze data.

Of course there has been progress in many fields since 1942 that have changed our lives in many ways. The engineers that figured out how to build a cell phone system went unnoticed by the public but the impact of it is now obvious to everyone. There was no new fundamental science breakthrough but existing technologies were put together in new way. So there is always stuff in the works below the public’s radar that may get our attention in a big way someday. Bill Gates talked about this and said advances do not happen overnight but on a scale of five or ten years big things can happen.

Is This How We Got Started?

 

Orbits Explained

 

Weird Eye-Brain Action

Don't delete the following paragraph just because it looks weird. Believe it or not, you can read it.

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