Reno My Male
Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Happy New (Accurate!) Year!
So the Earth's gone back to being right on time in its orbit around the Sun.
It's an interesting thing, really. We invented atomic clocks to track time better and then found out that Earth hasn't been tracking time accurately, so we validated the leap year which had been previously introduced to account for this.
Our ancestors believed in whims of gods and random variability. To them, it was quite acceptable that winter might be followed by more winter, or that a day should be cut short because of a god's displeasure. What they attributed eclipses to bears testimony to their way of thinking back then. And lo! - the universe complied, by providing them with an Earth that slowed down and made years a different length.
Our physicists and astrophysicists (now *there*'s a blast from the past term!) tell us that slowing down is the natural course for bodies in orbit, so we also believe in a certain amount of variability, but a predictable variability.
This is unpredictable. So were the ancients right, does everything really depend on the whim of gods, or are we missing some laws of physics? Or is the Universe adapting itself to our new demands on it?
I don't recall who in the last century said that 'the Universe looks less and less like a machine and more and more like a thought' but I'm beginning to think they're right. In which case, there are two consequences to this Earth-moving news:
ONE - we're all on time again, but we still have leap years, so we're actually ahead by about a quarter of a second per day, so you can all stop worrying about being late for appointments! and
TWO - since the Universe is a thought, and since I am experiencing this thought, it must be *my* thought, so why am I typing this weblog to figments of my imagination?
Happy New Year all you figments!
These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.
I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.
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