Tag Archives: time

The Life Of A Triptime

Working with my author friend this morning I mentioned we needed to be more productive than normal as I would be leaving early. I said I would be heading for more Southern climes at noon he gave me a funny look. I told him that [REDACTED] (my village of residence) was closer to the equator than our current location (if only by about 10 km) but he wasn’t impressed. It was then I pointed out that it could be the task of generations of travelers to make the journey. If a common garden slug/snail wanted to make the journey it would take many, many generations (especially crossing the main highways along the way).

It is a matter of scale, both in time and distance. Depending on how long your measuring stick is and what a typical life expectancy extends to affects the vision of how long a journey is. A recent car commercial on TV announces their car gets an additional 2 miles per gallon in range, then states that may not sound like much until you have to walk those miles. By shifting the point of view from travel at 60 MPH to 3 MPH, the idea of a mile of distance goes from 60 seconds to a 1200 second marathon.

Fractal geometry was applied to the distance of a coastline, that the length of an irregular curve changes as you change the length of the measuring stick. Perhaps the same thing happens in life. How long our life takes depends on how large of a measuring device you use to describe it. In terms of fraction of a lifetime, a year changes from a substantial proportion to a negligible amount, a mere nibble of desert rather than a huge slice of the pie. So our four hour session would hardly be long enough for the coffee to grow cold to us while a member of the order of Ephemeroptera (a mayfly for example) would consider this the equivalent of obtaining a doctorate (starting from scratch, not just post-secondary studies).

I know I am vastly more aware of distances since my disability torched my long-distance running (er, walking) jaunts. Without my cane, a trip from the couch to the bathroom becomes an extended expedition where Sherpa guides would not only be useful, but nearly essential. A walk in the park is out of the question. Fortunately my Guardian scooter does 5.5 MPH for about 20 miles (between charges) so a ride in the park is practical. Technology is wonderful in its application. So when I depart for home at noon, my Ford Explorer will allow me to travel home in (relative) comfort in about 20 minutes (I have to pass through 8 traffic lights along the way, I will inevitably need to wait for at least 5 of them). Life is good.

Take away my tools and I can relate to the slugs in a very personal way…here comes another vehicle…

Phred

post 34 of n

Birthday Candle Induced COPD

Birthday celebrations carry different levels of significance depending on your age. When you are celebrating your first one, you couldn’t care less. You have no idea why today is any different than yesterday. Mom and Dad are making a big fuss, as are almost everyone else in the room (an older sibling might be “fitching a pit” because they are not getting enough attention, but this, too, will pass). B-day 2 is slightly more important, probably because of the lead up excitement tends to carry over. You will have developed some understanding of the patterns of life and might notice today is different somehow. And there’s cake. Then you go to bed and life continues pretty much as before.

The bar gets set higher each year for the next half dozen or so, then seems to level out. Oh, it’s a great day, your B-day, but now it’s not necessarily the high point of your year (late December takes center stage) or the single focus point it might have been before. Other holidays are recognized and anticipated (the spring and fall candy festivals rank highly with people under the age of majority).

Over time, as the calendars pile up on the closet floor, other mileposts loom in the distance. You become “old enough to…” do various things. Drive a car, get a job, get a “friend” (rather than a buddy). Eventually you can drink, vote, and get drafted (not so much now, but a VERY frightening area of growing up during the ’60’s and ’70’s).

But eventually, you hit a plateau, where adding another notch on the belt of life is pretty much just another day (however, one with cake and ice cream). You don’t generally get any substantial benefits from what you had the day before (some restaurants will discount your meal based on your age, but a 1% additional reduction won’t cover the taxes for the meal). And there become certain milestone numbers that actual have additional stress attached (more emotional than rational, but for adult males the first doctor’s appointment after the big 5-0 has “thrills” that can be unnerving to contemplate). Decade numbers (30, 40, 50, …) are all mental triggers you are indeed getting old(er). For some, that is unsettling at best.  Some simply choose to deny or ignore the numbers as they get larger.

I was at a friend’s forty-first (it is less stressful to see it written this way than to just put “41” out there) birthday party. There was around twenty people around and we sat and enjoyed stories and talk (and the mandatory cake and ice cream). Overall it went well, but there was a comment made that really brought us back to reality. Someone mentioned that we didn’t do the same things we had a couple of years ago (might have been referencing a bowling event following the C&IC segment). As the night wore on people excused themselves to depart for home, and eventually the celebrant also departed for home and bed. The end of the event sort of fizzled out and ended with more of a whimper than a bang.

In fairness, there are children tangentially involved that were not “present” during earlier celebrations (I still have one of the “It’s a Boy” cigars as proof) so dad can be exonerated for seeking an opportunity to catch a few additional moments of shut eye. And gravity has increased (continues to grow larger with each passing year) while the length of each day grows shorter over time (while there is about the same amount of light in each day as when I was a kid, they don’t put anywhere as much dark in the nights anymore… just look at the bags under my eyes). So a (more) sedate party should not come as a surprise anymore.

I’m just not looking forward to the pit stops during the upcoming wheelchair races in the (hopefully distant) future.

Phred

post 28 of n

Interest Withdrawl From My Account At Daylight Savings

This Sunday is one of my two least favorite days of the year*. At 0200 (2:00 AM) my part of the world shifts to “Daylight Saving Time” and the clocks leap a full hour ahead (a perverse form of time travel with no perceivable benefit). This means I lose an hour of sleep and a great deal of value in my various “Emotional Savings Accounts” with others as it usually takes a couple of weeks before my anger and aggravation drops to near-normal levels.

I don’t remember exactly when the shift first began in my experience (the Wiki entry on Daylight Saving Time gives sometime in the 1970’s) but I do remember it being a real pain. Had to get up earlier for school, it stayed light longer in the evening, so it didn’t seem like time to go in (sunset moved later in time so dark came later at night… and who wants to go to bed if it’s not ‘night’ yet?). Eventually, we got acclimated to the change, usually just about the time for the shift back in the fall (back then the changes took place closer together, about 6 months long) when the cycle of adjustment started over again. I think there was a couple of years of debate and votes to approve the change before it was accepted by accident (the wording was to vote NO if you wanted to use DST… most people didn’t like it at first).

Now it doesn’t really matter anymore. Everyone has been subjected to the condition for so long it has become customary. You just “do it” and use the time change as a reminder to check the batteries in your smoke detectors (the method we used to do was wait for the crickets chirp to become so annoying that SOMEONE HAD to drag the ladder in and change the stupid things). Even though your biannual event does not halve the year evenly. In fact, we spend nearly double the  time with the clocks wrong (ahead of solar time) than matching the real world. I suppose this is “better” because when the change took place in April or May, commuting into the rising sun became a hazardous adventure twice each spring. By changing so early in the year, most drivers are going into work while it is still dark before the change, thus endangering each other only one month rather than two, but that’s a small gain.

If we were living in a primarily agrarian society, I might  buy the benefit of the change, but living by the electric time master (who doesn’t care if the sun even exists, for that matter… take serving on a nuclear sub for 90 days without surfacing for example) makes the change pointless for many and painful for some. A close friend of mine suffers from SAD (Seasonal Affect Disorder) and his depression in the dark months is terrifying. DST makes the day start earlier, so he awakens with more darkness ahead than behind, and suffers more severely. My depression is not so sensitive to light/dark cycles, but it is affected by my relationships with others, so the enemy of my friend is my enemy, too. (Maybe ‘enemy’ is too strong a term. Perhaps ‘tormenter’ is more appropriate.)

In any case, I desperately need to spend the next two days being extra nice to as many people as I possibly can.

Because, for most of the month of March, I will be a real jerk…

Phred

post 27 of n

(* For the record, the other worst day is the change back in the late fall. In theory we get an extra hour sleep, but it seldom works out that way…normally we can “stay up an extra hour” and sleep still suffers. HATE HATE HATE DST.)

Sermon From the Sidelines: A One Minute Message on Counting To Three (*)

“Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from thee. But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

Matthew 12:38-40  KJV

In the beginning (during the 1960’s), we were taught “old” math, usually by doing pages of problems. Ten in a row, 12 rows on a side, both sides with the same function. One day we would do hundreds of addition problems:

\begin{array}{rrrrr} 1 & 1 & 1 & 1 & {} \\ \underline{+1} & \underline{+2} & \underline{+3} & \underline{+4} & \cdots \end{array}

The next might be subtraction. Over time, we learned how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers (the “times tables” we learned in ancient history went through 12 x 12 = 144… today I’m not sure they even teach to memory but how to use a calculator, but that’s another rant post).

So, today we are expected to accept that 24 + 24 + 24 = 40.

At least that is how the “Easter” holiday is laid out. You have the death of Christ occurring after the “ninth” hour (Mark 15:34-37). In bible times, the clock did not start at midnight like we use today, but was geared to the sunrise and sunset. The ninth hour of the day (presuming sunrise to be about 7:00 AM) would occur about 4:00 PM, the middle of the afternoon. In Jewish time reckoning, the day started at sundown (see Genesis 1:5, 8, 13 for examples). Then you have the account of the women going early the morning of the first day of the week (Sabbath ended a week week, so Friday night and Saturday day was the last day of the week). Having them arrive about 8:00 AM on Sunday morning would be a reasonable time for the account in Mark 16:2.  Transferring the times to our clock would have 8 hours passing on Friday night (4:00 PM to midnight), 24 hours to cover all of Saturday, and another 8 hours on Sunday morning. 8 hours + 24 hours + 8 hours = 3 days and 3 nights.

Except it doesn’t add up. I learned that (using a day and a night as being 24 hours long) 24 hours + 24 hours + 24 hours = 3 days and 3 nights. 72 total hours. So if we want to use a full accounting of time, we can’t have the church holidays aligning with “Good Friday” through “Easter Sunday” because 40 does not equal 72.

Might I suggest another explanation that allows the math to work out? Our calendar has two kinds of holidays: those driven by a specific DATE (like Independence Day always falling on July 4th) and those driven by a specific DAY (like Thanksgiving taking place the last Thursday in November).

The Jewish calendar marks the Sabbath on Fridays, every one. But in their system of holidays the Passover remembrance is another Sabbath, driven by a specific date on the calendar. Exodus chapter 12 sets the date at the 14th day of the first month of their year. I would suggest there were two Sabbaths this week, the Passover followed by a day of preparation, then the usual Sabbath day. This provides a full 72 hours to elapse between death and discovery.

I would suggest we celebrate “Wonderful Wednesday” and “Resurrection Saturday” for our depiction of the death and rising of Jesus and leave the usual “Easter” event timing to the world.

It’s just as believable as a rabbit laying decorated hard-boiled chicken eggs and jelly beans…

Phred the Elder
DC3 Heretic Laureate

(* Disclaimer: 60 Second Sermon guaranteed if you read fast enough)

Phred

post 26 of n

The Horror Of (Self) Servitude

I am possessing limited mobility. For the most part, I use the electric Amigo style carts when I go shopping. It is really hard for me to enjoy a spending adventure that starts with a ten-minute hobble from the parking lot, especially when I  push a cart the rest of my journey. I don’t do a lot of binge-shopping, preferring rather to go to a mega-store (like WalMart) where I can get everything I need in one trip, and deal with the problems of transferring the junk from my car to the apartment later. But it was not always the case.

Last millennium, shortly after the dinosaurs became extinct there were no 50 acre establishment providing every conceivable product a household might need (these days some stores have banks, restaurants, hair and nail salons, and even tax preparation services under the same roof). If you wanted meat for dinner, you went to the butcher. Fruit and vegetables came from the grocery store. If you needed oil for the car you went to the gas station (which, strangely enough today, only sold automotive things – oil, lamps and fuses, belts – and possibly candy bars, gum, and soda pop). Depending on who owned the store, you might be able to get beer and wine from the grocery, but liquor was definitely out of the question. The liquor store was your only choice there. Shoes from a shoe store, clothes at a clothing store (if you were near a Sears & Roebuck you could get both together but it was dependent on how large a town you were near). Drugs came from the drug store (who would have thought…). Bread, rolls, and cakes from the bakery, and so on.

Then the ice age ended and something called a Supermarket was created. This incorporated a meat counter, produce, vegetables, fruit, and pantry staples like canned goods and baking supplies. Suddenly grocery shopping became a manageable single trip rather than an all afternoon adventure. By going to the bigger store, you gained the ability to gather a larger selection of goods at the cost of a close relationship with the people behind the counter. At the meat market it was likely you knew the name of the person working since his name was on the sign. And quite likely he knew your name and how large a family you had, what your preferences were, and would be willing, nay happy, to provide you with a special cut of meat should you mention such a need. The shoe seller likely sold your parents shoes (and you when you were little) and was likely a cobbler as well, so he could resole your dress shoes to make them last another year or two. For a special occation, the pharmacy was likely the possessor of a soda fountain, so you could go in and get a cherry phosphate or chocolate soda in a paper cone glass. (No soft serve ice cream then, nor fast food anything.)

When you needed to refuel your car, you drove to the gas station and a bell rang as you pulled into the drive. Stopping beside the pump, a man would come up to your car and ask how he could help you. He would pump your fuel, wash your windows, check the oil level in you car (and offer to add a quart if you were low), and would make change for your purchase should you not have the right amount of money (no credit cards, ever…they didn’t exist!). All done with a smile, rain or snow, hot or cold. You never had to leave your car for all this service.

Time passes. I spend a year in California in the mid 1970’s and was exposed to Self-Serve gasoline for the first time. Funny, but the incentive for pumping your own gas was a seven cent per gallon discount (doesn’t sound like much today, but then it was about a twenty percent discount…say 60-70 cents today). It didn’t matter if you went to the cheapest off-brand station or the biggest conglomerate oil company’s brand. Get out of your car and you knocked off that discount. The explanation I heard at the time was the company could offer the reduced price because they didn’t have to pay the wages of an attendant to work the pumps like at a full-serve island. When returning to Michigan, I found there was NO price difference between full and self service stations. Guess who pumped my gas (especially in inclement weather)?

Today? I can only think of one (1) full serve station and that’s nearly 40 miles from here. In theory there are stations that will send an attendant out to assist people with handicaps, but there is a couple of things with these programs that trouble me. First, there is a button on the pump that calls for help. So, you still have to get out of the vehicle and go to the pump to call for someone to come and run the pump you are standing next to. Huh? Secondly (and more ominous) I have been told by clerks in several different stations that the buttons don’t do anything… no bells, whistles, klaxon horns, nothing. So mashing the “Call for Help” button only serves to remove the thin layer of dust from that small part of the pump. (And raises the effective blood pressure, aggravation level, and stress of the person struggling to get in and out of his or her car in the first place.)

But I can live with pumping my own gas. At least (most) stations have roofed over the pump islands so you are (mostly) out of the rain and snow while working on your car. Vastly more irritating are the mega-stores that have chosen to make checkout a do-it-yourself adventure. In the old days a store might have two or three checkout lanes, staffed by cheery clerks and baggers to haul your groceries to your car and to help load them into the trunk. Some of the larger stores I have wandered through might have thirty lanes or more, presumably to allow for efficient processing during holiday rushes. In the last ten years a third of these lanes have been converted to self-service or “fast lane” checkout centers.

The principle reason is cost reduction. A single clerk can stand at a kiosk standing at the end of a dozen of these robot tellers and attend to errors as needed. this results in eleven less clerks working than if a warm-bodied person filled each slot.  And the savings is greater during times of slack, where two or three isles are needed continuously but the other eight might not do enough business to cover a clerk’s expenses for the entire shift. So for the business it makes cents sense.

Not so much for the purchaser. For my part, I refuse to use these abominations for two reasons. The typical store is decidedly not user-friendly for shoppers using these Amigo contraptions supplied. The top two or three shelves are not reachable while seated, and frozen foods, canned beverages, and dairy products stored behind glass-fronted doors are a wistful dream away. Occasionally a kind stranger will fetch a product from the distant lands, but many a traveler has returned sadder and poorer for the lack of a carton of MooseTracks. Once my trip is nearly finished I am confronted by the design failure of these conveyor belt driven product scattering machines. They are too high to use easily (it’s hard enough to just haul a 4 kilo bag of potatoes from over the steering handles at the front of the cart and swinging it onto the standard lane: bend, lift, twist actions of the back are OK in singular, doing all at once is the prescription for serious injury). They are simply not fun to use.

A more important reason for me to decline to use these lanes is the one mentioned above in gas stations: no employee wages being spent. In essence, by using these devices you agree to become an unpaid employee of the store for the ten minutes you are ringing and bagging your own purchases. If you assume a wage of twelve dollars an hour, you have effectively saved the company two dollars they would have had to pay someone (actually, considerably more than $2 when you factor in all the added expenses like payroll taxes and unemployment insurance, probably closer to $3 when it’s all said and done). Most of my working life I feel I’ve been underpaid for the amount of work I’ve done, but to volunteer to be giving my wages directly to my “employer” seems wrong on so many levels.

So I end up waiting in the line that sells cigarettes for 45 minutes to checkout my ten items…

Phred

post 23 of n

Relatively Relative Relativity

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”

For someone that plays with words, this saying is pure joy. The multiple meanings of words, the crazy parallelism, the twisted images. It is fun, but sadly not a true statement (or rather, pair of statements). My experience is fruit flies would rather have an avocado any day. Not that they are banana adverse, but there is something about an over ripe and under processed piece of raw guacamole that will generate MILLIONS of friends for a party that never ends. I was still using my vacuum cleaner to try and evacuate my kitchen of moving dust motes with wings 22 days after returning from an ill-advised trip. Gone 10 days, vinegar traps the next month.

As for time, an arrow doesn’t necessarily travel in a straight line (a parabola due to gravity and deflection from wind from side to side) or at a constant rate (friction verses a slight acceleration due to gravity) but it does not do justice to the variance experienced in the real world.

In the first third of my life, the concept of a time frame of 20 years was inconceivable. In fact, years seemed to be mostly an imaginary construct in a life of such short duration. Months and weeks were more manageable chunks to grasp in one’s imagination. Oh, to anticipate a birthday in the fall or the joy of Christmas during a day-dreaming session in school during a warm spring day was conceivable, but to actually suggest the ability to plan for a “future” more than a few calendar pages out seemed ludicrous at best.

The second third allowed for the growth of more abstract units of time. Employment created the need to “plan a 2 week vacation next year” with enough vision to actually submit a form to HR with proposed dates. Marriage and the start of a family made a “nine month” window slide from imaginary to imagery to immediate activity. Children expands ones (event) horizon to encompass whole blocks of time, the “terrible twos” through the teens (shudder!). Still, a two-decade block of time is a stretch to wrap one’s mind around.

Which brings us to the third half (as the tappet brothers used to say on “Car Talk”) of our show life. It seems absurd, but I am discovering that most of the interesting stories I am sharing include at some point the line “… that happened about… umm, twenty some years ago….” Now, I realize it is a time span going from over twice a lifetime to about a lifetime to about a third of a lifetime in this millennium, but (depending on what category you, the reader falls into) it is either impossible or depressing. And perhaps both in the same moment.

Also disorienting is the realization that time is anything but linear. I have been involved in radio for… um, well over twenty years or so now (starting in 1974, so I guess I need to repeat myself). While in the Navy, we would tune a short-wave radio to the WWV broadcast in Fort Collins, CO. This was a “clock” that ticked (and beeped) 58 times a minute, 60 minutes an hour, 24 x 7. It was partially a source of background noise, and a constant reminder of what time it was (which we needed to know as we processed messages from around the world). To hear “This is radio station WWV, Fort Collins Colorado, broadcasting on internationally allocated standard carrier frequencies of 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 megahertz, providing time of day, standard time intervals and other related information…” twice an hour was to be lulled into thinking time passed with metronome like precision.

Wrong! Everybody “knows” that time passes faster or slower depending on what you are doing. A minute sitting in history class takes about 400 seconds. Sitting at a table sharing the evening with your best friends can have 19 minute hours evaporate into the ether. And, as the ultimate example, were it not for event-driven time dilation why else would the last two minutes of every basketball game take just under an hour on an observer’s clock (not in the arena, but on the microwave in the kitchen, for example, while watching on TV)?

I was told as a youth that the older I got, the faster time would seem to pass. It has proven to be true, but I think I can give a scientific explanation for why: nocturnal-derived changes in angular rotation of the Earth. You see, just as gravity is much stronger today than it was when I was younger (I estimate it has increased at least 70% in the last three decades alone), the amount of darkness in the night period is much shorter than it was last millennium. Daylight periods have not changed (at least if you disregard the cumulative effects of “Daylight Savings Time”) but they don’t put as much dark in the nights as they used to.

In essence, the phrase used to start this rant would be better stated as

“Time flies like fruit flies”

Phred

post 15 of n