Mind Fuck: Day 7

Today I found out... Russia has 9 time zones! This has recently been reduced from 12 to avoid further confusion... To be fair, Russia is enormously big. It could fit the whole of Europe inside it quite comfortably about 3 times and so to have the same idea of time throughout the country would mean people waking up in Moscow at 3am to start their day while people in Chukotka in eastern Russia after midday to do the same. 

I have always been quite confused about time zones. They have always seemed unnecessary in my eyes, but then how else would we attempt to grasp time. It is simply about where you are in relation to the worlds daily cycle at any given point. London GMT is 15 minutes ahead of time than Bristol for example, but it would be silly for everyone to keep different time on such a small scale.

Hourly measurements are simpler ways of controlling this, to allow people to not only keep in time with each other but, to enable maximum hourly day-light.

Time is purely subjective but some pretty cleaver people have created a pretty straightforward way of keeping it no matter where you are in the world... You don't have to follow it but it's there if you need it. 

Mind Fuck: Day 6

Today I found out... Honey-Bees have an incredible grasp of time. They are able to time their flights with internal clocks. They can also work out how fast they are flying by measuring the speed at which objects pass by their eyes. They can combine these two things to work out how far from their hive a particular patch of flowers is. What's more they can communicate all this to their hive-mates...

When a scout bee finds a particularly good patch of flowers, she collects some pollen or nectar and buzzes back to her hive. Other bees cluster around while the bee performs a dance. If the flowers are nearby the bee just dances round in circles. But if they're more than 50 meters or so away, she performs a special waggle dance, running up and down the comb wagging her tail from side to side then start circling round and starting again. The angle of her run up the comb tells the other bees which direction to go in relation to the sun. The number of tail waggings she does tell them how long they need to fly for at a particular speed to reach the flowers considering wind speed too...

Humans had to invent clocks...

Mind Fuck: Day 5

Today i found out... T.S.Eliot's Four Quartets has some very interesting philosophical mentions of time. Here's one from Burnt Norton:  

 

Time present and time past,
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

 

And how about this from Little Gidding:

   
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from….

Please Note...

 Your Clocks Have Changed...

Mind Fuck: Day 4

Today i found out...that we humans have established a functioning method of measuring time, based on the orbit of our planet around the sun, our moons orbit around us, and the rotation of Earths axis... well i knew all that before, but today i wondered... What time is it on Jupiter? Despite being a dense uninhabitable gas cloud, if you were visiting Jupiter, you would probably want to know what time it was when you landed... 

Well, it takes 11.86 years for Jupiter to orbit the sun, and it has 63 know moons and fully rotates on its axis every 10 hours... CLOCKS DON'T WORK ON JUPITER STUPID!!!!

Mind Fuck: Day 3

Today i found out... that writing a Googolplex, in numerals, would be physically impossible, since doing so would require more space than the known universe provides...


The time it would take to write such a number also renders the task implausible: if a person can write two digits per second, it would take around about 1.51×10⁹² years, which is 1.1×10⁸²times the age of the universe, to write a Googolplex.

Mind Fuck: Day 2

Today i found out...Time travels at the speed of light. So if you were to travel at this speed but turn around and face behind you... What would you see? Yourself? A dark void? A blurred form reality? 
Trouble is no one knows because it would be impossible to do so without your face falling off, or dying a horrible death of some kind.

Mind Fuck: Day 1

Today i found out... that as a fraction of the lifespan of the universe (as measured from its beginning, to the evaporation of the last black hole) life as we know it, is only possible for one thousandth of a billion, billion, billionth, billion, billion, billionth, billion, billion, billionth, of a percent.....

And as if that wasn't enough... if you were to try and calculate the time left until the end of the universe (when it is completely void of matter, and time ceases to exist)... well there just aren't enough atoms in the universe to represent the number of years until that happens.