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About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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Hold On A Second... If you're one of the schmucks who celebrates New Year's Day on the day that was intended to be the Winter Solstice except the inaccuracies of the calendar eventually added up to about ten days before it got fixed, then Happy New Year. For you guys, whether or not you believe Jesus actually existed, it's the year 2006, or roughly 2010 years after he was allegedly born (not 2006 due to another couple of math errors, one of which is the fact that there was no year "0" and the other being that Octavian and Augustus turned out to be the same guy, so the four years of Octavian should have counted in the reckoning), and not counting the fact that the actual date of Jesus' birth should have been sometime in mid-April since no shepherd with actual testicles to freeze off is going to be watching over flocks by night near Bethlehem in late December.
I try writing that on my checks but the little blank is too short.
For everyone else, Happy Day When All The Shops Are Inexplicably Shut Down And The Streets Downtown Are Paved With Confetti, Vomit, Broken Glass, And Passed-Out Drunks.*
Also we got handed a leap second this past New Year's Eve, so be sure to adjust your atomic clocks accordingly.
Accuracy is a bitch. According to the fourth definition of the word "bitch" in the latest online edition of the American Heritage Dictionary. Assuming a new edition with a revised definition hasn't come out between the last time I checked before I wrote this and the time you read this.
You get the point.
Inaccuracy is where misunderstanding starts. You say something. I make my best guess at what you mean by what you said. Then I act on my interpretations. The more we agree on what the words mean, the more we agree on the implications of stress and tone of voice, the more we agree on the nuances of timing and context ... the more likely we are to be able to communicate successfully.
Accuracy is also very important in science. That's why scientists around the globe are trying to unanchor our concept of the measurement of time from the rotation of a bumpy, sloshy ball of rock. The gravitic drag of the moon is slowing down the duration of the day as it is. A few billion years ago daily rotations were about six hours long. A few billion years from now daily rotations will be weeks long (using the benchmarks of current durations measured by modern clocks of course).
Those scientists who care would like time to be measured in terms of some unalterable physical property of some common form of matter—to the extent that we understand what unalterable means. The speed of light could conceivably have been faster a long time ago, for instance. It's a problem. But if a second is defined as the time that it takes a certain number of peaks and troughs of a particular wavelength of light to pass a certain point—perhaps the wavelength of a photon emitted from a hydrogen atom (at rest with respect to ourselves) having been excited to a certain point above the ground state—then lots and lots of physicists will be really happy.
To think there are still places on earth where people have little use for units of time larger than a week or shorter than an hour... but who cares about them? They'll be happy regardless. And they won't cash our checks.
A millionth of a billionth of a second means something to a physicist. It doesn't mean anything to anyone else—unless we're looking to profit from the use of modern magical wonders like the global positioning system.†
Meanwhile back on the island where people are as likely to eat your checks as to cash them, people use the magic of looking for familiar landmarks, and, if that fails, shouting their fool heads off.
Anyway.
My recommendation? We agree to disagree. To physicists in their tidy little equations a second is a second is a second, as defined by hydrogen wavelengths or decaying cesium atoms or whatever they have handy that has the potential for producing a constant response to a constant stimulus. To the rest of us, it's dreadfully convenient for a second to be 1/86400th of a day, a day being measured as the length of time between times when the sun is at the highest point in the sky that it will get. As we are diurnal organic creatures whose physiology freaks out on the cellular level if the sun doesn't come up when we expect it, I believe we are owed this. Besides, there are precedents. Do we not have nautical miles and statute miles? Have we not already agreed to disagree with scientists (and vice versa) on what the word "calorie" means? Is not a second of time already different from a second of arc?
I say the physicists can have their ultra-accurate measurements of time and call them whatever they feel like calling them. And I'll go back to eating your checks.
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* Frozen Passed-Out Drunks only northwards of 25°N latitude.** Still doesn't fit in those little blanks on checks.***
** ... excepting high altitudes, where Frozen Passed-Out Drunks may occur at any time of the year.
*** Checks. You know, you write on them and people pretend they're worth money. An archaic form of currency that occurred after bags of metal bits and before debit cards.
† A palm-sized or smaller amulet that tells you where you are with an error range somewhere between ten meters and a centimeter, depending on how much money you paid. It does this by asking three or four fabulously expensive nuclear-powered boxes some thousands of miles overhead in the sky to tell you what time it is to a billionth of a second or so. The device compares the lags in the responses to each other—all of this just to tell you that you missed your turn half a mile back and now you're going the wrong way.
Vidicon needs a second of your time. |
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