God invented dinosaurs first before He figured out how to fold intestines. I figure it was a straight shot, mouth to anus, a really really long digestive track that allowed adequate time for nutrient absorption by virtue of its very length. Then God realized how bad dinosaurs were for the environment. They were huge! They produced huge waste! Then He killed them off and buried the fossil fuels so they wouldn't be a trouble to us.
That was before God figured out how to fold time.
Let us consider the pocket watch. No single technological device has revolutionized fashion and power as much as the pocket watch. The cell phone is simply the upgraded version. The pocket watch necessitated an extra and specialized pocket to be sewn into the waistcoat, wherever waistcoats were worn. Sure Big Ben was visible from the mid-eighteen hundreds up and down the river, but you could be in an interior chamber of an interior chamber waiting for St. Paul’s Cathedral to chime and wondering how long you’d have to wait. If you had a pocket watch, then you had knowledge in the palm of your hand.
If KNOWLEDGE IS POWER and TIME IS MONEY and if you had a pocket watch, then you’ve Ben bringing home the Bacon!
“Knowledge is power.” Francis Bacon 1597
“Time is money.” Benjamin Franklin 1748
If you could fold time into the pocket of your clothes, then travel to anywhen is nearly possible; certainly travel to anywhere along the connections of you wireless Internet device.
(I remember a time when it was a big deal, I mean a BIG deal to pay fifty bucks to get a clock chip added to your computer. You could use the word processor…or the spreadsheet—not both!—AND see the time displayed. It was a vast luxury, especially if you were in college and you had a wristwatch and a wall clock. I had some explaining to do to my parents. Anyway, is there a computer today manufactured without a clock function? Time may be money, but I think time is getting cheaper. Maybe time is somehow linked with the sub prime market.)
American physicist, John Wheeler, coined the term “black hole” and also said that “Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening at once.” But who’s to stop the Internet? Everything DOES happen at once on the Internet and there’s no clock to stop it! Information is loaded and used and moved without stratigraphy to form any kind of context. For instance, one of the rudest forms of communication is chat format, whereby you can have a conversation with everybody talking at the same time. It’s like a party where you have to shout over the music in order to be heard. But who is really listening? Miss Manners would certainly fail to approve.
Is time natural, as Wheeler infers? From Darwin we understand evolution in terms of change as a function of survival plus time. Who is time’s keeper? Does God make time for us? Or do we make time for God? Where does time come from? Where does time go? Does time walk before it flies? Does time ever land? How many feathers are there in a second? How many clocks are sold in second hand shops? How many minute hands does it take to push the hours along? Is time really ours?
Needless to say, my time management skills are…well that’s why I blog. It’s the perfect use of lack of focus between any given hash marks of the clock face.
AA In Boston
14 years ago
3 comments:
Incidently, John Wheeler, the guy who said, "Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening at once," was born in Jacksonville, Florida. Sort of the Tim Tebow of famous physcicists.
I liked your blog entry. It was rather mind-bending. I think you were on to a cool idea, actually, regarding the immutability of digital artifacts. They never age. The never decay. And with enough computational power, they can be instantly resurrected at any time. So the idea of living in the past, of the past never dying, is really only a matter of time. As Moore's Law progresses and computational speeds increase and memory becomes cheaper and networked devices reach ubiquity (or our brains become networked devices) we'll have no more need for nostalgia. Memory will become obsolete...a luxury.
Nice to hear from you, Bill. I thought you'd become an immutable artifact.
It took nearly twenty years for Fert and Gruenberg to win the Nobel Prize for giant magnetoresistance, which is an effect that allows a lot of information to be stored in a very small place, like the iPod in your pocket. So if it took nearly twenty years before recognition of such an important discovery, how fast do you think memory will become obsolete?
Can smell and taste and texture be recorded by digital means, or any other means of rapid recall? Can you lick a CD to taste the cinnamon of your grandmother's apple pie? My modem one time emitted a smell. It wasn't a good smell. It was the aroma of burning plastic after it had been smote by lightning. Smell and taste and texture could be the last bastion of nostalgia. Or they might be obsolete already. You never hear a near-death experience where a person SMELLED his life pass before his nose. No, I think for the most part THAT would not be pleasant.
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