Nice idea, but there's a big problem with that: The second is an SI unit. Changing it to a different value would require either an ugly fudge factor, or require changing the entire metric system. Either way metric depends on the second being the duration it is!
Thank you for that information. I did not know that. From our trustworthy wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units): "Because the SI is not static, units are created and definitions are modified through international agreement among many nations as the technology of measurement progresses, and as the precision of measurements improves."
I'm sure they knew what they were doing when they agreed in 1967 to define a second as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second) Though IMHO, it sure would be nice to be able to define a second as 1/100,000th of a day, something everyday people can grok. But of course, the "day" tends to change ever-so slightly in length each year. I can imagine people who need high degrees of scientific precision asking each other, "Are you talking about seconds in terms of today, or a year ago?"
But creating a calendar system has *always* been a big hassle with always a little bit of fudge factor. For everyday people, 1/100000th of a mean solar day would be fine, and it wouldn't make a significant difference to anything people regularly measure, even a 100m dash run this year versus 20 years from now. The Earth's rotation slows only about 0.002 every 100 years.
What's my birthday? As of now, it is November 30, -0035. Tomorrow it will be December 1, -0035. A month from now it will be Jan 1, -0036. Super easy!
I'm wondering if you're being intentionally dense here to construct a strawman, or misunderstanding my proposal. My hope is the latter. Your birthday will always be the same in absolute terms (November 30,1970 CE, or whatever). Your personal calendar could show your birthday either in absolute time just like it does now, or in countdown/up terms relating the moment of its passing with the present moment.
Further, I see that if we can survive the coming economic breakdown/malaise, we could put forward technology that could keep us always in the now. We can communicate a time to meet with other people in absolute terms (e.g. next Tuesday, August 30 at 8:00) and our personal time-piece can do the translation so the time is always "now" and anything coming up can be alternately shown to us as "t - 2 days, 3 hours, 7 minutes."
In other words, every person with a timepiece can be the center of their own world, and synched up in temporal verbiage with everybody else. E.g.- The US Civil War was "t + 150 years," World Peace Day begins in "t + 14 days" alternately Sept 11, 2011 CE.
Almost all of our time-measurement system is in arbitrary agreed-upon units (months, weeks, hours, minutes, seconds). The things that are not flexible are days (earth rotations), moon-cycles, years (fixed at 365.x days; earth revolutions around the sun), and the frequency of a cesium atom, etc. We could choose to have 12 months a year, each with three weeks, and have a 5.x day remainder week if we wanted.... The difficult part is to gather the political will to collectively agree upon a change. The catalyst for breaking free from this long-held system has to be a strong argument, and buy-in from a sufficient power-base.
Actually, while we're at it, we would do well to change to ten hour days. Each hour would be 144 of our present minutes. Each of the ten hours would have 100 minutes, and each of the minutes would have 100 seconds.
Each hour would be 144 of our present minutes.
Each minute would be 1.44x the length of a present minute.
Each second would be slightly shorter (0.86 of our present seconds).
The timepiece industry would have a hay-day.
And while we're at it, let's change the timing system to NCE(New Common Era) 0, following J.R.R. Tolkien's system for adopting new eras. That would put us more in the now, instead of the "good ol' days" circa 0 A.D. people are so strangely fond of. (We can still remember Jesus without having to continue this overdue count-up to 3000 or higher.)
All this would shake up people's reality enough that maybe our civilization could grow into something different/better and make us feel less removed from people in distant countries, with whom we're as close communication-wise as a person two miles away.
And yes, eliminating the present location-relativistic time-system now that a significant portion of the world population is globally connected is a Good Thing(tm). Someday, people will look back and say, "Really, you had to communicate with each other in that hackey and limited way???" Imagine if every time you wanted to physically meet with a friend, and instead of just giving them an absolute time and place to meet, you had to know their location in order to tell them the place. "Let's see, you're at 21st and Broadway? Is that my 21st and Broadway, or yours? Oh, we'll need to translate your location by 4 blocks..."
Yep, that's exactly what I'm talking about in my post above (posted after yours though) about the dangers of latency arbitrage.
We're looking at infinitessimally small latencies and holding durations. Not 20 seconds.
Furthermore, this infinitessimally short buying-selling period is starting to remind me more and more of calculus, and integrating under the curve.
Those who buy and sell once/day are missing out on a lot of detailed motion in every stock. As the trading times get shorter and shorter, the investor/gambler/choke-holders are nearing the actual curve and siphoning off any advantage that a less frequent trader may have.
Mark my words, if this continues unabated, Wall Street will be on its knees soon because the only "people" who trade with any success will be software programs that operate like a vice-grip as the time-domain and the frequency-domain both get optimized out of all creativity, and an honest prognosticating human who uses reason and a newspaper will have better odds at any casino in Vegas.
I'm surprised I haven't seen the phrase "latency arbitrage" yet.
You all are talking about buying and selling stocks "quickly" in terms of several seconds. But in this latest model, stocks are bought and sold faster than you can type a single word. It's automated, and the people who have a 100 millisecond advantage: the richest, who get their servers hooked up as near as possible to the source of the buy/sell info feeds.
Imagine the difference between playing Quake or another first-person shooter 1000 miles away from a server where some other players are directly connected to the LAN, and one player is actually playing on the same machine that's serving. Who gets the fastest updates and the best real-time view? The host!
Read more here: http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/investing/rigged-market-latency-arbitrage-3-billion/19503388/
The part that's most frustrating is "What's the size of the NASA budget?" And how does that compare to the size of our military budget?
We could have a colony in space or on the moon by now, if we weren't spending close to $1 trillion/year making war.
Here's a little look at more of what Japan's planning: http://pinktentacle.com/2010/06/futuristic-mega-projects-by-shimizu/
It's whether it should do business with a government that will use your products in a repressive manner. A wagonmaker could probably sell his wagons to someone who does not kill its own citizens for their ethnicity and still remain in business. But here is the crux. It won't quite make as much money. And the pure lust for profit is what is objectionable here.
This is a slippery slope. China has human rights violations, but then again so does the US.
There are over a million people of color in America in PRISON because of the so-called "War on Drugs" which is executed with a discriminatory bias, where white people (and people of the upper class) get off scot-free, or never even get harassed in the first place.
Should MS and other companies pull out of doing business in the US until it gives up the war on drugs?
that analogy is nothing short of brilliant. a guy punching holes in the walls with a sledgehammer == our government's solution of criminalizing marijuana.
Seriously, Nintendo is going in the right direction with their Wii controllers. Why not have wearable controllers, to make the gameplay more immersive?
Then, when you're battling the dragon, or having a shoot-out, you're using your whole body. Want to do more damage to the dragon/goblin? Swing your arm around faster. Want to avoid getting shot? Lay down on the ground.
Instead of sitting on the couch, eating chips, and getting a nasty case of repetitive stress disorder on your thumbs and wrists, we could actually be exercising.
You could spot the addicts because they'd be fit as all hell.
I would love to be able to shoot at rocks and alien spaceships from a FPS perspective.
Needing to turn in all those different angles, would mean that the game controller mapping would be critical.
Perhaps Defender 3D would be cool as well.
AND dollars are fluid. The treasury can just decide that there will be more and introduce a few more to adjust the system.
You can't just introduce a few more votes into the pie... Oh wait. That's what electronic voting is all about.
I'll bet extra-galactic space (beyond the furthest galaxies, beyond the fastest moving elements from the big bang) is colder, possibly even a vacuum if you go far out enough. (Actually, I was just there the other day, it was nice because there was no pet hair or dust bunnies.)
Isn't it kind of mind-blowing that according to big bang theory everything is contained within nothing?
The switch to digital essentially allows for the ability to cram ~6x the number of channels in the spectrum than there are currently.
The part that's total crap about it is that all of those extra channels are again going out to the same broadcasters who already have access to the previous ones. To understand that, one needs to know that the big broadcasters do not own the spectrum they broadcast on, the government leases it to them. This changeover is a perfect opportunity for many of the newly-created channels to go to organizations who put out smaller locally produced shows. Now that anyone with $2000 for a computer, some video-editing software, a DV camera, and some skill can make decent productions, there are a lot of other people (who are not affiliated with NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC, etc) who have something to say, but are denied access to leasing the airwaves directly, and are certainly denied access to putting their ideas across on any of the above if it doesn't fit with any of the major network's plans.
The other travesty is that the government is practically *giving* these airwaves away, when they really could and should be charging tens of billions of dollars or more. The government is planning on giving these airwaves away to the same people who already have them, and then once its a done deal, the broadcasters will be further entrenched, in the same fashion as they currently are.
If this aggravates you, call your congressperson. Call the FCC. Do a google search for "media reform". We need to act and create a groundswell.
It's your access to wider free speech that is being given away to those who already have far too much free speech and take full advantage of it to their own ends.
"I was getting 107 miles to the gallon when I T-boned that bus."
Math teachers don't set the curriculum. :(
on
The Golden Ratio
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· Score: 1
"The problem is that the vast majority of math teachers try to avoid troubling students' brains with the inherently abstract nature of mathematics."
Actually, that's pretty idealistic -- have you ever taught math in high school or junior high? I have, and decided it wasn't for me. Why? Students, parents, other teachers, the school administrators, and the government all expect that the students will be "taught to the test." You would not believe how frustrating it was to try to teach the underlying fundamentals to students who wanted nothing more than "just how to get the right answer" so they could get the problem done, or to flirt with the girl/boy in the seat next to them, or to just doodle.
Start teaching the basic concepts behind the Peano axioms to anyone not in college, without cloaking it very carefully, and you'll have parents calling in, and students who think its not important since it's not going to be on the SATs. Another issue is politics within the school -- newer teachers (with the most drive often) can get stuck with the remedial arithmetic and algebra 1 courses, not being given the option to teach "the real fundamentals behind math", which is a course that doesn't exist in standard schools anyway.
Unfortunately, the curriculum within schools is kinda stuck. Arithmetic, then Algebra, then Geometry, then Algebra 2/Trig, then Pre-calc, then Calc, with a couple other variants. All of those classes have stuff that students are required to know, and there's not enough time in the day, or energy in a teacher to a) teach the required stuff, b) teach the important stuff, and c) deal with a classroom with 30+ kids with understanding levels that span the bell curve. The required stuff is universally accepted as required, or the kids don't get into college X, and that's why the ideals go out the window.
Which is too bad... Where this kind of stuff really needs to change is at the grade school level. Lots of bright kids sit dormant with dumb arithmetic being repeated instead of getting stuff like this. Write yr congressperson or school superintendent, I guess, or if you're a parent, get active with your school district.
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Nice idea, but there's a big problem with that: The second is an SI unit. Changing it to a different value would require either an ugly fudge factor, or require changing the entire metric system. Either way metric depends on the second being the duration it is!
Thank you for that information. I did not know that. From our trustworthy wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units): "Because the SI is not static, units are created and definitions are modified through international agreement among many nations as the technology of measurement progresses, and as the precision of measurements improves."
I'm sure they knew what they were doing when they agreed in 1967 to define a second as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second) Though IMHO, it sure would be nice to be able to define a second as 1/100,000th of a day, something everyday people can grok. But of course, the "day" tends to change ever-so slightly in length each year. I can imagine people who need high degrees of scientific precision asking each other, "Are you talking about seconds in terms of today, or a year ago?"
But creating a calendar system has *always* been a big hassle with always a little bit of fudge factor. For everyday people, 1/100000th of a mean solar day would be fine, and it wouldn't make a significant difference to anything people regularly measure, even a 100m dash run this year versus 20 years from now. The Earth's rotation slows only about 0.002 every 100 years.
What's my birthday? As of now, it is November 30, -0035. Tomorrow it will be December 1, -0035. A month from now it will be Jan 1, -0036. Super easy!
I'm wondering if you're being intentionally dense here to construct a strawman, or misunderstanding my proposal. My hope is the latter. Your birthday will always be the same in absolute terms (November 30,1970 CE, or whatever). Your personal calendar could show your birthday either in absolute time just like it does now, or in countdown/up terms relating the moment of its passing with the present moment.
Further, I see that if we can survive the coming economic breakdown/malaise, we could put forward technology that could keep us always in the now. We can communicate a time to meet with other people in absolute terms (e.g. next Tuesday, August 30 at 8:00) and our personal time-piece can do the translation so the time is always "now" and anything coming up can be alternately shown to us as "t - 2 days, 3 hours, 7 minutes."
In other words, every person with a timepiece can be the center of their own world, and synched up in temporal verbiage with everybody else. E.g.- The US Civil War was "t + 150 years," World Peace Day begins in "t + 14 days" alternately Sept 11, 2011 CE.
Almost all of our time-measurement system is in arbitrary agreed-upon units (months, weeks, hours, minutes, seconds). The things that are not flexible are days (earth rotations), moon-cycles, years (fixed at 365.x days; earth revolutions around the sun), and the frequency of a cesium atom, etc. We could choose to have 12 months a year, each with three weeks, and have a 5.x day remainder week if we wanted.... The difficult part is to gather the political will to collectively agree upon a change. The catalyst for breaking free from this long-held system has to be a strong argument, and buy-in from a sufficient power-base.
Actually, while we're at it, we would do well to change to ten hour days. Each hour would be 144 of our present minutes. Each of the ten hours would have 100 minutes, and each of the minutes would have 100 seconds.
Each hour would be 144 of our present minutes.
Each minute would be 1.44x the length of a present minute.
Each second would be slightly shorter (0.86 of our present seconds).
The timepiece industry would have a hay-day.
And while we're at it, let's change the timing system to NCE(New Common Era) 0, following J.R.R. Tolkien's system for adopting new eras. That would put us more in the now, instead of the "good ol' days" circa 0 A.D. people are so strangely fond of. (We can still remember Jesus without having to continue this overdue count-up to 3000 or higher.)
All this would shake up people's reality enough that maybe our civilization could grow into something different/better and make us feel less removed from people in distant countries, with whom we're as close communication-wise as a person two miles away.
And yes, eliminating the present location-relativistic time-system now that a significant portion of the world population is globally connected is a Good Thing(tm). Someday, people will look back and say, "Really, you had to communicate with each other in that hackey and limited way???" Imagine if every time you wanted to physically meet with a friend, and instead of just giving them an absolute time and place to meet, you had to know their location in order to tell them the place. "Let's see, you're at 21st and Broadway? Is that my 21st and Broadway, or yours? Oh, we'll need to translate your location by 4 blocks..."
Yep, that's exactly what I'm talking about in my post above (posted after yours though) about the dangers of latency arbitrage. We're looking at infinitessimally small latencies and holding durations. Not 20 seconds.
Furthermore, this infinitessimally short buying-selling period is starting to remind me more and more of calculus, and integrating under the curve. Those who buy and sell once/day are missing out on a lot of detailed motion in every stock. As the trading times get shorter and shorter, the investor/gambler/choke-holders are nearing the actual curve and siphoning off any advantage that a less frequent trader may have. Mark my words, if this continues unabated, Wall Street will be on its knees soon because the only "people" who trade with any success will be software programs that operate like a vice-grip as the time-domain and the frequency-domain both get optimized out of all creativity, and an honest prognosticating human who uses reason and a newspaper will have better odds at any casino in Vegas.
I'm surprised I haven't seen the phrase "latency arbitrage" yet. You all are talking about buying and selling stocks "quickly" in terms of several seconds. But in this latest model, stocks are bought and sold faster than you can type a single word. It's automated, and the people who have a 100 millisecond advantage: the richest, who get their servers hooked up as near as possible to the source of the buy/sell info feeds. Imagine the difference between playing Quake or another first-person shooter 1000 miles away from a server where some other players are directly connected to the LAN, and one player is actually playing on the same machine that's serving. Who gets the fastest updates and the best real-time view? The host! Read more here: http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/investing/rigged-market-latency-arbitrage-3-billion/19503388/
The part that's most frustrating is "What's the size of the NASA budget?" And how does that compare to the size of our military budget? We could have a colony in space or on the moon by now, if we weren't spending close to $1 trillion/year making war. Here's a little look at more of what Japan's planning: http://pinktentacle.com/2010/06/futuristic-mega-projects-by-shimizu/
It's whether it should do business with a government that will use your products in a repressive manner. A wagonmaker could probably sell his wagons to someone who does not kill its own citizens for their ethnicity and still remain in business. But here is the crux. It won't quite make as much money. And the pure lust for profit is what is objectionable here.
This is a slippery slope. China has human rights violations, but then again so does the US. There are over a million people of color in America in PRISON because of the so-called "War on Drugs" which is executed with a discriminatory bias, where white people (and people of the upper class) get off scot-free, or never even get harassed in the first place. Should MS and other companies pull out of doing business in the US until it gives up the war on drugs?
that analogy is nothing short of brilliant. a guy punching holes in the walls with a sledgehammer == our government's solution of criminalizing marijuana.
Seriously, Nintendo is going in the right direction with their Wii controllers. Why not have wearable controllers, to make the gameplay more immersive? Then, when you're battling the dragon, or having a shoot-out, you're using your whole body. Want to do more damage to the dragon/goblin? Swing your arm around faster. Want to avoid getting shot? Lay down on the ground. Instead of sitting on the couch, eating chips, and getting a nasty case of repetitive stress disorder on your thumbs and wrists, we could actually be exercising. You could spot the addicts because they'd be fit as all hell.
I would love to be able to shoot at rocks and alien spaceships from a FPS perspective. Needing to turn in all those different angles, would mean that the game controller mapping would be critical. Perhaps Defender 3D would be cool as well.
AND dollars are fluid. The treasury can just decide that there will be more and introduce a few more to adjust the system. You can't just introduce a few more votes into the pie... Oh wait. That's what electronic voting is all about.
I'll bet extra-galactic space (beyond the furthest galaxies, beyond the fastest moving elements from the big bang) is colder, possibly even a vacuum if you go far out enough. (Actually, I was just there the other day, it was nice because there was no pet hair or dust bunnies.) Isn't it kind of mind-blowing that according to big bang theory everything is contained within nothing?
just using up a little bandwidth to say that.
Could you comment on this a bit further?
The switch to digital essentially allows for the ability to cram ~6x the number of channels in the spectrum than there are currently.
The part that's total crap about it is that all of those extra channels are again going out to the same broadcasters who already have access to the previous ones. To understand that, one needs to know that the big broadcasters do not own the spectrum they broadcast on, the government leases it to them. This changeover is a perfect opportunity for many of the newly-created channels to go to organizations who put out smaller locally produced shows. Now that anyone with $2000 for a computer, some video-editing software, a DV camera, and some skill can make decent productions, there are a lot of other people (who are not affiliated with NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC, etc) who have something to say, but are denied access to leasing the airwaves directly, and are certainly denied access to putting their ideas across on any of the above if it doesn't fit with any of the major network's plans.
The other travesty is that the government is practically *giving* these airwaves away, when they really could and should be charging tens of billions of dollars or more. The government is planning on giving these airwaves away to the same people who already have them, and then once its a done deal, the broadcasters will be further entrenched, in the same fashion as they currently are.
If this aggravates you, call your congressperson. Call the FCC. Do a google search for "media reform". We need to act and create a groundswell.
It's your access to wider free speech that is being given away to those who already have far too much free speech and take full advantage of it to their own ends.
When I read the comments about the headlines, that was my first thought. Heh, I crack myself up.
Actually, they look a bit like Cheney. Either Lon, or Dick, take your pick.
I don't even own that many tablespoons, but even if I did, I don't know that I could route that many all at once.
Just have to share this hilarious article, which kind of fits the theme:
CLICK HERE TO READ
"I was getting 107 miles to the gallon when I T-boned that bus."
Actually, that's pretty idealistic -- have you ever taught math in high school or junior high? I have, and decided it wasn't for me. Why? Students, parents, other teachers, the school administrators, and the government all expect that the students will be "taught to the test." You would not believe how frustrating it was to try to teach the underlying fundamentals to students who wanted nothing more than "just how to get the right answer" so they could get the problem done, or to flirt with the girl/boy in the seat next to them, or to just doodle.
Start teaching the basic concepts behind the Peano axioms to anyone not in college, without cloaking it very carefully, and you'll have parents calling in, and students who think its not important since it's not going to be on the SATs. Another issue is politics within the school -- newer teachers (with the most drive often) can get stuck with the remedial arithmetic and algebra 1 courses, not being given the option to teach "the real fundamentals behind math", which is a course that doesn't exist in standard schools anyway.
Unfortunately, the curriculum within schools is kinda stuck. Arithmetic, then Algebra, then Geometry, then Algebra 2/Trig, then Pre-calc, then Calc, with a couple other variants. All of those classes have stuff that students are required to know, and there's not enough time in the day, or energy in a teacher to a) teach the required stuff, b) teach the important stuff, and c) deal with a classroom with 30+ kids with understanding levels that span the bell curve. The required stuff is universally accepted as required, or the kids don't get into college X, and that's why the ideals go out the window.
Which is too bad... Where this kind of stuff really needs to change is at the grade school level. Lots of bright kids sit dormant with dumb arithmetic being repeated instead of getting stuff like this. Write yr congressperson or school superintendent, I guess, or if you're a parent, get active with your school district.
my two cents.