Not So Fast !

Have you ever committed a faux pas that left you wishing you had spent just a second or two more thinking before you spoke to the woman who just slapped you?  Have you ever found yourself clinging to a rock face wondering why this hike seemed like a good idea when you started it?  Have you ever pondered why the checklist in your head seems to lack items that, mid-crisis, you know would be on the written one you’d always meant to complete?  Have you ever screamed like a little girl while waiting for the car, which just moments ago you had under perfect control, to come to a violent stop as it is spinning down the highway putting into practice all of those theories you neglected to internalize while dozing through physics class?

 In other words, do you wish you could stop everything for just a second allowing the logic that seems always to lag the enthusiasm time to catch up? Then brother (I exclude women here because this is not a problem experienced by the fair sex… quite the contrary, they tend to over think opportunities for adventure to the point of paralysis… but that is a thesis for future consideration) you are a member of the society of screw-ups… welcome.

Imagine just how sweet your life could have been if you’d had a switch, that when finding yourself under the pressure of making a decision, allowed you to stop time briefly while the rest of the world waited for the correct synapses to close leading you to the most beneficial and survivable alternative.  You probably wouldn’t have signed those loan documents committing you to five years of usury to pay for a Camaro you are destined to wreck during the first month of ownership.  You would probably still be dating that knock-out and be on friendly, albeit platonic, terms with her mousy little cousin.  You wouldn’t be digging bubble gum out of your mustache.  Yes, the ability to stop time would be a great asset to anybody who is prone to questionable decision making.

But before one can control time (and I mean actually influence the flow of time, not merely control the speed of events which happen within time), one must define time.  Well, as far as I can reckon from watching the Science channel, there are three types of time. One is the cosmological notion of space-time which theorizes that any event (indeed, all events) is unique in its known position in all four dimensions, height, width, depth and time.  This has far too many variables for my feeble intellectual distillation abilities so we will all agree the problem of time control is far too complex to solve within this definition.

Another definition of time, closely related to but seemingly irreconcilable to the first, is the time associated with quantum uncertainty.  If you thought time type one was tricky… well just consult with any of Schrödinger’s very confused cats and you will see by their nervous ticks that not only is this concept impossible to put into practice, it’s scary as hell.

So that leaves us with the third definition of time.  The time we experience by marking our lives against the mechanical movements of components within our solar system vis-à-vis each other. Now as abstract as the first two time definitions seem to be, they are far more concrete than the tools we use to measure our own lives and experiences because that time is based on the purely serendipitous confluence of way too many variables to have even the remotest probability of purpose.  (Remember: Why vs. How.) None the less, it is the time we are comfortable with because it allows us the illusion of control over the events of our lives.

What is the key measurement within our time toolbox?  The year; that celestial phenomenon defined as one circuit of the Earth around the Sun.  To reinforce this statement, let’s take a look at some conversational evidence.  When asked for their age, one does not reply, “262,800 hours!”  They would most likely say, “Thirty.” Years being implied in the answer.

“When did you graduate from high school?”

“Nineteen seventy-two.”

The second level of time measurement is dominated by the day, that experience of the Earth completing one full rotation on its axis.  When discussing events of imminence, we default to this level and its subdivisions; the hour, minute and second. Aha! A unit that we can associate with the thesis subject; stopping time for a second. The second is not existential in itself as it is an abstract creation born of the human need to order the universe.  But by life-long conditioning it is a phenomenon on which we can all agree even if it is observable only by use of a device created to track the passage of time as we imagine it.  Look, I’m trying to be scholarly here, don’t try to get too much out of this paragraph other than I saw it as an opportunity to throw around some cool words.

So now that we have concluded that the second is the time measurement of choice for our experiment and that a second is a subdivision of the length of time the Earth requires to complete the rotation known as a day we must assume that the way to save or gain a second is to stop the Earth’s rotation.  Let’s suspend our disbelief for just a few moments and pretend we have developed the power to stop our planet’s rotation in its tracks.  What would happen?

Don’t panic; I’ll do the math for you. The Earth rotates at a rate of approximately 1,000 miles per hour at the equator. But since I live in San Diego, which is at north latitude 33˚, not on the equator, we must adjust for the difference in the diameter of the circle described by the Thirty-third parallel.  This results in a one-third reduction in speed, or a rate of approximately 667 miles per hour.  This translates to about 978 feet per second.  Are you with me so far? Good!

So, when we magically stop the Earth’s rotation in its tracks, everything resting on the earth (e.g., buildings, vehicles, the ocean, you) would continue to travel eastward with an initial velocity of nearly 1,000 feet per second until something (e.g., air drag, mountains) brought you to a halt.  Can you think of anywhere on the planet you might be where you wouldn’t strike something in a 1,000 foot-long flight at ground level?

So there you have it. Stopping the world for a second to think about it would result in the  complete destruction of everything.  Now, aren’t you glad you took an extra second to think this through?

Unsuitable for Framing

So there I was, sitting in the exam room of my physician, naked except for the modesty sheet the nurse had given me, freezing my ass off.  Don’t call the florist just yet, girls, it is just a routine annual physical.  When you get to the age where there is more hair on your back than on your head they come with the territory.  As is common in the market place of medical services I was waiting.  Now I don’t mind, I don’t really have anything else to do.  But for fear of having the sheet slide off of my chiseled physique, I opted to use both hands to hold it in place foregoing the opportunity to peruse the Time magazine offering the latest news of the Romney candidacy for president.  To keep my chattering teeth from destroying themselves I concentrated on the sole piece of artwork in the room, an impressionist painting (I’m quite confident it was a print reproduction because, although my doctor practices in Del Mar, a rather snooty coastal community in North San Diego County, I doubt they decorate with original art work) that as best I could decipher was an ocean scene of some kind populated with a myriad of boats.

After considerable effort, I decided it was either a regatta on some bay fronting a city skyline featuring a large skyscraper or, a rather interpretive depiction of the battle of Trafalgar at the instant of a massive explosion hoisting a waterspout hundreds of feet above Admiral Nelson’s fleet.  I could not make out with certainty any flags that would indicate the nations involved or any freshly severed limbs flying through the air so I faulted on the side of the regatta theme.

 I share this story not to titillate (remember, I was naked) but to launch a rant about art and the pretentiousness associated with it. Let me state; I believe artwork should faithfully portray the subject matter in detail enough that the casual observer does not have to strain his intellect or imagination to recognize it, or grab for a sick bag. The Italian classicists had it right.  When glancing on the visage of David, Michelangelo left no room for misinterpretation.  

Did anybody ever ask Monet to sit for an eye examination?  I feel pretty confident they would have found evidence of severe cataracts or at least astigmatism.  I don’t believe he was using interpretive imagination.  I think the guy painted exactly what he saw!  How do I know?  Because when I take my contact lenses out, the world looks just like a Monet painting… and I qualify as legally blind.  But art aficionados being who they are, one of them one day encountered a Monet painting and, to bolster his own standing as an expert, christened the style “impressionist”.  All of his associates, not wanting to seem out of step with the current trends in art, harrumphed, nodded, chewed their Victorian mustaches and said, “Quite! Impressionist! Extraordinary!” And thus, the movement was begun.

But did they stop there?  No!  There is only so much demand in the world for paintings featuring fuzzy flowers. The maestro painters of the twentieth century observed, quite rightly, that their medium was being usurped by the science of photography.  So the painters, to keep up, created super-realism.  This is painting that strives to reproduce the clarity and sharpness of the photograph.  But after a short while, the artists discovered that after all the hours of painstaking micro-brush strokes they had delivered something that could be accomplished by a talented amateur with a modest quality camera and a diligent processing lab in a fraction of the time at an iota of the cost.  In other words, the economics of super-realism didn’t pan out… thank you Mr. Eastman. 

Picasso? Please! Give me a straight edge and a box of crayons.  I’ll show you cubism!

The art world, seeking to remain relevant, then looked to the other extreme for its salvation.  If they couldn’t be more accurate in capturing the realities of the visual world, they could certainly be more obtuse.  So, you take the post World War II social upheaval, a total relaxation of any standards and mix in copious amounts of illicit pharmaceuticals, voila, you have abstract… e.g., Jackson Pollock!  Has anyone besides me considered that his work was the product of poor attention span and drug induced tremor?

 

 

There is one school of art that has caught my eye; Surrealism.  At least when Dali offers you a melting watch, you know it is a melting watch!  The philosophy eludes me.  Why would a watch melt?  I know the processes by which one could make a watch melt.  I just don’t see value. (I refer you to my blog posting of 8/22/13, How or Why?)

 

 

 I could go on and on with examples but I’ve exhausted my meager knowledge of fine, or not-so fine, art. And any way, by doctor has entered the room and she gets nervous when I mumble to myself during the examination.

 “Turn your head and cough.”

 

Quod Unusquisque Nosse

I know a lot of stuff.  Heck, I’ve been collecting this knowledge for an embarrassing number of years.  Much of the stuff I know was collected at the trough of the American educational system during a seventeen year dance that concluded with a bachelor’s degree from a fully accredited public university.  I have to admit, it took me twenty-one years because I am easily led astray by shiny things.  But in the ensuing years, I picked up a material amount of intellectual flotsam and jetsam disregarded in the halls of academia. If you are a regular reader of these missives, you have more than likely been exposed to a few of these gems, especially if you are ambitious enough to tackle my offerings with a dictionary by your side.

In this week’s posting I am going to offer you some tidbits of trivial knowledge that will hold you in good stead among drunks and most probably labeled a bore by the tea-totaling set.  This exercise to boost your worth as a cocktail party guest will require some minimal amount of effort on your part.  I am going to offer you several pieces of knowledge you should already own but probably don’t, or if you ever did, have lost along the way.  I will pose questions, give you some relevant information to show how world wise I am, but not present the answers.  However, you need not do any research.  In the last section of this thesis, I will present the answers to you.  Are you ready?  I am interested if anyone else knows all of these answers off the tops of their heads.  Let me know. 

Quod Unusquisque Nosse 

What are the names of the seven dwarfs? We all know the fairy tale “Snow White”. It was published by the Brothers Grim in 1812, with their final version completed in 1854. You know about the magic mirror, the poison apple and the glass coffin. But interestingly enough, the dwarfs were not named in the original work. They were first given individual names in the Broadway play Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1912).  But the names that have become iconic were invented for the 1937 Walt Disney film bearing the same title. Their names as given in the play of 1912 are: Blick, Flick, Glick, Plick, Quee, Snick and Whick.

Who are the Three Musketeers?  This is the best work of fiction I have read!  And that statement encompasses some of my own arrest reports.  Now considering my disdain for French literature (you know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever struggled through anything by Victor Hugo) this is quite the endorsement.  It is chock full of adventure, suspense, intrigue, romance and humor… and humor.  The story was first published by author Alexandre Dumas as a serial offering in 1844.  We owe credit to Dumas for the trademark line, “One for all, all for one!” The novel’s setting is the 16^th century court of Louis XIII.  Several movie versions have been produced, but due to the length of the novel, the most faithful treatment was by director Richard Lester with two movies; The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), distributed by 20^th Century Fox.  Your challenge; name the title characters.

Can you name Santa’s eight tiny reindeer? Yeah, yeah! We all know Rudolph, but he didn’t make the scene until 1939 in a booklet written by Robert L. May.  But the plank holders of Santa’s flight crew were first identified in the 1823 anonymous poem A Visit from St. Nicholas. (Yes, yes Virginia, the poem is also know by the titles: The Night Before Christmas and ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas in popular usage, but I have never been particularly popular myself, so please hold to proper form and use the correct title in public conversation.) Eventually the authorship was attributed to Clement Clarke Moore but as with most things literary there is a controversy that assigns it to Henry Livingston, Jr.  As a man who has spent his life avoiding controversy, I will consistently do so here stating I have no opinion.  Far more important than assigning credit is acknowledging that this poem is responsible for creating the first uniform image of the American Santa Claus.  Knowing the order in which the reindeer are named will earn you extra credit.

Name the funniest men in the history of film.  No, Will Ferrel did not make the list!  I am of course referring to the Marx Brothers.  If you are not familiar with their work, you have been sorely deprived of low humor in its highest form. What became known as the Marx Brothers was a family on-stage music and comedy act from New York making their debut in 1905.  Their act transformed from more music to more comedy as they found their vaudeville and Broadway niche.  The film legacy was introduced in the 1929 Paramount Pictures film The Cocoanuts (my all-time favorite).  The films were a collection of skits and gags from their stage act sewn together with an often nonsensical plot. Five of the Marx Bros. thirteen feature films were listed among the American Film Institute's (AFI) top 100 comedies of the Twentieth Century, two (Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera) among the top twelve.  The brothers also made the list of AFI’s 100 most significant screen legends, the only group act to be included.  If you are new to the Marx Brothers, you will find as may iconic lines as you will in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  I’ll give you a hint, there are more than three.

And Now… the Answers

 

The Seven Dwarfs: Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy and Dopey

 

The Three Musketeers: Athos, Porthos and Aramis.  If you included d’Artagnan, you weren’t paying attention to the assignment.

The Eight Tiny Reindeer:

“Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer and Vixen, 

  “On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Donder and Blitzen;…” (sic)

The Marx Brothers: Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo.  Zeppo appeared in only the first five films in relatively minor, straight (meaning non-humorous, not non-gay… not that there is anything wrong with that) roles.  Gummo did not appear as an on screen personality.

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”

-- Groucho Marx

Il Mio Amore, la Luna

Il Mio Amore, la Luna

I love the moon.  It’s not some cockeyed romantic fascination fueled by mythological attributes assigned our cosmological traveling companion: But rather, appreciation of her exemplary illustration of key laws we believe govern the physical universe.

In the Beginning

While no one was around, at least no one who left any record of observation at the time of her formation, the most popular widely-accepted theory asserts she was born in a violent collision between Earth and another planet. Scientists are so sure about this they have assigned a name to the errant wanderer, Theia (named for some obscure Greek Mythological goddess with an affinity for shiny things… so your typical woman).  Now this seems to me a bit presumptive as there was no formal introduction, no trace is to be found in these parts and she apparently left no forwarding address.

The story goes; four and one-half billion years ago, give or take forty-five million years, a planet about the size of Mars (that’s the red one out there next in line) was wandering about our corner of the Milky Way and, influenced by that most universal of phenomena - gravity, attempted to occupy the exact same space-time as Earth did.  It is very important to state this in terms of space-time because both locality and timing are crucial to this event.  Had space been shaped other than it is or time passed at some different rate, no collision would have occurred and you would be working a crossword puzzle rather than reading this, maybe; but we’ll discuss that later.

In the aftermath of the mother of all fender benders, debris flung into space formed into an accretion disk, much the way one was formed with the birth of the Sun thus resulting in the hard, rocky planets; always with the accretion disks, these scientists.  I suppose the reason for such general acceptance of this theory is that modern-day geo-astronomers have built computer models that, applying the made-up data they have created, result in the outcome they were expecting.  This technique also serves global-warming advocates well, but I’ll reserve that rant for another post.

Thus, gravity caused the debris orbiting Earth to accrete, voila, the Moon.  

Ah, the Eternal Dance

What fascinates me about the Moon is her seductive motion across the heavens (or her path through the night sky, for you soulless cretins).  Stanley Kubrick notwithstanding, romantics can hear the faint strains of On the Beautiful Blue Danube as the Moon waltzes across the starry night. But I’m no romantic (as you well know by now) so we’re going to dabble a bit in the rudimentary mechanics that so often inspire poetic effusion.

I will try to minimize the astrophysical esoterica but you will have to bear just a bit.  The planets (especially since that mathematical trouble maker Pluto has been shed from the list) all orbit the sun on roughly the same plane.  That plane (a geometric plane, not an aircraft) is defined by the equator of the Sun. Even our beloved Moon orbits the Earth on this same plane.  Generally, the planets rotate on their axes (the plural of axis, pronounced aks-ees… unfortunately this is the same spelling for the plural of axe, the woodsman’s tool, which is why I have wasted so many words here) which are ninety degrees offset (perpendicular) to this plane.  This plane is called the ecliptic. Now if you are any kind of science geek, you know that there are two exceptions to this; Uranus (stop snickering!) and Earth.  Uranus’ peculiarities have no bearing on our experience with the Moon so we will refrain from discussing them here.

The Earth, however, is absolutely germane to this story, so we will discuss it.  Our axis is tilted 23.4 degrees from the perpendicular with the ecliptic.  This is believed to be the result of some large astronomical collision in the distant past by a wandering planet, say one that might result in the formation of a moon.  Well considering what we’ve learned about the creation of the Moon, that would be pretty convenient, wouldn’t it?  This tilt is responsible for such niggling phenomenon as the seasons, the variance in the length of days and, the north-to-south meandering our moon tracks through the sky.  So, if you find yourself humming some waltz in three-quarters time while gazing at the harvest moon, now you know why. 

I’m Sure It’s Just a Phase

Another unique feature of the Earth, Moon relationship is the spectacle of how she presents her image to those of us who watch such things.  The Moon orbits earth approximately once every 29.5 days.  The Earth, of course, rotates on its axis once each day (give or take one-quarter day per year... well actually, it’s always give).  Thus, each day (or night, which is the best viewing time) we see just a little bit different view of the moon.  I’m sure you know it is all due to the relative positions of the Moon, Sun and Earth. 

A Full Moon occurs when the Moon is directly opposite the Sun from the Earths rotational perspective, this always happens at sunset.  Then each earth day, the Moon’s own shadow grows on itself reducing the observable area by approximately 3.4% until fourteen and three-quarter days later, it is invisible to us as we experience a New Moon, this always happens at sunrise. The period between Full and New, as the moon appears to grow smaller, in known as, “on the wane” or “waning”; the opposite, when the moon appears to grow larger is known as “on the wax” or “waxing”.  Halfway between the full and new phases, occur the first and last quarter, which is confusing because what we see is one-half of the disk we see at full.  When more than one-half of the moon is illuminated, we call it “a gibbous moon” and when less, crescent (hopefully, for obvious reasons). So, to recap, we have: new moon, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full moon, waning gibbous, last quarter, waning crescent, new moon.

If this has confused you, just go outside on a clear night for several days in a row and see how the moon’s shape changes from night to night. If you are still confused I can come to your house and point out which of those heavenly body is the Moon.

A Familiar Face

You may have noticed, that each time you look at the Moon, notwithstanding the variation it its appearance due to phasing, that it always presents the same face to us here on Earth.  This phenomenon is the result of tidal lock.  Simply put (because we don’t have enough time, or let’s be honest, brain power to tackle the math) our moon completes one full rotation on its axis (one lunar day) in the same time it completes one full orbit of the Earth, or 27.5 days.

“But wait!” you cry.  “You said the Moon’s orbit is 29.5 days.”  Well thank you for paying attention and catching that… fasten your seat belts, here goes.  You see, there are two ways of measuring an orbit.  One is the sidereal, in which the point of orbital focus is the Sun (27.5 days) and the other is synodic, in which the orbital focus is the Earth.  This is somewhat advanced stuff so if you are interested you can look it up yourself.

This tidal locking (also known as synchronous rotation) is actually tugging at the Earth so as to cause a slowing of the Earth’s rotation resulting a lengthening of day of fifteen micro-seconds per year; and you thought the days were getting shorter!

What of the Future?

It seems the Moon, like all children, is trying to escape the influence of its parents. Scientists proffer that at formation, the Moon was between 12,000 to 18,000 miles from Earth (center mass to center mass, not surface to surface).  This seems to leave quite the margin for error and may be due to the dearth of reliable measuring tapes available at the time.  Today, the average distance (remember, all celestial orbits are elliptical) is 239,000 miles.  While this may seem a considerable distance, the Moon has had around four and one-half billion years to make the move out of its mother’s basement; it has set a blistering pace of about three inches per year.  The current, laser measured rate of departure is about one and one-half inches per year.

“What” you may ask, “will the night sky be like when the Moon has traveled far enough to break the chains of Earth’s gravity and go a-wandering aimlessly through the Universe.  Well, let me put your mind at ease.  At the present rate, long before we witness her final departure, our sun will have exhausted its fuel supply and grown in size as a Red Giant (look it up, this story is getting too long as it is) engulfing all of the inner planets, ours as well, and we will all have been burned to a cosmic crisp.

There is no need to thank me.  I consider it both honor and duty to put your minds at ease concerning the future destiny of humanity.

Ciao!