birthday

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Year-long quanta and Planck exercises for your core

Well, it’s Monday again.  Huzzah.

I don’t have much new to say.  I still do not have my air conditioner, thanks to the frustratingly poor delivery logistics of FedEx®.  I also have to blame the seller, of course (though I find the concept of blame mostly valueless) since they were the ones who advertised the unit as arriving between the 28th and the 30th of May (this year), and they failed to ensure that it would in fact arrive within their predicted time range.

Hopefully it will arrive today, and hopefully by the time I get back to the house I will have the energy to set it up.  Usually at the end of the day I barely have the energy to change my clothes.

In other news, it was my sister’s birthday recently.  That’s a good thing, and I’m glad she’s doing well.  It would have been nice to spend it with her, but that wasn’t doable given my recent life events.  Of course, I’ve said before that it’s a bit funny that we think of a person as one year older on their birthday, as though time applied to human age in quanta the size of one Earth year.

At the Planck scale time may in fact be quantized, but that’s a very, very tiny scale‒if memory serves, it’s the time it takes light to travel one Planck length*‒and for ordinary experience, the flow of time is continuous, though it is variable thanks to Relativity.

That got me thinking what it might be like if time did apply to humans all at once, one day a year.  I think that would have some curious consequences.  For kids, of course, it might be quite a cool thing, and they might look forward to each birthday enthusiastically‒especially around the time of puberty.

But for adults past their twenties, say, birthdays might become a thing of fear, or at least anxiety, and more so every year.  Imagine that even the long-term consequences of illnesses and injuries only accrued on one’s birthday‒possibly at the exact anniversary of the time one was born.  If you knew you’d been injured that year, you’d surely be dreading the birthday on which the consequences of that injury first fully applied.

Or what if you knew you were predisposed to some chronic complaint, or had a risk for some form of cancer, or of dementia, but you wouldn’t know if anything had happened until the time of your birthday?  I imagine everyone would plan to go to the doctor the day after every birthday, at least once they had passed their twenties.

It’s an interesting idea for a story, perhaps.  You could see people having birthday parties and the like, partly to celebrate and partly to offer support for their friends who were aging.  There could be whole special rituals surrounding the process, especially as people got old enough to perhaps die when the year accrued.

And then there could be a weird, truly bizarre occurrence.  Maybe one person would be found who, after aging “normally” his whole life, suddenly got younger at one year’s birthday, and then again at subsequent birthdays, as if there were some type of glitch.

Heck, even a person who aged continuously would be a freak of nature in such a world.

Anyway, that’s what I found myself thinking about.  It seemed mildly amusing.  I’m not going to write such a story or anything.  At least I don’t expect to write it.

Indeed, I’m basically finished writing this for today.  I hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Which is on the order of ten to the negative 35th meters.  That means that there will be thirty-four zeros after the decimal point before there is any other numeral, so…a very small distance across which causality may act at the “speed of light”.  Since the Planck length is 1.6 x 10-35 meters and the speed of light is about 3 x 108 meters per second, the Planck time would be 1.6/3 times (10-35 over 108) or .5 x 10-43 or just 5 x 10-44 seconds**.  That’s way, way too small for us to measure.

**Or .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000005 seconds.

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For he today that sheds his blog with me, shall be my brother

clock3

Greetings and good wishes.  It’s Thursday, and thus time for a new blog post.  Another week has passed.  It may well still exist in a General Relativistic “block universe,” but that for those of us who live within the perceived flow of time it’s gone forever.

I hope you’re all doing well.  This time next week will be roughly the date of the vernal equinox, after which, in the northern hemisphere, daytime will be longer than nighttime for six months.  That’s something pleasant for most of us to anticipate (I say “most” because, unless I’m mistaken, the majority of the human race lives in the northern hemisphere…please correct me if I’m wrong).  Also, of course, for us Americans who don’t live in Arizona, last Sunday was the morning of “springing forward,” when we move our clocks ahead an hour in obedience to the whims of Daylight Savings Time (for most clocks I use, the computers themselves did that job).

Tomorrow is my brother’s birthday, by the way, so if any of my readers know him, please take a moment to wish him the best and happiest of possible days.  He certainly deserves it; it’s not his fault that he has a sibling like me.

In all seriousness, he’s a heck of a guy.  I think I’m being quite honest in saying that he’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever known.  My parents certainly did an excellent job with my older brother, and before him with my older sister.  I guess by the time I was born they were just too exhausted to keep up the good work.

I’m kidding, of course.  They did just as good a job with me.  It’s simply a brute fact that, every now and then, a factory will produce a lemon, through no fault of anyone who works there.

Speaking of myself—which is mainly what I do here—it’s been interesting to discover how personal my new story (working title: Safety Valve) is.  That’s the one that started out as a simple short story notion, and which I hadn’t really planned to write at this time but decided to do rather than another story that was too similar in genre to its predecessor.  Now, obviously, it’s a story idea that I had, and which I wrote down, so it comes from me, but it’s remarkable to realize how much meat the idea has, and how much it touches the feelings and experiences of my life.  I’m not sure that this will be obvious to the story’s eventual readers, but it really does have a visceral resonance with me that’s quite unexpected.  This may not be entirely a good thing.  It doesn’t make the writing, or the story, especially joyful, but it does make the process gripping…which is good, because the story is far from finished.

At the same time, I’m puttering along on the editing of Unanimity, which is going to be a long process.  I need to pick up the pace a bit.  I also need to start editing Free Range Meat, my most recent short story.  That’s almost certainly going to be my next published bit of fiction, and there’s no good reason for it to take very long.

In other news, my notion to set aside certain moments during the day—my equivalent of “smoke breaks”—to produce blog posts for Iterations of Zero has not panned out as planned.  However, though “you can’t always get what you want,” it turns out that “if you try sometimes, you get what you need” *.  In this case, I decided to do what I’d meant to do in writing for IoZ as audio instead.  I’ve already recorded and edited a highly non-focused first episode.  I’ll be posting it shortly, probably this very day, and I invite anyone who’s interested, and who has roughly a half-hour of idle time, to listen to it.  I’d dearly love some feedback, as I have no idea how good, bad, or ugly it might be.  At least, I have no idea that isn’t colored by my own point of view.

And, speaking of disjointed collections of thoughts—which I was; see for yourself—this week’s blog post seems about done.  Once again, I wish all of you a tremendous surfeit of happiness, a deep and abiding sense of satisfaction, and a statistically implausible amount of good luck.

TTFN

*I forget who said that