Time

Time is a awesome and annoying thing really isn't it, we never really seem to have enough of it. Also it seems to be a resource since we can spend time and waste time. Though to be completely honest that is not really want to talk about (why do I write talk when I am writing about things?).

What I want to talk about Time as in the dimension there are varying ways in witch people explain  how we see time in every day life some people explain it our temporal perception as being like watching a parade through a keyhole that you can only see a small part of it at any moment, others explain it as if you were walking down a hallway that it pitch black and the lights only turn on behind you making it impossible to see where you are going but its easy to see what there was behind you. both of these are good ways of explaining it the only issue is that they only really tell half the story.

the way I see time is that it is like drifting down a river in a inner tube from a tire at night we can only see things where we are and we cant stop moving because of the current. Now I know what all you clever people are thinking now, 'but James what about the laws of relativity?' well ok I will admit that's a flaw in the explanation but to be honest that is not what the explanation is about, its about how we perceive time not the actuality of our temporal existence witch can be easily effected by gravity and speed and the like. Why can our actual temporal velocity change? what is temporal velocity? you may want to know temporal velocity is the rate that time changes in relation to a fixed time point it can also be measured by measuring the quantity of change between two identical clocks. there is a whole lot of math involved in calculating the exact deviat between the two clocks.

Any of this can be calculated by some rather complex math though I don't really understand the math so I cant really go into it. Though I can tell you that relativity has been proven by putting two identical atomic clocks one in a 747 and another on the ground and when they flew the 747 fast for a while (I cant remember the exact details of the experiment) however they found when they checked the clocks the one from the 747 was slightly behind the one that had been on the ground. Now here is something I bet most of you have never considered just by going about our lives and walking around, driving, flying whatever you do to move is actually slowing your personal time so we actually move out of sync all the time compared to each other however never enough for anyone to ever notice.

I know that may have been hard to take in so I am going to break this up into a few more parts.

Fellow time travelers I bid you farewell until another post has come into our local temporal existence. (it already exists)

Speed kills

'Speed kills, slow down' many times have I heard this being thrown at us as a people in reference to our cars and that speeding puts us all at greater risk. This is true but the statement rings untrue to someone who knows what really kills in crashes. What kills people in car crashes is stopping quickly, newtons law ( 'an object will keep moving in one direction until stopped' ) is what kills people. Think about it if your moving at 100kph you have a fairly large amount of energy if you crash into a brick wall you stop very quickly and (if you have one on) your seatbelt stops you making a dramatic exit from life, the issue is that everything inside you wants to keep moving forward this somewhat poses some problems for the delicate organs inside you often ending in damage. Just to prove further that stopping is the problem not going faster think about now fast we are going to start with let me list a few things that affect our speed. ( assuming that we could have a fixed point in space-time to calculate our speed from) We have our global rotation, speed of orbit around the sun, ok yea pretty basic and now the slightly insane part, on top of those two we have our solar systems orbit around the galaxy then we have the galaxy's movement in relation to the other galaxy's and finally the total universal migration to the 'dead spot' of space and lastly general universal expansion rate. They all add up (and occasionally subtract) to the total speed. So saying speed kills is generally wrong but I guess it sounds better than 'stopping kills so don't crash' DFTBA

One year on

This being the 4th of September everything I see is tinted in the memory of fear from a 7.1 earthquake and not knowing what was going to happen. That has of course taught me a valuable lesson that being that hey life could be worse I have lived through the year I never considered.

So what have I learned that I can teach you all?

Never ever underestimate the human spirit I have spoken to people who pulled friends out of rubble, lost houses, lost friends and family and seen death in front of them. Myself I discovered that even when at what I had deemed the limit of my ability to stay and fight for my friends and help them I could take so many more emotional hits and keep going.

I apologize if this is to much emotional blabbering for you, however if you think about it when your world is shaken and torn down and you experience the true fear of death it's hard not to get emotional. The thing that got me through it was relationship with people when people bind together it's amazing and it turns darkness into something bearable.

As a final word to those who have never experienced anything like what myself and my fellow Christchurch citizens, value your friends more and remember your life and theirs can be taken at any moment don't live for tomorrow because nothing is ever certain your life can be taken instantly. In closing do not forget your mortality EVER.

(written on the 4th of September)