Post by Gate-Hacker on Jun 19, 2005 11:28:33 GMT -5
[shadow=purple,left,300]Well, i had to write an English paper a while back.. Our terms were that it had to be 500 words long and it had to "Defign" something...
well, everyone, and i mean EVERYONE chose something like "Love" "Respect" "Wisdom" "Strength"... except me.... i Chose TIME...
and, here's my essay... tell me what you thinik.... It's somethign that I've been pondering for a long time now.
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People are always asking the question, "What time is it?" Sometimes they phrase it a little differently. They'll say, "Do you have the time?" I reply, "No. I don't believe I do. I certainly didn't have it this morning when I left the house. Could you possibly have left it somewhere? You know, now that you mention it, I believe that the Navy has the time in Washington. They keep it in an observatory or something, and they let a little of it out each day . Not too much, of course. They wouldn't want to give use too much time; we might not use it wisely." Sometimes, in a playful mood, when asked if I have the time, I'll say, "Yes," and simply walk away.
I do that because I hate to disappoint people. You see, there is no time. After all, we dont know when now is. We made the idea of time up. It's a human invention. There are no numbers in the sky. Believe me, I've looked; they're not there. Sometimes we think that we really know WHERE we are, but we really don’t know WHEN we are. For all we really know, it could be the middle of last week. The time zones are no help; they're all different. In fact, in parts of India the time zones actually operate on the half hour instead of the hour.
Never mind the difference in India; the major calendars disagree by thousands of years. To the Chinese, this is 4703; the Hebrews think it's 5766; the Muslims swear it's 1426. There is no telling what the Mayans and Aztecs would have said if they were still around, but I guess their time ran out. Remember, these are CALENDARS we're talking about. They're an INSTRUMENT specifically designed to keep track of time, and they're all different. Our current calendar is such an amateur show that every four years we have to cram an extra day in just to make the whole thing work.
The Julian calendar was introduced in 46 B.C., the Roman year 709, but it was off by eleven minutes a year, so by 1582 there was an accumulated error of ten days. Accordingly, that year Pope Gregory XIII decreed that the day following October 4 would be October 15. Officially, in 1582, no one was born in France, Italy, Spain or Portugal during October 5 through October 14. Britain didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752, and they dropped eleven days out of September . Since this also applied to the American colonies, officially, no one was born here from September 3 through September 13, 1752. During that same year New Year's Day was moved from March 25 to January 1. The way it was handled before, for example, was that March 24, 1750, would be followed by March 25, 1751.
We use words like "now," but it's a useless word, because every time you say it, it means something different. Everything we think of as "now" is either the very recent past or the very near future. There's no present. "Welcome to the present." ZOOM! Gone again! It's amazing how something as precisely calibrated as time can be described so loosely; especially where short periods of time are concerned. We say, "at once," "immediately," "right away."
The truth is that there is only one definition of time. Time is the distance between two events. Time is so impossible to measure. Our planet revolves around the sun every 365 days (depending on leap year). There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. Actually, there are 23 hours and 56 minutes in a day, which is why we add the extra day in February every four years. If there were some accurate way to measure time, then, all of these numbers would be divisible by each other, but they're not. Time is only what humanity makes it to be.
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Gate-Hacker[/shadow][/color]
well, everyone, and i mean EVERYONE chose something like "Love" "Respect" "Wisdom" "Strength"... except me.... i Chose TIME...
and, here's my essay... tell me what you thinik.... It's somethign that I've been pondering for a long time now.
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People are always asking the question, "What time is it?" Sometimes they phrase it a little differently. They'll say, "Do you have the time?" I reply, "No. I don't believe I do. I certainly didn't have it this morning when I left the house. Could you possibly have left it somewhere? You know, now that you mention it, I believe that the Navy has the time in Washington. They keep it in an observatory or something, and they let a little of it out each day . Not too much, of course. They wouldn't want to give use too much time; we might not use it wisely." Sometimes, in a playful mood, when asked if I have the time, I'll say, "Yes," and simply walk away.
I do that because I hate to disappoint people. You see, there is no time. After all, we dont know when now is. We made the idea of time up. It's a human invention. There are no numbers in the sky. Believe me, I've looked; they're not there. Sometimes we think that we really know WHERE we are, but we really don’t know WHEN we are. For all we really know, it could be the middle of last week. The time zones are no help; they're all different. In fact, in parts of India the time zones actually operate on the half hour instead of the hour.
Never mind the difference in India; the major calendars disagree by thousands of years. To the Chinese, this is 4703; the Hebrews think it's 5766; the Muslims swear it's 1426. There is no telling what the Mayans and Aztecs would have said if they were still around, but I guess their time ran out. Remember, these are CALENDARS we're talking about. They're an INSTRUMENT specifically designed to keep track of time, and they're all different. Our current calendar is such an amateur show that every four years we have to cram an extra day in just to make the whole thing work.
The Julian calendar was introduced in 46 B.C., the Roman year 709, but it was off by eleven minutes a year, so by 1582 there was an accumulated error of ten days. Accordingly, that year Pope Gregory XIII decreed that the day following October 4 would be October 15. Officially, in 1582, no one was born in France, Italy, Spain or Portugal during October 5 through October 14. Britain didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752, and they dropped eleven days out of September . Since this also applied to the American colonies, officially, no one was born here from September 3 through September 13, 1752. During that same year New Year's Day was moved from March 25 to January 1. The way it was handled before, for example, was that March 24, 1750, would be followed by March 25, 1751.
We use words like "now," but it's a useless word, because every time you say it, it means something different. Everything we think of as "now" is either the very recent past or the very near future. There's no present. "Welcome to the present." ZOOM! Gone again! It's amazing how something as precisely calibrated as time can be described so loosely; especially where short periods of time are concerned. We say, "at once," "immediately," "right away."
The truth is that there is only one definition of time. Time is the distance between two events. Time is so impossible to measure. Our planet revolves around the sun every 365 days (depending on leap year). There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. Actually, there are 23 hours and 56 minutes in a day, which is why we add the extra day in February every four years. If there were some accurate way to measure time, then, all of these numbers would be divisible by each other, but they're not. Time is only what humanity makes it to be.
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Gate-Hacker[/shadow][/color]