(no subject)
Somewhere "in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun."*
... Freak, I'm bored.**
And around this yellow sun, a small, blue-green planet orbits at roughly 93 million miles.***
Today, as it happens sometimes, this blue-green world nearly completes another circuit of its orbit for me, aligning itself more closely with its position at the time of my birth.
And what bloody difference does that make overall? That an intersecting line can be (hypothetically) made between the current moments and my own birth through the dimension of time without running in complex vectors through other dimensions (as much, considering I'm actually 800 or so miles north of where I was born)? Would this have more meaning were I closer to my own birth-place? For instance, if, between 6:50 and 7 am (well, I suppose considering the change in observance of daylight savings time, it would have to be between 7:50 and 8 am now) I stood in the very room I was born, would there be any significant connection drawn between my own birth-self incident and my would-be current self incident? Would I derive some greater knowledge of myself, or of the universe itself?
Would I find within myself the great and incomprehensibly clear, yet somehow in crystalline ineffability, Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? Would an awakening descend upon me, spilling out the product of 7, 3, and 2? Perhaps then I would know how 5 felt about being left out of this all, it being a perfectly respectable prime number and all that.**** Or perhaps this is part of the answer itself.
All the while, the poor soon-to-be mothers would no doubt be disturbed by that one guy trying to derive significance from the universe while they're trying to go through some labor, thank you very much, and could he please go somewhere else?
Though perhaps it is strange to note me reading the book Adams published in the year of my birth around the very time I was born. Perhaps I need to watch Godzilla 1985 while I'm at it.
Anyway, on a slightly non-intersecting line of thought, I think it's logically possible for a cube to be round, so long as more than three dimensions are involved, probably more than four. It really only takes roundness in at most 2 dimensions for the thing to be considered round. I mean, a circle is obviously round, but by extension from this, if you add a dimension perpendicular to the circle, but in a straight line (which line is obviously not curved), you still end up with a round object, only it's a cylinder now, instead of a sphere.
Therefore, if a cube is round in two dimensions aside from the three by which it is defined, it must certainly be round as well, while still being quite square. The tricky business with time as a dimension, though, is that it can't be measured nearly as easily as the space dimensions we're used to. One would really need to start defining things, I guess as rates, since rates appear to be a sort of ruler - something by which a state of being is measured. One can measure time by, say, volume, if only you knew the rate. Such it is with an hourglass.
Which, if you ask me, sure beats digital watches. Excepting, of course, if you count the time-functions in cell-phones (which I depend heavily on) which happen to be displayed in digital form.
Back to my second-ish point (or so). One could probably argue that roundness, especially that of true circularity, can be measured as some value of sinusoidal functions (such as sine or cosine). If, then, you had a rate expressed sinusoidally, such as, say, a pendulum, perhaps you could say that that is a roundness of time? Does this mean that a block at the end of a pendulum is round, and not merely moving in a round path? Stopping it would therefore be akin to changing its shape in the 4th dimension?
So, does this mean the Earth could be counted as a 4 dimensional sphere? And me being in the very room I was born would not mean I'm in the exact place of my birth, but that, given all spatial alignments and temporal harmonic alignments, would be akin to me looking across a number of stained-glass dioramas into one of my own birth. That is, if I had a way to view through the temporal dimension (or dimensions?), which of course I don't.
So what is a birthday? It's a harmonic of one's birth. And as the harmonics increase, it becomes less and less related to that birth (sometimes quite out of tune, really, such as 7 and 11). And perhaps also it's temporally where one identifies as 'home.' Spring is very much like 'home' for me, but much too short. I really can't imagine someone else not feeling like home in spring, especially early spring such as this. So perhaps what I truly need is to be 'home' while I'm 'home.' That is, while I'm home temporally, to be home in comfort, ie a lack of longing.
Trouble is, I don't quite know what I'm longing for.
*Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as published in its omnibus The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide edition, 1996, Wings Books, New York.
**Bored enough to include endnotes.
*** paraphrased from Adams, numerical figure corrected to reflect actual values.
****unless you count the business 5 had with 10 in forming base-10 monopolistic practices. After some accusation, 5 eventually decided it didn't need to be a factor in the Answer anyway, and it was, it affirmed, doing quite well for itself in base-10 anyhow.
... Freak, I'm bored.**
And around this yellow sun, a small, blue-green planet orbits at roughly 93 million miles.***
Today, as it happens sometimes, this blue-green world nearly completes another circuit of its orbit for me, aligning itself more closely with its position at the time of my birth.
And what bloody difference does that make overall? That an intersecting line can be (hypothetically) made between the current moments and my own birth through the dimension of time without running in complex vectors through other dimensions (as much, considering I'm actually 800 or so miles north of where I was born)? Would this have more meaning were I closer to my own birth-place? For instance, if, between 6:50 and 7 am (well, I suppose considering the change in observance of daylight savings time, it would have to be between 7:50 and 8 am now) I stood in the very room I was born, would there be any significant connection drawn between my own birth-self incident and my would-be current self incident? Would I derive some greater knowledge of myself, or of the universe itself?
Would I find within myself the great and incomprehensibly clear, yet somehow in crystalline ineffability, Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? Would an awakening descend upon me, spilling out the product of 7, 3, and 2? Perhaps then I would know how 5 felt about being left out of this all, it being a perfectly respectable prime number and all that.**** Or perhaps this is part of the answer itself.
All the while, the poor soon-to-be mothers would no doubt be disturbed by that one guy trying to derive significance from the universe while they're trying to go through some labor, thank you very much, and could he please go somewhere else?
Though perhaps it is strange to note me reading the book Adams published in the year of my birth around the very time I was born. Perhaps I need to watch Godzilla 1985 while I'm at it.
Anyway, on a slightly non-intersecting line of thought, I think it's logically possible for a cube to be round, so long as more than three dimensions are involved, probably more than four. It really only takes roundness in at most 2 dimensions for the thing to be considered round. I mean, a circle is obviously round, but by extension from this, if you add a dimension perpendicular to the circle, but in a straight line (which line is obviously not curved), you still end up with a round object, only it's a cylinder now, instead of a sphere.
Therefore, if a cube is round in two dimensions aside from the three by which it is defined, it must certainly be round as well, while still being quite square. The tricky business with time as a dimension, though, is that it can't be measured nearly as easily as the space dimensions we're used to. One would really need to start defining things, I guess as rates, since rates appear to be a sort of ruler - something by which a state of being is measured. One can measure time by, say, volume, if only you knew the rate. Such it is with an hourglass.
Which, if you ask me, sure beats digital watches. Excepting, of course, if you count the time-functions in cell-phones (which I depend heavily on) which happen to be displayed in digital form.
Back to my second-ish point (or so). One could probably argue that roundness, especially that of true circularity, can be measured as some value of sinusoidal functions (such as sine or cosine). If, then, you had a rate expressed sinusoidally, such as, say, a pendulum, perhaps you could say that that is a roundness of time? Does this mean that a block at the end of a pendulum is round, and not merely moving in a round path? Stopping it would therefore be akin to changing its shape in the 4th dimension?
So, does this mean the Earth could be counted as a 4 dimensional sphere? And me being in the very room I was born would not mean I'm in the exact place of my birth, but that, given all spatial alignments and temporal harmonic alignments, would be akin to me looking across a number of stained-glass dioramas into one of my own birth. That is, if I had a way to view through the temporal dimension (or dimensions?), which of course I don't.
So what is a birthday? It's a harmonic of one's birth. And as the harmonics increase, it becomes less and less related to that birth (sometimes quite out of tune, really, such as 7 and 11). And perhaps also it's temporally where one identifies as 'home.' Spring is very much like 'home' for me, but much too short. I really can't imagine someone else not feeling like home in spring, especially early spring such as this. So perhaps what I truly need is to be 'home' while I'm 'home.' That is, while I'm home temporally, to be home in comfort, ie a lack of longing.
Trouble is, I don't quite know what I'm longing for.
*Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as published in its omnibus The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide edition, 1996, Wings Books, New York.
**Bored enough to include endnotes.
*** paraphrased from Adams, numerical figure corrected to reflect actual values.
****unless you count the business 5 had with 10 in forming base-10 monopolistic practices. After some accusation, 5 eventually decided it didn't need to be a factor in the Answer anyway, and it was, it affirmed, doing quite well for itself in base-10 anyhow.