In a place without time
there is no story to tell

In a place without time
there is no story to tell,
all persons, places,
firm and free,
transfixed and stubborn
in the silent still.

That which would move
does not flinch a fiber,
those who would try
cannot move a muscle,
particles that spin and bounce
do neither in their torpor,
rusted through the core,
the rust can creep no more.

Motion needs time
to step through its dance.
Time needs motion
until the clock stops.
Think of one,
you’ve set them both
racing towards
a distant goal.

This thing popped into being while I was reading the sixth “brief lesson” in Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. That sixth lesson is titled “Probability, Time, and the Heat of Black Holes.” The tiny thing I’ve presented above addresses the unimaginable and, thus, is a paradox.

Continue reading “Space/Time”

I’ve misplaced my spectacles!

To lose or not to lose, that is the question….

I’ve misplaced my spectacles, where have they gone?
I’ve looked on two tables flanking my chair,
I’ve checked on my desk where I place all the mail,
I’ve scanned the floor where they might have escaped,
gotten down on my knees to see if they lay
masked by a book that fell when I slept,
I’ve picked up the chair to see if they crawled
away when they fell off my nose when I napped,
I grabbed up an article I forgot that I’d read
and threw it away, but the lenses weren’t there,
I peered in a box that once held a mouse,
not one with fur and whiskers and feet,
but one with buttons and lasers and wheels,
I searched in the kitchen, on the stove, in the fridge,
I considered the cabinets—why would they hide there?
But they weren’t where they should be,
they could be anywhere!

I went to the bathroom and glanced at the sink,
the toilet tank cover didn’t hold them at all,
I gazed at the tub, but I don’t wear them to bathe,
I viewed where the ointments sit in a row,
I ogled the t.p., stored in its stack,
the rolls stayed silent, the glasses weren’t there.
I went to the car and checked over the visor,
I scoured the floor, even under the seats,
I got out a ladder and went up to the roof,
the gutters were filled with debris, not eyewear,
the whole roof was bare of spectacles too.
I called nine-one-one and they laughed in my ear,
I tried four-one-one and they hadn’t a clue.
I asked my neighbors if they’d seen them around,
they seemed quite concerned, a bit alarmed,
but had not spotted the glasses at all that day.
I finally gave up and went back inside.
They were where I had left them, where they belong.


“Have a Good Day”

“Have a nice day!”

“How is the day treating you?”

Sometime in the last few years, I worked out a response for these greetings, at least between me and people who know me a little. I’m sure I would just get looks of bafflement from those who don’t.

“The days are all the same. It’s what you make of them that matters.”

A day, after all, is just a block of time we’ve stitched together to help us make sense of our lives. Twenty-four hours and most of us experience day and night, each of which has very specific characteristics in the amount of light, temperature, humidity, winds (aka atmospheric convection currents), and all of the creatures attuned to these variations.

If we weren’t endowed with the minds we have, we would just do the things that kept us living until inevitable mortality swept us aside. If I was a worker bee (I’d have to be a drone as all worker bees are females, but stay with me for the moment), we would spend our days searching for nutrients for the drones, our queen, and her spawn. Over our 4 to 5 week lifespan, if we were tasked with nectar gathering, we would gather enough nectar to create one-twelfth a teaspoon of honey, but we would never sleep. A colony of 50,000 to 60,000 workers would gather about 4,000 teaspoons (about 5.2 U.S. gallons or 19.71 liters) of honey in the 4-5 weeks, followed by other workers and so on.

Apis mellifera (all rights reserved J.K. Lindsay)

But we are not bees, nor will we ever bee (ahem… pardon me). While we are both social creatures, we think about our days in ways that would have the worker bees tied in knots, wondering whether it wasn’t time for a break from the constant business of keeping the colony alive. If we were a drone, a male bee that loses its sex organs when it mates in flight with the queen, dying afterward, we might reconsider that last coital flight, binge-watch another season of Que Sera Sera on the BBC, eat honey and bee bread until we could no longer move. If we were a queen bee, we would have been chosen—seemingly at random—from huge numbers of female larvae and fed royal jelly throughout our lives. We would lay 1,500 to 2,000 eggs per day and live four to five years (instead of the 4-5 weeks a worker lives), although our production of eggs would fall after the first two years. But if we were intelligent and could make choices beyond those typical of queen bee-dom, we might give up producing so many eggs, cutting back to a mere 150 to 200 over one year and then having some fun for the remaining years.

Some of us (the >7.475+ billion of “us”)—by no means all of us, unfortunately—get to choose what our days hold for us, but every day is the same, every day is just twenty-four hours of minutes and seconds. Whether we have a “good” day or a “bad” day depends on where we live, our class, ethnicity, gender, religious beliefs, education choices, genetics, lifestyle choices (by which I mean what we choose to put into our bodies (salted corn chips or fruit? vegetables or meat?)). If we are female and live in a male-dominated society with fundamentalist religious beliefs of any type, our education choices are probably limited by what the patriarchs say is possible within the context of their realm. The men define the realm based on their view of what “God” (this is in quotes because in this context, the notion of “God” is suspect) would accept and they have inferred that women do not need to be educated beyond an ability to speak, do chores, and raise a family. Of course, in some of those societies the men hold themselves to strict practices as well, but that doesn’t keep them from inequitably limiting the choices of others.

There are a lot of these inequities in the world, inequities that block some from the rights that others enjoy without question. Because of the barricades constructed by some, a day may be a period in which survival may or may not happen, in which whatever rights are allowed are further limited by detention (at home, in prison, at work). The day looks on in its unblinking way, seeing and not-seeing all the lives that are lived within it, providing its amoral interval in which we can make choices or have choices made for us.

But the days are fine, thanks.

What will you do today?


Happy Localized Temporal Flux!

Which is briefer – Planck time divided by infinity or its inverse?

As I write this soon-to-be-anachronistic piece, it is already the “new year” in various places around the world. For instance, in Hong Kong it is 12:04 A.M on Sunday while it is only 11:04 AM Saturday here (east coast U.S. time).

The truth is far more complicated and far more interesting to consider.

First of all, there is the notion of sidereal time—time relative to a fixed star‘s position. It is used by astronomers, who cannot rely on our own sun’s position as our positional relationship to it is not fixed. As a matter of fact, starting in the 19th century it was noticed that the “fixed stars” are not fixed either. They are just distant enough that they are far more fixed than our local star seems to be. All sorts of calculations can be sorted out to use a non-fixed distant star or bright astronomical object as relatively fixed, but I neither understand these calculations nor would you (I suspect) find them particularly interesting. So, the bottom line is sidereal time is in constant change here on earth. If I am standing shoulder-to-shoulder with you, we are in different sidereal times. Sidereal time has no respect for time zones. Time zones are useful in that it would be a nightmare to discuss the time it actually is if we were not to bunch time together in chunks like we do.

Second, time is not really measured in chunks like hours, minutes, and seconds. One really has to consider the fastest event in the universe to consider time more accurately, if not more usefully. The shortest time is the calculated Planck time, which is 5.39×10-44 seconds (in other words there are 1.9×1043 tP in one second—roughly 2 followed by 43 “zeros”—an incomprehensibly large number of events on the “standard human time scale (SHTS).” It is the amount of time it takes for a photon in a vacuum to pass through a Planck length, which is also very brief, distance-wise.

I’ll just let you go to other sources for more information, m’kay?

The thing about Planck time is that it is a time derived from a physical standard calculated by Planck, so although useful for physicists, there’s something a little incestuous about the whole business. Various elements have layers of electrons probabilistically scooting around their nuclei at mind-bending rates of speed, while also changing their quantum energy levels from their lowest energy levels (aka ground states) to a variety of higher energy levels. These electronic transitions have been studied and are variously known to behave themselves in very dutiful ways. As they are in constant motion between energy levels and motion takes time, even on the atomic scale, the distances and times are very tiny. Cesium atoms, for instance, experiences 9,192,631,770(±some variation) transitions between energy levels per second. The atomic clocks based on this cesium transition are so accurate that they are calculated to lose only 1 second in 100,000,000 years (one hundred million years!) or so.

Part of the work that scientists do is involved in never being satisfied with a “good enough” answer; they are always looking for increased, accuracy, precision, measurement stability, always looking for a more refined “truth” than that which has been understood before. If you were a professional runner, for instance, and you just achieved a personal best, you would not go home, pop open a bucket of ice cream and settle in for the rest of your life. The next time you ran, you would try to better your personal best. Same with scientists, except the standards are set by nature and the tools we have to achieve better outcomes are constantly in the process of improvement.

Cesium has been the standard for measuring seconds for some years now but has just been displaced from its throne by an ytterbium-based atomic clock that “ticks” 518,000,000,000,000 (518 trillion) atomic events per human second. This allows a crazy level of stability that makes the mere 9 billion mark previously set by the cesium atomic clocks seem like sundials. The following video is a National Institute of Standards and Technology scientist discussing this improvement on video, along with explanatory text.

If all of this weren’t disconcerting enough for you, these atomic clock scientists have found that time varies with altitude as well. In experiments using aluminum atom atomic clocks, they have been able to demonstrate that these variations in time have an effect with each foot of elevation, meaning that our feet are in a different time zone that our heads (does this explain clumsiness? it’s at least a better excuse than “I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time!”). Over a 79-year lifespan, the difference would only amount to about 90 billionths of a second, but it is there all the same.

The whole point is that while we usher in the new year, we might give pause to remember that what we are celebrating is a not entirely accurate astronomical event. The earth has orbited around our sun for the past 365 days and will start that process again. In the meantime, sidereal time and atomic time—and Planck time for that matter—are all moving at rates that we can’t even comprehend unless we’re practicing the science of measuring—and improving—on atomic clocks and the electronic quantum transitions that are involved. From a practical standpoint, the next time you look at a second hand on a clock or watch a minute pass, consider the atom and all the changes it has gone through in that time. Consider that, as the earth rotates and precesses on its axis each day, we are each in our very own time zone. In fact, various parts of our bodies are in various time zones, particularly if you’re measuring our relatively enormous selves in Planck lengths.

So, Happy New Year! We have orbited our sun at the rate of 67,000 miles per hour—or if that seems too fast to you, let’s just say 19 miles per second—over the past roughly 365.256 days and yet, knowing these underlying facts, we will all count down to midnight in the enormously large seconds increments “ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one-happy-new-year!” and 6.144 hours later, the new orbit of the earth around the sun will start.

Not to be a party-pooper, but…



Featured image

P.S. My introductory excerpt is not a serious question, it’s just a bit of good-natured trolling…

The Old Man and the We

Those who go down to the sea in boats…








Featured image








The thing marked “11” is the shear pin



Waterway Markers


Tidal Marsh 2.jpg
The labyrinthine nature of lowcountry salt tidal marshes
(all rights reserved, Christopher Craft, Indiana University)




Pluff mud at low tide





So, this is why I don’t fish.

And then there is the toadfish. A picture will suffice:

The Toadfish, nature’s answer to the angler’s prayer






Featured image:

On The Day

On the day…

On the day the whole sky was filled with rainbow light,
someone said “I don’t like the color red,”
another said “I don’t like the color green,”
another said “I don’t like all these colors lighting up the sky,”
and another said “I wish rainbows came in more natural colors,”
but most people just stayed quiet and smiled
at the beautiful sky full of rainbows
and wished for another day
as beautiful as this.

On the day it rained honey in glimmering drops while the sky shone,
someone said “this is sticky! I need a bath!”
another said “this is too sweet! It should be in a jar for later!”
another said “if this stuff is so good, why do bees let us have it?”
and another said “I like my sugar in tiny parcels I can open as I need them,”
but most people opened wide and
let the golden dew fall into their hearts,
course through their blood, infusing them with
the essence of flowers and sunlight.

On the day the air smelled of jasmine and roses in all its parts,
someone said “what happened to the smoke from burning forests?”
another said “I liked the air better when it reeked of oil,”
another said “I want that stench of cattle farms back!”
and another said “nothing smells better than that new car smell,”
but most people just filled their lungs and let it out,
and did it again and again, relishing the way their chests,
filled up with all the invisibility of delicate scents,
then emptied to prepare for another gulp of what the day had in store.

On the day the earth had mountains and valleys and rivers and oceans,
someone said “what are these lumps? They are too high to climb!”
another said “if I walk into this valley, I have to walk back out!”
another said “the water in this river is cold and the fish bite!”
and another said “the ocean is not a good color and the waves are too large!”
but most people saw the beauty around them
and were astonished that they found themselves alive in such a place
with eyes to accept light and mouths that could gape in wonder
and a brain that kept impressions and memories when the wonders weren’t there.


Featured image: Sam Valadi Rainbow uploaded to Flick April 2, 2015

The Crown and Hill Country Summers













$9.5 billion












