Timeline
Human life is so short when compared to the age of the universe. I've been thinking about this since I mentioned Marc Andreessen, the inventor of the web browser in my KTK of two weeks ago, http://www.dailykos.com/.... The guy is only 43 years old. The man who invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, is 59. In 1955, when he was born, there were only 250 computers in the world. The late Henry Roberts invented the PC in 1975; he would be 73 today. Now they are ubiquitous; you are probably reading this on one right now.
Plenty of people are living to 100 nowadays so some of the advances in knowledge have occurred during their watch, things that are "common knowledge" today. It was not understood until the 1920s, through the brilliant work of Edwin Hubble, that the Milky Way Galaxy was far from being the only one in existence. And that the universe was not static but expanding from a "Big Bang". Plate tectonic theory had its beginnings in 1915 when Alfred Wegener proposed his theory of "continental drift. It wasn't until the 1960s that scientists developed the theory of plate tectonics. Although quantum mechanics was being researched in the 19th century, the phrase "quantum mechanics" was first used in 1924.
These discoveries occurred during the life of our parents and grandparents. And I could mention once more the rate at which they continue to this day. Warp speed.
Several years ago I was entranced by several diaries by Kossack Yosef 52. He excerpted sections of his book The Emergence and Nature of Human History under his real name of Joseph A. Miller. It is a marvelous book which I immediately purchased and you should too:
http://www.lulu.com/...
An excerpt from the book attempts (successfully) to put our brief existence into an understandable context.
If the entire age of the Universe could be reduced to one year, the genus Homo did not emerge until around 10:30 pm on 31 December. In this scale, the oldest member of sapiens, perhaps 200,000 years old, emerged at about 11:52 pm on that fateful last day. The earliest agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, about 11,000 years before the present, began about 25 seconds ago, the earliest written records, about 5,000 years old, emerged about 11 seconds ago, and all of human history since the year 1500 has, in this Universe shrunken temporally to one year, taken place over the last 1.15 seconds. The life span of a centenarian on this scale is reduced, therefore, to about one-fifth of a second. The life span of a person of typical life expectancy in the advanced countries would be about one-seventh of a second.
So if time is ever dragging (as it is for me somewhat due to my anticipation for the Epic Glacier Meet-up) just consider the brief blink of an eye we are here and enjoy every moment as it is possible.
Now for something completely different. You may remember that we had fierce storms here in California in February. I did a KTK on the subject on February 8, with photos. The greenhouse and the big barn were damaged.
Bummer
I called a local barn builder who to his credit came over. He said the job wasn't worth it to him. My son went up a ladder and thought he could do the repair but it didn't look safe. We brainstormed: maybe rent a scaffold ($180 for 24 hours). Maybe rent a lift ($160 for 24 hours). Solution, he purchased a harness and special rope and, using extra panels stored in the barn, made a perfect repair.
He also repaired the greenhouse roof (clear poly on the end) and while he was up there, pruned the grape. Quite the genius construction guy.
Hope your kitchen table is full of delicacies, both conversational and comestible.
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