Virginia Woolf on the Elasticity of Time Long before psychologists had any insight into our warped perception of time — for instance, why it slows down when we’re afraid, speeds up as we age, and gets twisted when we vacation — or understood how our mental time travel made us human, another great investigator of the human psyche captured the extraordinary elasticity of time not in science but in art. In Orlando: A Biography (public library) — her subversive 1928 masterwork, regarded as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” which also gave us her insight into the dance of self-doubt in creative work — Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) writes: Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.
10 Animals You Won't Believe Are Closely Related Thanks to the know-it-all from second grade, we're all aware that dolphins and whales are mammals, not fish. But it's probably been a while since you've pondered just how incredibly, mind-blowingly weird it is that you and whales were the same animal more recently than whales and sharks. Or to put it in chart form, you and whales split up somewhere in the big tangle of bio diversity up top labeled "Age of Mammals" while whales and fish haven't been the same animals since way the hell down ... ... here where you see the word Selacchi. So how is it that our evolutionary cousins ended up with flippers and fins exactly where fish have them and we ended up needing swimming lessons? Courtesy of Getty Images." Turns out it's the same reason birds and bats both ended up flying around on wings: convergent evolution, the smarmy term for when completely unrelated species develop similar traits. Image By Glen Fergus What it looks like: You don't need your wife standing next to you screaming, "MOUSE!
Clocks Metric (or Decimalized) Time The day is divided into 100 parts (centidays), plus decimal fraction. Think of it as a percent of the day. The "Universal Metric Time" is based on the International Date Line. Much more information at my Guide to Metric (or Decimilized) Time. Hexadecimal Time The day is divided up into 65536 parts and written in hexadecimal (base-16) notation (A=10, B=11 ... Much more information about this can be found at Intuitor Hexadecimal Headquarters. Octal Time Octal Time uses a base-8 system (digits 0-7). Base64 Time Base-64 uses ASCII characters (in ascending order: A-Z, a-z, 0-1, +, and /). Binary Time Like hexadecimal time, the day is divided into 65536 parts, only we display it as a binary number using squares for bits, here using dark squares to represent 1 and white for 0. This can be viewed as a variation of hexadecimal time by dividing it into four 2x2 blocks of squares, each block corresponds to a digit of hexadecimal time. Mayan Time
6 Insane Discoveries That Science Can't Explain We like to feel superior to the people who lived centuries ago, what with their shitty mud huts and curing colds by drilling a hole in their skulls. But we have to give them credit: They left behind some artifacts that have left the smartest of modern scientists scratching their heads. For instance, you have the following enigmas that we believe were created for no other purpose than to fuck with future generations. The Voynich Manuscript The Mystery: The Voynich manuscript is an ancient book that has thwarted all attempts at deciphering its contents. It appears to be a real language--just one that nobody has seen before. Translation: "...and when you get her to put the tennis racket in her mouth, have her stand in a fountain for a while. There is not even a consensus on who wrote it, or even when it was written. Why Can't They Solve It? Could you? Don't even try. As you can imagine, proposed solutions have been all over the board, from reasonable to completely clownshit. Our Guess:
Why England Was A Year Behind Belgium, Spain and Italy for 170 Years William Hogarth's satirical painting, "An Election Entertainment" (1755), includes the words "Give us back our eleven days!" (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) In 1584 a violent, angry crowd ransacked the city of Augsburg, Germany. Citizens broke through thick windows and shot their guns into the street. They were marching to City Hall to make it clear that they would not take the authorities’ new plans sitting down. The people of Augsburg weren’t just upset that their calendar was being changed, which would skip birthdays and ruin weekends. The marketplace in Ausburg, Germany in 1550. In The Reformation in Germany, C. A riot was the only way to go, or so thought some 16th century Augsburgers. The reasons for the calendar change, in an astronomical sense, were less sinister than the people of Augsburg assumed; Aloysius Lilius, the astronomer who proposed the project, was just trying to improve the dating system begun by Julius Caesar.
6 Things From History Everyone Pictures Incorrectly Nobody Dressed How You Think They Dressed The Perception: So already it's pretty clear that if we don't have photos laying around of the historical period in question, we're basically just guessing. And that's interesting considering how many figures from the distant past we think we have a perfectly clear image of. For instance, ninjas looked like this: Vikings looked like this: And as anyone who's ever attended a Thanksgiving event at an American grade school knows, pilgrims looked like this: The Reality: The ninja outfit is ridiculous, if you think about it. Hidden inside those bushels are like a million katanas. On rare occasions when they needed to move through the dark undetected, they still didn't wear black. As for the Vikings, the one single thing we know them for--wearing huge horns on their helmets--isn't true. Viking helmets: built for sensible pillaging. As for the pilgrims, they were simple, farming folk, and as such wore clothes that made sense for the job. Source. Oh hell yeah
Time Zones 5 Insane Explanations for Stuff Your Body Does Every Day It's weird: Much of what is going on inside our own bodies is still a complete mystery to us. For instance, we pointed out a while back that science has no idea why we yawn. Then you have things like crying, or laughter, which are parts of our everyday lives, but upon closer examination make no sense at all -- why would we signal sadness with eyeball drool? And the theories as to why we do some of these things are downright bizarre ... #5. Hiccups are a series of stupid, diaphragm-driven breath convulsions that bother you for a while, then vanish just as inexplicably. But there is a scientific consensus on exactly how annoying hiccups are. If you think of your body as a temple for the pantheon of your bodily functions, hiccuping would be the trickster god running amok and mooning people for shits and giggles. The Surprising Truth: Hiccuping may be useless to you now, but some scientists think it played a huge part in what got you there in the first place. Think much further back. #4. #3.
The Psychology of Time and the Paradox of How Impulsivity and Self-Control Mediate Our Capacity for Presence “Reality is never and nowhere more accessible than in the immediate moment of one’s own life,” Kafka once told a teenage friend. “It’s only there that it can be won or lost.” The great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky believed that what draws us to film is the gift of time — “time lost or spent or not yet had.” From the moment we are born to the moment we take our last breath, we battle with reality under the knell of this constant awareness that we are either winning or losing time. We long for what T.S. These multiple and contradictory dimensions of time is what German psychologist Marc Wittmann explores in Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time (public library) — a fascinating inquiry into how our subjective experience of time’s passage shapes everything from our emotional memory to our sense of self. One of Wittmann’s most pause-giving points has to do with how temporality mediates the mind-body problem. In a sense, time is a construction of our consciousness.
6 Pieces of Fan Art That Are Better Than the Original If 37 percent of the Internet is porn, then the other 63 percent must be people complaining about stuff. A movie that disappointed; a game that's taking too long to come out; George Lucas. Well, sometimes the companies or creators will actually address their fans and say, "You think you could do better than us?" And sometimes the fans will answer back, "Um, actually, yeah." #6. Star Wars Fan Remaster Looks Better Than the Real Thing Unless you still have a working VCR, the only way to watch the original, theatrical versions of Star Wars is buying the out-of-print 2006 DVD box set, which insultingly comes with the original movies as mere bonus features on a separate disk (meaning, you had to pay for the Special Editions to get them). But what else are fans supposed to do? How the Fans Made It Better: A fan from the U.K. named Adywan did that and much more. ESBR Preview ESBR PreviewHmm. ANHR Visual Comparison ... making the lasers hit the right places ... #5. How the Fans Made Them Better: #4.
How Different Cultures Understand Time