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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| Once again, my random numbers gained sentience and gave me two articles in a row on a similar subject. This time-related article is from a slightly more reliable source, Scientific American. How Measuring Time Shaped History  From Neolithic constructions to atomic clocks, how humans measure time reveals what we value most Humans have tracked time in one way or another in every civilization we have records of, writes physicist Chad Orzel. I suspect this may be something of a tautology. If there wasn't time-tracking, what records would we have? In his new book A Brief History of Timekeeping (BenBella Books, 2022)... Obviously, it's not "new" anymore, as this article was also from 2022. Also, I'll give him points for riffing off of one of the most famous nonfiction book titles. ...Orzel chronicles Neolithic efforts to predict solstices and other astronomical events, the latest atomic clocks that keep time to ever more precise decimals and everything that came in between. Sounds like a book I wouldn't mind reading. I've said this before, but while I generally despise ads, I can give a pass to appropriate ones. Book ads, even when thinly disguised as magazine articles, are like movie trailers. Besides, most of us here are writers and readers, by definition. Scientific American talked to Orzel about the coolest clocks in history, the most complicated calendar systems and why we still need to improve the best clocks of today. As you might guess from this, the rest of the article is an interview transcript. There’s an interesting democratization of time as you go along... Mechanical watches start to become reasonably accurate and reasonably cheap by the 1890s. They cost about one day’s wages. Suddenly everybody has access to accurate timekeeping all the time, and that’s a really interesting change. One must read the whole paragraph, including the parts I skipped in that quote, for full context, but I feel like that glosses over the most important change: that from natural time based on solar days and sun stations (solstices/equinoxes) to a mostly-arbitrary human invention that somewhat ignores natural cycles. Like, if the sun appears halfway to the horizon at "noon," can it really be "noon?" Every civilization that we have decent records of has its own way of keeping time. It’s very interesting because there are all these different approaches. Some of the differences can be better understood, at least in my view, through understanding what other things were important to the culture. A farming society at high latitudes might be more interested in a solar calendar that can warn them when, to coin a phrase, "winter is coming." Herders closer to the tropics would be more likely to care about lunar cycles, because there's not a lot of seasonal variation but it's nice to know when there's more light available after sunset. And then there's the Maya, who seem to have been more interested in Venus. Time is defined in terms of cesium atoms, so the best clocks in the world are cesium clocks. I would hope it's covered in his book, but that's the sort of thing that also interests me: We have solar days, which are fairly easy to measure even with primitive technology (e.g., sundials). Thanks to Sumer, we divide those into 24 hours; each hour has 60 minutes, and each minute has 60 seconds (I vaguely remember at some point going into how Sumer was fixated on base-12 and base-60, and how much of our current timekeeping system is a vestige of that). So a second started out as 1/86400th of a day. But the length of a day—a solar day, I mean, not a sidereal day—can have slight variations. So they apparently took an average, called it an official "second," and defined it instead in terms of atomic transitions. This is, I think, akin to how the meter was defined geodesically, and only later redefined as how far light travels in a certain (very small) time. Einstein’s general theory of relatively tells you that the closer you are to a large mass, the slower your clock will tick. At some point, you’re sensitive to the gravitational attraction of graduate students coming into and out of the lab. At that point, it becomes impractical. Eh, who needs grad students, anyway? So, interesting article, even if it is a teaser ad. This shit's like catnip to me, so I might need to break down and actually buy and read the book for once. You know. When I have time. |
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They also don't use DST except the states along the border. It really does seem economically driven.
