It’s About Time (again) 

     Like the periodic debate over whether to abolish the electoral college, which pops up every four years just before a presidential election but is forgotten just after the election, a debate over whether to simply keep daylight savings pops up every year before the time change but is forgotten just after the change until the next cycle. This year some states are saying the heck with all that and are electing to keep daylight savings year round.

     This brings up a question, though. What time is it ever, really?

     Turns out that depends on many things.

     Military people count time quite sensibly, as minutes and seconds within 24 of our hours.  

For them, 2:20 in the afternoon is simply 1420.  The rest of us are often unsure whether someone means before or after noon when they suggest a time to rendezvous for romance.  And time is always different for all the zones around the globe, of course.  It must be confusing for those poor folks near a time zone border who live on one side and work on the other.  They could get to work at a time before they left home, for example. 

     We divide our year arbitrarily into 12 months, but what is a year?  For us, it’s one trip around our star, or about 365 days, and a day, of course, is one earth rotation.  But on Mars a year is 687 of our days, and a single day on Venus is 243 of our days, but a day on Jupiter is only 10 of our hours.  A year on Uranus lasts over 84 of our years, on Pluto it’s 165 of our years.  Nobody on Earth can live so much as a single Pluto year even if they drink veggie smoothies and don’t watch politicians debate or Congress attempt to legislate something.

     It takes our star about two minutes to rise and clear the horizon; in other words it appears to move its own diameter in 2.13 of our minutes.  But on Mars sunrise takes 1.44 of our minutes, on Mercury it’s 16.13 of our hours, while for a maximum type-A Neptunian, it’s but 2.85 Earth-seconds.  Yet of course the sun is not really moving at all in relation to any of us.

     All this was hard enough to sort out, but then along came that electric-haired Einstein who, one of our centuries ago, told us in his relativity theory—long since now a proven fact—that time is not a constant and is really quite unreliable because it moves slower under increasing gravity or under increasing speed.  Near the speed of light (186,000 miles in a single one of our Earth-seconds) time nearly brakes to a relative stop.  This means that time moves a little slower for somebody standing at our equator, zipping along at 1,100 miles per hour as the earth rotates, than for somebody standing on the north pole, who is only turning around in place as the earth rotates (you’d think they’d get dizzy), but astronauts on the ISS are in an even slower relative time frame because they’re doing 17,150 mph to keep from falling onto Disney World or New Jersey.  But wait just an Earth-minute, they’re in zero gravity so they also experience a faster time factor.  Luckily, all their time variations don’t work out to zero or they’d never get anything done.  They’re already wasting enough of whatever their time frame is playing with their weightless food and beverages.

     On some huge dervishing distant planet, a hundred of our years unfold while only a single minute elapses for us.  Wow.  Imagine how THOSE poor creatures would feel waiting in line at the DMV. 

     And consider the geniuses who figured out how to make the GPS system work.  The satellites are speeding so their time slows down by our Earth-based reckoning.  They’re in elliptical orbits so their distances from earth and their speeds are constantly varying too, so . . .  Anyway, those clever GPS math wizards had to accommodate half a dozen different time-shifting gremlins just so you can find your way to the World’s Biggest Gator Attraction somewhere in Florida before you run out of ethanoled gas.

     The next, ah, time somebody asks you the time, it’s okay if you tell them you honestly don’t know and nobody else in the whole Universe does either.

Phil

If you're looking for an interesting way to pass some leisure time, check out the North Carolina suspense novel series Guns, Diamondback, Kllrs, and Deathsman in print or Kindle on Amazon for some distracting pandemic reading. And thanks to all those out there who have sent complimentary and encouraging e-mails about the series. You’re much appreciated.  www.philbowie.com

 Why Go to Space? (Part Two)

   Last post we thought about why the space effort can ultimately prove critical to humankind’s survival in the Universe. But there are hundreds of other ways space program developments are already benefiting us. Here are just a few:

   Improvements in Mechanics: magnetic bearings that eliminate friction and thus wear; plasma coatings that eliminate lubricants in moving parts; laser-based welding that’s stronger and more uniform; micro lasers for precision drilling and cutting materials; structural analysis software that’s used extensively in manufacturing; cleaner paint stripping methods; weight reduction materials with increased strength.

   Medical and Safety Advances: a voice-controlled wheelchair, ultrasound skin damage assessment; emergency rescue cutters; a self-righting life raft; personal medical alarms; a tollbooth purification system to protect workers; better environmental sensors; an enriched baby food ingredient to enhance infant mental and physical development; improved swimming pool purification; a miniature programmable pacemaker; safer ocular screening for children; a digital imaging breast biopsy procedure that greatly reduces pain and scarring; a fast automated urinalysis system.

High tech advances: highly efficient telemetry systems; semiconductor stacking for faster processing speeds; computer scheduling of complex tasks; scratch resistant and stay-clean lens coatings; interactive computer training methods.

Improved Environmental Systems: great solar energy advances; a device for continuously measuring atmospheric pressure; satellite weather monitoring; satellite scanning for forest management; a more accurate lightning warning device; much improved air quality monitors.

Miscellaneous fields: improved school bus chassis design; a flywheel energy storage system;  advances in hydroponics for better global vegetable production; a stronger wing design for jet aircraft along with cleaner, quieter, and more efficient jet engines; studless winter tires; much improved 12v portable coolers and heaters for campers, truckers, and medical transport; improved golf ball aerodynamics.

    These are but a few of the advances in almost every field of human endeavor that have spun off from the space program, with more to surely come.

    When we send a rover like Perseverance to Mars, for one stellar example, it needs the best solar energy system we can invent, it need stronger, lighter materials, it needs long endurance, it needs advanced robotics, it needs bearings that won’t wear out under the harshest conditions, it needs advanced cameras and telemetry. Developing new materials and products and systems to meet all these many requirements means much of that vastly improved technology can also be put to work right here at home in myriad ways.

    Does anybody still think the Space Program is a wasted effort?

Phil

www.philbowie.com

Check out the North Carolina suspense novel series Guns, Diamondback, Kllrs, and Deathsman in print or Kindle on Amazon for some distracting pandemic reading. And thanks to all those out there who have sent complimentary and encouraging e-mails about the series. You’re much appreciated.

 

 Why Go to Space?    

   We recently witnessed the culmination of a stupendous scientific achievement when NASA landed the car-sized rover Perseverance on a rugged area of cold and distant Mars. Now the exciting exploration phase begins. We may even find proof that life once existed there.

   Such missions always bring out the Space Scoffers who argue that we shouldn’t be spending so much to explore space when we have so many dire problems right here on Earth. Why, they ask, are we doing such worthless stuff?

   Why do these scoffers never mention the trillions squandered on our massive military complex that benefits mankind not at all? The staggering 2021 defense budget is $705 billion, yet few question that. The 2021 NASA budget is $23.3 billion, only three percent of what defense is costing us.

   When we first went to the Moon one of the astronauts took a picture of Earth with the desolate alien horizon in the foreground. That photo changed mankind’s collective thinking. It was striking and deeply moving. A small sphere impossibly floating in the blackness of space, and so incredibly beautiful. There were no color-coded nations, no artificial boundaries, only verdant continents and vast cobalt blue oceans and pristine cloud veils. We saw our planet for what it is—a precious home in the hostile cold and the stellar violence and the lonely vastness.

   That astonishing photo had a profound effect. What followed were the beginnings of efforts to preserve and protect our home. The EPA, the NOAA, and annual Earth Day were founded. We banned leaded gas. Congress passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. The fledgling environmental movement suddenly grew up and became serious. Many nations joined in. The whole Moon program was worth it for these initiatives alone.

   Of course, we still have major problems with pollution and climate change and explosive population growth and poverty and inequality. And we do need to fix all that, which good people are trying their best to do.

   But only the space program will ultimately save us a few hundred or a thousand years from now. And it will do that with what we're just beginning to learn.

   The Moon was a steppingstone. Mars will be another "giant leap" for mankind. Right now, our species is confined to this vulnerable planet. An asteroid strike, a nuclear exchange, or a virus far more deadly than Covid all have the potential to decimate us. Outposts on the Moon and Mars could be our lifeboats, preserving enough of us so that one day, after the effects of some such catastrophe dissipate, we could re-seed Earth with our kind. No more reasons for taking these steps are necessary, yet as with the Moon program, we are sure to reap an additional incidental bounty of scientific knowledge along the way to Mars. (More about that next week.)

   One unarguable fact looms over all of this. Our star, the sun, cannot last forever. This is true because it only has a finite amount of fuel and it is already middle aged. It does not have to die in order to make our planet uninhabitable. It only needs to shift a fraction either way in its output over time to kill us off.

   The space effort is in its infancy. One day we’ll have to migrate over several generations to some young habitable planet orbiting a young healthy star, or our species will vanish from the Universe. We cannot hope to do that without first learning how. We’re taking the first tentative steps toward that goal.

   The Moon and Mars are teaching us.

   We might compare the space effort to the history of flight. It was just over a century ago that the Wright Brothers took to the sky in their fragile homemade biplane and look what has happened in aviation since. Nobody could have foreseen just how important air travel would become. The current Mars missions, wondrous as they are, only represent the beginnings of what will become an even grander adventure—our migration out among the stars.

Phil

www.philbowie.com

Check out the North Carolina suspense novel series Guns, Diamondback, Kllrs, and Deathsman in print or Kindle on Amazon for some distracting pandemic reading. Judging from reviews and e-mails, people seem to really like the yarns.

A Staggering Statistic 

   We’re more than a year into this terrible pandemic with half a million American deaths from it.

   That’s a sobering, staggering statistic. It's more than the American combat deaths in World War One, World War Two, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. Difficult to comprehend.

   STILL far too many people are not masking or distancing and are thus putting themselves and others at grave risk.

   But an even more troubling fact is the refusal of so many among us to accept the free vaccines. Sorry, but I just don’t understand this. We’re told by those who certainly ought to know, like respected Dr. Fauci, that the vaccines are safe and highly effective. They represent some of the most successful scientific achievements ever.

   Naomi and I have had both shots and are deeply thankful for them. Side effects were minimal for both of us. We’ll continue to take all precautions for several reasons, including the troubling recent news about virus variants.

   Please consider accepting this life-saving measure when it’s your turn.

Phil

www.philbowie.com

 

 

A Skirmish in the Covid Battle

   Early on, as the Covid menace loomed ever larger and began killing thousands around the globe and all across America, the North Carolina Piedmont Authors Network saw the dire need for financial relief in many areas of society and decided to do something about it.

    The result became an independently published anthology with all proceeds channeling through the Book Industry Charitable Foundation to people in urgent need. Thirty-seven authors, including award winners and New York Times bestsellers, donated quality essays, letters, and fictional tales in fascinating variety to the effort, which is now available in print or Kindle as Writers Crushing Covid-19.  Some of the pieces have to do with the pandemic and personal loss. Many other pieces serve as excellent distracting reading that will amuse, enlighten, and satisfy any reader. I’m proud to have a modest tale of my own included, which earlier took second place in a UK short story contest against some stiff competition.

    As neighbor helps neighbor in the ongoing battle against this common invisible enemy that has sickened and killed so many of us, you can play a part in the fight if you’ll buy your own anthology copy. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed, and you’ll be contributing in a fine grass roots effort to help our fellow Americans.

    Here's a link to make ordering easy: https://www.amazon.com/Writers-Crushing-COVID-19-Anthology-Relief-ebook/dp/B088C3NVDV

    Please spread the word.

Phil

www.philbowie.com

Virus numbers are declining, but please keep masking and distancing. The fight is far from over.

 

A dozen Tips from the Top      

“Just write your story, the one you know that you would like to read.”  —Michael Connelly

“I write exclusively for the reader. I’m not interested in winning prizes or critical acclaim. I just want to give readers a few good days of entertainment.”  —Lee Child

 “Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.”  —Daphne Du Maurier

“In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.”   —Stephen King

“I don’t get writer’s block because I don’t believe in it. I believe you sit in front of the computer and force your fingers to get something on the screen.”  —Janet Evanovich

“The most important thing in writing is to have written. I can always fix a bad page. I can’t fix a blank one.”  —Nora Roberts

 “Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”   —Anne Sexton

 

 “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”  —G. K. Chesterton

 “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”    George Orwell

 “Nothing but deadly determination enables me to ever write—it is rowing against wind and tide.”

       —Harriet Beecher Stowe

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”  —Jack London

 “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”Robert Frost

Phil

www.philbowie.com Check out the NC suspense series.

Please mask up and distance until we get out of the dark Pandemic Woods.

 

Vanishing Species

   In the past decade alone ten species around our planet have gone extinct, including the Caribbean Monk Seal, the Madagascar Hippo, the Yangtze River Dolphin, the Formosan Clouded Leopard, the Japanese River Otter, and the West African Black Rhino, which at the start of the twentieth century numbered a million; now poached to extinction. In 2018, the last male Northern White Rhino, named Sudan, died, probably dooming that species as well, although there are valiant last-ditch efforts to bring them back using invitro fertilization. There are more Siberian tigers in captivity now than exist in the wild. 

   Once, millions of elephants roamed throughout Africa. Now the herds have declined to thousands, and they’re being driven ever closer to the bottomless extinction cliff.

   I wrote the novel Killing Ground to raise awareness of ongoing African elephant poaching across that vast and troubled continent, where more than 600 million people have no electricity, much less electric toothbrushes, where clean drinking water is scarce, basic sanitation is rare, and health care is minimal. With so many dire problems, the fates of wild creatures tend to warrant only relatively low priority.

   Please check out the story on my website: www.philbowie.com

   And please spread the word. A portion of proceeds goes to help those noble beasts.    

Phil

www.philbowie.com

Please mask up and distance; they're the best weapons we have to fight the killer virus until vaccines can push it back into its cave.