Posts Tagged ‘chronology’
“Time … thou ceaseless lackey to eternity”*…
Source art: Chronos and His Child by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli
The human mind has long grappled with the elusive nature of time: what it is, how to record it, how it regulates life, and whether it exists as a fundamental building block of the universe…
Quanta‘s fascinating timeline traces our evolving understanding of time through a history of observations in culture, physics, timekeeping, and biology: “Arrows of Time”
* Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece
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As we try to Be Here Now, we might send amusingly insightful birthday greetings to Richard Philips Feynman; he was born on this date in 1918. A theoretical physicist, Feynman was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-WW II era.
Richard Feynman was a once-in-a-generation intellectual. He had no shortage of brains. (In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum electrodynamics.) He had charisma. (Witness this outtake [below] from his 1964 Cornell physics lectures [available in full here].) He knew how to make science and academic thought available, even entertaining, to a broader public. (We’ve highlighted two public TV programs hosted by Feynman here and here.) And he knew how to have fun. The clip above brings it all together.
– From Open Culture (where one can also find Feynman’s elegant and accessible 1.5 minute explanation of “The Key to Science.”)
“You are not stuck in traffic. You ARE traffic.”*…
We’ve used 2016 information on population. There are now at least 3.8 billion people living inside the highlighted circle, and that’s not even including the tally from countries that are partially in the circle like Pakistan or Russia.
The circle holds 22 of the world’s 37 megacities – massive cities that hold at least 10 million inhabitants. It also includes the five most populous cities on the planet: Tokyo, Jakarta, Seoul, Karachi, and Shanghai, which alone combine to hold 144.5 million people.
This geographical region also holds many of the emerging markets of the future, countries that the World Economic Forum expects will lead global growth in years to come. Vietnam, Myanmar, Philippines, Indonesia, and Bangladesh are in the area highlighted, and Pakistan is partially there as well.
As a website called BrilliantMaps explains, there are some other subtleties to the circle that are worth detailing. The circle contains a lot of people, but it also has:
The highest mountain (Everest)
The deepest ocean trench (Mariana)
More Muslims than outside of it.
More Hindus than outside of it.
More Buddhists than outside of it.
More communists than outside of it.
The least sparsely populated country on earth (Mongolia)…
See the infographic in its entirety at “The Majority of the World’s Population Lives in This Circle.”
* TomTom SATNAV Advertisement
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As we contemplate concentration, we might recall that it was on this date in 1880 that Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)– the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London– was officially adopted by Parliament. Originally set-up to aid naval navigation (in the calculation of longitude), Greenwich had been the national (and imperial) center for time since 1675. In 1847, GMT became the standard for British Railroads, and quickly became the de facto standard for all other purposes. The 1880 Act simply made de jure what had become de facto.
GMT became the international civil time standard, but was superseded in that function (in 1960) by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
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