bad-time-analogies

[bad-time-analogies]

the raw and tender present becoming more and more baked and hardened into the adamantine past. barren, cracked, forgotten reaches of land. hand stopped by glass

[bad-time-analogies]

Imagine time as a tumblr blog. Each post is a discrete entity, fully self-contained, a single, infinitesimal fragment of time, a snapshot of our universe as it exists in that moment.

What, then, if the posts cease? What would that even mean? Can something be understood to stop if there exists no time after that cessation? If another moment doesn't come? What if the blog is abandoned because the op got tired of it, and then comes back to discover a bunch of notes and new followers came while the blog was unattended? What if the blog was apparently part of a gimmick blog contest? What if the blogger posted again?

Was the blog ever truly abandoned, then, if there was always going to be another post?

Did time ever cease?

[bad-time-analogies]

i don't know what i was expecting. these time analogies are horrible. congratulations you did the thing you set out to do

*curtsy*

[bad-time-analogies]

Seizing an opportunity to revive a mostly-abandoned gimmick blog: Time was invented 4 months ago as an analogy for roasted chicken

variations on "feel old yet" meme:

lying (overshooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 36 years ago

lying (undershooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 7 years ago

lying by a ridiculous amount (overshooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 900 years ago

lying by a ridiculous amount (undershooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 15 minutes ago

real date of event no one reading was alive for: feel old yet? the great san francisco earthquake happened 118 years ago

real date of event no one reading was alive for or cares about: feel old yet? prince frederick henry died 395 years ago

event no one reading was alive for and also lying: feel old yet? the great san francisco earthquake happened 4 years ago

event that did not happen: feel old yet? brian mulroney was assassinated 48 years ago

event that did not happen and even if it did this would be a lie: feel old yet? brian mulroney was assassinated 197 years ago

real date of event on a cosmological scale: feel old yet? the sun was formed 4,600,000,000 years ago

lying on a cosmological scale (undershooting): feel old yet? the sun was formed 12 years ago

lying on a cosmological scale (overshooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 12,000,000,000 years ago

real date of a personal anecdote that only you know or card about: feel old yet? i made a really good stir fry 5 years ago

reversal: feel young yet? frozen 3 is coming out in 3 years

reversal on a cosmological scale: feel young yet? the sun will collapse in 8,000,000,000 years

reversal (lying about event): feel young yet? the first episode of spongebob will air in 3 years

reversal (lying about time, overshooting): feel young yet? frozen 3 is coming out in 8,000,000,000 years

reversal (lying about time, undershooting): feel young yet? the sun will collapse in 3 years

reversal (lying about time, really undershooting): feel young yet? the sun will collapse in 12 minutes

real date of a recurring event that wasn't very long ago: feel old yet? halloween was 13 days ago

lying about recurring event: feel old yet? halloween was 10,000 years ago

reversal of recurring event: feel young yet? thursday is tomorrow

reversal of personal anecdote: feel young yet? my laundry is done in 52 minutes

real(?) date of a nonspecific event: feel old yet? something happened 2 years ago

lying about the reader (undershooting): feel old yet? you were born 5 years ago

lying about the reader (overshooting): feel old yet? you were born 650 years ago

making a reasonable guess about the reader: feel old yet? you were born 22 years ago

technically telling the truth about the reader: feel old yet? you were born between 0 and 120 years ago

threatening the reader: feel young yet? you will die in 7 days

non sequitur: feel old yet? half of all chameleon species on earth live in madagascar

non sequitur (lying): feel old yet? chameleons are immune to fire

lying on several levels: feel old yet? chameleons were invented 36 years ago

self-reference: feel old yet? i started writing this post 40 minutes ago

giving up: feel old yyet?th e emmenkr,tn dbw a 8 gn m hk\

i can't finish the joke someone else come up with a punchline: feel old yet?

declarative statement: you feel old.

subversive declarative statement: time isn't even real.

reference another meme: feel old yet? yeah. this is the beach that makes you old.

reference another meme specifically about injecting non sequiturs into long posts: feel old yet? the glue that lets you walk up and down anything was invented 36 years ago

[bad-time-analogies]

Imagine time as a tumblr queue, each day a single post. The creator of the queue has, so far, produced enough days for time to be a continuous flow from one day to the next. But what if the queue runs out? What will the final post look like? Will there be more posts someday?

The answers are this, this, and probably

[bad-time-analogies]

Consider a novel contagious illness. It begins somewhere with a "patient zero" who infects others, who then infect others, and so on, ever increasing the total number of infections, until such time as the world population has largely been infected and the rate of new infections is approximately uniform.

The disease is time. Patient zero is the big bang, the beginning of the universe. The rapidly increasing rate of infection is the period following the big bang, our universe expanding at an increasing rate. This includes the present. But one day the infection rate might stabilize. What if effective methods are implemented to control the reproduction rate of the illness? With proper masking, contact tracing, and ventilation measures, could time be stopped?

[bad-time-analogies]

Time often serves to conceal the truth from us. At the time of an event, we do not recognize its importance, and later, we do not know what happened. One of the big example questions is: where did life come from? How did the so-called primordial soup give rise to what we would recognize as living organisms?

In 2744, a team of biologists will use time travel to find out, going back hundreds of millions of years to when the very first life on earth is thought to have emerged. Through a series of field tests and thorough study, they will find that the first organisms on earth, the ancestors of all living beings, were the bacteria on some of their equipment that will have been improperly sterilized.

[bad-time-analogies]

Time is an apple. Take a bite: this is your lifetime. The apple remains, but its total volume diminishes. Eventually, only the inedible core will remain, the distant future when the universe is no longer hospitable for life.

The skin of the apple is the present. One must penetrate it to consume any of the interior of the apple (the future). But what if a creature could puncture the skin, travel through the future and return to the other side of the apple where the skin awaits, piercing it from the other side and emerging once again, somewhere else in the present? These theoretical bites are called wormholes.

[bad-time-analogies]

Imagine time as a sword. The blade is the "light cone" of our point in space and time, the entirety of the universe that we can affect. The distant past is the pommel of the sword, countering the weight of the blade and moving the balance point to somewhere more useful. The hilt is one's own lifetime, the part of all time that we can grasp and move directly.

But not all swords are the same, for not all lives are the same. Is time balanced close to the hilt, such that our lives can change the future easily? Or is it farther down the blade, lending weight to the future, giving it more momentum, more cutting power?

[bad-time-analogies]

Imagine time as a tree. The past is the trunk, thick and reliable, and each time we make a choice, a new branch is formed. If the tree were cut down, we would have a large quantity of time to work with, but time would run out eventually and no more would grow.

But what if we practice coppicing, the forestry method where the main trunk of the tree is kept short and intact, and smaller vertical branches are harvested occasionally while the tree remains alive? We can do this by making many rapid choices at the same moment. This is an excellent source of linear time, for wood grown this way is straight-grained and long, but its diameter is small and it may be unsuitable for experiences requiring large slabs of time. But perhaps the design of our experiences can be modified to include more composite time made from many narrower branches.

Regardless of the method by which we manage the forest in which time grows, reducing the waste of time is key to sustainable timestry. Creating poor quality experiences that use inexpensive time and weak joinery that does not last is a very significant factor. An experience constructed with half-lap and mortise-and-tenon joints, and sealed correctly with the lacquer of causation, should never need replacing.

[bad-time-analogies]

On March 8th, 2027, at 8:50 AM UTC, time will end. This will go largely unnoticed by the general population but certain experts in physics, watchmaking, and scheduling related fields are predicted to be "quite miffed" at this.

But the end of time only matters to these people because only they are paying attention. Consider time like a film. If one watches the film with rapt attention, then when the final shot ceases and the credits roll, one notices. But if one is not really watching the film, if it's just on in the other room while one is washing dishes, if one is talking over it with one's companions, then time can cease entirely out of one's awareness.

Time is expected to begin anew on March 8th, 2027 at 8:50 AM UTC.

[bad-time-analogies]

Time is like a box of chocolates. Each chocolate is a moment, and each moment is different from the next in inscrutable ways. There are markings on each moment, patterns and shapes, but do they convey information? Is it possible to know the true nature of a moment from the future before biting into it?

The answer lies in whether you still have the guide that identified each chocolate from the inside of the lid.

[bad-time-analogies]

Imagine time as a ruler. It extends from past to future in a linear fashion. This is the universe as understood in Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry.

But thanks to general relativity, we know that time and space are intimately related, and that time is curved. In fact, time is curved because it is much thinner than Newton believed. The curvature allows time to remain rigid enough to hold up its weight while measuring how long it takes to do something. But this no longer describes a ruler--the curvature of time is that of a tape measure, which implies the existence of a spring that will pull the future back toward the past and coil it up into a small space. This is what astrophysicists call a black hole.

[bad-time-analogies]

Imagine time as a long corridor. Along the corridor are many doors. Each time we make a choice, we go through one of the doors, entering a similar long corridor, or perhaps the same one again.

But in front of each door is a pair of guards. One tells comforting lies, and the other tells uncomfortable truths.

Both of them say "Look, pal, there's no way you're getting out of this corridor, whether you go through the door or not."

[bad-time-analogies]

Time is like an octopus. At the center is the mantle, cohesive and certain, representing the past. Attached to the mantle is the present: the eyes and mouth of the octopus, from which we view the universe and with which we consume things. The tentacles are the future, extending in all directions, extraordinarily flexible, and covered in suckers. It is with the tentacles that we seek what we desire.

[bad-time-analogies]

Consider a single strand of spider silk. It is easy to imagine time as a linear strand, from the past to the spinneret.

But spider silk forms webs. Each time the silk crosses another strand, time branches and through careful consideration we are able to change the course of history, the shape of the universe, turn away from the expected future towards some other strand of time.

But all current and recent events seem to follow inevitably from previous ones. Has the universe become deterministic? Is free will no longer available?

Is the strand of silk upon which we find ourselves... sticky?

Is the spider coming?

[bad-time-analogies]

The universe is a lotion bottle, containing the rich and viscous moisturizer we call time. Our will is the pump at the apex of the bottle, pulling time out of the universe through the straw of our experience.

One day, perhaps, the bottle will be empty. But long before that, it will still have plenty of lotion, but too thick to settle around the bottom of the straw, our efforts at the pump in vain.

Experts are pursuing a way to shake the universe so that the time settles a bit.