Thursday 6 March 2008

Time Travel

At the beginning of the week, we were deprived of a late snowfall that others nearby were able to enjoy. Poo. Meanwhile, friends of Kevin's on the other side of the country lament the long, cold winter. Jammy bastards, they should share or shut up.

Here, we anxiously await the return of the hummingbirds from Mexico. I know that sounds like we're waiting for the flight of the conchords, but no, the real hummingbirds usually come back around St. Paddy's day. Kris heard and saw one in her garden last Sunday, so we've put the feeders out already.

A recent post on the F-Word blog about sexist language, led me to another blog, 'Alternet' which quoted a brilliant experiment by Douglas Hofstadter. He said, let's suppose that language were based on race, not gender.

"His article ("A Person Paper on Purity in Language") creates an imaginary world in which generics are based on race rather than gender. In that world, people would use "freshwhite," "chairwhite" and yes, "you whiteys." People of colour would hear "all whites are created equal" -- and be expected to feel included. Substituting "white" for "man" makes it easy to see why using "man" for all human beings is wrong."

Language is unbelievably important. I'm sick to the back teeth of being told it isn't. It shows your attitude, it shows your thinking and on language shall you be judged.

An article I don't understand in the New Scientist a couple of weeks ago, suggests that this could be the year when time travel starts.
What I think I understand is this.
There will be a new particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, a Large Hadron Collider, which will be switched on this year. It may be possible because of this new LHC, to physically link the future to the present by way of wormholes. We can't link to the past, it will only be possible to link to the first time a Time Machine exists which - could be this year.
Yes, well that seemed pretty clear, mainly because I've left out the entire mathematical part.
Later in the year, expect people in the future to start visiting.
Oh, just look at the diagram.

Picture © New Scientist.

2 comments:

Sleepy said...

I Time Travelled today.
Back to that point in time when I got a fucking face full of bastard compost worms!
Can't say I'm impressed with the technology.

Schneewittchen said...

Oops, s'posed to be wormholes, not worms.

Do they make good compost though?
I have a theory about the compost. I take all of our veggie and fruit waste to work and out it in the compost bin there, no compost ever seems to come out and yet there is always just enough room to put the veggie waste in. Ergo, the worms are sending the product somewhere through wormholes.