Mid-October Fizzle Down, Time Puzzles

This weekend has been so lovely, and too short. It didn't help that I spent most of my time commiting myself to starting and finishing a few home economics projects instead of using more time to spend outside. I needed to bottle some beer, and then found some great other discounts and used the opportunity to make some pickles and sausage*. With all the sausage, beer, and sour pickles in my kitchen, it was like a one-man Oktoberfest around this place.

Running has been a bit of a pain lately, both figuratively and literally. My watch stopped tracking for the last couple of runs, including today's. My leg is starting to stiffen again, perhaps because of it losing its muscle memory due to more infrequent trials, and my failure to give it the stretching it probably needs. I've been resorting to doing more walking instead. Ella is definately happier, because of her extra inclusion, and getting to tour around more and sniff out the remaining smells of autumn that she finds lovely before the weather gets worse.



Mega-Eyeballs (Ella) greeting Super-Schnozz (Chance)

I thought I'd test my wits with FOREX trading again, and I'm trying to relax right now in this early afternoon Sunday before the currency markets re-open in Oceania and East Asia (it's an hour away from Monday morning in Sydney). This time discrepancy, the Toronto Waterfront Marathon**, messing around with time equations in Excel, and noticing my typical current waking hour falling close to an hour ahead sunrise at this time of the year as the daylight hours shorten more and more as we approach winter solstice made me think about all sorts of puzzles related to time, and realizing how much of our own language is a barrier as to why it's so damn difficult to formulate a sensible equation that a computer can process, and now much more difficult it's becoming to process happenings in a global ecomony in a world that functions 24/7. Questions that boggle my mind are things like:

• How far into the "future" does this "present" moment exist? That is, what is the limit of the farthest extended reading of time that the current moment can be expressed as a future time compared to your own timezone. The answer to this, of course, is whatever the current time is in the UTC +13 timezone, 19 hours ahead from my timezone, which would be the one west of the International Date Line. This time is being experienced along the meridian that intersects some rock out in the mid-Pacific somewhere. How far would you have to go if you jumped off that rock and started swimming until you technically reached "yesterday"?*** That answer would depend on how far north or south this rock was from the Equator. This leads me to wonder. . .
• If I were directly on the geographic North (or South) pole: the points on Earth where all time zones converge, which one do I use? If I took 5 paces northward from the South Pole, turned 90 degrees right and ran in circles, keeping a constant radius from the pole, would I be prematurely aging myself by days at a time? Theoretically, moving through all timezones so fast, I could pass through a week or so after a couple hundred meter circuit. Is it possible to stop your aging by running the other way around?****
• Supposing one had a regular diurnal cirradian rhythm, what would be the most optimal time to fly, and which flightpath must one take from one's timezone of origin, to the opposite side of the Earth (12 hours) that would most proactively reduce, or entirely eliminate, jetlag?
• If someone made a virus by some innocent botch in a financial program where a calculation was being made by using "negative time", could that person effectively use the resulting "negative interest" to pay off their credit card, and even make money?
• If I had to pay a capital gains tax here in Canada on an investment I made at a Hong Kong brokerage house, which had a massive fluctuation in profit (or losses) between 23:59:59, Dec 31st my time, and 23:59:59, Dec 31st  Hong Kong time, which quarterly report is used?

Some of those things are silly thoughts, others are asked out of genuine curiousity. The other prompt for this weird fascination with timezone play is a quirky European film called Night on Earth, a film about the lives of taxi drivers around the globe at one particular evening. 

I only other thing to add here is a little maxim my late uncle frequently said: "Today is the yesterday of our tomorrow."


*- A bit disappointed with my savings yield with the pickle and sausage making. I figured that I considering the quantity I produced and the time I used, I only saved between $65.00 and $75.00. I'm sure I could do even better than that. The sausages are bitchin' awesome by the way. I can't report on the pickles for another couple of weeks.

**- A friend of mine is participating in it; thinking about how she dislikes traveling into different time zones and wondering how her subjective experience of the run (effected by jetlag) was compared to her actual performance.
***- The opposing question is: how late into the "past" is this present moment being registered? I hence would presume GMT -12. Don't ask me how daylight savings would would play on this. I'm from Saskatchewan for Crissakes, and in a timezone where we don't have to mess with that shit.
****- There is a natural phenomenon by which a prolonged stay on Antarctica, a place where -82 C temperatures occur, and 50 kpm windspeed is common, that will induce a greatly delayed cellular decay, and all chonological aging stops. . .it's called FREEZING TO DEATH!