God Awful Things

When I first visited Los Angeles I knew there was something different about it. It was like the sunny and 75 days made people just a little more chillaxed. No need to lay on the horn in traffic, man, cos you’re not getting anywhere any faster anyway. After moving out here I heard a term, and I really with I could remember where I heard to provide them credit. That term was “California Casual”, referring to the pace and attitude of things out here. In time I came to become even more lackadaisical in my saying “California Casual” and abbreviated it just down to “cacas”.

Over at Discover Magazine, they have an article called “20 Things You didn’t Know About Time.

5 By observing how quickly bank tellers made change, pedestrians walked, and postal clerks spoke, psychologists determined that the three fastest-paced U.S. cities are Boston, Buffalo, and New York.

6 The three slowest? Shreveport, Sacramento, and L.A.

So there you have it, we do things just a little slower out this way, so kick back to some Seger, crack open a cold one and chillax.

So others from the list that I found interest.

1 “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so,” joked Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Scientists aren’t laughing, though. Some speculative new physics theories suggest that time emerges from a more fundamental—and timeless—reality.

20 There may be an end of time. Three Spanish scientists posit that the observed acceleration of the expanding cosmos is an illusion caused by the slowing of time. According to their math, time may eventually stop, at which point everything will come to a standstill.

But most hilariously,  I have often joked that there needs to be a term for the space of time it takes between orgasm during sex to wanting the person to leave your place, I had long thought there was no such term, but am happy to learn there is.

18 According to quantum theory, the shortest moment of time that can exist is known as Planck time, or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second.

And just to provide a little science on Planck Time..

The Planck length is the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum effects dominate. This is the ‘quantum of length’, the smallest measurement of length with any meaning.

And roughly equal to 1.6 x 10^-35 m or about 10^-20 times the size of a proton.

The Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to across a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the ‘quantum of time’, the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10^-43 seconds. No smaller division of time has any meaning. With in the framework of the laws of physics as we understand them today, we can say only that the universe came into existence when it already had an age of 10^-43 seconds.