Could Pavement‘s “Circa 1762” be the best-penned song by one of Earth’s greatest bands? It has my vote.

So another birthday of mine has come ‘n’ gone (it was yesterday, in case you forgot); a mostly uneventful day and that’s fine with me. I’m not big on birthdays. I should rephrase that. I’m not big on MY birthday. I’ll party it up for the birthdays of family and friends, though. A while ago, I must’ve still been in highschool, I daydreamed (as I often did) about the concept of time. My conclusion was that time sucks and more specifically, the concept of measurement (time, mass, distance, etc) sucks too. Yes, ‘sucks’ the scientific term, folks 😉 Time is so arbitrary. Like really arbitrary. The fact that nanoseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and so on are the way they are is all a fluke. What is one second? Well, it’s roughly consistant with the average human heart beat (1 beat/sec). Atomic clocks are synchronized to over 9 billion osciallations (I can’t recall the exact number….Google it, folks) of a cesium-133 atom. Why do we call 60 of these seconds a minute? Because back in the day in Egypt, their number system used base-60 (we use base-10). They liked 60. 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day…. Wait a minute. 24? What happened to 60? Six scandal? Pyramid sprinkler system ruined the original documents? 6*4=24, perhaps? Fine, split the day up into four 6-hour segements…6, 60, all about the sixes. 360 days in a year? No, there’s 365 (really ~365.24) but 360 fit the mold and it timed right with the growing seasons. Who added the other 5 days to the year? My brain hurts.

So to bring this full circle, if somebody a long time ago decided that the heart beat of a mouse (much faster than a human heart beat) should be a second and 25 of those seconds would be a minute and so on, this would throw our concept of time out of whack. Maybe the time elapsed from a birthday, for example, could be shorter or longer if we really did some weird tinkering. But then that would be the accepted time measurement anyway and it wouldn’t matter. But think about it. Oh great, I just ruined birthdays and anniversaries for everyone. Don’t pick a scheduled (perceived) time elapsement to make someone feel appreciated, I guess. Don’t do it daily or weekly or hourly, just do it often.

Maybe the Bangles‘ “Walk Like An Egyptian” is the best-penned song.

PS: Being (hopefully) wiser now than I was in highschool, I’ve come to understand that science can sometimes be random and arbitrary. Don’t take my teenaged theories too seriously 😉