Rakkity/Shamaru

The space-time confusium

Let’s see now, as I write here it’s 8:40 pm JST; that’s 6:40 am EST, so this email is arriving at Central St blog factory just before dawn. It’s Wednesday here, so it’s Tuesday there. These are my thought
processes as I write to my intern back at Goddard in MD. (His name is Rick, and he’s a recent graduate from UMd.)

Every day Rick sends me some figures that he’s made for the paper we’re writing together. If I write in the morning, he doesn’t get that email till the next day, which is really the previous day, and if he writes to me in the afternoon, I get it in the morning of the same day. Right? Except when I write to him late at night, and he is at work and actually gets the message in near real time. When that happened once, Rick asked, “How did you do that?”

So when I critique his work, he has to figure out what I’m talking about. Is it the figure he just sent, or is it the one he sent yesterday? Or maybe its the one he will send tomorrow, and I’ve got advance notice of it.

I don’t know how we’ve done it, but together we’ve actually done some productive work in this time warp.

Mike’s the only person that I’ve been able to quasi-IM with. But Mike’s always in a time warp. (That’s due to the Black Hole in the library.) Time is only a coordinate that measures the distance between blog entries, right?