Can anyone explain the time difference thing to me?
It turns out that the Russian city I mentioned before is only 1 hour in time difference. Shit even Australia is 2 hours difference. How can some place so far away be one hour difference?
Please explain time differences to this doofus.
Phtsically, It takes the sun that much time to get to the city, for it to be in the “one o’ clock” postion.
Imagine a horse race.
Instead of the race track being fifteen metres wide, it’s ten thousand kilometres wide. The Kiwi horse hits the finish line first. Two seconds later, the Australian horse is there, on the Kiwi horse’s tail. But 10 000km away, a Russian horse hits the line only one second after the NZ horse. The Australian horse comes third.
It’s all about the longitude.
(of course we Aussies all know that NZ is two hours ahead and twenty years behind. BOOM tish. :D)
Actually that does kind of make sense in my doofus brain.
It was very nice to see Aussie lose the netball in a Sydney home game 
Time changes based on the difference of location east to west. North to south has absolutely nada to do with it.
(But could you explain jet lag to me? I mean, why should my body’s ‘timetable’ stay where I WAS when I’m clearly HERE? Can’t get my mind around that.)
Cuda
I find it pretty mind-boggling to think that solid matter is made up almost entirely of empty space.
-DNA.
-How trillions of cells can work together to make an organism that works perfectly.
-The fact that we’re here at all. Birth itself is so complicated and everything must work out just right.
-How the Pyramids of Giza were built.
Makes perfect sense to me. You’ve stayed at your old locale for so long, that your body expects sunet to be around, say, 6:00 PM and bedtime at 11:00 PM (local time.) So you travel six timezones eastward, and try to keep with the local schedule, where sunset is now the equivilent to 12:00 noon your local time, and bedtime is 5:00 PM. Why should your body adjust instantly to the new timezone? It was used to the old one. If you took your sweet time going through timezones (like say a car or train) that would be fine, but you went faster than your body could compensate. I’m not too keen on the specifics, but your body adjusts it’s timetable by more than just the visual clue of “hery, sun is going down, must be sunset, five more hours till bedtime.” A vriety of factors play into your internal clock.
Let me see if I can make a stab at jet lag.
Say that you take a plane from LA to New York. You leave LA at noon and you’re in the air for 5 hours. When you land, your body thinks it 5 pm, but you get off the plane to find that it’s dark outside and all the clocks say 8 pm.
When it gets to be about 11:00 and everyone else is going to bed, your body thinks it’s 8:00 and you’re still wide awake, but you go to bed anyway and have trouble getting to sleep.
When your alarm goes off at 7:00 am your body is still thinking it’s 4:00, and besides, you just got to sleep. After a day or two your body acclimates to its new settings and everything is OK, but then you fly back to LA and have to go through the same thing all over again, except in reverse.
Yes, but…
At home, my body is attuned to the position of the sun - morning, noon, night, call for specific responses from my body (or maybe learned? - not sure). Ideally, it should be attuned to the sun no matter where I am - not take days to figure it out. (“maybe this is proof that Og doesn’t want us to travel so fast” - heading for the hospital for a tongue-in-cheek-ectomy.)
Cuda
Yes, but there is more to it than that. Your body has an internal clock that does a pretty good job of keeping track of time, so even when you’re indoors with no visual clues your body has a pretty good idea what time it is. If you suddenly add or subtract 3 hours your internal clock gets confused. The visual/astronomical observations are out of sync with the internal/how long I’ve been up clock. That’s why you get jet lag.
But that’s the part that boggles me. Early man had no need for a ‘bodyclock’ - no one was going to outrun it without mechanized travel. So why in evolution did this arise/persist?
I’ve read many theories about the biological clock, but none that explain what use it serves. And I have trouble with a useless function in evolution. Can you give an example where the bodyclock is a help rather than a hinderance?
If you were in New York, for however long, and are about to fly to LA. You wake up at 6am New York time, and it’s 3am in LA. You hit the airport, fly all day, and arrive in LA at 3pm LA time. It’s 6pm in New York, where you started your day. You go out for a beer and a burger, take a walk on the beach, and then get to your hotel at 7pm. It’s 10pm in New York, and you’ve been up since 6am. Awake for 16 hours, you’re ready for sleep, but it’s only early evening in LA.
Going back, you wake up at 7am LA time and fly back to NY. You arrive at 10pm NY time and have to be at work at 8am tomorrow. It’s only 7pm where you started the day, you’ve been up for 12 hours, but you’re supposed to go to sleep now if you want to get in 8 or 9 hours of sleep. You toss and turn for a few hours, because you’re not ready for bed.
It’s not about acclimation to a time zone so much as it is a matter of how long you’ve been awake that day, and how physically tired you are. Sometimes you’re ready to sleep and the sun’s still up, and sometimes you’re wide awake and it’s late at night.
How 'bout if it’s dark and cloudy all day? All day looks like twilight, so if all you had to go one was cues from the sun, you’d be nodding off all day (remembering that, pre-electricity, people naturally go to bed pretty much at sundown, 'cause there’s nothing better to do and firelight is expensive in fuel.) A few days of bad weather strung together and all you’ve done is sleep, and suddenly you’re out of roots ‘n’ berries and no one’s slaughtered an antelope all week!
So yes, our clocks readjust themselves according to the sun eventually - which is why so many people suffer insomnia near the poles at long light periods - but it doesn’t happen immediately, so we don’t waste days when we can’t see the sun.
And yeah - WAG all the way.
Oh, and the thing I can’t get my head around: why two cars going in opposite directions at X miles per hour aren’t approaching each other at a rate of 2X miles per hour. I cannot tell you how many people have tried to explain this to me, and I just can’t get it to stick.
Well you can just rock me to sleep tonight! :mad:
The same thing time is expanding into.
The economics of money and banking.
I’m a business major, graduated 1977. I had to take a course in it to get my degree. If the prof hadn’t graded on a bigass curve, I’d still be working on my BBA. M1, M2, V…WTF? He might as well have been speaking Swahili for all I could understand.
A flight that costs $100 today was $200 yesterday but $75 tomorrow. If you want to fly on the weekend, that will be $400. If you really need to fly right now, it will cost you $1000. The round trip flight is cheaper than the one way flight. A one hour flight to the next state is more expensive than a six hour flight across the country. What kind of bizarre economics are at work here?
Why the hell do we itch? In almost all cases, doing anything about the itch is bad for you.
Insect bites, rashes, and healing scabs all itch, but scratching makes them all worse.
Are your eyes itchy? For the love of Og, don’t rub them. If they’re itchy because you have a bit of grit in your eye, or if you just happen to have a piece of grit in your eye, then rubbing your eyes can scratch your eyeball.
So when your body itches really bad, the way you should respond is do nothing. That’s right, the correct reaction to one of the most uncomfortable, compelling sensations that human beings can feel is to do nothing. Don’t scratch it. Don’t rub it. Don’t touch it. Ignore it.
This, I feel, is one of the most compelling aruments against Intelligent Design.