TIME
is that Stuff that keeps everything
from happening
Global Warming: Global Warning!
The Query
"What is Time ?" is as old as human philosophy itself. Read what some Nobel Prize winning Writers have to say about the subject.
Time is always relative, - but the keys to reasonable temporal perspective in societal contexts are in the evolution of information encoding, and the persistence of lifestyles. Great diversity still persists, and tells all about adaptation... and true sustainability.
From Historical Records, the Warmest Periods in the Earth's recent few hundred thousand years have almost always Been Good for Humans.
The trick is to start trying to understand how Solar irradiance is linked to your local climate.
Who do you Believe, and Why?
This is one of the key dilemmas of applied science, technology, and medicine in day-to-day living. Without going into great depths of detail here, it is also important to recognize just how really young are our most sophisticated observational bases for making informed decisions about an ever- changing world... and about the opposition to making the world more efficient ... e.g., What in Hell Happened to Nicholas Tesla, and his Great Ideas? & Where will the next Tesla come from?
Thus, with a deeper understanding of this concept, I have tried to explain to many of my "statistician" fish population modeling colleagues that the average fish dies at somewhere between day one and day seven after hatching, leaving a whole lot of un-average fish behind - or NOT... Darwin understood this, as have many other from even earlier history.
The context of any system needs carefully determined, not simply defined as a general convenience to the analyst. Since Nature is dynamic, on all time and space scales, it is nearly inconceivable that anyone could successfully build credible arguments, e.g., for use in resource management - around steady state concepts...
Fishing, for example, is an economic venture, where many sectors are subsidized, or even hidden from public view... This latter behavior has been the scourge of natural resource management techniques throughout the 20th century... with enormous consequences in loss of credibility of the sciences, as poorly defined techniques fail to track realistically, and therefore fail to protect many or most living species within dynamic aquatic ecosystems.
Many fisheries, such as the San Diego tuna fleet, have come and gone, all since the early 1900s. This is a serious and complex problem of local, national, and international dimensions - and it is certainly not just about 'overfishing'.
Read all about these issues in OUT of FISHERMEN'S HANDS...
Interested in one copy, or a bundle for courses or groups ?
Brief & Order Instructions .pdf file& -If NonUSA airmail delivery requested add US$8.00
Now lets see what else we need to know...
Standard news media portrayals of the relationships between local processes such as forest fires, volcanic eruptions and seismic epicenter disasters - and the viewers - are more often than not treated as
"things that happen to others..."
until eventually each of us becomes involved in one or more of the vast array of possible natural disasters, or phenomena. These "natural" processes occur in time and spatial patterns that are nearly continuous, if not always where you, the observer, are poised at the moment. Most of these processes have gone on since the planet congealed, to shape the physical world by creating mountains, valleys, and plains, as well as a continuously changing mosaic of local ecologies within which living systems have either organized, or died out.
This is the basis of Darwin's great insights, and so-called controversy.
Is it always the "most fit" that survive,
i.e., the most adaptive - Or simply the fortunate?
Are modern human beings "fit' enough?
Or, in fact, are we too fit?
Can we really outwit Nature?
Likewise, we are only now learning that natural systems (and their economics) depend upon both Events and Seasonal Disequilibrium as engines - the prime creators of options - and renewals.
Yet, there remain many, particularly government agency resource managers, and their systems modelers, whose wishful thinking too often presumes that "assuming equilibria will lead to stability"- and that forced "persistence" is a basis for Sustainable Ecosystem concepts.
This basic premise is simply out of touch with real-world variabilities - e.g., those that are beyond human intervention, Nature's Engines of Change.
Charles Darwin may not have had the last word...
or some say that today it might be
But, then again -
Stephen Jay Gould had another idea - Punctuated Equilibrium.
The basic importance of catastrophic events in our history, and the resulting consequences, particularly new coping strategies seems to hit home. Where survivors thrive, life changes, as new coping strategies arise
There have been a lot of Words...
Of course there are many questions about humans, and their limitations.
There have been many discourses, and competition between
Now, finally, there is an online Encylopedia to help everyone Connect Time, Events, and Social Processes, and Ideas - WIKIPEDIA !
How about a few Pictures instead??? Sounds???
Or just Gorillas???
The underlying messages in the various linked Chronologies is simply...
Ain't life weird?
Great Search Engines I have Known - and Used!
MetaCrawler
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All The Web - Wow!
Can be Fun & Fast, but... Don't stop looking elsewhere...
Rules We Should All Respect
LOGIC in Argumentation
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Last Update: October 4, 2006
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