By Mehran Moghtadaei (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Under the American style, however, next year is going to be the media bonanza: there will be a 3/14/15. Never mind that you should round that 5 to a 6; I’m willing to bet that the media coverage for 3/14/16 will not be as great. But then again, if you want to write it in this order, next year there will be a 3/14/15 9:26:53.58979… The prefect representation of pi!

As long as you use that calendar, clock, date notation, time notation, and sequence of date and time. The clock is based on an arbitrary division of the day into hours, the arbitrary hours into an arbitrary number of minutes, the arbitrary minutes into an arbitrary number of seconds, while the calendar is based on a “close-enough” alignment of Earth-rotations to Earth-revolutions, with a “best guess (at the time)” of the nativity of Christ.

Which is all well and good for most media coverage, but is there an option for selecting temporal units other than the arbitrary or Earth-centric seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years, and a 0-point (or “epoch”) other than a guess at the nativity? There is!

The metric system uses seconds (and so kiloseconds, megaseconds, teraseconds, and otherwise), but those are based on a particular definition of “second”, the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K. Since I don’t understand that, I won’t rely on it, and I wouldn’t expect the same selection to be made independently.

No, what we need are natural units, units whose definitions are based on universal constants. I think Planck time (t_P) would do admirably. It’s tiny, about 5.39106×10⁻⁴⁴ seconds. If a ZettaPlanck time (Zt_P) is a sextillion Planck times, 20 sextillion Zt_P would be just over a second. Without a change in our understanding of physics, there’s no such thing as a fraction of a Planck time. I don’t understand everything else around it, but it makes more sense than the definition of a second.

OK, so what about the selection of the start of our counting point? I think the Big Bang should serve here. It is estimated at 13.798 ± 0.037 billion years ago. So:

13,798,000,000 years × 31,556,952 seconds in the average Gregorian year ÷ 5.39106×10⁻⁴⁴ seconds per t_P puts us at about 8.0767571×10⁶⁰ t_P. So we’re waiting for 3.14159265358979…×10⁶¹ t_P to celebrate the next “Pi Planck Time” (πt_P). That will happen around 39,872,000,000 AD (rounding off to five significant figures). The Big Bang is closer to us than that. Similarly, the last πt_P was closer to the Big Bang than to us. It happened in 8,431,000,000 BC. Sigh. So I can see why the media will use the usual calendars and clocks instead.

—jhunterj

P.S. Any math or formula errors are mine. Please point them out in the comments.

Further Reading

Bang! The Complete History of the Universe , by Patrick Moore

Complexity and the Arrow of Time , by Charles H. Lineweaver

Pi: A Biography of the World’s Most Mysterious Number , by Alfred S. Posamentier

My own visceral feelings about “solipsism” tend to be negative, based on the assumption that it leads people to act selfishly, as if their viewpoint were the only one worth considering.  This may indicate more about me than about solipsism, and I’m probably conflating it with derealization and other psychological disorders.

Portrait of Gandhi in 1931

But lately I’ve been thinking about how it could be used positively, to drive positive thought experiments, plans, and even solutions.

Gandhi wrote “As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.” (Often paraphrased as “Be the change you want to see in the world.”) This is that, with the twist: waiting to see what others do is forbidden, because the experimental assumption is that there are no “others” to wait on.

Whatever problem, task, or stressor is foremost in your mind, try thinking about it solipsistically: what if you are the only real agent of change? What if it were up to you to bring peace to the world, to cure cancer, to fix the economy stupid, to get that pothole repaired, to organize your finances, to make your family safe, to make yourself happy? This is not just a variant of Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan. You can come up with ideas that involve other people doing thing, but you’re still the driver: how can you get those apparitions to do what you want? Or encourage the behavior you’re looking for?

Wikipedia’s Be Bold slogan. Made by Wapcaplet. To .svg by Oile11. (CC-BY-SA-3.0)

Wikipedia has a slogan: Be bold. The idea is there is you could make suggestions, discuss them in committee, and maybe one day do something. Or you could go ahead and do something and then work out any problems afterwards.

Just like you are the only agent of change in this experiment, now can be the only time for change. The same way that, of all the beings out there, you can be sure only that you truly exist, of all the times past, present, and future, you can be sure only that now truly exists. Maybe your memories were created by REKAL. And of course tomorrow never comes. You can make plans, but you have to make them right now. You can dwell on your memories, in nostalgia or regret, but you have to dwell right now. The only time you can do anything is right now.

It can also help you change focus from others, envying their lot or doling out unwanted advice on how they can fix their problems. You can’t be as sure of their lot and their problems as you can of your lot and your problems. And really, why should their lot matter?

But don’t be a jerk. Solipsism as a thought experiment to see how you can improve yourself, your family, your village, or your world is great. Solipsism as a way of doing whatever you want because, hey, you’re the only one who matters: no.

No one can carpe diem the way you would.

—jhunterj

The idea is not mine. David Seah inspired it with his 2007 blog post, and I’ve intended to do so for several years now, but the good intentions got me nowhere until now.

1. Really the first resolution is to launch jhunterj.com for my blog. That’s been done, but this year I need to get it monetized somehow. I have gotten no traction with Google and fixing my lockout of my “real” account for AdSense, so I either need to set up a different Google account or go with an AdSense competitor. Neither option is particularly appealing, but either would be better than no monetization. “Perfect is the enemy of good.”
2. I was running regularly last summer until I tore a tendon in my foot, and have done precious little exercise since. So: I resolve to get a bicycle this year and, until then, do push-ups, crunches, and dumbbell curls at least four days each week.
3. I will join at least one GenDayton committee this year. Community Service or Marketing seem likeliest.
4. Add another resolution on 3/3, when I come back and revisit these.

Do you keep your resolutions from January 1st? Do you want to join me in a Seah-esque trip through checkpoints this year?

—jhunterj

Whether you’re managing your time, your money, or your calories, the basics come down to:

1. Become conscious and intentional about your “spend” (dollars spent, activities by the quarter-hour, food consumed).
2. Reduce your spend to less than you’re earning (income, “free” time, calories burned). Failing that, increase your earnings to more than you’re spending: get a side job or sell some items you’ve been hoarding, exercise more. We haven’t really found a way to get more hours in the day yet.

This is life’s scoreboard. You can get by without keeping score, and you probably won’t have much fun if you try and keep score of everything, but if there’s an area you want to improve on, keeping score is indispensable.

Before trying to make any non-trivial changes in step 2, take a deep breath and find a way to track your spending. There are websites and mobile apps that will help you log every little spend as it happens, but you do have to make it a habit. You can even start with a generic note-taking app, such as Evernote, before getting lost in the plethora of dedicated app choices out there.

Even the simple act of documenting your activities can highlight easy “wins”, without going much further. And without documentation or some kind of measurement, none of the expert advice is going to do much good—if you don’t know how you’re doing, it’s nearly impossible to figure out how to do better. Or as they say in management, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Once you have a firm grasp on what you are doing now, you can figure out what you need to do differently to reach your goal, to win. And if you don’t want to do anything differently, it’s time to re-evaluate what you thought was your goal.

—jhunterj