Why is it that humankind has the irresistable impulse to make things more complex and abstract until hardly anybody can understand them?
Things usually start out so simple a 5-year-old can understand them, then progress to the point that it takes an advanced degree in a specialized subject to even hope to understand some narrow portion of the complexities. We did it with the concept of money. In the beginning there was barter (I trade you three beaver pelts for that cow), something that any kid who trades Pokemon cards can understand. Then we moved to gold/silver/bronze coins, then paper money (originally redeemable in precious metals, but eventually turned into an abstract entity of its own), then things like checks and drafts and bonds that were redeemable in paper money (but eventually multiplied to an extent that there was more money represented by those things than there actually existed paper money to cash them all out if their owners actually tried to do that), then electronic exchanges where no paper of any sort was needed... finally reaching the state of affairs when things like mortgages were bundled into complex securities that were traded in convoluted ways... and, oops, something went wrong somewhere and we had a world financial crisis. Time is another one of those things. First people counted days, something anybody can do. Then they tried to correlate them with seasons and moon phases, which got more complicated. Subdividing days could be done with sundials (tough luck on cloudy days), or eventually various sorts of mechanical clocks that had to be constantly reset as they driffted away from the sun. But in theory the day was divided into 24 hours, of 60 minutes, of 60 seconds; any kid can still easily learn that... until the scientists had the brilliant idea of redefining the second based on atomic clocks, causing it to get unmoored from the sun and necessitate all the complications this list talks about. -- == Dan == Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/ Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/ _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
