Abandon Mythology

There’s nothing like a wet day for dry reading. I’m spending this rainy Monday morning catching up on the Sunday papers. Yesterday’s New York Times has this good, though long, profile of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his past coziness with the financial institutions he’s currently spending billions of taxpayer dollars bailing out. This paragraph caught my eye:

But since then, the New York Fed has given two more no-bid contracts to BlackRock related to the A.I.G. bailout, angering a number of BlackRock’s competitors. The fees on those contracts remain confidential. 

It reeks of the two things I most despise in government: cronyism and secrecy. In fact there’s something very familiar about it. Hmm.

I was about to make my the-more-they-stay-the-same point by replacing “New York Fed” with Defense Department and “AIG bailout” with War on Terra and then blockquoting the whole thing in pleasing cayenne again, but I chickened out. What if I somehow altered the time-space continuum and slammed us back to late 2001/early 2002 when dubya started playing war preznit? *shiver*

I’ve been busily letting weather and work get in the way of completing the shingling of my roof. I’m still less than halfway through that chore, but hopefully I can finish this weekend. I’m getting a reprieve this morning waiting for a pretty heavy frost to burn off.

In my “spare” time I’m still plugging away at re-building this site from scratch using a combination of book study, internet tutorials, reverse engineering and plain old trial and error. I’m swimming in stuff like this:

<?php

if ( !empty($withcomments) && !is_single() ) {

?>

#page { background: url(“<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?> }

<?php } else { ?>

#page { background: url(“<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?> }

<?php } ?>

So, needing to take a break from the break I took from roofing, I (of course) dive into something else that’s way over my head. Cosmology. I don’t have the education to even begin to understand it, but unlike the frustration brought about from parsing computer code, the theoretical physics of our universe always leaves me with a pleasant sense of wonder.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. In my last post, I mentioned the sense of acceleration of life commonly felt by those of us past our prime. We may not know exactly where the abyss lies, but we begin to feel the wind as we travel in that direction. There’s a fascinating parallel to this imagery to be found in our cosmos. Ever since the Big Bang, our universe has been expanding, but in the last decade or so, measurements have shown that this expansion is accelerating. Due to some unseen force scientists have labeled Dark Energy*, the galaxies appear to be hurtling towards an abyss of their own. 

Of course, the feeling that the years are somehow passing faster for us as we grow older is merely the brain recognizing the failings of the body. It is an appreciation of life brought about by the realization that time, at least for us, is finite. Now some Spanish scientists have theorized that time itself is finite, that the measured acceleration of the universe’s expansion is actually time slowing down. 

Naturally, the theory has a few chilling conclusions. If time is slowing, it could – in billions of years – actually come to a complete halt, University of the Basque Country professor José Senovilla told New Scientist.

 
Would that mean everything freezes in place forever? Apparently. Does forever mean anything if time itself has literally stopped? 

Now that’s a question worth pondering on the roof today. 

*Interestingly enough, (to me anyway) somewhere in the wreckage of my website(s), there exists an unfinished post about Michelle Obama with this as a title.