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Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic Evolution^SM

Click on this Clock for the exact naval observatory time...

Welcome to my Page of Time! "One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse betneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time. Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatcfhes, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in pefrect succesion. And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all." - Alan Lightman in his novel, Einstein's Dreams, pp. 33-34

Let's start out with WWV, they use a Cesium Fountain Clock for our country's time standard. Click Here to visit "NIST," WWV's home page or, call 303-499-7111 and hear the WWV signal live, on your telephone.

Click on these "Thumbnail" images for a larger view:

My poor wife-to-be accompanied me on this 1975 "date" to WWV...

Both of these photos were taken of WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado in early October, 1975

At that time WWV's transmitter site was located on County Road 1 just outside of Fort Collins, Colorado

Some thoughts on time:

• "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
  I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is."
                    - Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Chapter 2, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For)
• ""I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
                    - Albert Einstein
• "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
                    - Physicist Niels Bohr
• "There is no universal time, because time is a route-dependent quantity."
                    - Physicist Hermann Bondi, Relativity and Common Sense (Chapter XII, Acceleration)
• "Time is concomitant with the physical world but cannot be pointed to as existing in any material way."
                    - His Holinss, The Dalai Lama, An Open Heart (Chapter 3, The Material and Immaterial World)
• "There are at least three different arrows of time. First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time, the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases. Then, there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future. Finally, there is the cosmological arrow of time. This is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting."
                    - Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (Chapter 9, The Arrow of Time)

Time Orientation

The past is just a memory and the future is a guess.
The point where they meet is the present, and it is the
only place you exist. The address of where you live is eternally now.

- Camden Benares in Zen without Zen masters

Time

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town Waiting for someone or something to show you the way Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking And racing around to come up behind you again The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older Shorter of breath and one day closer to death Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time Plans that either come to nought, or half a page of scribbled lines Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way The time is gone the song is over, Thought I'd something more to say Home, home again I like to be here when I can When I come home cold and tired It's good to warm my bones beside the fire Far away across the fields The tolling of an iron bell Calls the faithful to their knees To hear the softly spoken magic spells [Fom Pink Floyd's Darkside of the Moon album]

ON TIME Time was, is past thou canst recall, Time is, thou hast employ the portion small, Time future, is not and may never be, Time present is, the only time for thee. (10-13-2006) I found this printed on a Sunderland Lustre Jug (early 19th Century), at Bamburgh Castle, while Tami and I were visiting the UK - unfortunately photography wasn't allowed inside...

Daylight Savings Time (DST):

Okay, what web page addressing the concept of "Time" could possibly go on without touching on the evils of Daylight Savings Time? Well, not this one!!

For those of you in parts of the world (and parts of the U.S.) who don't have to set your clocks back and forth every few months the concept must seem Really strange! Well, for many of us who are forced to endure this semiannual ritual it seems equally strange as well!!

Although it will never happen in my lifetime, simply ending Daylight Savings Time would bring peace, harmony, and steady sleeping habits to those people living in places that are still engaged in time tinkering.

There are tons of web pages, around the Internet, that suggest we end Daylight Savings Time. Here are a couple that provide some thoughtful insight to the idea along with a little history:

• End Daylight Savings Time "Anti" DST
• WebExhibits "Pro" DST but offers history and opposing viewpoints...

Dates and the Common Era: What does "AD," "CE," and "BCE" mean?

AD, or "Anno Domini" is Latin for "In the year of Our Lord" - it's a dating system based on the Christian belief in the Birth of Christ. The problem is, most of the world isn't Christian so it's pretty unfair to require Jews, Moslems, Hindus, Witches, Druids and Atheists to refer to the current date as being in the year of the Lord when they may not even know who Jesus was to begin with! Plus, there's a lot of controversy over the actual date Jesus was born at anyway - it can vary as much as six years and probably didn't take place in December!!

So, it's become increasingly more common to refer to dates as they relate to CE or the "Common Era." The Common Era is the period beginning with a year near the birth of Jesus, coinciding with the period from AD 1 onwards. Of course any date before the AD1 is referred to as "BCE," or Before Current Era.

Here's what Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia,
has to say about dates and the Common Era:

"When used as a numbering system for years, the Common Era is abbreviated as CE and the BCE/CE system is synonymous with the much more common BC/AD system ('before Christ' and 'anno Domini,' or 'in the year of [our] Lord [Jesus Christ]'). Thus 500 CE is the same year as AD 500. Similarly, 'before the Common Era' and BCE are used synonymously with 'before Christ' and BC. Just like the AD/CE equivalency, any 'BC' year is the same 'BCE' year, so it is equally accurate to say that Julius Caesar was assassinated in either 44 BC or 44 BCE.

"Both 'CE' and 'BCE' follow the year. This contrasts with proper use of 'AD', which mirrors the fact that the original Latin is a prepositional phrase, so 'in the year of the Lord 1601' is correctly written as 'AD 1601', and not as '1601 AD', as many people write. This is opposite to correct usage of 'BC', which is always written after the year it modifies (e.g. '44 BC')."

Ancient Time:

"These astronomers excelled in their mathematics. Neither ancient Greeks or Romans had the concept of zero. The Maya did, and they used it in computations that took them thousands of years backward into mythic time when the original ruler-gods were born and the sun first dawned. While Europe tried to calculate with unwieldy Roman numerals, the Mayas used a positional system comparable to our decimal system; there's had a base of 20, however, not 10."

Links:

1. 100 Year Perpetual Calendar
2. 3,000 Year Perpetual Calendar (South Australia)
3. 10,000 Year Calendar
4. Birthday Calculator
5. Clock and calendar
6. Clocks by ClockLink
7. Cosmology
8. NTP Network Time Protocol project
9. Official US Time
10. Sciecne Stuff by me!
11. USNO US Naval Observatory
12. USNO Clock and Moon Phase animation
13. World Time Server
14. World Clock - Time Zones
15. World Clock by Peter Russell
16. WWV (NIST)

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