Tag Archives: time

Time and Effervescence

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Hello everybody! What’s up? Cool.

This is an apology—I’m sorry. I have to knuckle down and study, and get a mountain of work done. Thesis is looming, and I have to slay it with such furious force I sometimes wonder if I have the energy. Just as an example. Among other things that are on.

I apologise if you feel like I’m ignoring you or not being as friendly, flexible or free-going as usual. It’s the part of the year where I might tell you, if you are being a git and getting in my way, to fuck off. Don’t take it personally, it’s just a friendly greeting. Or a warning, depending on how things are. Sorry in advance if your feelings get hurt, but I can’t afford to care much. (Really, nobody should be giving a flying fuck about anybody’s feelings at all, but that’s a topic for a later post.) Right now, I feel a bit crap, which justifies it enough to type it in.

I hope to join you on Thursday morning for Coffeetime Day, maybe. If not my feelings will be with you while I sip on a cuppa away from all the fun.

WWDC Day One: Ponies and Steve

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Things I learned today:

  1. Applied Queuing Theory.

    The outside queue to WWDC at about 5:30 AM

  2. Queues in Practice and Principle.

    Another shot of the queue

    Another shot of the queue

  3. Queues and You: A lesson in hidden opportunities.

    The queue inside Starbucks

    The queue inside Starbucks

  4. Queue Participation for Fun and Profit

    Internal queue friends

    Internal queue friends

  5. Time and Distance: A queue-theoretic case study

    Are we there yet?

    Are we there yet?

  6. Escalating Queues to the Next Level

    Skilled "escalatio" practitioners

    Skilled "escalatio" practitioners on the way up

  7. Go go go!

Between arriving a little early and careful migration during relaxed waiting periods, we managed to score better seats in the Presidio room than certain people who had been awake and waiting all night.

View of the stage from where we sat

View of the stage from where we sat

Then we had the keynote. You can watch it yourself when it becomes available to download. Quick summary:

  • Phil Schiller is a pretty good substitute for Steve;
  • I want an MBP now;
  • Bertrand Serlet still likes stirring the shit among Windows types;
  • Bertrand Serlet is a cyborg;
  • When the 1 jumped off stage when they announced the price for Snow Leopard, I nearly JIMPed;
  • Scott Forstall is a dude;
  • The iPhone app demonstrations were too long, but if the two more complicated demonstrations worked, it would have been great.
  • iPhone 3G S… :O

A quick summary of the rest of the day (Lunch and State of the Union addresses):

  • Lunch was not fail at all, but a table and seat would have been nice;
  • Apple have given us all free ponies to take home;
  • New technology built into Snow Leopard and iPhone OS 3.0 announced at the Core OS SOTU is pretty sweet and I almost can’t wait to install the latest builds;
  • New features announced at the Developer Tools SOTU that will appear in Xcode, Dashcode, Instruments, and compiler technology, all totally blew my mind, and the session was definitely sponsored by the word “thankyou!”.
  • The Graphics SOTU could have used a little more momentum, however there was still lots of cool stuff they showed (only I could have told anybody 90% of it beforehand)

Other curious factoids:

  • The Americans don’t use permanent markers, they use Sharpies.
  • My attendee badge now has “University of Tasmania” written on it with a Sharpie.
  • Microsoft’s developer toolkit just got leapfrogged.

So after the last session, Tony, Jon, Paris, Andrew, Jess, Jess and I went to Mel’s Diner for some fast food, and then we caught UP in 3D like we wanted to before. I was very impressed by the storytelling and artwork put into the film by Pixar, and was pleased to see our old friend André Pang in among the credits, despite however limited the time he’s worked there.

Bedtime!

Time

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Time is traditionally accounted for by counting periodic motion of a planetary mass in the solar system. One rotation of Earth is a day, one revolution about the sun is a year. In the current era, it has its progress tracked by atomic clocks, the principles of which is founded upon the periodic motion of subatomic particles. I recall learning at one point in school that the relevant international standard is based on energy transitions of a particular isotope of caesium, and identifying over nine billion periods of its radiation as one second.

As a dimension, time is indispensable in understanding all manner of sciences and human affairs. The most important to anybody familiar with their own mortality must be as the quantitative measure of the difference between moments of birth and death—and therefore the quantitative metric of life. So (to continue stealing this idea from Jonar C. Nader’s fantastic book How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People), somebody who wastes your time consequently wastes your life.

Most of the time, humans are preoccupied with events in the past. In deciding a course of action, one regards old data as a reliable source of information about the future. Tempting it is to go even further and state that old data programs humans to think vertically. Naturally, the adage states that history repeats itself. However, old data only provides for rational decisions. If old data is a product of the past, what is new data a product of? In answering this question in a way that allows the existence of new data, the foundations of time as seen to be about repeated events needs to be revised.

To put it another way, it’s not just another day.

It’s a new day.