Once again bright sunshine and cold temperatures here on California’s north coast as another new year arrives, whether we like it or not, and it sure don’t feel like a Friday.
And it sure-as-shit don’t feel like another ‘whole‘ year has gone bye-bye — my post from last Jan. 1 (seemingly a swift dash in time), noted a 5.1 earthquake in the area to jolt us into 2015, and produced a rapid-clock spin the next 12 months.
Celebration this time comes the sun (via ABC News): ‘A solar storm watch will be in effect through New Year’s Day after a powerful flare hit Earth today, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration‘s Space Weather Prediction Center.’
A New Year’s ‘beta-gamma’ time game…
(Illustration: Tessa Hunt-Woodland‘s ‘Solar Flare,’ found here).
Across the news cycle this morning, I didn’t see any mention of major problems reported, though, there were numerous stories/photos of the ‘Northern Lights,’ or the Aurora borealis, produced off the event, which started Monday when a sunspot cluster erupted, blasting an M-class flare directly at earth.
This resulted in extreme-ultraviolet radiation, causing a radio blackout over South America, Africa and the south Atlantic Ocean. And some interesting night skies, as visible over much of the northern US.
Not here locally, I don’t think.
Thoughts, too, on the speed of time nowadays. Maybe it’s my age — 67 — that creates this sense that time is moving quicker than it did, however-long-ago. Apparently, partly to blame, an aging mind.
From Vox on Wednesday and why we oldsters ‘think’ time moves quicker — main point:
There are a few different ways to study how we perceive time.
Scientists can look at time estimation, or our ability to estimate how long a minute passes, compared with a clock. (This is what Sothern is doing.)
They can also look at time awareness, or the broad feeling that time is moving quickly or slowly.
Finally there’s time perspective, the sense of a past, present, and future as constructed by our memories.
What researchers have found out is that while time estimation and time awareness don’t change much as we age, time perspective does.
In other words: Our memories create the illusion time is accelerating.
…
The research finds one twist, however.
When people reflect back on their own life, they feel like their early years went by very slowly and their later years go by more quickly.
This could be the source of the belief that time goes more quickly as they age.
Old-asshole or not, time be rushing at us…wait and see.