Time

Lately I've been thinking about the Nanosecond........I mean, really...a NANOsecond? Are we an obsessed species or what? What other creature on the face of the earth - or under it - even splits time up in a measure of YEARS? They all seem to get along just fine. However, we humans have the need to shatter a second into a billion pieces. Think of a bear. Now here's an animal that gorges himself just before nodding off to sleep for a few months. Do you think that when he wakes up he worries that he has just slept away a fourth of his year? (just as a side note, did you ever wonder how a bear manages to keep from, ah...well, lets say...fouling his nest while he takes his 3 month snooze? I can't even make it through one night! I actually read something about that a while back. It seems Mr. Bear introduces some high fiber food into his diet just prior to commencing his hibernation. Things like pine needles, dry leaves, small twigs and pine cones and the sort. These then form a sort of intestinal dam which prevents "accidents" while he sleeps. Of course, with the arrival of spring and his emergence from a cozy den, old Mr. Bruin becomes a bear on a mission. I have to tell you that I wouldn't want to be anywhere near a grizzly who has just awakened with the need to, shall we say, eliminate a certain amount of fiber from his system. I wonder if that is the origin of the saying "grumpy as a bear"? But I digress.......) Where was I?... oh yes...Nanosecond. The nanosecond is so short that no human can actually time it. We had to invent something to keep track of this itsy-bitsy shard of time that we decided needed to be tracked. Its called the Atomic Clock. I don't know about you but that sounds like a rather dangerous piece of equipment. I can just imagine myself waking up to the alarm on my atomic clock, rolling over and hitting the snooze button with a bit too much vigor and eliminating the wester half of the Salt Lake valley. Don't get me wrong, I'm somewhat of a science fiction buff and I know that if we didn't have things like Nanoseconds, astronauts on their way to Mars might not get their rockets fired exactly on time and end up circling Saturn by mistake and we don't really want that to happen. Its just that it all just boggles this simple man's mind a bit too much. So, I guess I'll just let the people who have to worry about such things as nanoseconds carry the burden for me. Maybe I'll just see if I can find a nice pine cone to munch on and try to sleep in tomorrow. ......Later.