On buses

Earlier I wrote about my daily bus trips. I told you they are boring. Ok, nothing much interesting might happen to the outsider, but to the watchfull eye some interesting things happen almost without reaching the conscious level of ones mind.

So. This morning i got on my bus again. As on most mornings, i am the only person to get on the bus on its first stop, so i get to be the only one (apart from the bus driver) to witness the filling of the bus. More and more, i get detached from the other people's on the bus and their lives. Though every day i see more of them, it seems like seeing more is to feel more apart. Distance gets important.

And i am not the only one thinking that way. Take a random bus stop and an empty bus approaching. Several people standing at the stop. When the bus stops, it will always come down to the following: Person 1 steps on the bus. He is the only traveller who gets to choose between two equal alternatives. It depends on his opinion on the driver of the bus. If Person 1 doesn't like the driver, he will undoubtedly walk through the entire bus and take the seat nearest to the rear window. If he considers the driver a part of the bus, or he doesn't have a negative impression of him, he might also choose to sit directly behind the driver. Person 1 is however the only one who has this luxury. The moment he has taken his seat, all the other people are bound to a very strong bus law:
The Law Of Maximum Distance.

Let's pretend that Person 1 has some grudge against the driver, and decides to sit way in the back of the bus. Obeying the Law Of Maximum Distance, Person 2 will take his seat near the driver (despite any grudges he or she might feel against the driver). Person 3 will see Person 1 and Person 2 and take a seat at the exact center of the bus. This will continue until all benches are occupied by one person. Then, once again, one person gets to choose (because now all seats are equal again), but this is not really the case, for to gain maximum distance, not only location is of importance. There also has to be a proper means to escape. Thus, the first of the remaining seats that will be taking, will be the seat in the direct vicinity of the exit door. That one being taken, The Law Of Maximum Distance will take over again and all other seats will fill evenly according to the law.

So, inside small areas people behave like mindless gas under pressure, and take as much interpersonal space as they can get. In itself that isn't too strange: there are more laws in nature that apply to microscopic as well as macroscopic scale. The really strange thing is, that people act the opposite way when they are not yet on the bus, but still waiting on the bus stop. Though there is space enough (open air, an unending strech of sidewalk in at least two directions), as soon as the bus appears over the horizon, they stampede to a single imaginary square inch on the edge of the sidewalk. All the people know that this is an impossible thing to do, but yet they try it. And they keep doing that every single working day!

My point is: How can it be that being outside or inside a bus determines the human behaviour? Is there some dark force involved? Do we find it so important to be the first on the bus, still knowing that the driver got there first, anyway? What use is it to have free choice, if there is nothing too choose from? And the oddest: Why do people choose to stand in a crowd, pushing against eachother (which they seem to hate), in order to sit in a crowd, trying to avoid eachother's early morning gazes (which they also hate)? What is the point? Hmmm. To be continued...

On time

Wouldn't it be nice if you could see in the past? Anywhere you would want to look?

I think i might have an interesting theory about that, but it depends strongly on the assumption that, given an empty universe in which two bodies (stars or whatever) are introduced, these two bodies would immediately begin to act and react on each other, as if the information about the physical states of the two, like gravitional pull, were swapped instantaneously.

I do however not have a universe at my disposal, nor do i own two considerable masses to tinker with. I fear that the speed of light also binds this theory, but if there is anybody out there who knows that this is not the case, i might have some theory about how we could take a snapshot of yesterday.

Please respond...

On speed

First, I have to disappoint all you addicts: this isn't one about drugs, but about the concept of moving between A and B within a certain amount of time. A few days ago, i was sitting in a bus, and as i am one of those people who prefer not to stare fellow citizens in their faces, it was my duty to keep the bus window semi-opaque with my moist breath, so to protect my travelling friends from the gaze of whoever was standing on the bus stop.

Needless to say that this task didn't ask much of my attention. Therefore, i began wondering about the concept of speed. Basically, we (i, at least) take speed for granted. We walk, drive, travel by several other means, and in the process mostly we don't think about the walk or ride or flight itself, but about what will happen to us once we've reached our destination. And that is a pity. Speed is a remarkable thing.

Remarkable, because i just discovered that speed can only exist in two very distict states, which are: no speed at all, or the speed of light. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to go between those two speeds. And we use these two states every day! Don't let highway patrol get you!

"But how can this be?", you might be asking now. I'll try to explain. As i said, the theory got to me while being on my way home on some bus, and i just now decided to post it, so i had to backward engineer it and regrettably some of the - very sound - theory is lost.

It begins like this: If one wants to walk, he has first to move his leg. But before he can move his leg, he must move a muscle in that leg. However, before the muscle moves, he has to send (i.e. move) a signal from his brain to his leg muscle that tells it to move. To make up this signal, some chemicals in his brain must move, et cetera. Conclusion is that everything that moves, does so because it is being moved by something that is ALREADY moving. Nothing moves by itself.

Imagine a car, driving from C to D (it has driven a lot between A and B, so i decided it was time for a change). Somewhere halfway it encounters a rabbit, and its driver decides to brake, even though he has some very serious business to do in D, and he's already late. To do so, the wheels of the car should slow down, but this can only happen if the driver begins to move his foot. only actually he can't do that. To start movement - to accelerate - a reaction mass is required, moving the other way. But as nothing moves by itself and the reaction mass isn't already moving, the two masses could never reach a speed other than zero. Acceleration is impossible!!

Having concluded that nothing can move by itself, and that acceleration is impossible once we've reached a speed of absolute zero, we can only look around us and say: "But everything IS moving nonetheless. How do we explain that?" Simple. Once we look closer at things (but science doesn't yet have the tools to do so), we could only discover that everything does indeed always move. As the only discrete measure of non-zero speed is the speed of light (this one is proven), it can only be that everything moves with the speed of light, only not all the time. It's more or less like a neon light. When the gass inside the tube is touched by a tiny bit of electric energy, it leaps (without intermediate states) into a light-emitting state, until it lacks the energy to do so and returns to its 'dark' state.

When we move, we move with the speed of light during a very short frame of time, and thus over a very small distance. Then we idle for a while, and move again. The energy stored in petrol tanks, candy bars et cetera, gives us the ability to alter our speed-state. The more energy applied, the longer the speed of light states become.

Now the only thing we need to do is to try to maintain this enlighted state a little longer, so that we can cross the Atlantic in a fraction of a second, or to get ourselves a speeding ticket that even Bill Gates couldn't afford.

In the beginning

Were was I? Did I mention anything about myself already? Guess I did, so I won't bother you with too much of me. Back to the main problem:

What to post??

Don't know yet. I'll get back later.