Friends,
Happy Easter! I hope you've had a great weekend with friends or family and have taken the opportunity to ponder the mystery of resurrection and the passionate love that would cause the God of the universe to sacrificially die in your place.
Unfortunately, along with these profound spiritual mysteries, I also pondered something else this weekend. I came to absolutely no solid conclusion on the matter, and so I turn to you, O readers, for some answers.
The Enigma
Like almost every weekend, at some point in the past couple days I was driving. Like almost every weekend in Pittsburgh, there was a great deal of rain falling from the sky. And so, like most weekends, at some point this weekend I was using my windshield wipers.
Thus, like over half my weekends, at some point in the last 36 hours, I frowned and thought, "Why are the speed settings for my windshield wipers so pathetically inadequate?!" Seriously, almost every instance of rain I've come across (with a few torrential exceptions) has been too much for my slow setting but not enough for my fast one.
But, unlike any weekend I've ever had before, this time I decided to measure the time intervals of my windshield wiper settings to prove how terrible they are. So now I present to you the three windshield wiper settings for "my" Honda CR-V:
Setting Similar animal Period of wiping Useful for...
1 Snail 6.89 seconds Someone spitting on car
2 Cheetah 1.89 seconds Extremely hard rain
3 None; lightning bolt 1.29 seconds Driving on ocean floor
Help me understand
I need serious help understanding this. Why in the world is there such a huge gap between settings 1 and 2?? How could someone designing a car think that the appropriate wiper intervals are 7s, 2s, and 1.3s? Am I the only one who sees how close 1.3 and 1.9 are? And how far apart 2 and 7 are!?
Where are the settings that would have my wipers swooshing every 3, 4, or 5 seconds?! These are clearly the settings I would always use, since setting 1 is too slow and setting 2 is too fast. Setting 3 is like a joke that you only feel comfortable telling when you're driving through a hurricane.
If you have the answers to any of these questions, please enlighten me.
Also, let me know of any other automobile frustrations you have.
Jon
Friends,
I'm sorry it's been so long! I've been kept from blogging by a crazy combination of family events, sinus infection, a new roommate, and Final Fantasy IX. Due to the antepenultimate item on that list (some of you were perhaps wondering if and when I would work old ante' into a post... it just happened), I don't think I can offer you a well-developed, thorough post today.
What I can do is bring to your attention a couple crazy questions/ideas about memory and time.
1. Superior Autobiographical Memory
I first heard about this [phenomenon; condition; ability; syndrome] on an awesome episode of 60 Minutes. People with SAM -- and there are only 8 known cases in the world! -- can remember every day of their lives. The easiest way for me to explain it to you is this:
Think about your memories of two days ago. What you did, what you were wearing, what you had for lunch, etc. Your amount of recall of that day is seemingly the amount of recall a SAM person has for every day of their lives. If you give them a date, literally any arbitrary date from any year in their adult life, they mentally "flip" to that date in a mental calendar system and rattle off a bunch of random facts.
I offer no questions, analysis, or offshoot tangents. This phenomenon is so crazy that it stands alone. Like the cheese in "The Farmer in the Dell."
2. Age and the perception of time
Several years ago it occurred to me that age might affect our perception of time intervals. For instance, a few months ago I celebrated the completion of my 26th year of life. That year was to me, at the time of that celebration, 1/26 (or 3.8%) of all my time spent on the earth. To a ten-year-old, a year is 10% of shis life; to an old person, maybe around 1.4%.
So I began to wonder, does a year still feel like the same length of time regardless of one's age? Lengths of time that are equal often feel different -- the one minute it takes to wait for something to download or the thing in the microwave to heat up feels much longer than the first minute of basically any positive experience.
[Those examples are somewhat non sequitur, since the change in perception is due to emotional state rather than age. I was just trying to show that, in principle, not all equal lengths of time feel equal.]
There are all kinds of questions that stem from this. To a 2,000-year-old person, would a day seem more like an hour? To an old person, do birthdays just seem to keep happening? When I was a kid, did I think days were long and years were almost endless?
Well, that's all folks
As soon as I kick this illness, I will try to compose something thoughtful and/or eloquent for you.
Please share any thoughts on the above, or anything related to memory, age, or time.
Jon
