Amount of Time it takes for an email to be replied to if I need the answer RIGHT NOW THIS MINUTE: approximately 4 days
Amount of Time it takes for an email to be replied to I said I’m including an attachment and then forget to attach the document: <20 milliseconds
I heard this yesterday on tv:
“This day I completed my thirty first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little, indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought, and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least endeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestowed on me: or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.”
Meriwether Lewis wrote that on his 31st birthday. At the time, he had just crossed the Continental Divide and days earlier managed to finally acquire enough horses for his men so they could complete the mission and have a chance at success. Sometimes we’re not the best judge of we’ve accomplished so far.
I was fascinated by this article that I read today in NASA’s Earth Observatory because it answered a question that has puzzled me since tar balls have started washing up on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico earlier this spring: If that stuff is bad and unusual (and I definitely believe it is), then just what the hell has been covering my legs in tar when I swam in the Gulf of Mexico for all these years?
For my whole life, I’ve preferred the Gulf in June and July and the Atlantic in August and September because if you swam in Gulf after a bad storm or a hurricane, you’d come out with your legs covered in tar with seaweed sticking to it and that crap was impossible to get off and it was all gross and icky and just not pleasant, but it’s not like I ever thought to myself, “Hey! I wonder if this is bad for me?” I always just thought the Gulf had tar at the bottom that a storm would stir up, but then after the BP accident, I became convinced that oil companies had been spilling oil in the ocean for years and it had all been covered up.
As it turns out, my initial theory was correct. There is oil at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico (which is why they drill for it there, duh) and lots of it seeps out through cracks in the ocean floor each year. According to the article:
“On water, oil has this wonderful property of spreading out really thin,” said Mitchell. “A gallon of oil can spread over a square mile very quickly.” So what ends up on the surface is an incredibly thin slick, impossible to see with the human eye and harmless to marine animals.
Not always, dude, but I do feel reassured.