Tuesday, February 7, 2006

Benrik diaries - Travelling and time.

Well before trying to start tasking I decided to do some research (at wikipedia).

What is travel?
Travel is the transport of people on a trip or journey. Reasons for travel include:
- Tourism—travel for recreation. This may apply to the travel itself, or the travel may just be the necessary investment to arrive at a desired location.
- Visiting friends and family
- Trade
- Commuting–going to various routine activities, such as work or meetings.
- Migration—travel to begin life somewhere else; nomadic people do this
- Pilgrimages—travel for religious reasons
The word originates from the Middle English word travailen ("to toil"), which comes from the French word travailler ("travail").
(Travel or traveling is also a name applied to a specific violation in the game of basketball.)


What is Time? (I found many answers on this one and chose the physiological explanation.)
Different people may judge identical lengths of time quite differently. Time can "fly"; that is, a long period of time can seem to go by very quickly. Likewise, time can seem to "drag," as in when one performs a boring task. The psychologist Jean Piaget called this form of time perception "lived time".

Time appears to go fast when sleeping, or, to put it differently, time seems not to have passed while asleep. Time also appears to pass more quickly as one gets older. For example, a day for a child seems to last longer than a day for an adult. One possible reason for this is that with increasing age, each segment of time is an increasingly smaller percentage of the person's total experience.

Altered states of consciousness are sometimes characterised by a different estimation of time. Some psychoactive substances--such as entheogens--may also dramatically alter a person's temporal judgement.

In explaining his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying that although sitting next to a pretty girl for an hour feels like a minute, placing one's hand on a hot stove for a minute feels like an hour. This is intended to introduce the listener to the concept of the interval between two events being perceived differently by different observers.


I have to think about this for a while.

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