TFTD - On Context

Context.

The photos of the Presidential campaign in today's Best of 2004 spread look entirely different through the lens of the outcome than they looked when I first saw them.

This same phenom gives all our memories the same kinds of "outcome tints" over time. So oddly, there can be no perfect remembering of what really happened. Even the (allegedly) "impartial" technology lens - be it video, audio, or text - carries the selection filter of its creator.

So that got me thinking: you don't need to be Einstein to savor the analogy of the effect predicted by general relativity - frame dragging - in which the orbit of a small body orbiting around a rotating massive one is slightly perturbed by the rotation. Brings us back to the one-ness of it all.

Hmm, need to know more.
Quick search produces: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~kolena/framedrag.html
and here's what I found there:

EARTH DRAGGING SPACE AND TIME AS IT ROTATES

An international team of NASA and university researchers has
found the first direct evidence of a phenomenon predicted 80 years
ago using Einstein's theory of general relativity -- that the
Earth is dragging space and time around itself as it rotates..."

Listen to Erricos Pavlis of the Joint Center for Earth System Technology, a research collaboration between NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County:

"General relativity predicts that massive rotating objects should drag space-time around themselves as they rotate.

"Frame dragging is like what happens if a bowling ball
spins in a thick fluid such as molasses. As the ball spins, it
pulls the molasses around itself. Anything stuck in the molasses
will also move around the ball. Similarly, as the Earth rotates,
it pulls space-time in its vicinity around itself. This will
shift the orbits of satellites near the Earth."

Thus, as any toddler worth his/her salt can tell you, we each are at the center of our universe. What shall we do with that? I like to pose questions like that to myself. And today, as I do, a favorite phrase from the Jewish High Holidays prayerbook springs to mind, and as I think more, it's not a bad one to resurrect for the secular New Year's moment as well:

"Days are like scrolls: Write on them only what you want remembered. " -- Bachya ibn Pakuda

As we enter 2005

I'm not sure what it is that pulls me to this.

Well, if I get honest, I guess I actually do.

It's time to free up the hybrid of the journalist with the geek in me. The essential "connect the dots" part of my nature that wants to connect each thought with each other, each person in my orb with each other. Each possibility I see with the resources to go from potential to kinetic.

So there. I've got it. A mission statement of sorts.

I'm sure I will refine it when it's not nearly midnight on Christmas, but for now, Dayenu.