2006 9
Joshua Ramo´s Average Speed
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
My friend Joshua Ramo wrote an article in Newsweek that manages to talk in poetic terms about the most non poetic of experiences, jet lag. In this article he introduces a concept of a person´s average speed.
we came up with the idea of calculating our average speeds. We took the number of miles we had flown in the year, divided it by the number of hours in a year and produced an average annual velocity.
Reading this I thought that a related measure could be a personal globalization index. The formula would be the same but only intercontinental flights would count.
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Andrew McLaughlin on May 11, 2006 ·
I wonder if Joshua’s persistent jet lag is counterbalanced by the theory of relativity. As Joshua’s personal velocity approaches the speed of light, time for him slows relative to time for the rest of his. So his 4 hours of red-eye sleep as he crosses the Atlantic amount to more like 8 hours for the rest of us, so that he emerges from the plane better-rested and less aged than us. That’s my working theory to explain his energetic enthusiasm for life amid the schedule he keeps.
Darius Carr on May 29, 2006 ·
The formula has it’s good points. On the minus side, it would have Dubya a “citizen of the world.”
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Pablo Baqués on May 10, 2006 ·
In this age of technology, travel is multidimensional.
Martín, Joshua:
I enjoyed Joshua’s article.
In afterthought mode, though, I asked myself if the approach is too linear for this day and age. Dividing distance by time?… That’s it?…
It sounds like something Odysseus might have done to calculate his average speed on the way back from Carthage to Ithaca. (Even then , I am not sure how to compute the seven year long “lay over” (uh, sorry) at Calypso’s island.) Be that as it may, we now should bring other dimensions into the calculation.
Some of us tend to be more static than others in a physical sense but we travel with the mind! To wit: enter Lisa Randall. Lisa is a physicist and a professor at Harvard University. I learned about her not by travelling over time nor distance but through Christopher Lydon’s interviewing Lisa in the program on NPR, Open Source, of April 26.
Lisa talks about “other dimensions to gravity” as casually as I discuss the Red Sox game against the Blue Jays. While I cannot say I understood everything she said, she kept me so engaged that I resented Christopher’s trivializing the talk every now and then. I am now convinced there are other dimensions to the universe, and that we inhabit this limited pocket of appallingly scarce three dimensions plus time.
So,… average speed : d/v? No no, there has to be more than that. How about web sites comprehended plus posts published plus delicious pages coined and concepts acquired/memories retained… AND THEN divided by time and corrected by a factor of multidimensional gravitation?
Ever thought about the speed of thought within the framework of einsteinism?
d/v:too simple.
Talking about multidimensionality, let me add an audio greeting, to expand the dimensions of Martin’s blog into sound.
Just in case the link to audio blogger does not work, I will be posting all of this to my blog as well.