Skip to main content

'Slow' cycling in the Guardian

Peter Walker of the Guardian muses about the journey vs. the destination, via bicycle, in this recent blog post.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Leap second decision put on hold

The International Telecommunication Union recently postponed a decision on whether to do away with the leap second -- which means, by default, it will remain until at least 2015. The leap second is artificially inserted into the stream of time every now and then to account for the slowdown of the earth's rotation. Like the leap year, this system speaks to a fundamental clumsiness inherent to our system of timekeeping -- however precise it may seem on a day-to-day basis. Felicitas Arias, director of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, is among those arguing for the abolition of the leap second, as she explains in this interview from December . But scientists could not agree at the ITU's recent summit, so the decision got put off. " We are using a system that breaks time," Arias argues. "The quality of time is continuity."  True, but it is hard to accept Arias' unwillingness to come up with an alternate system, instead leaving it to...
Post a Comment
Read more

When a clock falls silent

With the shuttering of Big Ben for the next few years, commentators have tied the distress over the great clock's silence to the fact that it is coinciding with Brexit . But is it more than that? What does this historic clock that is so vividly seen and heard really mean to Londoners and the tourists who flock to it? The silencing of Big Ben — and the attendant hand-wringing over it — is an object lesson in the extent to which the visual and auditory symbols of timekeeping insinuate themselves into our lives. (Leaving aside for the moment that Big Ben is the bell, not the clock.) "No one needs Big Ben to tell the time," wrote Anne Perkins in The Guardian . "It depends what you value."
Post a Comment
Read more