Generation Pacman

Recently, after reading some things online, I was disappointed to learn that the Atari 2600 version of Pacman isn't held in very high regard.  In fact, it seems that most of my peers think it downright sucked and that it's universally considered a disaster in the world of video games.  Apparently everyone who was anyone hated the game and in one collective voice the whole wide world joined hands and told Atari that it was a huge failure.  Well, this certainly would have been news to my brother and I back in 1982.  We loved the game.  We actually bought our first Atari specifically so that we could play that game.  We were tired of pumping quarters into the arcade version at the local ice cream shop and we wanted something that we could play whenever we wanted.  We spent hours upon hours playing it.  My brother once played one game that lasted almost an entire day.  This was before games had a pause feature, so the only way he could get a break to go to the bathroom was to hand over the joystick to me with the quixotic stipulation that he would kill me if I died too many times.  I wouldn't hesitate to say that I have fonder memories of the Atari version than of the actual arcade version.

But was it as good as the arcade version?  Of course not.  No Atari adaptations of popular arcade games were ever as good as their coin-operated counterparts.  You accepted that without giving it a second thought.  You just figured that was the price you paid to be able to play the game at home.  It was the natural order of things.  If we had turned on a game and it had looked as good as the arcade version, we wouldn't have known what to do.  Our brains would probably have splattered all over the walls.  If I look back at it now, it's through adult eyes and 29 years of advancing video game technology.  Yes, Pacman only faces one way.  Yes, the maze layout is monotonous and constrictive.  Yes, the trapdoor exits at the top and bottom of the screen are fairly useless.  Yes, the ghosts flicker and they're all the same color.  The thing is though, my brother and I didn't care about any of that at the time.  We were playing Pacman, in our rooms.  Wow!

Atari 2600 Version

This isn't the first time I've been treated to the sight of the internet unzipping its fly and pissing all over my childhood memories.  I'm turning 35 in a little over a week and my generation seems to hold a certain ascendant position in Internet culture at the moment.  We're just old enough to wax nostalgic, and yet still young enough to know what "WTF" and "BRB" stand for.  As a result, the internet is inundated with all kinds of "hip" pop culture references from my childhood.  Sometimes this can be kind of cool.  It can be neat to find out that something that I thought only I and maybe a handful of kids in my neighborhood knew about was actually a big deal with other kids out there.  We weren't all connected like this back then, of course, so sometimes the internet feels like this big class reunion to me.

Arcade Version

But then you have these people.  They like to speak with such...authority.  They say this sucked or this was awesome, and to anyone who was cool it was as obvious as the blue sky.  Well, I'm here to tell you, it wasn't like that.  It's never like that.  I grew up with these people.  A lot of the stuff that they so aggressively claim was "cool", frankly only kids that ate paste were into.  A lot of the stuff that they tell you "sucked", only the dopey eyed fat kid with the fudge-sickle mustache was the one complaining about it.  I never thought someone was cool because of the toys they played with, or the cartoons they watched.  Only kids who were little obnoxious jerks in training would have thought like that.  I would never even have conceived of it.  I was too busy playing in my room.

I'm not saying I have a problem with someone who didn't like the Atari version of Pacman or anything else that I liked as a kid.  I have a problem with people who presume to speak on my behalf, and make blanket claims about what "everybody" thought about this thing or the other.  If you didn't like it, you didn't like it.  There was no codified standard that everyone fell in line with.  Kids argued endlessly about these things then, just like they still do now.  People who hop online and declare that  everybody knew such and such was cool are people who never got over these old, stupid arguments and now they're living out some delusional fantasy where they get the last word in.

Besides, as far as this Pacman thing is concerned, I think there's a good deal of hindsight involved in these critiques.  Unlike these self-proclaimed pop culture authorities, I don't have the slightest idea what other kids thought of the game, and I was only six or seven at the time, so I can't provide you with detailed sales figures.  I just know that I can't imagine being quite so jaded back then to have been so nitpicky about the game.  It's hard to believe that these kids were standing on the very threshold of home video game technology moaning about flickering ghosts.  I have to figure that either they're embarrassed about the wide-eyed children they once were, or someone had a far, far more privileged childhood than I did.

Fun with Song Lyrics

Although you may not be familiar with the term, I'm sure you're probably all familiar with the rock lyric phenomenon known as the "mondegreen."  This is the term for misheard lyrics, whether it's Jimi Hendrix making out with another guy, or John Fogerty giving directions to the bathroom.  I'm been guilty of this quite a few times myself.  My favorite instance is the Warrant song "Heaven."  By misunderstanding two lines of the song, I complete misunderstood the narrative behind it.  Here's what I thought the opening lines were:

Got a picture of your house.

You're standing by the door.

It's black & white and faded,

and looking pretty worn.

See the fact without a word.

See the wedding in the back.

Memories of a greater man,

they're really coming back.

Now, from the highlighted lines and the rest of the song, I pieced together the story here.  In his younger days, the singer had been in love with a girl.  It seemed like they'd really last.  It seemed like they were going to share their lives together.  It seemed like "Heaven" wasn't too far away.  Sadly though, things don't always work out.  The promise of their relationship didn't hold, and now he's left looking at old photographs and regretting his lost love.  He sees the "fact" of the wedding and that she moved on and married someone else.  He sees it "without a word", because...well, it's a photograph.  It would be nice, touching, and make perfect sense if it wasn't for the fact that the highlighted lyrics should actually read:

See the factory where I worked,

silhouetted in the back.

Ohhhh...Oh, I see.  This is just a story about how they were young and he worked in a factory or something.  Yeah, that's pretty deep.  Thanks a lot Warrant for ruining the song with your "actual" lyrics.  Okay, moving on.  

In the world of country music, I've noticed a somewhat similar phenomenon.  The problem here isn't mis-hearing the lyrics.  I can understand the words just fine.  It's just that sometimes in the interest of rhythm and rhyme schemes, sentence structure gets sacrificed.   I know what they're trying to say, but if I really feel like being a smart-ass (which I usually do) then it's easy to take these things the wrong way.  Here, I'll show you what I mean with the Colin Raye song "Love, Me":

I heard those words just hours before

my grandma passed away

in the doorway of the church

where me and Grandpa stopped to pray.

"Look over yonder, boy.  There's a church where we can pull on over and get some prayin' done."..."But Grandpa, I think Grandma's starting to stroke out.  She's twitching all funny and foaming at the mouth."..."Well, bring her along.  Ain't no better place to die than the house of the Lord.  Let's just hope we don't lose her before we get her through the door.  Yee Haw!"  Or then we have the Bryan White song "Rebecca Lynn":

I said, please, Becky would you marry me

prom night in the car out by the curb.

Alright Becky, maybe it's not my place to give relationship advice, but I think this guy might be moving a little fast.  I know he bought the corsage and paid for dinner, but isn't a little much expecting you to marry him on Prom night, and in a car out by the curb of all places?  Not exactly a girl's dream wedding, and how is this supposed to work?  Where are the guests supposed to sit, the back seat?  Heck, where's the minister supposed to be?  Maybe the "car" is a taxi and the driver doubles as a justice of the peace.  Maybe he's talking euphemistically.  Maybe he's talking about getting "married" in the conjugal sense.  If that's the case, we'll leave you kids alone and move on to the Billy Ray Cyrus song "Could've Been Me":

My buddy John said you looked real pretty,

and you acted like you were in love.

He said the preacher asked for objections,

and he thought about standing up.

Well, I told John he must have been crazy,

because you were just about to say, "I do."

He just gave me a wink and said all he could think

was it could have been me with you.

Now, technically, I suppose there's no problem with the grammar or sentence structure here, but I can't be the only one who thinks that last line sounds just a little tiny bit like John is proposing a union with Billy Ray that's still illegal in many states, especially with his heavily suggestive wink.  Hey John, I appreciate that you're trying to be a good friend and everything, but you gotta give poor Billy Ray some time here.  Can't you see that he's still trying to get over this girl?  Be patient, man.  Just don't come flying out of the closet like that when the guy's clearly got a broken heart.

Anyway, see you all later.       

How I Wish Mood Rings Worked

Rachel Hoyt over at Rhyme Me a Smile is conducting some sort of Smiley Sociology Study which involves getting a broad cross-section of bloggers to write posts about mood rings.  It's like Gorillas in the Mist, but instead of gorillas and mist you have bloggers writing about novelty jewelery.  Afterwards, I imagine she'll tabulate her findings with lots of charts and graphs in her secret lab.  Then she'll take the results to the pentagon in a sealed envelope, so that they can figure out effective ways to use mood ring technology with soldiers in the field.  In other words, I don't have the slightest clue what any of this about.  However, I've always found mood rings to be somewhat interesting, so I figured I was up for the challenge.  I looked up some information to learn how mood rings work, and I was disappointed to learn that they work by nothing more mysterious than skin temperature.  Basically, it's like someone took that thermometer sticker off the side of your fish tank and made a ring out of it.  No, this just wasn't going to cut it for me.  So I bring you my explanation of how mood rings ought to work, if the world were truly a place of magic and wonder. 

In Ancient Egypt around 1438 B.C. some workers were digging in a rock quarry in the Nile basin when they discovered an odd looking rock crystal, a crystal which we know today as "morphite".  As it lay, the rock was black, but when the worker picked it up, he found that it turned a bright green.  The worker stood there mystified, staring at it, until another worker snatched it from his hand.  To the surprise of both men, the rock now turned blue.  Yet another worker came up and grabbed the rock from the other two men.  In his hand the rock now turned red.  The three men hurried to show their discovery to the slave master who was supervising the work at the quarry.  The slave master was quite impressed with the rock.  He quickly had the three workers executed, and then he posted guards around the spot where the rock crystal had been discovered.  At night the rocks were mined in secret, and taken by the cart load back to the Pharaoh's palace.

These rock crystals became known as "telling stones", and they were originally used primarily in court proceedings.  The accused would be brought before the Pharaoh and questioned with the telling stone in his right hand and his left hand raised.  If the stone turned a certain color at any time during the trial, the accused would immediately be taken away for execution.  It is from this ancient practice that the practice in modern court rooms of "swearing in" descended.  The telling stones long outlasted the ancient Egyptian dynasties.  In the middle ages, they were used by knights to locate the lair of dragons.  It was believed that the stone would turn a certain color in the proximity of a dragon, but in reality it was only registering the knight's increasing fear as he thought he was approaching a dragon's lair.  Finally, in 1884 H.M. Clausterfield had the idea of making jewelery out of the crystals and he coined the term "mood ring".  He placed a few dozen in the display window of his Manhattan shop, and they quickly became a sensation.   

But how do these "telling stones" work?  To answer this question requires a certain basic knowledge of brain bio-chemistry.  You see, the brain operates by generating a Neurological Electrical Resonance Field, or NERF for short.  It is this field which gives us the experience of consciousness or the mind.  Think of the brain as being like a television.  By itself it is just a solid piece of hardware, but when you apply electricity it becomes able to display sounds and images on the screen.  The sounds and images are not a part of the TV.  They are an ethereal construct who's existence is supported by the TV.  Likewise, the NERF is not a part of the brain and it can be no more found by the dissection of tissue than your favorite show can be found by disassembling the circuits and transistors of a TV.  The mind is just an electrical field, generated and maintained by the brain.

This field pulses at a variable frequency, depending on the mood and mental activity of the subject.  When the subject is in an agitated or distressed state, the field pulses at a very high frequency.  This is part of the body's natural defense mechanism.  The brain increases the energy output to the field in response to a sense of danger.  In this manner it compensates for the sense of danger by heightening mental acuity and alertness.  When the subject is in a relaxed and pacified stated, the field pulses at a much lower frequency, allowing the brain to preserve the chemicals it uses to generate the electrical energy for when it is needed. 

Naturally, these variations of frequency affect nerve impulses through-out the body.  There is an almost imperceptible vibration to the body that it is perfectly attenuated to this frequency.  The molecules of the body make tiny oscillations similar to the way a wine glass responds to sound waves.  Since this is a constant fact of our existence, we don't really notice it, but there is nowhere that this phenomenon is more acute than the epidermis.  As a result, the skin generates a separate field which is in tune with the NERF, known as the aura.  To certain highly sensitive individuals, this field is actually visible.  The light rays that pass near to the subject's body get distorted by this field, disrupting certain bands of the spectrum while accentuating others.  To our sensitive observer, it appears that there is a certain colored glow emanating from the subject.

This brings us to our mood ring.  You see, the color changing properties of the crystal, which captivated the fascination of people as far back as Ancient Egypt, are actually nothing more than an illusion.  In it's natural state, morphite is black in color.  In fact, morphite is always black in color.  It just has a coating on it's surface that is sensitive to the brain's electrical field in the same way as the human epidermis.  Actually, it's far more sensitive.  While the aura is only visible to certain people, the same effect can be seen by anyone who looks at a mood ring.  However, although the effect differs in degree, it is the same by nature.  The oscillation of the morphite's surface coating is simply distorting the spectrum of light rays in close proximity to the ring, making it appear as if it's turning different colors.  Often the effect lingers on the ring after the wearer has removed it, because the oscillation takes time to relax back into its normal equilibrium and return the ring to its normal black appearance.

Well, there you have it.  I realize now that I could have perhaps looked deeper into how brain chemistry actually affects skin temperature.  I suppose that could have been interesting.  But hey, what's done is done, and it is what is, and whatever.  I hope it brightened up your Sunday a little, at least.                         

My Blog Turns 50

I've known about blogging for years, but I had the misfortune of first learning about it from an article written by someone who dismissively described it as a bunch of narcissistic, self-indulgent whining about boring stuff that no one else cared about.  Foolishly, I accepted this critique without further investigation.  Most subsequent opinions that I heard were along the same derogatory lines.  Even the positive opinions sounded awful.  They all praised blogging for being so "raw" and "free form" and "unedited" and "yeah!"  Brother, that sounded like a bigger mess than what my dog leaves in the back yard.  Meanwhile, all this information was being filtered into my brain through the word "blog" itself; quite possible the dumbest, ugliest word in the English language.  I don't care if it's short for "web log".  I don't care if it's short for "baloney log".  Can't we call it something else?  Can't we call it something cool, like "Vampire Hunting"?  I'd like to say I was a vampire hunter before I died, but what can I do?  I'm just one man!

Ahem...I'm getting a little ahead on my story here.  So there I was, lost and wandering the internet.  Occasionally, I would run across a curiously babbling fellow traveler who would call out from the wayside, "Hey there, Check out this link where this guy talks about what I was saying yesterday about the thing.  You know?"  I would thank this odd, simple creature and make haste in the direction that it sent me.  That was interesting, I would think, as I continued on my way.  Gradually, the world's dimmest light bulb went off over my head and it finally dawned on me that these were blogs that these people were sending me to.  I learned that while they could be self-indulgent, they certainly didn't have to be boring.  I learned that people used the format in a wide variety of ways.  I learned that you could write about something other than the color of your cat's latest hairball.

Why it took me so long to realize this, I don't know.  Honestly, I'm a little slow sometimes.  For some time, I'd had the idea floating around in the back of my mind of starting my own web site where I'd post regular articles about my ideas, and maybe reviews, and whatever.  I knew nothing about HTML coding, and I didn't want to pay for web hosting, though.  Then this blatantly obvious revelation about blogs came along, and I realized, hey, I could do all that by writing a blog.  And so, out of the formless void "nuclearheadache" was created, and I saw what I had made and I said, "Yeah, alright.  That'll work.  I think I'll go make myself a roast beef sandwich."

My office, or whatever you want to call it.

The first post I ever wrote and posted on this blog was actually the Artificial Intelligence post, which is now buried in the archive somewhere in the middle of October.  I was dissatisfied with it when I first wrote it.  It seemed like a bad way to start.  It was too cold and impersonal.  It set the wrong kind of tone, and I wasn't sure where to go from there.  So I pulled it, and started over with a little snippet that basically just said, "Hey world, I'm here."  Eventually that got deleted as well.  As it stands now, the earliest post on the blog is about this documentary that they showed on The History Channel called Apocalypse Island.  This seems like a fairly random place to start, but in a way it's appropriate.  I made this blog to delve into everything from the big questions of our existence to the little trivial details of our lives, from The Big Bang to fortune cookies.  That first post falls somewhere squarely in the middle.

As things rolled along, I got a feel for what I was doing and a better sense of how this was going to work.  I would weave certain running themes and topics in and out of each other, picking up the threads now and then, and interspersing them with stand alone posts.  So far this has worked out well, and it always leaves me feeling like I've got a lot more to deal with down the road, so I haven't run out of material yet.  At first I felt like I was speaking to an empty auditorium, listening to the uncanny echo of my own voice.  Eventually some people started to drift in.  Some of them probably mistook the place for a bar, or they just wanted to use the restroom, but some of you have stayed and made your own contributions.  I thank you for that, and for helping me feel like this isn't completely wasted effort.   

From some of the opinions I mentioned above, it's clear that professional writers consider blogging to be the internet's version of vanity publishing, something any old fool can do.  Even the "positive" remarks that I mentioned are unmistakably condescending.  It's true that anyone can start a blog.  You can have a new one up and running in five minutes if you like.  But not everyone can write a blog and stick to it, and not everyone can create a blog that anyone will actually read.  In this homemade, do-it-your-self world of electronic words, it may seem like there's no quality control whatsoever, but like any other form of publishing the quality is controlled by you, the reader.  A bad blog will whither and die on the vine.  Even self-publishing has its own form of natural selection.

So here we are at post number 50.  It's been fun so far, and hopefully I can see this through to another 50 and beyond.  When I hit 100, I think I'll take time out again for another filler post...errr, I mean retrospective.  Until then, hopefully I can keep it entertaining.      

Trying to Understand Relativity (part 7)

I had planned to start off this post by correcting an error I made in the last relativity post.  I had said that a trip across a light year at 75% the speed of light would take 18 months, when actually it would be 16 months.  I was going to go into a lengthy explanation of how to figure this, but a lot has changed since then, and pursuing this mistake would be a waste of time.  You see, I've come to the conclusion that I've gotten completely off the track with this, and I need to approach the problem from a fresh angle.  I'm pretty sure that everything I've said up this point, and every piece of progress that I've thought I made is completely wrong.  So not only have I been making your brains hurt, I've been doing so with gross errors in logic and my ignorance of the concepts I've been trying to deal with.  For this I apologize.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.  I've really been trying to put some genuine effort into figuring this out lately, and I want to give you some kind of idea where I'm at with this.  The best place to start would be with a comment I left on the last relativity post:

I was doing some actual reading on this today, and I came across an interesting explanation. Imagine you have a clock that works by bouncing a beam of light between two mirrors stacked on top of each other and facing each other. The interval between each bounce is one second. If you started to move the clock to the right, then it would look like the beam of light was traveling at an angle to a stationary observer because the position of one mirror would always be slightly to the right of where the other had been when the beam hits it. So from the stationary observer's perspective the beam of light would be traveling a farther distance between the mirrors. Since the speed of light is constant then the time it takes the light to reach each mirror is actually extended and therefore time becomes distorted. One second becomes 1.3 then 2 then 6 and so on, as the clock is pushed faster to the right. The exact amount of distortion can actually be calculated from the angle that the beam is skewed. But, if you were to run along side the clock, keeping pace with it, the beam would be straight up and down again and bouncing at perfect one second intervals. It's not just a matter of appearances. The distance the beam is traveling is actually relative to the observer.

So see, THIS I understand. It's the best explanation of relativity I've found. For the first time it gives me a perfectly clear idea of not only how but why relativity works. I just have to figure out how this relates to my scenario. Or maybe I need to come up with a new scenario. I don't know.

I was thrilled when I first discovered this illustration.  Finally, an explanation of relativity I understood.  I spend pretty much the entire shift at work that night bouncing that beam of light around between those two mirrors in my head as I went about the business of filling the machines and mopping the floor.  It actually made sense.  I just had to figure out how to apply this to Bob and Ann and I was home free.  

Unfortunately, as always, it turns out that none of this was going to be easy.  A few days later I had some quiet time to really think and dig into the situation.  It wasn't long before I came face to face with another huge problem.  You see, although the above illustration does a great job of explaining how an observer in one frame of reference can see time moving differently in another frame of reference that's in motion relative to his own, it doesn't help me understand how that time distortion affects the motion itself between the two frames.  That's the issue that I think is really at the heart of my thought experiment.  A message I sent to my friend, secondscout, who assured me he has the answers to all this, will demonstrate what I mean: 

Hey, since you're throwing your hat into the ring on this, I figured out something you can help me with. I found a good thought experiment the other day that explained the time dilation effect. I described it in the comments of my last post on my blog. It might be one you're already familiar with. Anyway, I think I have a good idea how and why the clock would look like it's running slower on a ship speeding away from you at near light speed. I'm having a problem now with the speed and distance the ship itself would appear to be going. Would it look like it's going it's actual speed, or would it look like it's traveling slower to the same degree as the time is slowed on board? Either way, I'm coming up with a problem.

I'll explain with a simpler version of my experiment that's closer to the classic twin paradox. Let's say Bob and his mother live in the same house. Bob hops aboard his rocket and takes off at 75% the speed of light. Now, to his mother watching at the window time appears to run slower aboard the ship. For every minute that passes aboard the ship, she sees 90 seconds pass on her clock at home. Now, if Bob looks back at his house, he sees the same thing. From his point of view, it looks like he's standing still and the house is zipping away from him at 75% the speed of light with a slower clock. From a relative standpoint it doesn't matter who's in a ship and who's in a house, it just matters that there's a gap widening between them and the speed that it's widening. It only makes sense to say he's going 75% the speed of light away from the house. His speed has to be calculated from a reference point.

Okay, so after Bob has traveled for a year, he stops. At 75% the speed of light, he's now 9 light months from the house. So when he looks back at the house, I would think it would appear that only three months have passed there since he left. At this point, I'd almost be willing to chalk all this business of slowing clocks and time dilation up to the most elaborate optical illusion of all time, caused simply by the delay in the light's travel time, and go take a nap, if it wasn't for one thing: The Mother.

See, it doesn't work out the same from her point of view. She can't look across the 9 light months and see him as he was 3 months after he left the house, because he wasn't stopped on the 9 light month spot 3 months after he left. He didn't stop there until a year after he left. So, supposedly she shouldn't see him reach that point and stop until 21 months after he's left the house.

But how can this be? They're both traveling at 75% the speed of light relative to each other. When Bob stops, they both stop. When they both look back, shouldn't they both see the same distance and difference between each other? Yet, it seems for the mother that she has to see Bob's speed slowed to the same degree as the time distortion. Meanwhile, Bob has to see the house move away from him at it's actual speed. At one year, he is 9 light months from the house. How could he truly say he was traveling at 75% the speed of light otherwise?

Now, you could try to look at from the opposite point of view. You could say the house was speeding away from Bob, and the mother looked back after a year across the 9 light month distance and saw Bob as he was three months after they parted. But the problem is that Bob stopping the ship is an event that happened at a specific position in time and space. It was that action that stopped the widening of the gap. It seems like everything would have to add up in agreement with exactly when and where it happened.

So, I hope this makes sense? I'm totally stumped. If you can help me out of this one, then I think I can figure the rest out. I think it's all a matter of flipping it around for his approach to House A. I think I was actually closer to the answer in my first couple of posts. If time on the ship appears to slow as it speeds away, shouldn't it appear to go faster as the ship approaches? I don't know. Maybe you can answer that one too.

I'm expecting a reply on this before too long.  I might copy it into the next post, with secondscout's permission, of course.  In the meantime, if anyone sees what I'm talking about and has any ideas, as always your contributions are quite welcome.  As you can see, it's two steps back and maybe half a step forward.  Now I can't even get Bob to leave his house without running into problems, let alone get him over to Ann.  Don't worry, we'll get these two crazy kids together yet.

EDIT: At the risk of making this the longest post ever, I'm going to go ahead with the edit I mentioned below.  Although the concept of relative motion is fundamental to the understanding of relativity, I haven't really delved too deeply into the matter in these posts.  Perhaps in the past I didn't fully appreciate what an important element it was.  Perhaps I took for granted that more people were familiar with the concept.  Either way, I think it's time to spare a few moments for a basic explanation of the concept.

In the comments below, Chanel was confused about how the house could be moving at 75% the speed of light in the scenario I laid out above.  I explained that it was a matter of relative motion.  We put some cars on a highway and I explained how their speeds calculated relative to one another.  If you're going 50 MPH and the car in front of you is traveling at 40 MPH, then from your perspective the car ahead of you is backing up towards you at 10 MPH.

Now, all this might seem needless confusing and a complete waste of time, but the fact of the matter is that the speed of nearly everything with one crucial exception is calculated from a reference point.  Generally we use the Earth itself as a reference point, and since most of our experience is confined to the surface of the Earth, this works out nicely and we never give it another thought.  When we're driving at 50 MPH in our car we never consider that this is 50 MPH relative to the Earth.  We just figure that's the speed we're moving.  But now let's say we stop at red light.  At that point, we figure we're standing still, and someone standing at the side of the road would agree.  They would look at our car and say it's stopped.  However, the Earth itself rotates at about 1,000 MPH give or take.  So, to someone out in space, they would say you're spinning at 1,000 MPH on the surface of the Earth.  The guy standing by the roadside thinks you're stopped because he's spinning at 1,000 MPH along with you.  Now, suppose there was a guy further out in space.  He would say, no, you're spinning at 1,000 miles an hour AND orbiting the sun at 67, 062 MPH.  Standing still indeed!  Now, suppose there was someone even further out in space.  He would say, no, again.  He would say you're spinning at 1,000 MPH, orbiting the sun at 67,062 MPH AND orbiting the galaxy at 447,000 MPH.  Finally, if you asked someone in another galaxy how fast you were moving, they would say you're spinning at 1,000 MPH, orbiting the sun at 67,062 MPH, orbiting the galaxy at 447,000 MPH and all the while you'd also be speeding away from them at 2,250,000 MPH (depending on which galaxy you talk to.)  So you see, the question of how fast you're going depends entirely on the reference point you're figuring your speed from.  In reference to the Earth, you're standing still.  In reference to the sun, you're spinning at 1,000 MPH and orbiting it at 67,062 MPH.  In reference to the center of the galaxy....you get the point.

Here's another example that doesn't involve a trip to deep space.  Let's say you're on a bus.  You're sitting in the back, and your friend is sitting up front.  You throw a tennis ball to your friend.  A guy sitting across the aisle clocks of the speed of this tennis ball, using a radar gun or something.  He gets a result of 5 MPH.  From his point of view, that's how fast the ball is moving.  Okay, now let's say you pass a guy standing on the street just as you throw the ball, and let's say the bus is going 50 MPH.  If he also had a radar gun and he had the slightest interest in knowing how fast the tennis ball was moving, he would get a result of 55MPH.  From his point of view, that's how fast the ball is moving, because the frame of reference that the ball is being throw at 5 MPH is itself moving at 50 MPH, so the results are compounded.

You'll remember though, that I said above that there was one crucial exception to all this.  That's the speed that light travels.  Light stands apart from all these interlocking frames of reference.  It travels at the same speed regardless of who is looking at it.  Let's say that instead of throwing a tennis ball, you shined a flash light up at your friend.  The guy across the aisle would clock the beam as traveling at the speed of light.  The guy standing on the street would also clock it as the speed of light, not the speed of light plus 50 MPH like the tennis ball.  The movement of the bus isn't a factor.  The light travels the same speed regardless.  Hell, even the guy in the other galaxy would agree on the speed.

Well, this created a problem.  Light is so much faster than the speeds we usually deal with (186, 282 miles per second) that it isn't real an everyday problem, but it was a problem nonetheless.  How could light cut through all these frames of relative motion and always end up being the same?  Something had to give.  Einstein came along and figured out that that something was space and time itself.  Why is that?  Well, that brings up back to the clock experiment I mentioned way up at the top of this post.

Fig. 1

The clock (fig. 1) operates by bouncing a beam of light between two mirrors.  The beam of light is represented by the yellow lines going up and down.  For the sake of argument, we'll say that the interval between each bounce is one second.  That would make the mirrors 186,282 miles apart.  That would be one huge friggin' clock, but again, for the sake of argument.  Every time the beam hits the mirror, it makes the clock tick one second.  Up, down, tick, tock.   It's a clock; it measures time; yawn...whatever.

Fig. 2

But, let's say you started to watch the clock move to the right.  Fig. 2 is suppose to represent the clock in motion, but you know how my Paint skills are.  The grey clocks are the same clock as it's moving, alright?  So, since the clock is moving, when the beam of light bounces from the bottom mirror to the top one, the top mirror is no longer in the same spot directly above where the bottom mirror was when the beam of light left it.  During the time the beam of light is traveling from bottom mirror to the top, the top has shifted to the right, because the clock is moving to the right.  From where you stand the light traveling in a zig-zag pattern of angles (fig. 2) which means it's traveling a farther distance.  It's not only covering the distance between the mirrors up and down.  It's also covering the distance that the clock has moved.  If we were dealing with tennis balls, there wouldn't be a problem.  We would just add the speed that the clock is moving to it's bouncing speed, and everything would fall nicely into place.  But light is different.  We still measure it traveling at the same speed.  So, since it's traveling a farther distance, but yet going the same speed, that means it takes longer to travel between the mirrors.  Since the clock is still ticking a second for each bounce, you begin to see it take longer and longer to tick a second as the clock moves faster and faster and the beam of light has to travel a farther distance and a more acute angle to keep up with it.  The clock begins to slowwww dowwwwnnn.  Tiiiiicccccckkkkk.....tooooooocccccckkkkk.  Gradually you notice that the time on the clock is falling behind the time on your watch.  Time is moving slower for the moving clock.

Now, suppose your friend was standing there with you.  They don't feel like just standing there watching the clock, so they run to catch up with it.  As they reach a speed where they're keeping a perfect pace with the clock, they look over and see fig.1 again, because relative to them, the clock is once again standing still.  So the years pass, and you stand there watching your friend and you grow old, but they stay young because time has slowed for them relative to you.

This "relative to you" is the crucial point.  If your friend looks back at you, it seems that you are receding from them.  If you're leaning against another one of these fancy clocks, they'll see the zig-zag effect on your clock and they'll think time is slowed for you.  You see, it's all relative.  So, who's growing the long white beard here?  Well, that brings you to the Twin Paradox.  The problem I propose above is a little different.  

Let's say your friend runs for a year.  They run at speed that will put them at a distance where the light will take 9 months to travel the distance between you after a year.  Then they stop and look back.  Now, you're both standing still relative to each other and time is ticking the same.  The light that reaches your friend has taken nine months to travel from you to the spot they're standing on, so they see you as you were nine months in the past.  But you can't look across that same distance and see your friend as they were nine months in the past, because they weren't stopped on that spot nine months ago.  They were still running with the clock.  This is where I'm stuck.

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