Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away!

Yesterday the poor old botanist was trying to impress you with the fact that horsetails are 150 million years old. And that's pretty old all right, but astronomers have a way of humbling (or is that Hubbling?) us biologists in terms of time and distance. Want to see something 13.2 billion years old? Hubble obliges. And it's pretty amazing because the whole universe is estimated to be only 13.7 billion years old. Sort of makes you feel small doesn't it. And you wonder if somewhere in all those galaxies some other sentient organism has gotten technologically advanced enough to look at a similar view and wonder the same thing. Or is it that while life is common enough given the bio-friendly chemistry of this universe, most inhabited worlds stall at about the cyanobacterial stage, which is where Earth was for the vast majority of its meager 4.3 billion year history. To even begin to grasp such a thing is a true intellectual achievement, and in stead we have people who think some religious cluck who predicts the end of the Earth based on a book is important. Maybe we aren't so far out of the slime after all.

Universal Standard Time - Set Your Watches

Each fall and spring here in the Northern Temperate zone, excluding Hoosiers who insist on doing their own thing for the silliest of reasons, our local time reference shifts an hour to take maximum advantage of daylight hours. This shift between daylight savings time and “standard” time always causes considerable consternation, so the Phactor has no illusions about how troubling it will be to resetting your time pieces to account for new data that provides an age of the Universe at 13.75 billion years (+/-0.11) rather than 13.73 BYA. Yes, this was published 9 months ago, but what are a few months (years, eons) on such a time scale? So set your watches accordingly. This of course rather points out that our local time designation, a system designed to make trains schedules meaningful and accurate, and in this the good old USA this is an abject failure, is quite arbitrary and those atomic watches that set themselves to an accuracy of one 250th of the second or something like that are an absurdity. Numbers like 13.75 billion years always sort of boggle the mind, as does the implication that the universe ballooned from a subatomic size to something the diameter of a soccer ball during its first 30 seconds of existence. And so you sort of wonder where did all this stuff come from, and the answer, a marvel of mathematical logic, is that the sum total of positives and negatives, the matter and antimatter, in the universe are essentially zero, so there is nothing to account for save a miniscule asymmetry on the side of matter, and this is what we see. The Phactor does so apologize to any reader who has a more sophisticated understanding; this is the best this botanist can do.