Happy (Reformed Gregorian) New Year! Eat Vigna unguiculata for Good Luck!

Click image to enlarge.

 

I hate cliches, so some years ago I resolved to tell C-space Happy New Year completely free of babies in diapers and hunched-over old men. That's its only virtue: it's different.

 

Light -- a shortcut nickname for electromagnetic radiation of all sorts, not just the narrow band of colors human eyes can perceive -- has a well-measured speed and well-understood properties. So light's speed and properties produce this Light Cone, and inside the Light Cone is all we can ever perceive or remember about the Past, the Present and the Future.

 

There may be other "stuff" outside the Light Cone, but we can never perceive or know it.

 

I suppose I should also throw in a word about The Arrow of Time. It flows inexorably in just one direction, and never flows backwards (even though Newton's wonderful laws of motion and gravitation and mechanics merrily work equally well forwards and backwards). So the Past is always behind us, the Present is now, and the Future is always ahead of us, and hasn't happened yet. And never Contrariwise.

Eventually we'll reach the Heat Death of the Universe, but you don't have to worry about that any time soon.

 

If you're preparing a big hoopla Happy New Year whoop-de-doo at your local Midnight -- mine will be about 8 hours from now -- please remember that this Magic Moment of the Odometer flipping over its rightmost digit specifically references the Reformed Gregorian Calendar. There are lots of other calendars, each with its own different Happy New Year date. But for a variety of reasons, some logical and scientific, most entirely arbitary, most of the world chooses to pop open a bottle of methode champaignoise and shoot off colored explosives when the Reformed Gregorian Calendar tells it to.

 

I just heard about 1,000,000 people in Hong Kong sing "Auld Lang Syne" first in English/Scots Gaelic, then in Chinese.

 

Vleeptron would like to thank Israel for making last week's Pilgrimage to Bethlehem unsually welcoming and easy for Christian pilgrims. Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity also got its first architectural makeover in 600 years, and the little town's merchants apparently prospered. Just like the first Christmas, but for happier reasons, there was No Room at the Inn.

 

For all Vleeptroids in Galaxy Dwingeloo-2 and on Earth and low-Earth orbit, Vleeptron and Agence-Vleeptron Presse and Lenny & Spike wish you a spectacularly peaceful and happy 2014. Leave a Comment and tell us how you celebrate the New Year. We eat black-eyed peas (Vigna unguiculata) for good luck. If we can stay awake until Guy Lombardo plays Auld Lang Syne, we'll drink a little methode champagnoise.