Aint life funny.

Another eventful weekend has come and gone, Friday night I went over to a friends house, he was taking advantage of the weather and having a little get to gether in his huge garden. He actually has streetlights of the vintage variety dotted around his Ponderosa of a plot. I cracked open the last case of Bollywood beer from the bouncy castle do, and things went well until the last bottle. I think I mentioned that all who tasted this fine drink found it rather Moorish. Which is probably why a skirmish developed over the last bottle. I’m getting ahead of myself here because this post is about the Finite law and is the reason for the narcissistic pic that accompanies it.

I had taken along my camera not just to record the happy time we were all surely going to have, but also to enlist the help of someone to take a better pic of me for my profile. A photograph taken with the black night sky as a background can be very flattering and is usually far more dramatic than one taken next to the washing line or dustbins. Quite how dramatic this pic turned out to be I could never have guessed. As it is the pic is a perfect example of the Finite law, I will try to explain.

Newton said this "The quantity of matter is the measure of the same, arising from its density and bulk conjointly." However I think he was wrong, the equation misses some important components. Example one: Imagine a chap in an aircraft several miles above the earth. He jumps out intending to open his parachute and descend gently to the ground, his chute fails to open so depending on his height at the time of jumping he will spend anything from three to six minutes plummeting earthward. On his way down he will be in perfect condition, he could while away the time performing air acrobatics, pretending to be superman, or catching up on a little sleep, what he does doesn’t matter, the point is he is ok until he hits the ground.

Example two: A chap is tied to a post and blindfolded, another chap comes along with a gun and discharges the gun at his head, for the time it takes the bullet to reach his head he is in perfect condition. It only when the projectile enters his bonce that he will start to feel uncomfortable, as it were. I have a third example that I will come to shortly, but for now let’s decide on our points of reference.

Whether the body is travelling toward the object or the object is travelling toward the body is for our purposes irrelevant, if we shut down the distance between the two and make our first reference point one centimetre distance between the body and the object. Our second reference point has to be velocity, the speed at which the two impact, the third reference point logically has to be time, although time doesn’t actually exist except as a tool invented by man to measure a series of events.

So the equation should sound something like this: 1 Centimetre x Velocity x Time = Finite-time, I think I have that right, If I haven’t I am sure Kaz will put me right.

Back to the party, there I was sat enjoying a drink and taking in the night air; I was talking to a sensible girl who seemed the ideal person to take my pic. Sensible people usually take good snaps. I leaned forward showing my good side and tried to look enigmatic with just a trace of a smile. At the same time several feet away from our table two people were making a grab for the last bottle of Bollywood beer. The person who got it opened the top; the beer spilled out over the top soaking the bottle, the person who had lost the battle made a final grab for the precious liquid. The winner wildly swept the bottle away in a wide arc. The slippery bottle left her hand and had now become a projectile travelling at speed toward my head.

My sensible friend pressed the shutter, a squilly-second after which the bottle hit me on the back of the head and shattered soaking me in beer and leaving a lump the size of a golf ball. So the picture displays my finite time. Using the equation mentioned before we can work out that as the bullet was travelling somewhere in the region of one thousand to fifteen hundred feet a second depending on the weapon used. And the chap with the dud parachute was travelling at 120 mph or 54 m/s. my finite time assuming the bottle was travelling at twenty to thirty miles per hour was incredibly shorter than theirs.

Had the sensible person not been taking my photograph the shattered glass might easily have done serious damage to her eyes, as it was the camera shielded her although she did receive a small cut to her forehead. When I came round I tried to explain my theory of finite time to her but she wasn’t interested, she was more concerned about getting the blood out of her shirt and whether or not she would be scarred.

So what have we learned from this post, two things, one I’m a good looking bastard and two, everybody’s finite time is different.