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What goes around

''Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub
It is the centre hole that makes it useful
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there''
-Lao Tzu

We seldom blame language in our questioning, instead thinking that when we wonder about deep concepts such as Time, Life, God and Weather we are dealing with bottomless entities that are too complex for us. Very often this complexity is of our own making and we realise causes are sometimes no more than words.

‘Time’ is just such a concept and only exists in our own imaginations. Time is only an idea. From the original dai and the Greek demos meaning to divide we have evolved words like day, time, tide, tidings, tidy, divide and democracy.. The Old Norse was tidhr and the Old English tid. We divide time into years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds – divisions that make it seem absolute, like something that exists apart from everything else in the world including our own consciousnesses.

But divisions are not part of nature. You would not come across a percentage lying across a path. The clocks (Latin clocca=bell) in nature are sun and moon. The Sun gives us day and night and the year, and the Moon the months and tides. The sun from soldat, was literally that thing in the south. The word moon is from me meaning measurement. Being very clockwork the moon was used as an astronomical tape measure. The moon loses 10 seconds per year, or 20 minutes every 135 years before it is again in the same position in the sky with respect to the background stars.

Time became useful as divisions of candle burning, with hours noted by marks on the wax. There were also water and sand clocks. Night time was a function of candle burn-down. Today we have atomic clocks measuring a millionth of a second, something ancient candle users never dreamed of. As we chose to watch candles, sand, water, moon and sun, time became a consideration.

The nonhuman world has biological clocks. Oysters respond to the fortnight, which is lunar. Potatoes detect air pressure changes in advance from a solar process. Fish bite better around new and full moons. The Canadian Rockies Hunting Calendar parallels the Maori Fishing Calendar, although elk and eels do not communicate.

The word ‘life’ is from leip meaning to stick or adhere, as in fat, and to leave meaning failure to stick. The root word gave us leaf and leaves, literally those which “leave” the tree. ‘Life’ is what ‘leaves’ the body upon death. Life is defined as a function of its opposite. It really means that you only knew you had life when you no longer have it, which may not helpful. Feeling ‘alive’ may be an illusion.

It is odd when science dedicates trillions of dollars to discover what time and life is, when original meanings are basic and simple. A time machine? Only when we find a way to make a candle unburn and add wax.

Nothing causes time that would be discoverable, neither will we discover what causes weather. Life is only known afterwards and upon absence, but weather arrives before. But like time, weather cannot be controlled because it is only a human concept involving comparative measurement.

So questions have a lot to answer for. Having a word for something enables abstract discussion in the concept’s absence. Measurement is neither cause nor control. Talk of global warming is as if there is one annual global temperature average from which the planet has been straying, the difficulty being that an average is not a temperature - merely an idea of a temperature which doesn’t suddenly pop out of mathematics and into reality.

The Earth does not have just one temperature. It is never in global thermodynamic equilibrium — neither within itself nor with its surroundings. Neither can we entertain any reality of weather modification. It is like saying we can choose, from later in life, when to be born.

So to the word cycle. Connected is circle and the Old English kweol=wheel.. It is harder detecting cultivate and colony, and still harder recognising dwell, yet kwel was the root form. Cycles meant not turning but returning, back to base, to home, to dwelling. Kwel also yielded hull and neck, something positioned on a home-based axis. Whilst what goes around comes around, a cycle, like a home does not move - everything revolves around it. Cycle is more about the home than what leaves the home. The axis remains still.
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Each year, thousands of Alaskans pay $2.50 to guess the exact date and minute the Tanana River ice goes out in Nenana. This year, 261,000 people bought tickets, bringing the winner's take to an estimated $318,000, just shy of last year's record jackpot of $350,000.

The May 20 breakup this year sets a record for the latest the ice has gone out in Nenana since local railroad workers began record keeping 97 years ago. The brutal winter Alaska experienced created more ice on the river this year. The last measurement, taken May 6, showed the river ice was 40 inches thick. By contrast, last year, the ice was only 28.7 inches thick on April 19. After that, it became too dangerous to check.

The event puts measurement into perspective. Humans cannot control climate, only measure it. The measurement of weather and climate is a kind of game and doesn’t mean anything deeper than interesting speculation. The increased ice was unhappy news for the local global warming alarmists. For the rest it was entertainment and a village competition, and for the local kids, all the fun of the fair.

Lao Tzu would have been pleased. Profit would have come from what was there, and usefulness from what was not there.


Ken Ring of www.predictweather.com is author of Weather Almanac for NZ for 2013.