Beyond the Information Age discusses a new way of thinking about computers, knowledge and understanding. See the editorial for more information....



Sense of Time

Now let's examine your sense of time. If the object you picked up was the same temperature as the room you would have no idea how long it had been there in the room. If the object was very cold or very hot (EM data) that would tell you about how long the object had been in the room before you picked it up. This is type TM data; coded in time carried in mass. Your brain functions as your sense of time and time is generally computed from the physical properties of other data types. If it turns out that you recognize the object you picked up in the room as a dinosaur fossil then its shape (SM data) and it appearance (SE data) could be computed by your brain to yield TM data that tells you how old the object might be. Your sense of time comes from four different data types TM, TE, TS, and TT. A Morse code message sent with flashes of light (long dashes, short dots) is type TE data. TS data is your ability to sense the motion of an object, and TT data is simply a date or place in time like May 5, 2004.

Let's look again at that object we picked up in the darkened room. By picking it up you sense the objects weight, this is type MM data. If this object was very light and weighed only a couple of grams you would immediately know it wasn't a real dinosaur fossil, it must be a fake plastic copy. Even though the object had the shape and appearance of a fossil it's weight was wrong so your estimate of its age (time data) must also be wrong.

This is a first example of analyzing data to get at the truth about an object. Sensing just one or two data types from an object is not always enough to find the truth about what the object is. The more data you have about an object the more able you are to properly characterize it within our universe of MEST.




Last Update: 2006-Dec-23