EP #6: Perspectives...

This time of year can be hectic with the holidays, and once you add in the COVID-19 crazy, we all probably need to stop, catch our breath. and gain some perspective...
Please enjoy Rick's tour of Perspectives...
We hope that you find joy, peace, love and understanding while we celebrate the holidays and move into 2022!

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https://collierhomeinspector.com/

Trade Secrets Inspections
Rick Kooyman
rick@TradeSecretsInspections.com
(239) 537-1186

Transcript

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Charlie  

Welcome to the Trade Secrets Inspections podcast, because “You need to know!”. Here's your host, Rick Kooyman.

Hey there. This is Charlie McDermott, the producer of the Trade Secrets Inspections, podcast. And as always, my partner here Rick Kooyman, the owner of Trade Secrets Inspections. Rick, how are you today?

 Rick 

I'm doing excellent, Charlie, and it's great to be with you again.

Charlie  

Thrilled to have you. And I always enjoy our sessions.

Rick 

Yea we have a good one today.

Charlie  

For our listeners, Rick has been teasing this episode, he has something real special. A little bit out of the box. Is that a good way to yet you give me a lot of details that a good?

Rick 

Yeah, we're going to talk about something other than real estate today we're gonna we're gonna enjoy understanding or appreciating ourselves and today and, and what's important to us.

Charlie

Oh, man, I love that. Well, let's, let's hear it, man. 

Rick

All right. So what I'm gonna start talking about is how we, how we live our lives, how we measure ourselves, and you know, the history of where that comes from, you know, we all follow basically, a week a calendar, you know, we chase the clock around all day long. And it's just kind of something that goes unobserved or where did all that come from? You know, how did that how did that stuff come to be? Yeah, yeah. So, so let's look at the history of calendars to start with. Okay, so let's talk about real primitive stuff, you know, way back when there was, you know, no, no scientific instruments. So, as a primitive being, you had basically two ways to measure time, right? You had day, the time between the two nights? Right? And you had essentially what was the month, or the lunar cycle, the time between the new moons and that was pretty much what you had to observe. There were other nuances to be seen. But in general, for the average person, you, you saw the sun come up and go down. And that was your day. And then at night, you saw this other thing come and go. And it changed every day, throughout the month. And that was the other measure of time was the lunar month. Okay, so the stars in the sky appear in different locations, depending on where the earth is in its orbit around the sun. But you know, that wasn't really known at the time. But through observation, it became pretty obvious if you paid attention that, well, there was a CYCLE occurring, you know, and you could predict that this was going to happen, or this was going to rise at this location. Because it did this once before. Right. Okay, so way of measuring or our, let's create a cycle, right? The Egyptians, we all know, we're lovers have the night sky. They, the priests really studied the night sky. And they essentially watched what was what was called the Dog Star or Sirius, okay. And they watched and were able to notice that Sirius came up at the same point, every 365 days.

They took that, and we're able to use that measure to measure the number of days in the year as opposed to the lunar cycle. Because if you look at the moon, the moon cycles are 29 and a half days. So it's out of sync. Right. Right. And, and a lunar year is actually 354 days. Okay, so if followed the lunar calendar, which was what early people did, because it was easier to track the lunar cycle, and people live by the moon cycles. This shifted, because you were missing a few days in your year, you're essentially you were 11 days short, while you followed the lunar cycle, right? Since figured that out by rocks and Sirius or the Dog Star and said, Hey, there's actually 365 days in this rotation. And that helps us keep our seasons in line. Okay, so they switch to the solar calendar at that point. Right. And it came about from watching the stars. But they moved to a day cycle calendar of watching the sun. Okay, so it changed that irregularity or that shift. And historically we have a record of when the Dog Star gear was first recorded. So this is kind of an oddity in AD 139 was recorded in Egypt as a dog star here. And based on the relative shifting of time, you could calculate when they first originated their calendar based on the shift because they're, they're still missing a little bit of time and their count of the days, because our earth actually orbits the Sun in 365 days, and approximately six hours, so that six hours is still an air for them. And they weren't accounting for it. So their calendar also drifted a little bit due to the six hours, but instead of drifting on like a 32 year cycle, it shifted on a 14 160 year cycle. So it was less noticeable, if you will, right. Okay. But as we got more and more civilized, these shifts in times started to become more noticeable because civilization was prospering, you know, people were starting to travel and alignments were becoming more important. And then we got into the Roman era. And Julius Caesar comes to power and says, you know, this is, this is all out of whack. I need this better.

So he employs someone to figure out how to make it better, and they figure out hey, we're missing the six hours. So we end up with what we call the Julian calendar. So he left the Egyptian Calgary went to the room and calendar, the Julian calendar. So essentially, he said he they figure this out. And in 46 BC, he says, Alright, we're going to start over, I'm going to add 99 days to the this year 46 BC to correct for the slippage and we're going to start January 1, 45, BC, with the new calendar, the Julian calendar. So they add that six years and, and doing it, they create leap year. Okay, so we all here to leap year, which is basically every four years, we add one day to the shortest month of the year, to compensate for the six hour shift. So Feb 29th occurs every four years, essentially is a leap year.

Now, this is kind of I found this interesting, at the same time that the Romans were figuring this out and making their calendar on the opposite side of the world, independent. The Maya, were doing the exact same thing. They created a 365 day calendar, as well. They divided it up into 18 months, and they had 20 days in a month and they created a calendar round. Is that is what they called it. You know, it was intriguing that similar things were happening in society development on completely opposite sides of the earth when they were fully not in contact with each other, or as far as we know. Right. Right. Right. Right. So that's intriguing that, and that worked for a very long time. Wow. As we advanced into the new modern times, though, and we started to record and measure time more accurately, I guess, blocks. Again, it was realized that 365 days and six hours wasn't correct. And there was still an error there. Really, really. So the actual right thing was 365 48 minutes and 46 seconds. So that's three, it's 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds.

The correct two from the Julian calendar, to what we live with today. And today's calendars actually known as the Gregorian calendar. Where do you get that name? Well, it was created by Pope Gregory the third, who again said, Hey, we have an issue in shipping and scheduling. And we need to figure out how to solve this problem. So he employed a mathematician, Christopher Claudius to resolve that issue. And they decided that that missing little bit of minutes there amounted to an extra three days every 400 years. So they had a simple solution. They were like, well, how are we going to figure this out? Well, Pope Gregory the third had a moment of genius. And he said, You know what, let's take the centuries ending in 00. So you know, 2000, whatever, just your zero ending centuries. And if they're divisible by 400, then we're going to make those leap years and if they're not, then they're not leap year. So this simplify that. So like the year 1600 There is a leap year any year 2000 is also a leap year. But in the year 1700 18 119 100, we didn't have a February 29. Leap Year, those years skipped the Leap Year to correct for the time.

Charlie  

So is is that in addition to the every four years?

Rick Kooyman  

Yeah, exactly. That's it's the correction to the Leap Year principle. So there's a little bit modification to the four year every four year thing. And in that if the century ends in zero, and is divisible by 400, then it's not a leap year. Oh, my goodness, well, actually, it is a leap year. And if it's not 400, then it's not a leap year. So it's kind of interesting. So there's a calendar. Okay. So now we know we live with our Gregorian calendar, and it came through, you know, all of its developments. And then we're like, but really, we live by the week, right? Well, geez, the week is fully subjective, isn't it? Well, China developed a five day week, which was basically established for work privileges. And then on the fifth day, was the day of bathing and hair washing. So work your servants to the bone for five days. On the fifth day, you allow them to take a bath. And then they actually moved that to 10 days. And I guess she took a bath every 10 days. We have a seven day week. So where did the seven day week come from? There's two general kind of ideas where that might come from. One is the biblical story of creation, which we all know, you know, God created the earth. On the seventh day he rested. Or, there's the more likely story where the Romans created in the first century, the seven day week, and they named it after the seven known planets. So it started with the Roman names of the planets. And it got a little bit taken over by the Norse and the Norse gods. And they changed half of the days of the weeks to Norse Gods name. So you have the beginning of the week with Roman planet names like Marty and Mercydie. And then you have Tui, Wote Thor and Frig, which is actually Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. So they're just they started off as these names of planets and names of gods and the words have just been changed through dialects. And, you know, they're kind of not exactly what they started with, but they have their roots and in the names of planets and gods. Okay, so this is arbitrary stuff right? Now, now we got this calendar that we've taken, I don't know, a couple 1000 years to figure out how to get right. And we made up this arbitrary week that we all live by, and we divided that up into hours so that we can all meet each other for lunch accurately. But what does all this mean? We're talking about numbers. So this is where I want to really take you for a ride. Okay, so let's look at numbers mean, one to 10, we all know, you know, we can we can conceive of one to 10. Or you know, the zero in the one, you know, so it's pretty easy to get ourselves from one to 10. But when we start talking about big numbers, it's hard to wrap your head around it. Okay, so let's take a look at money, because we all can conceive of money. And let's look at Mr. Gates. So let's say Bill Gates is worth $56 billion. Okay, so if we looked at that in a different way, we could say that he earned $3,000 a minute, or $50 a second. For his time, he worked at Microsoft. A pretty good hourly rate.

Charlie  

And not too shabby.

Rick 

I mean, it literally, it says if you took if he took five seconds to stop and pick up $100 bill off the floor, he was literally not using his time wisely.  But again, this is the power of numbers. Okay, so we're trying to conceive it. What does this stuff mean? All right. So we take one to one to 10. And we had, you know, billions and trillions and all that. So let's make sense out of that. So, instead of money, let's look at it in time. We have one second. It was one second, right? Well, if we take a million seconds, how long is that? It's actually 12 days. That's a nice vacation, right? Okay. million seconds is 12 days. It gives you something to conceive of, right? Right. Well, what's up billion seconds. Long is a billion seconds. It's actually 30 years. Right? So when you go from a million to a billion, it's hard to conceive of how big that step is, you know, you went from 12 days to 30 years. Well, geez, trillion. You know, we keep talking about this new number with, you know, to me, I'm like, man, we're talking about money and trillions. Now, I can't even conceive of this. What does this mean? Right? So what is a trillion seconds?

Okay, it's 30,000 years. Right? So you went from one second to a million seconds being 12 Days to a trillion seconds being 30,000 years. That's longer than the historical record of human civilization. I mean, there's some relevance, or archaeological evidence that say there might be societies of 100,000 years or whatever. But you're still talking. A trillion in seconds is 30,000 years. That's a huge number, right? So right, we're getting there. We're getting there. Okay. So now let's, let's take this one step further. All right. So we all measure ourselves according to this earth, year, day, hour period thing. Right? Completely relative to ourselves. So how do I mean that? Let's say you meet an alien, this afternoon, you go out have lunch, and you're gonna have it with the first extraterrestrial you ever met. Now, the first thing you want to know is you're going to eat you, when we figure out that they're not a threat. Okay, let's see what we can learn from each other. So what would you want to ask your first alien friend? What would you want to know?

Charlie  

I don't know.

Rick 

Where are you from? Mm hmm. Okay. Maybe How do you measure time? Or how old are you? What scale? Would you use them? You can't measure it in Earth years. He's not from our solar system. Right. So how do we relate to that? Do they die? Do they have a life cycle? What do they know about how the universe was created? Or is there a god? I mean, these are deep thoughts, right? Okay, but we can all say that we can all ask these questions, whether we're from Earth or not. So how do we look at the scale of things? Well, in an alien representation, we can look at it on a solar timescale. Right. So now that we've got an idea of what billions and trillions sounds like, our solar system that we live in, is about 5 billion years old. Okay, the Earth was created about, you know, we're about three points. 13 point. Well, I misspoke there, our solar system. Present day, we're at 13 Point 7 billion years since the Big Bang is what they say, Okay? Now, if the sun was created, somewhere after the Big Bang, but before the earth, and all that the sun is about 4.5 billion years old. And it's said to be about halfway through its life. So let's say that the sun lives to be 10 billion years old, at which point it's supposed to go into become a red giant and absorb the earth and all that and the earth will be gone. But that's not what we're looking at. We're looking at solar timescales. So if we measure the universe, according to solar masses, at the end of the energy being consumed in the universe, it is estimated that all the stars will burn out in about 15 trillion years. Okay, so that's a really big number. But it's a really big universe, right? So think about it. In 15 trillion years, there will be no stars left in the sky, the universe will have gone completely black. Well, then what? Well, then you have all of eternity. So you're in you've lost, you've left the solar era. And now we're into the next era of the universe or the dark era, which we can't even begin to conceive of. Right. So So, I guess the end of the story is or where I'm taking on all this is, you know, just recognize the absolute value of your actual personal existence, your actual time here. You know, that I think, therefore, I am position, you know, this moment right here right now. And it's absolute relevance or you know, the specialness of it, and appreciate its for its full value, you know, and the irony of what we think of is important to us, is often not really what's important to us, what's really important to us is our recognition of our time. And, and appreciating the value of being able, being able to recognize it. And appreciate it while we're here.

Charlie  

So from this point forward, I now address you as Professor Rick Coleman, number one, and we're poorly I mean, my goodness, you You really did a nice job. Going through the history i had 90%. Of what I had no idea I snooze through that class, I guess, or I just never heard of it. So that was insightful. But, you know, to put this all in perspective about, like you said, our time here and the power of now, right, really appreciating, you know, every day every moment.

Rick 

Yeah, and our loved ones and, and what's important to us and what's, you know, maybe, relative to the moment, important to us, but not overall important to us. And in the grand scheme of things, and yeah, yeah, the power of numbers is it's an interesting thing, the zero and the one, how far they can go.

Charlie  

And amazing how that was figured out so long ago without computers, and you know, all that stuff that we just take for granted.

Rick

Wow, yeah, it all starts with watching the sun, and then watching the night sky, and then figuring out the difference between the two. And then trying to make sense out of what a trillion means. Alright, goodness, I still can't wrap my head around man. But man, it's such a leap. And then if you take those concepts and yet you apply them to something that they actually hold relevance to, which is kind of soldiers timescales. And there's a finite period to that even.

Charlie  

Alright, we have Yeah, blew me away today. So thank you for cheering i I have no idea what's next man. This is uh, this is great stuff. Yeah, yeah, it was fun. So thanks for the ride. And we look forward to the next episode. 

Rick 

Till the next time, Charlie.

 Charlie 

Thanks for listening to the Trade Secrets Inspections podcast. To learn more about Trade Secrets Inspections, go to www.TradeSecretsInspections.com or call to 239-537-1186.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai