Captain's Log, Supplemental

One of the guys I work with has a bike! The vroom vroom kind. He told me what it was and I'd never heard of it before, but he said it is a sportbike! Wait a minute...I know this because I saw him with his helmet...that means he rode today...it was like 40 degrees?!? Damn crazy bikers. And there were some scenes with house on his bike, also. Ironic that a guy with a bum leg rides a bike more than twice as powerful as mine. I tell myself that he's just a fictional character, but it never helps.

I was discussing time zones with my office mate today, and he brought up an interesting query: how will we handle time zones in the future when Amazon expands to Mars? I found it quite interesting, as evidenced by the expression on his face when I brought up the general theory of relativity. Seriously though, time on Mars would be problematic. For one thing, days and years are different. Suddenly GMT/Zulu/UTC is no longer universal, since you would have to come up with some mapping to martian days and years. And the orbits of Earth and Mars are your best bet for a clock. You can't really use the time the sun takes to orbit the center of the galaxy--that reminds me, Battlestar might have a good ending. Anyway...so besides the lack of something common between Mars and Earth, you also have...time dilation? Yes! And then there's the problem of communicating between Earth and Mars. I don't know how far away they are from each other, but I'm going to bet that Light is going to takes a few minutes. Makes TCP acknowledgements less useful. And then what do you do when Mars and Earth are on the opposite sides of the sun from each other? Thats going to make next day shipping a real challenge.