RANDOM WIKIPEDIA TOPIC(S): June 10 + Livonia (His Name is Alive album)

Marking time is futile. It's like pushing a pin into a roaring waterfall to mark a passing droplet. We're all on a blue, spinning ball that feels, for the most part, pretty stable on the surface. We have days. We have years. We have atomic clocks and calendars. We usually know when our birthdays come around, or when night falls. But it's illusory.

Technology has allowed us to get a bigger and bigger picture of where we sit in space. And we're not sitting still. There are objects moving within objects moving within objects to the power of infinity. It gives me vertigo just thinking about all the orbits within systems within galaxies that are all spinning and speeding and pushing and pulling amongst themselves.

In 2008 we added a Leap Second to the clock. Just to keep things 'in check'. And when I say 'we', I mean the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. It sounds like an organization from a George Orwell novel, or a Terry Gilliam movie. It's slightly disconcerting that we need to 'adjust' something as simple as a second, that in this day and age we need to 'delay time' to get our atomic clocks back in sync with 'mean solar time'. If it weren't true, you'd accuse me of making it up.

By the way, did you know that the length of a second has been changed? Twice! Once in 1956 (based on a precise division of Earth-around-the-Sun revolutions) and once again in 1967 when they realized that the Earth was slowing down and changed to a measurement based on the vibrations of a caesium-133 atom. Caesium is one of the few metals that can turn to liquid in a warm room, and is named after the latin 'caesius', which means "sky blue." So everything that happens in our world, from shuttle launches to television programs to when you punch the alarm clock and when you leave work, is dependent on the movement of the tiniest piece of liquid metal named after the sky.

So take an arbitrary date, like June 10th (the same date the Mars Spirt Rover was launched back in 2003), and ask yourself if our planet will be in exactly the same location on that date the following year. Not a chance. And will it have gotten their a fraction of a fraction slower than the 'year' before that? Yup. It's all relative. The earth is getting heavier due to cosmic dust from meteors, the Moon screws up our orbit (and it's getting heavier too), as do millions of other gravity emitting space-flung objects like comets and asteroids. It's a giant space/time-crushing cluster bomb out there.

And as we are spinning wildly through space (and time), we are emitting a sphere of radio and television waves out into space. Everything that has ever been 'broadcast' doesn't just travel across the world and end when it reaches our radios or our TVs. Some of it keeps going. Out into space. Forever. Mind you, forever is still less than 100 years, and about 65 light years, but it's still crazy to imagine that we've emitted a tiny ball of noise, not unlike the speck on the clover in Horton Hears a Who. "We're here! We're here! We're here!" This tiny "yop" has reached as far as Alpha Centauri (the closest star to Earth) and now well beyond. This ever-spreading sphere of noise is degrading, like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, as it stretches through space. Scientists call it the Radio Bubble, and eventually it will just pop and blend in with the noise of the rest of the Universe.

But right now, 20-some-odd-light-years away on planet Gliese 581C, there is a (very, very, very) slim chance that a sentient alien life form with a specialized receiver* might be picking up an Earth-university alt-rock station broadcast from 1990. This alt-rock station might be doing an afternoon of songs from the label 4AD, which might include sub-culture hits from the Pixies, the Breeders, Lush, Dead Can Dance, The Cocteau Twins, and even His Name Is Alive.

Hey, if we can believe that a dancing sky atom can tell us the time, why can't we believe that somewhere up there Joe Alien is banging his space TV, trying to watch the first episode of Seinfeld?

*As an aside, this 'space receiver' would need to account for a) the Doppler effect (you know how the sound of an ambulance siren distorts as it's blaring past you? They'd need to correct that because the Earth is rotating, and revolving), b) the weakness of the wave forms (the satellite dish would need to be about 20 miles wide), and c) the extra static and noise.

Next random topics: Yogen Früz + Highland Park Public Library (Illinois)