uncertainty principles

ART-FAG.NET, something new. I've been listening to King Crimson's Larks' Tongues in Aspic on repeat all day (it's the only track you'll ever need) and writing html, and am in a fantastically good mood. On Saturday Iain and I sat in an inner-city park I used to play in as a toddler and talked about physics; he tried to explain why time slows down as you approach the speed of light and although I grasped the concept of inertial frames of reference easily enough I've never been able to comprehend what time actually is, what does it measure? "Time is the property of the universe that facilitates causality," said Iain, lying back and resting his head on his hands, but it didn't really help. I did, however, manage to understand why falling into a black hole turns you into spaghetti, which made me feel a little better. That night, eating shepherd's pie in a farmhouse kitchen with my parents and about thirty pensioners from my mum's church, he and my dad continued to work on me, using the cruet set to illustrate the principle of neutron stars so dense light cannot actually go round them, and in return I challenged him to work out the density of Button Moon given estimates of the size and mass of Mr. Spoon (20cm; 50grams) and the diameter of the button (1metre). After a few minutes scribbling on a napkin he came to the conclusion that if Mr. Spoon was able to jump a quarter of his own height it would have to be about as dense as the real moon, only infinitesimally smaller. It would still be a bloody big button though, if you ask me.