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17 octobre 2005

Catch up with Peter in his Full Moon update

I have to report that tonight a very large yellowish moon appears to be rising above the studios at an astounding rate - it brings to mind questions about the relative nature of perception, and as I'm hoping our speed of planetary rotation is within 'normal' operating parameters, there must be some other explanation....

"As animals get bigger, from tiny shrew to huge blue whale, pulse rates slow down and life spans stretch out longer, conspiring so that the number of heartbeats during an average stay on Earth tends to be roughly the same, around a billion. A mouse just uses them up more quickly than an elephant.

Mysteriously, these and a large variety of other phenomena change with body size according to a precise mathematical principle called quarter-power scaling. A cat, 100 times more massive than a mouse, lives about 100 to the one-quarter power, or about three times, longer. (To calculate this number take the square root of 100, which is 10 and then take the square root of 10, which is 3.2.) Heartbeat scales to mass to the minus one-quarter power. The cat's heart thus beats a third as fast as a mouse's."
(see link below)

I'm not quite sure that this explains the moon's apparent haste, as I'm roughly the same size as last month, but as a link to this months 'Full Moon Club' update there's possibly a tenuous thread through elephants to 'Africa' and from 'our stay on earth' to 'Still Growing Up", both of which are to be found in this months video offering...the moon's not full forever!

Watch the video in The Full Moon Club
Of Mice and Elephants: A Matter of Scale
'Africa Calling' and 'Still Growing UP' in our store

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