How high are you?
this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
5 points (56.1% liked)
No Stupid Questions
47987 readers
735 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
25%
Am I talking more slowly? No, it must be time that’s wrong.
Well it's the fact that so many others noticed. But I have no way of knowing if they are also old... So that's my current theory.
You're old now and you can't say mississippi quite as effectively anymore
That's honestly my dominant theory. And everyone else who is also noticing this is a Genxer.
The counting systems were always bullshit. Different people and at different times have wildly different speech tempo. What you can do is trying to find your rhythm by actually saying a word repeatedly as fast as you can without mispronouncing and counting how often you can do that in a minute; That'll give you a fairly accurate measure you can use.
They're not wrong but they are inaccurate and unreliable. Clocks, on the other hand, are pretty accurate and reliable, and atomic clocks even moreso, and most digital clocks are now synchronized to the atomic clock standards in some form using the internet or wireless. The definition of time is quite accurately standardized to an extremely high level of precision and has been for a very long time. The human brain is not standardized like this and hopefully will never be because that's a gross and scary idea.
The definition of a length of time has been maintained with levels of precision that have increased dramatically since ancient times, but at no point in the last, oh, say, at least 1000 years, has the measurement of time changed by anywhere close to 25%.
The antikythera mechanism is believed to be at least 2,000 years old and was able to calculate the passage of time and the motion of the planets far more accurately than Mississippis ever could hope to. The passage of time has not changed the accuracy of that device, only our understanding of the motion of the planets has, and again that's a human brain problem not a time or motion of the planets problem.
The point of those kind of estimation methods is not so you'll agree with a clock, it's so you'll agree with yourself if you do it twice. Using a "foot" as a literal measuring unit isn't so dumb if only one person is measuring.
In cooking, what a "cup" is in volume can vary by like 30% from cook to cook and depending on environmental factors. But if you're the same cook, working in the same environment, your method will work every time.
If time was faster or slower, you wouldn't notice anything. Because time is an expression of causality, and if causality is either faster or slower, it would go for everything, including you, your phone, your watch and everything else.
If time was slower or faster, there would be no way to detect it.
But we do have an inner clock, and that clock slows down as we age, making things feel/seem faster.
Many animals have way more accurate inner clocks than humans, for instance cats can tell the time of day very accurately, and are known to have daily routines on the clock, also disregarding sunlight and owner behavior.
Most animals also have a way more accurate perception of speed of events, and will often seem to react only in the last second, but will very rarely fail. This can be seen with for instance pigeons in traffic. That will only move at the last moment when cars or scooters or bicycles approach.
So whatever number of seconds it takes a person to count Mississippis or run 100 meter, is purely subjective, and in no way a reliable measure of time.
I specifically remember counting chunks of time as long as 15 minutes and not being off by a minute.
I can almost guarantee that memory is not accurate. the human inner watch is simply not that accurate, even with tricks to aid it.
I personally have a somewhat similar memory, of being able to tell the clock very accurately by the position of the sun. But the truth is I probably tricked myself, and when I got it wrong I discarded it, and only remembered the accurate ones. Classic confirmation bias, that we should all be aware of that we are all victims to now and then.
I see your point, kind of trippy to think about. Is time constant?
As Einstein said, time is relative. But that only means it is relative to different circumstances.
Moving at light speed time stands still, and the theory is that inside a black hole time also stands still.
So being at a stationary position in non gravity space is the fastest time will go.
But lets make it simple, and consider weather time is a constant on earth, at least within a margin we are not able to perceive.
And to that question the answer is that yes time is constants, because changes in the speed of time are universal and affect everything equally.
Meaning that the relative time we perceive is constant.
BUT on the other hand, time is different to a satellite that orbits the earth, because the faster movement slows down time, but the lower gravity accelerates it. Which makes it necessary for GPS satellites to compensate for that to make accurate positions possible.
Anecdotally the GPS system was originally financed and implemented by the US military. And the generals did not believe this, so they claimed the system to compensate was unnecessary, which of course it turned out the scientists were right, so they had implemented the system to compensate anyway, and could turn it on, when they had proved to the generals that it indeed was necessary.
https://www.gpsworld.com/inside-the-box-gps-and-relativity/
The net effect: A GPS satellite clock will gain about 38 microseconds per day over a clock at rest at mean sea level.
This just made me think of something... Have we ever proven through measurement the speed of light is constant? For example every test I can seem to find requires measuring it both ways. How do we know it's not faster in one direction? Wouldn't we still get the same measurement if we can only measure that way?
The limit of speed of light is a property of space-time, not a property of light.
Another way to understand it is that it is the maximum speed of causality. The limit doesn't go only for light, but for instance also for gravity, which AFAIK is also proven by the measurement of gravitational waves.
The reason only light can achieve this speed is that it is massless. Because if light had mass, it would have infinite energy, and take infinite energy to achieve the speed of light.
There are numerous explanations for how 2 objects moving at the speed of light still only approach each other at the speed of light.
Take a look at Youtube, there are many good videos explaining relativity in general and speed of light in particular.
It's all relative.
wink
A whole lot of people just seem to have absolutely no sense of timing/rhythm.
A really weird place I've noticed that is at my work as a 911 dispatcher.
Once in a while we have to give CPR instructions over the phone, and a big part of that is counting with the caller to make sure they're doing the chest compressions fast enough (100-120 beats per minute)
I was in band back in high school, I can keep that sort of rhythm in my sleep (though my throat starts getting pretty dry depending on how long it takes responders to arrive and take over)
But a handful of my coworkers really struggle with it, they count too fast or too slow, speed up and slow down, it's a little terrifying to be honest.
The ones who do manage to keep good time have mostly had at least some music training, or are at least keeping an eye on the seconds counting by on the clock on our computer to keep time.
I just tried counting Mississippis with my eyes closed and a timer going, and I nailed it within a second. But I think I definitely went a little faster for the first 19 and then slowed down a little after that because there's just less syllables in the numbers until you hit that point, and more after it.
Once you hit a certain age, every week goes by faster than the previous one.
I think that happens at every age. Every new day is a smaller fraction of your life then the previous day.
I've always counted too slowly using this method. I think my general cadence is slower than average, as I tend to walk more slowly than most people, in spite of being tall. Also, I need to slow down fast talkers on YouTube, like Louis Rossmann. I imagine he'd get through 45 mississippis in 30 seconds.
You are blessed, this is a much better thing to deal with than walking, talking and counting too fast. I find that it's more compatibke with human society to operate slightly slower than slightly faster in all these things
I am wondering if my counting has changed as I got older. Someone said to try 1 and 2 and 3, etc. But that seems to have the opposite problem where I am counting them way too fast.
because you don't use that for more than single digits or teens
it's used to slow you down with using monosyllable digits. once you go above twenty, you drop it becaues the digits start becoming 3 or 4 syllables.
i never heard it being used beyond the count of ten. like, you use it as a kid when counting, but i don't see why an adult would ever do it. i know how long a second is.
I always found that ineffective and also somewhat childish. I just count the seconds, that way I'm usually off only 2-3 per minute.
That would make time 25% slower... 33%?...
But no. People just probably talk 25% faster now
I found that one second in my head is almost twice as fast as 1 second to everyone else is. Then I got diagnosed with ADHD.
Howevs I don't think 1 second is like, the baseline of human processing though. It's an arbitrary number which is a 60th of a 60th of a 12th of daylight time in Mesopotamia.
Fun fact: In ancient greece (and presumably elsewhere, maybe as early as babylon) days were considered to genuinely change length throughout the seasons. Many clocks around the world cknvey this, inckuding Prague's Astronomical clock
I just tried it 10 times in a row and was withing 1-2 seconds of 45 every time.