Did the world’s axial tilt just change?Did the world’s axial tilt just change?
September 30, 2009
As far as I know and after surveying the world’s top scientists, there is no evidence of any kind of recent shift of the earth’s axial tilt. Yet, I understand why people everywhere may be wondering about this. From my own recent experience, something in the world has recently changed. Being a person in my mid 40s, my professional career has lived through the evolution of Microsoft Windows. As such, from Windows 3.1.1 to Windows 95/97 to Windows NT to Windows ME to Windows 2000 to Windows XP and the curse of Windows Vista, I, like many, have become accustomed to learning how to kill locked up applications with task manager, the need for the daily reboot and the benefit of the cleaning reinstall to clean up my system. Nonetheless, my systems, no matter how much I increased the memory and processing speed, seemed to slow down over time. Meanwhile, being a Unix lover from my days at Bell Labs, I also stood by with admiration of the expansion of Linux, an offspring of Unix and Apple’s decision to move their operating system to a stable Unix based kernel.
On the cell phone side, I had reluctantly migrated to Windows Mobile based phones in the hopes of making my life more productive, even though I knew sluggishness and instability was my destiny. A year and a half ago, I abandoned the daily reboots of my Windows Mobile phone and gleefully followed the masses by embracing the iPhone 3G. Like it or not, the world was how I expected it would be.
In the last week, however, the foundation of all my expectations has been shaken by two independent experiences. First, I volunteered to become one of the evaluators of Windows 7 in our corporate environment. Note, that because of my own terrible experiences with Windows Vista, I had dutifully remained on Windows XP, accepting the fact that my environment continued to get slower and slower in between more frequent cleaning reinstall cycles. Even though I’m running only a 32 bit version of Windows 7, I have found the experience amazingly satisfying. My applications and environment has become down-right zippy and my user experience with intuitiveness, connectivity and stability has been surprisingly “Apple-like.”
My second experience relates to my iPhone. After doing what I thought would be an innocuous iPhone software upgrade as part of a periodic sync, all of my non-Applie iphone applications suddenly refused to work. I dutifully walked through all the troubleshooting steps. As each one failed, I was forced to do a complete restore of my iPhone, followed by a re-installation of all my applications. Ugh! Since that time, my iPhone has gone into unresponsive lala land three times where I.ve had to resort to the double-button-hold system restart - an experience very similar to the curses of my old Windows Mobile Phones.
I suppose more data is needed to determine if something drastic has happened. Perhaps this is just a blip in the otherwise predictable trajectory. For now I’m going to enjoy the new found zippiness and stability of Windows 7 and pray that my iPhone returns to normal.
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