TWIL #52: From Temporary Moments to Gravitational Pulls
Every Sunday, I write down a few things that caught my attention that week: details I tripped over, ideas that lingered, questions I needed to understand by putting them into words. This isn’t about being right or complete. It’s about noticing, wondering, and thinking on the page.
Thanks for reading. I hope something here sparks.
The word I loved most this week: ephemerality
Ephemerality means something exists only briefly.
From the Ancient Greek ἐφήμερος (ephēmeros): “lasting only a day.”
It’s the idea that things can be temporary without being incomplete.
That their value isn’t reduced by their ending.
- A moment you can’t recreate.
- A way of thinking you eventually outgrow.
- A phase of life that only makes sense in hindsight.
- A flower that blooms knowing it will fall.
We often treat temporary things as failed versions of something permanent.
Ephemerality pushes back. It says: this was never meant to last.
Ephemeral things don’t fail by ending.
They end by design. And because of that, they deserve attention.
When you see it that way, duration stops being the measure.
Attention becomes the point. Presence becomes the value.
So the question becomes:
What in your life was designed to be brief? And are you giving it the attention it deserves while it’s here?
An endless robotic floor
While scrolling through Youtube Shorts I saw this video... Wow!
Developed at the University of Tsukuba, CirculaFloor is a VR locomotion system built from robotic floor tiles. As you walk, the tiles rotate and shift beneath your feet, subtly redirecting you so you stay in a small physical space while experiencing continuous movement. And the strange thing: it’s already 16 years old!
Most VR systems flatten the world. CirculaFloor didn’t just think about forward motion, but about verticality: how bodies actually move through space.
Which makes the questions unavoidable.
Why isn’t this further developed? Especially when we keep talking about spatial computing, embodied experiences, and “presence”?
Maybe it is too complex.
Too expensive.
Too early.
What other futures already exist, fully thought through, patiently documented… and still waiting for us to notice?
Jupiter protects Earth
That was the sentence I read in an article. So I followed it.
At a basic level, the idea is simple: Jupiter is huge (300x Earth). So huge that its gravity dominates a vast region of the solar system. When asteroids or comets drift in from the outer reaches, Jupiter often gets to them first. Its gravity bends their paths, pulls some in, flings others away, and redirects many long before they ever get close to Earth. Not perfectly. Not intentionally. But often enough to change the odds.
So I got interested in gravity. How does that work?
Gravity, at the Newton level, looks like this:
- F is the force pulling two things together
- m1 and m2 are the masses
- r is the distance between them
- G is a tiny constant: 6.67×10−116.67 \times 10^{-11}6.67×10−11
So two important takeaways fall straight out of that equation:
- More mass = more pull
- More distance = way less pull (squared!)
And Jupiter's mass is so big that, even at this distance, it has some pull on you. Okay, not that much... after AI did the calculations for me Jupiter’s tug on me is roughly the same as the gravitational pull from a 70 kg person about 12 cm away. (Yes, gravity gets that much stronger that fast when distance shrinks.)
But it made me realize... if Jupiter pulls on me. So does the Sun. So does every star and planet in the galaxy. And every object, because "every mass attracts every other mass."
Which means, purely in a gravitational sense, I’m not just attracted to my wife. I am also attracted to every other woman on the planet... okay, and every stick and stone.
And on a more serious note: this means that nothing in the universe is isolated. Everything is quietly connected, whether we notice or not.
