From the work blog, a fond look back at what I was doing ten years ago today:

Given as we are to the measurement of time in human terms – the second of a heartbeat, the day of waking and sleeping, the year of spring planting and fall harvest – the time scale of an astronomer defies comprehension.

Space is vast, and time is near eternal when measured on human time scales.

For people like Greenhill and Hicks, a millennium is a single flicker of a cosmic candle.

A few hundred thousand years is recent history, about as close to the present as you can get without missing the moment.

A million years may as well be yesterday. Even at a billion years they’re barely breaking a historical sweat.

As humans prepared to measure the passage of a thousand years, watching their calendars roll over to 2000, astronomers’ stories are a reminder of the depth of time.