Ed Lake's web page

Comments for Sunday, April 21, 2019, thru Saturday, April 27, 2019:

April 22, 2019 - Sigh! I thought this image of a single-beam radar gun checking the speed of a moving vehicle from a moving patrol car would resolve many arguments, but all it did was generate more arguments:

Moving radar gun checking
speed of moving car

To me it is absolutely clear that the gun is pointed at the white car. But the folks on the sci.physics.relativity UseNet forum argue that it is clearly pointed down the road. I say the 62 mph is the reading for the white car, they say the 62 mph reading is the reading for the road, which they see as moving relative to a "stationary" patrol car that is traveling at 62 mph on the road. And it must be just a coincidence that the operator grabbed up the radar gun just as the white car started passing by.

I need to find more videos of single-beam radar guns being use in moving vehicles. If that white car wasn't there, we wouldn't have an argument.

I also need to find out where the second beam is focused in a 2-beam radar gun. When the gun is calibrated, they put two different tuning forks in front of the same transmitter-receiver. There MUST be some difference in where the beams are focused, otherwise you just have two beams doing the same thing.

April 21, 2019(B) - Aha! I think I found something! Just before lunch, I was watching a YouTube video that a school teacher from Chile stated confirmed his beliefs (without explaining where or how the video does that), and I noticed a spot in the video where it seems to confirm my understanding of Relativity and how standard radar speed guns work. I hadn't noticed it on my first viewing. It is very brief and happens at about the 5 minute mark in the 7 minute 45 second video. Here's a screen capture of that point:

The video was shot to illustrate how a misaligned antenna on a 2-beam radar gun can give the wrong speed for the patrol car. (A 2-beam radar gun provides a speed for the patrol car (and gun) and the speed of a target vehicle.) The misaligned 2-beam antenna, which is fixed to the dash board, is not pointed straight down the road, it is pointed at an angle to the road, so it reads the patrol car's speed as being 55 mph, while the car's speedometer says the patrol car is going about 62 mph. To confirm the patrol car's speed, the operator suddenly picks up a single-beam radar gun and points it at a white car that is moving alongside the patrol car at about the same speed. The single-beam radar shows that the white car is moving at 62 mph.

According to True Believers on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum, and according to the on-line sales pitch for the Bushnell Velocity Speed Gun, the "The Velocity Speed Gun will measure the relative speed of a target as it moves towards or away from the Speed Gun." In other words, in the above situation the gun should register zero. Both vehicles are moving in the same direction at the same speed, so their speed relative to one another is zero.

According to my understanding of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, the radar gun emits photons at c (the speed of light) whether the gun is moving or not. In the above situation, the photons hit the white car at c-v, where v is the speed of the white car as it moves away from the point of emission. The photons hit at a slower rate, giving a Doppler effect of a slower oscillating photon. Atoms in the car then emit equivalent photons back to the radar gun. Those return photons oscillate slower than the photons that were emitted by the gun. The gun compares the fast oscillating speed of the photons it emitted to the slow oscillating speed of the photons that were returned and computes the difference in oscillation rates to be equivalent to a target speed of 62 mph. (The gun cannot show minus numbers.)

As I see it, this also means that if the single-beam gun was pointed at the railing along the side of the road, the gun would register zero as the railing's speed. The gun emitted photons that traveled at c, the photons hit the railing while traveling at c, and the railing will send back photons that oscillate at the same speed as the photons emitted by the gun.

It looks like I'm going to have to re-start the sci.physics.relativity discussion to see what the True Believers have to say about this.

April 21, 2019(A) - Yesterday, I finally put an end to the arguments I was engaged in on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum. The arguments had turned into endless opinion vs opinion claims about the meaning of words. Did Einstein use the words "postulate" and "principle" interchangeably as if they mean the same thing? I say "NO!" Einstein did not use them that way, and the words do not mean the same thing.

POSTULATE: an idea that is suggested or accepted as a basic principle before a further idea is formed or developed from it: (Astronomers postulate that the comet will reappear in 4000 years).

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/postulate

PRINCIPLE: a basic truth that explains or controls how something happens or works: (The machine works according to the principle of electromagnetic conduction).

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/principle

Is accepting an idea as a basic principle before developing an idea from it the same as a basic truth? Isn't that like saying if someone postulates that the Earth is flat in order to develop an idea of how to pole vault from China to Australia, that is the same as a basic truth that if the Earth was round, that would mean that if you drop a nickle, it could roll until it fell off the Earth?

It becomes an issue when the actual Second Postulate as defined in the second paragraph on page 1 of Einstein's 1905 paper on Special Relativity is ignored and instead a second principle stated as part of a different argument at the top of page 4 is argued to be Einstein's Second Postulate. Unfortunately, there is no simple way to resolve such arguments. It's just opinion versus opinion.

In another argument on the sci.physics.relativity forum, an electrical engineer bragged how he once beat a traffic ticket by bamboozling the judge. Here is how he described the case:

I once beat a speeding ticket this way by playing on the general lack of science of the police and judges. The police officer started off how they check the calibration of radar every morning by using the tuning forks (they had two of different frequencies) and each tuning fork corresponded to a displayed speed.

...
Police: ...and when using this tuning fork the radar unit displays a speed of 37 miles per hour...

Me (cross examing) Regarding those tuning forks, how fast were they traveling when you calibrated the radar unit?

Cop: The tuning forks are designed to display a particular speed when....

Me (insisting) How fast were the tuning forks traveling at the time...

Cop: The tuning forks cause the radar to display a particular speed....

Me: How fast were the tuning forks moving????

Cop: (finally) I was holding it in my hand in front of the horn, so they were stationary...

Me: So the radar gun is displaying a false speed of 37 miles per hour while clocking a STATIONARY object? And that's how it is CALIBRATED?? So how does anyone know if the speed you mentioned was meaningful if a STATIONARY object gets clocked at 37 miles per hour??

Cop: ummm.

Judge: Not guilty.

Claiming that you bamboozled a judge is a bizarre admission, but the engineer saw it differently. He said,

Any lawyer does the same daily.

It is a doubly bizarre admission since the engineer appears to have argued that the tuning fork must be moved around at 37 miles per hour in front of the radar gun, it cannot just vibrate. So, the standard procedure for calibrating radar guns is invalid, because it doesn't work the way the electrical engineer says it must.

I argued that when the tuning fork vibrates, the tines move at 37 mph. The engineer argued,

The tines vibrate back and forth in a sinusoidal pattern, first increasing then decreasing then increasing negatively then decreasing, constantly changing speed. Stating it is moving at a fixed speed is nonsense, especially since its (instantaneous) speed is going to depend on the AMPLITUDE, that is how hard it was whacked!

That is saying that a tuning fork cannot be used to tune anything! You cannot use it to tune a piano, since there is no meaning to the tone that you hear. Then what is the purpose of a tuning fork? And why do they call it a "tuning fork"? The engineer explained that "It is actually the radar gun which is fooled" when it is calibrated by using a tuning fork. His explanation was just gibberish to me, and I tried finding a clear explanation of how a tuning fork is used to calibrate a radar gun, but I couldn't find one. The explanations HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE say nothing about what the radar is actually measuring. We KNOW that a radar gun just shows the highest speed of any moving object in its target area. I'm assuming that that means it measures the speed at which the tips of the tines move, i.e., 37 mph in the court case. But the engineer disagrees:

the tips are constantly changing speed and direction, in a sinusoidal pattern, plus the speeds constantly decrease as the vibration dies down.

Here's an illustration I created for a comment I made on this subject ten months ago:

The tines just move back and forth, not in any "sinusoidal" (sine curve shaped) pattern. The gun will give a reading of 25 mph, which is the fastest speed the gun is measuring. But I cannot find any source anywhere which states explicitly that that is how the radar gun tuning fork works.

What I did find was that, if you do not know what you are doing, you can point your radar gun at a parked vehicle and get a reading of 35 mph, as shown in an excellent video I found. Here's a screen capture from that video:

What the video is actually showing is the highest speed recorded from the last time the gun was properly used to measure speeds. But I couldn't argue that the engineer may have done things that way, and I couldn't ask him to give me a demonstration of his gun being pointed at a highway sign from a moving car, because he might just do what is done in the above image - show the highest speed recorded in a previous test. After all, he has openly admitted that he will attempt to bamboozle people (even a judge) in order to achieve his objective.

So, I ended the discussion. We were in total disagreement on how a tuning fork works, and there was clearly no way I could change his mind. And he didn't offer to supply any facts or evidence to support his belief that a tuning fork has no set vibration frequency and just vibrates depending upon how hard you hit it.

It seems like something that can be easily disproved, but I really need to find solid evidence of how a tuning fork works when calibrating a radar gun. I once read somewhere that a radar gun can register 100 mph for a target car if a leaf on a tree in the target area is vibrating at 100 mph. The gun just shows the highest speed, it cannot tell you where that speed is measured from. A vibrating leaf is not all that different from a vibrating tuning fork.

But it's all going to have to wait until I can find something solid to use as evidence, and I really won't have time to even try finding something before the end of the month. I have a personal project which will be keeping me busy until then.

I've probably said this many times, but arguing on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum is like arguing with a cult of True Believers. They claim I am "closed minded" because I do not believe what they believe. Meanwhile, I just look at the evidence, which disagrees with what they believe. But I cannot find one single piece of evidence which undeniably shows who is right and who is wrong. All we can both find is slightly ambiguous evidence that does nothing but generate arguments. I started the debate on April 10, and today, 11 days later, the thread consists of 168 comments from 19 different people, and the comments have been viewed 349 times. Close to half of those comments are from me. It's depressing to think about how much time I spent writing those comments.

Comments for Sunday, April 14, 2019, thru Saturday, April 20, 2019:

April 18, 2019 - Hmm. I wondered if the Muller report is available on-line for anyone to read. Yup. I found a copy and downloaded it into my computer. It's searchable, too. You can read it HERE or download a copy from the page at that link. Here's a quote from the report:

According to notes written by Hunt , when Sessions told the President that a Special Counsel had been appointed, the President slumped back in his chair and said, "Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked ."⁵⁰⁴ The President became angry and lambasted the Attorney General for his decision to recuse from the investigation , stating, "How could you let this happen, Jeff?" ⁵⁰⁵ The President said the position of Attorney General was his most important appointment and that Sessions had " let [him] down ," contrasting him to Eric Holder and Robert Kennedy. ⁵⁰⁶ Sessions recalled that the President said to him, "you were supposed to protect me," or words to that effect. ⁵⁰⁷ The President returned to the consequences of the appointment and said, "Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency . It takes years and years and I won 't be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me." ⁵⁰⁸

I also found this image of me standing in front of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris a long time ago:

Me in front of Notre Dame in Paris
- long ago

April 17, 2019 - I still have far too many things going on at once. The biggest chunk of my time right now is being spent on arguing with the folks on the sci.physics.relativity UseNet forum. The thread I started on April 10 now has 80 posts by 15 different authors. About 10 of those authors are arguing with me about one topic or another, and sometimes multiple topics at once. And the arguments are getting longer and longer. I'd like to stop it and walk away, but some of the arguments are very thought-provoking.

Meanwhile, I've also been busy checking out all the podcasts mentioned on a Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast about podcasts. And sometimes those podcasts mention other podcasts. I checked out about 15 different sources for podcasts that seem like they might contain something of interest to me. I didn't have time to listen to more than one or two complete shows, but I downloaded and saved dozens of them. I saved a small sampling from each of the podcast sources that seemed like they might be of interest. Now I just have to find the time to listen to them.

I've filed away 22 episodes of Big Picture Science, which is produced by the SETI institute, and I haven't had the time to fully listen to any of them.

One source that was new to me was You must remember this. It is described this way:

This is the podcast exploring the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century.

It's about scandals involving old-time movies stars like Maureen O'Hara, Marlene Dietrich and Claudette Colbert. The podcasts may prove to be boring, but right now they have me very curious. I saved 11 episodes.

On the other end of the time scale, there's a podcast about recent data security breaches called "Breach." That one has me curious, too. I saved 6 episodes, but they appear to be 3 parts each on 2 different topics.

And, of course, I have to write comments here from time to time, otherwise people might start to worry or think I've died. I also have to prepare for a trip I'm going to be taking next week. Whether or not I'll be posting anything while I'm on the trip has yet to be decided.

April 15, 2019 - Groan! I definitely have too many things going on at once. It doesn't help that yesterday I listened to a podcast about podcasts (episode #272 on The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy), and the podcast provided the names of at least a dozen other podcasts I had never heard of before. So, I'm going to have to check them out to see what they are all about.

Meanwhile, on the positive side (I think), yesterday I finished listening to the audio book version of "Dark Matter," a sci-fi novel by Blake Crouch.

The unabridged audio version is 10 hours and 9 minutes long. I started it on Friday, listening to about 3½ hours of it, then on Saturday I listened to another 4½ or 5 hours, and yesterday I listened to the rest. It's a suspense novel, while also being a science-fiction novel. The main character leads a relatively normal life teaching science in college in Chicago, and he has a wife and son. Then suddenly he's kidnapped, he escapes, and his kidnapper is coming after him. That may not seem like a sci-fi novel plot, but the key point is that when he was kidnapped he was taken into a different dimension (or a different universe).

I almost gave up on the book when it started getting into Quantum Mechanics and "MultiVerses" (multiple universes in multiple dimensions). The main character has to find he way back to his own dimension. He's in a dimension where he is an award winning physicist, but he's divorced from his wife, and his son was never born. As he tries getting back to his own dimension (via a mysterious box in an abandoned power plant on the South Side of Chicago), he keeps encountering different versions of himself in different dimensions, and basically they all want to kill him in order to take over his life.

The story does carry you along, and it was certainly well told with the narrator using different voices for different characters, but I don't believe in the premise of the book, which is that every major decision you make creates an alternate universe where you decided differently. (It's the plot of a Gwyneth Paltrow movie from 1998 that I really like, "Sliding Doors," where missing a train puts poor Gwyneth into a parallel universe where her life is very different.)

So, while I didn't like the scientific premise for the book, it was still an enjoyable 10 hours and 9 minutes.

Meanwhile, I had to disappoint the guy who emailed me to ask my opinion of a scientific paper he had written. It was just too technical for me, and it seemed to have a more complex model of photons than typical papers. He uses a model where a photon is "concentrated energy traveling as a helical solenoid." In other words, the photon is cork-screw shaped. How do you polarize a corkscrew shaped photon? I apologized and told him I couldn't help him.

Also meanwhile, a guy on the sci.physics.relativity UseNet forum who may have read my paper about Photons and Polarization wrote something about photons that really got me thinking. He wrote:

Light as particles alone can’t explain why:
     1. its speed is c in air
     2. why its speed is less than c in glass
     3. why its speed is regained to c as it re-emerges from glass.

Part 3 is the key part. How can a light photon speed up when it exits a thick medium (like glass) and enters a thin medium (like air)? A photon has no engine to help it accelerate. Or does it? Could its oscillating fields push it faster? It's something I need to think about.

This morning I see a different scientist has answered the question by writing:

Speaking loosely: when the light ray is inside the medium, its myriad photons are constantly interacting with the myriad charged particles, and at each such interaction the "old" (incoming) photon is consumed and a "new" (outgoing) one is created.

That seems wrong to me. It is the process where photons are consumed by atoms in a surface and a new photon is then emitted. But the energy never goes further than the outermost electron, and the new photon is generally emitted in some random direction, except for silvered mirrors where the photon is emitted back in the direction from which it came. In the situation quoted above, each atom would have to take in the photon from one direction and emit a new photon in the exact opposite direction. That doesn't seem logical. It would seem to mean that the energy would have to pass through the nucleus of every atom it encounters. But, I'm going to have to think about it a bit before I write a response.

Busy busy busy.

April 14, 2019 - It seems the surge of readers of my newest paper "Photons and Polarization" is rapidly slowing down. But, the "surge" was never very big. In the past 6 days, only 34 people have viewed the copy I put on Vixra.org, and 78 people have viewed the copy I put on Academia.edu. As far as I can tell, no one has made any comments on those web sites. I mentioned the paper on the Time and Time Dilation Facebook group page, but there were no comments there, either. Only 6 people viewed my post, and there is no way to tell if any of them even read the paper. And I also mentioned the paper on the sci.physics.relativity UseNet Newsgroup, but the responses there were only personal attacks from people on my "Do Not Respond" list, a couple people who just basically said, "So what?" and some largely incoherent ramblings from people who seem to be struggling with the English language. That latter group just seemed to be pushing their own papers and ideas. Nevertheless, I responded to a couple posts from that latter group to see how they respond.

For example, yesterday I exchanged posts with a physics teacher in Chile who recommended that I find colleges nearby where scientists are giving talks, so that I can listen to them and ask questions. As I was typing a response about how I don't have the time to hunt down the locations of such talks, particularly when it seems highly unlikely that the subject of the talks will be my very narrow fields of interest, I suddenly realized that I listen to science talks almost every day. I listen to science podcasts. So, I mentioned that in my response. I'm now waiting to see how he responds. This morning I see nothing from him. I wonder if I made him aware of science podcasts for the first time.

I hadn't thought about mentioning podcasts on that UseNet forum before. I haven't been on any UseNet forums since last September or so, and I think I first learned about science podcasts a couple months ago. A search through my comments on this web site finds that I first used the word "podcast" in a December 2015 comment, when I argued with some 17-year old operator of a podcast about the "Rational Scientific Method." Then on October 23, 2017, I again mentioned a podcast. It was a podcast by the CDC (that is no longer on-line), and it contained information about one of the anthrax victims who hd survived. At the time, I evidently had no idea how popular podcasts were becoming. In one comment I even spelled it "pod-cast." The term didn't really mean much back then. Not what it means to me today.

In the comment I wrote yesterday on the sci.physics.relativity forum I mentioned a podcast that is one of my favorites. It is Episode #325 of "The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy," a mind-boggling interview with Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the excellent books "Sapiens" and "Homo Deus," both of which I read in early 2018. In the podcast interview, Harari and the podcast host talk about the common fear of computers taking over the world, and the BIG difference between "consciousness" and "intelligence." Professor Harari explains that problems related to artificial intelligence ("AI") are very different from how they are typically imagined. It isn't that computers are going to suddenly become conscious and robots are going to take over the world so that no one can turn them off, the real problem is that people are going to let computers do more and more tasks involving intelligence, and humans are going to forget how to do those things. People are going to depend upon computers more and more, until they reach the point that they cannot live without having computers constantly help them and make decisions for them.

They give an example of people using GPS to find their way from place to place. Some people use GPS so often that, if GPS was to suddenly shut down, they wouldn't know how to get home. They have lost all sense of direction and the need to recognize landmarks, which involves intelligence. They just do as GPS tells them.

Others use Google search so much that they lose their ability to do research without Google. It's a really interesting podcast, and it made me realize that I need to keep a record of the good podcasts as I go through them in order.

Meanwhile, when I checked my email inbox this morning, I found an email from someone in Australia who read my "Photons and Polarization" paper. I think it may be the first time anyone contacted me about a paper of mine via an email. He complemented me on certain parts of the paper, and then he asked for my thoughts about a paper he plans to put on Vixra.org. Groan! It's a very technical paper, 28 pages of fine print with 30 illustrations, and his visualization of a photon is very different from mine. So, it's going to take me awhile to study it and to give an opinion. But, it should be educational.

Also this morning, I found two posts addressed to me on the sci.physics.relativity UseNet forum that are not from people on my "Do Not Respond" list, so I'm going to have to respond there, too. I'll probably do those first, since they are relatively short posts and my responses can also be fairly short.

Busy busy busy.

Comments for Sunday, April 7, 2019, thru Saturday, April 13, 2019:

April 11, 2019 - Hmm. The number of unique readers of my paper on "Photons and Polarization" on vixra.org increased by 2 overnight, jumping from 15 to 17. However, the number of readers of the academia.edu copy increased from 4 to 48. I don't quite understand that, since I only mentioned the vixra.org link in my discussions on the sci.physics.relativity Usenet forum. I think academia.edu must be promoting the paper somehow, probably in hopes of getting me to join their "Premium" version where you pay a monthly fee and get certain benefits.

As I was typing this comment, they sent me an email with a graph:

academia.edu statistics for my
photon paper

Meanwhile, the discussions on the sci.physics.relativity forum are the standard stuff, i.e., attacks from mathematicians and rambling comments from people who have a hard time expressing themselves in English.

Also, I put together a crude animated gif of the oscillating fields of a photon, viewing the electric field from the side and and the magnetic field edge on. Here's what it looks like:

I was thinking of creating a "top view," a "front view" and a "traveling view," all in the same gif (but a lot smaller than the one above). However, that looks like a lot of work, and I'm feeling like I want to move on to other things.

April 10, 2019(B) - While running errands this afternoon, I finished listening to CD #14 in the 14-CD audio book set for "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future."

It was a very interesting book. I never paid that much attention to billionaire Elon Musk before, even though I would see his name mentioned in the news when his company Space-X tested rockets and became the first private company to deliver supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). It's quite possible that Space-X may soon start transporting astronauts to the ISS. Musk was also an investor and big force behind Paypal and Tesla motors. His vision of getting rid of gas-burning cars and replacing them with electric cars makes a lot of sense, but he'll have other billionaires fighting against him, billionaires who make their billions off of oil and gasoline.

The contrasts between billionaire Elon Musk and billionaire Donald Trump are also interesting. Musk believes Global Warming is a big danger, he cares for his employees and for the environment, and he voted for Obama. Trump would probably love bringing back coal-powered cars, he does not believe that Global Warming is real, he'll fire any employee who he feels is not sufficiently loyal and a supporter of Trump's agenda and beliefs, and he absolutely hates Obama.

The Tesla automobile seems like a millionaire's status symbol right now, but the book suggests that there are so many benefits to having an electric car versus a gas-guzzler, and electric cars are much much simpler than cars with internal combustion engines, so the price of electric cars will almost certainly go down and down. The biggest obstacle right now seems to be the recharging-stations, which are few and far apart. Musk has visions of cars pulling into a charging station where robots replace battery packs in a matter of a few minutes, and your car then has what it needs to keep it running for another 500 miles. And, of course, the batteries would be recharged using solar panels and wind turbines, the technologies that Donald Trump just hates.

Musk's biggest dream seems to be to colonize Mars. While that seems a long way off, Musk is working on it right now. He sees it as the only way to keep the human race going after life on Earth becomes no longer viable.

There are probably a lot more interesting things in the book that I'm failing to mention, but there's just no easy way to make notes when you listen to an audio book while driving. So, I'm just working from memory in this comment.

April 10, 2019(A) - This morning, the vixra.org statistics for my new paper "Photons and Polarization" show that 13 people read the paper in the past 24 hours, raising the grand total for two days to 15. The number of new readers on academia.edu increased by just 1 in the same time period, for a grand total of 4. While the numbers aren't astonishing, 13 reads in one day for a single paper of mine is better than average, but less than the record of 23 which I hit twice for the same paper with "Simplifying Einstein's Thought Experiments" in May, 2018, when I had 23 reads on the 16th, 21 on the 17th and 23 again on the 18th.

This morning I mentioned my "Photons and Polarization" paper in a new post to the sci.physics.relativity Usenet forum. I think it's the first time I've posted there since September of last year, yet when I posted the message this morning, there was another message by me right next to it. Someone had responded to a message I posted in May 2017, putting his post at the top of the list after my new post. I can't believe that it is just a coincidence, so I'm going to assume that it was someone who saw my new paper on vixra.or or academia.edu, researched me, and found that I had posted messages to the sci.physics.relativity forum in the past. The person writing the post wants to collaborate with me. I would think that if someone wants to collaborate with me, they'd send me an email. Unfortunately, I'm not interested in collaborating with anyone on anything. I'm just writing for my own edification.

It could be interesting, however, to see what the reaction to my new paper is on the sci.physics.relativity forum. That message I posted in May 2017 had 389 responses and 1,139 views.

April 9, 2019 - Yesterday, I finished reading a book on my Kindle. It was "Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House" by Cliff Sims.

I've got 33 pages of notes, i.e., passages I highlighted while reading. I wouldn't say it was an enjoyable read, but it was definitely interesting. Cliff Sims is a Trump supporter, so it's a look at how a Trump supporter thinks. Sims is also a religious man, so it's a look at how a religious man can support someone like Trump who happily breaks nearly all the Commandments. Here's how Sims justifies working for Trump:

I joined the campaign with no illusions about who Trump was—a deeply flawed man. But the balance of the Supreme Court was on the line, which mattered to me and so many others. In my view, this really was the Flight 93 Election: “charge the cockpit or you die.”

The term "Flight 93 Election" comes up a few times early in the book. It is a reference to United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. When Muslim terrorists took over Fight 93 with the apparent plan to crash it into the White House, some of the passengers attempted to take the plane back from the terrorists. They knew they were going to die if they didn't, so they had to give it a try. In the end, they all died in a farm field in Pennsylvania. Sims saw the 2016 election as being similar. If the Religious Right didn't take the White House, their religious beliefs would not be made the law of the land and they would be doomed to live under non-believers.

Here's a passage about Sims' background:

At the time, my faith was one of the reasons I struggled with Trump’s unexpected rise. The playboy past, the casinos, the profanity, a seeming lack of common decency—all of it was tough to swallow for a Southern boy with Baptist ministers for a father and grandfather.

Here's a quote about working conditions in the White House from early in the book:

The inner circle of Trump World was not always a pretty picture. Too often it was a portrait of venality, stubbornness, and selfishness. We leaked. We schemed. We backstabbed. Some of us told ourselves it was all done in the service of a higher calling—to protect the President, to deliver for the people. But usually it was for ourselves. Most of us came to Washington convinced of the justice of our cause and the righteousness of our principles, certain that our moral compasses were true. But proximity to power changes that. Donald Trump changes that.

Backstabbing is the way things are done in the Trump White House. Cliff Sims eventually got booted out by jealous backstabbers who didn't like the fact that Sims had a closer relationship with Trump than they did. Here's how Sims describes the results of a personality test he took:

My test results revealed that while I was by disposition a polite person, I was not by nature a kind one. I was quick to seek revenge and slow to offer forgiveness. I had a warrior spirit, but lacked a servant heart. I was too quick to pass judgment on the motives of my “enemies,” while granting myself moral superiority in the process.

That appears to be the general type of person Trump had around him. They considered themselves to be "killers" out to get rid of their enemies. Another quote:

Killer. This was the single highest compliment that Donald Trump—not the President, but the man—could pay another human being, and it had been for decades.

and another:

In 1980, a half decade before I was even born, Trump sat down with entertainment reporter Rona Barrett for his first-ever network television interview. “I think that the world is made up of people with either killer instincts or without killer instincts,” Trump told her. “The people that seem to emerge all the time—it doesn’t mean they’re the best … are the people that are competitive and driven and with a certain instinct to win.” In short, killers. And this was a mind-set that had been instilled in Trump since childhood.

And lastly, here's a quote from near the end of the book:

I do know that I am proud to have worked in the White House, to have served my country. I’m proud to have worked for the President of the United States. And in spite of the frustrations and misgivings laid out in this book, I’m proud that the president I served was Donald Trump. In a sense, my time in the White House could serve as a cautionary tale of the corrosive effects of power. I do believe that power can corrupt, that our moral compass becomes less trustworthy the closer it gets to the magnetic pole of absolute power. But the further removed I am from the West Wing, the more convinced I become that what power really does, more than corrupt, is reveal—it exposes our true colors, uncovers or magnifies the flaws that already existed.

So, while it certainly wasn't an enjoyable book to read, since it was written by someone who thinks he is morally superior to others who do not share his faith, and who was happy to work for a total hypocrite because it served his own agenda, it was interesting. The only problem is that it makes you wonder how many others in America think like Cliff Sims. Are they the majority? If they are, then I shudder to think what the future will be like.

During breakfast this morning, I started reading a humor book about writing and creating comedy shows for television. I think I'm done with reading books about Trump for awhile. The ten unread books I have about him will just have to wait.

Meanwhile, the first day's vixra.org statistics show I got a whopping 2 reads on my new paper "Photons and Polarization." On Academia.edu the paper got 3 reads. I hope no one gets injured as they climb over one another to be among the first to read my paper. ;-)

April 8, 2019 - My paper "Photons and Polarization" is now on vixra.org at the top of the list in the Classical Physics category. The email notification that was in my inbox this morning says that it was posted at 6:18 a.m., about 4 hours ago. So far, there have been no readers (except me), but I think they only update the "Unique-IP document downloads" information once per day, and I think that happens sometime in the afternoon.

I just mentioned the paper on my Facebook page about Time and Time Dilation.

And I just added it to academia.edu. I haven't been paying much attention to that site, and I probably should check to see if there are other papers I should post there. I just need to find the time to focus on that task.

Meanwhile, yesterday I listened to a very interesting podcast from the Geek's Guide to The Galaxy. It's episode #232 from December of 2016, and it is an interview with Shawn Otto, the author of the book "The War on Science."

The War on Science explores ways that citizens can fight back against a creeping tide of anti-science nonsense promulgated by everyone from postmodern academics to greedy oil companies to nature-loving hippies. An important step is to make journalists understand that science and opinion should not be given equal weight.

With all the science podcasts I have on my waiting list, I hadn't thought about any "war on science." It seems like lots of people are interested in science. But, of course, that doesn't mean there aren't also a lot of people who want to discredit science because it conflicts with their beliefs or their business goals.

Unfortunately, my local library doesn't have a copy of "The War On Science," otherwise I'd put it on my reading list. But, I think it may explore some of the same topics as "Merchants of Doubt," which is already in my Kindle waiting for me to get to it.

April 7, 2019 - I think I'm going to upload Version 1 of my paper "Photons and Polarization" to Vixra.org later today. The paper consists of just 13 pages with 18 illustrations, sometimes 3 on a page. The paper probably needs work to get rid of some repetition of arguments, and the illustrations definitely can be improved upon, but I've already spent so much time on the paper that I don't have the will power to make further improvements right now.

As soon as Vixra.org advises me that the paper has been placed on their site and provides me with the link address, I'll first provide that information on this web site, and then I'll provide it on my Time and Time Dilation Facebook page. Hopefully, that would be tomorrow morning. Then I'll probably wait a day to see what reaction I get before I inform the belligerent and closed-minded scientists and trolls on the sci.physics.relativity newsgroup about it. They'll probably go bonkers - or they might just totally ignore it.

In preparation for submitting the paper, I checked Vixra.org and was reminded that I have to pick a category for the paper. They list 13 different submission categories, such as "High Energy Particle Physics," "Astrophysics," "Quantum Physics," "Quantum Gravity and String Theory" and "Climate Research." The proper category for my paper appears to be "Classical Physics."

I then perused some of papers that had been recently submitted in that category and found one that seems to hit on one of the subjects that my paper addresses. The paper is titled "About Energy of Photon," and it's by two "independent researchers" with no details as to where they are located, but their names suggest it's probably in the Middle East or India. While there is bad English in the title and in the paper, the point of the paper clearly agrees with my paper 100%. Here's the abstract for their paper:

There is a widespread view in contemporary physics that the electric field of an electromagnetic wave is in the phase with the magnetic field. This statement is incorrect. The article discloses in detail that the above statement leads to violating the law of energy conservation. The right statement is that electric and magnetic fields in the photon are shifted mutually by 90 degrees. In this case the electric field converts to the magnetic field and vice versa. The energy of the photon over time remains constant.

It would have been nice if the paper explained why "there is a widespread view in contemporary physics that the electric field of an electromagnetic wave is in the phase with the magnetic field." But it doesn't. It just says it's wrong. In my paper I also say it is wrong, and I explain that it is wrong because it is illogical. And I explain why it is illogical. The "Energy of Photon" paper consists mostly of mathematical arguments. I cannot decipher the mathematical reasoning used in the paper, but there's no doubt that their conclusion agrees with my paper - and so does most of their abstract. My paper just covers a lot more territory and does a much better job of explaining things.

Interestingly, the paper seems to argue that the mathematics may work perfectly for the "widespread view," but it is still nonsense. And the authors provide their own mathematics to justify their argument.

While it's kind of disheartening to discover that others are saying the same things I am saying, on the positive side, their paper tells me that there are at least two other people in the world who agree with me about something. Their paper also suggests that we may be the only people in the world who agree about how photons work. We just arrived at our conclusions from different directions.

I also noticed that the same authors have recently put a paper titled "About Arrow of Time" on Vixra.org. It's also mostly about math, but it definitely has nothing to do with anything I've written.

Yesterday, my plan was to start work on a second paper about photons sometime next week. It would be titled something like "Refraction, Diffraction and Photons," and would include material I had to strip out of the first paper, things like how photons work in Thomas Young's Double Slit Experiment.

But this morning everything changed. My subconscious had been very busy overnight and when I woke up it informed me that it was time to self-publish my two science fiction novels. I wrote them in 2013 and 2014, but I wasn't able to find an agent to help sell them to publishers. (Check my comments for April 24, 25 and 27, 2014). It's kind of a surprise to me that it was so long ago. I wrote the first one in late 2013. (Check my comment for December 22, 2013. ) I wrote the sequel the next year. My thinking in mid-2014 was that it would be easier to get an agent or a publisher interested if I had a 3-novel series completed. Series novels are the current rage - particularly in science fiction. But I could never think up a good idea for the 3rd novel.

The first step in the process of self-publishing will be to re-read the first book to make sure it's still as good as I thought it was back in 2013. Then I'll have to refresh my memory about how self-publishing works. The last time I did it was in 2012. It's easier today than it was then, but what my subconscious was so excited about was that it's also a lot easier to promote a self-published book these days. Social media and podcasts have changed everything.

Comments for Monday, April 1, 2019, thru Saturday, April 6, 2019:

April 3, 2019 (B) - Someone just sent me a link to an article titled "Court orders publisher OMICS to pay U.S. gov’t $50 million in suit alleging 'unfair and deceptive practices'.” The article doesn't say much, but when I checked out OMICS, I found that they publish "open access" scientific articles, which means the author pays OMICS to publish the article in one of their journals, and readers get to read it for free.

That always seemed like a scam to me, but I encountered a lot of scientists who seem to consider "open access" journals to be a sound investment, particularly if their company is providing the money. It allows the scientist to tell the world that his or her paper has been peer reviewed and published, which gives it some validity. The judgement document for OMICS, however, says:

Consistently, Defendants have represented their peer review policies as “highly appreciated, accepted and adaptable” to the criteria set forth by agencies such as PubMed. (PX12 Att. L at 773).
In contradiction to these assertions, however, the FTC submits evidence indicating that Defendants’ peer review practices are a “sham.” (FTC’s MSJ 24:4–5). For example, in certain instances, consumers who submitted articles were approved for publication within just several days of submission. (SJX 26 Att. A at 20, 53, 69, 84, 86, 114). In others, consumers reported receiving no comments or proposed revisions from peer reviewers. (See id. at 37, 53, 73, 93, 114, 124). The consumers who did receive feedback from reviewers have noted that it was not substantive.

and

Based on documents received through discovery, the FTC asserts that out of 69,000 published articles, only 49% indicate that some form of review was conducted.

OMICS also runs "conferences" on various scientific topics, charging people to attend the conferences. They promoted such conferences by saying they were organized by noted scientists. But most of the time the "noted scientists" named in the advertising had nothing to do with the conferences. Some even sued OMICS to have their names removed from the advertising.

A little additional research shows that The New York Times printed an article about OMICS's scams on December 29, 2016. The article was titled "A Peek Inside the Strange World of Fake Academia." And looking at the comments following the original article in the link I was sent, it appears that OMICS is based in India. That is probably why the article says the government is going to get the money, instead of OMICS repaying the people it bilked. If the government does get the money, then they can figure out how to distribute it.

I've never paid to have any of my "scientific papers" published. I do not have the "credentials" that the top scientific journals require before they will even read a paper, so I just put my papers on Vixra.org and/or Academia.edu. There is no charge, and there is no "peer review" before acceptance. The only "peer review" information you generally get is statistics on how many different people have accessed the paper. Some readers might post comments, but generally only those who disagree do so and they say nothing else of value. But, at least the information is out there and it has my name on it. So, if someone else says the same thing in a paper they wrote, I can prove that I had the idea first.

April 3, 2019 (A) - My two blogs are still working this morning, so I'm not going to mention them again on this web site until the blogs either disappear or until the 1st of next month, whichever comes first.

Meanwhile, yesterday I voted in local elections for the first time in as long as I can remember. (I usually only vote in the Presidential and mid-term elections.) I voted because there is a Trump-supporting judge running for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and I just had to vote against him. His TV ads put my teeth on edge, reminding me of the book by Ed Asner I recently read and how conservatives constantly argue that they want to uphold the Constitution, when in reality they are saying that they want to interpret the Constitution to fit their agenda and beliefs.

This morning I see that the race is too close to call, and they will probably have to do a recount. But the Republican judge is declaring victory anyway, since he appears to be ahead. I'm not sure what it means for national elections, but it clearly shows that liberals and moderates (like myself) very often do not bother to vote, while those driven by anger and hate want to make their feelings known.

By coincidence, last night I rented and watched a movie titled "Vice." It's about Dick Cheney's rise to power. But most interesting to me was the fact that the movie shows President George W. Bush to be an incompetent. I've always viewed "W" to be the dumbest President we've ever had, even dumber than Trump, but this movie shows "W" as knowing he is not very smart and unsuited to be President, so he allows his Vice President, Dick Cheney, to run the country. It's an extremely interesting movie, while at the same time being very depressing. After watching the movie, I have a slightly different view of Trump. I now see Trump as being as dumb as George W. Bush while at the same time being as evil and as scheming as Dick Cheney. And I worry that there may be enough people who are driven by hate and anger in this country to elect Trump again in 2020.

April 2, 2019 - My two blogs were still there this morning. But the March 20 email I received from Google said,

This is a reminder that on April 2, 2019 we’re shutting down consumer Google+ and will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts. Photos and videos from Google+ in your Album Archive and your Google+ pages will also be deleted.

So, I guess the key word is "begin." How long will it take them to get to my blogs? I dunno. I can't even find anything on my blogs that uses the term "Google+", so I could be misinterpreting everything. Here is a snapshot of this morning's statistics for my "My Thoughts on the Changing World" blog:

Stats for My Thoughts one the
Changing World

Stats for My Thoughts one the
Changing World

Note that 13 pageviews in a day is about the maximum the blog gets these days, and Russia is the next biggest visitor after the United States. Brazil seems to be third. Compare the above to the stats for my Debating the Anthrax Attacks of 2001 blog I included in yesterday's comment.

Note, too, that the 2nd most popular Entry page is titled "Trump thinks emotionally, NOT logically." I tried to start a discussion on that topic just over two years ago, on March 23, 2017. No one responded. For the past couple days I've been wondering if the people who do not have their kids vaccinated are primarily Trump supporters. Such people are clearly thinking emotionally, not logically. And some claim religious reasons for not having their kids vaccinated. That probably also puts them in Trump's camp. Or, I could be putting 2 and 2 together to get 397.

The current measles outbreak is in the news almost every day. Measles was virtually wiped out in the US about twenty years ago. Two weeks ago, there was a great episode on Madam Secretary about the current outbreak. And there are plenty of web sites which expressed concern years ago over people not having their kids vaccinated.

Sometimes I wonder if there shouldn't be some kind of test to see who thinks emotionally and who thinks logically. Everyone probably does both, but the people who primarily think emotionally could be a danger to everyone. When there is a danger, you do not want to be surrounded by people who only think emotionally. Such people also do not believe in Global Warming. I wonder if we need to find ways to change their mode of thinking - or find ways to convince them emotionally that vaccination is best for everyone and Global Warming is real and a major problem that cannot be ignored.

I'm tempted to create a blog entry about this. But what would be the point if the blog is going to disappear at any moment? Besides, there appear to be plenty of Facebook groups discussing it. Unfortunately, most are run by people who think vaccines are dangerous and that the current measles outbreak is some kind of conspiracy to get people to accept having their children vaccinated.

April 1, 2019 - Tomorrow I should find out if Google is going to delete my two blogs, Debating the Anthrax Attacks of 2001 and My Thoughts on the Changing World. I haven't updated either one in a long time, and I've made full copies of both blogs, so I'm ready for it to happen.

Each morning, as part of my daily routine, I check the statistics for the two blogs to see how many people are visiting. There haven't been very many lately - until a few days ago. Below is a screen capture of part of what the statistics look like for my anthrax debate blog (there's nothing unusual on my Changing World blog statistics.)

anthrax blog stats for April 1, 2019

Part of the warning Google is giving me is at the top. (The full warning in shown in my March 21, 2019 comment.) It's mostly gibberish to me, but I'm pretty sure it says they are going to delete the two blogs on April 2.

More interesting to me this morning is the number of pageviews. The graph in the upper left corner shows four large spikes in the number of pageviews. If I put the cursor over a spike, it provides the time and number of views the spike represents. The first small spike is for 10 a.m. on 3/26/19 and represents 82 views. The second spike is for 11 a.m. on 3/27/19 and represents 331 views. The third spike is for 7 p.m. on 3/28.19 and represents 364 views. The fourth is for 10 p.m. on 3/29/19 and represents 402 views. And the last tall spike is for 2 a.m. on 3/31/19 and represents 414 views.

The stats on the upper left show that there were 442 pageviews on 3/31/19, so the spike represents well over 90 percent of the total views for the day. There is no meaningful information about what page or pages they looked at, but in the lower right it shows 1,583 pageviews came from Google.com and the map shows that most of the pageviews came from the United States. Could Google have made copies of the pages on the blog? Is that what generated the spikes? The blog has 124 separate pages, so what would 442 pageviews represent? I dunno. I'm not even totally certain that Google is going to delete the blogs tomorrow. That is just how I decipher the gibberish in their messages added to the blog - and in the one email they sent me.

It's kind of scary to have a big corporation that uses its own terminology (or computer geek terminology) send warning messages that are virtually indecipherable.

Interestingly, this morning I received another order from a different giant corporation (the same one I mentioned in previous comments in January and December). That corporation, too, cannot be contacted because they are so large that they cannot afford to staff enough people to deal with individual customers directly. So, you have to deal with computers if you want to communicate with them. And, if you have a response that does not fit one of their programmed questions, their computers cannot compute it. And their computers will just repeat their request. The request is an order for something, presumably books (or a book). But they do not say which book or how many books they want me to ship them. You have to join a program in order to find out. And the program costs $99 per year. Since I won't do that, I'm evidently doomed to receive orders for books once a month for the rest of my life.

Comments for Sunday, March 24, 2019, thru Sunday, March 31, 2019:

March 31, 2019 - While I still think my paper about photons should be finished in a week or ten days, I'm feeling I need to add more references. So, I browsed through the 4th edition of a college textbook titled "Optics," by Eugene Hecht. It generally supports the idea that light consists of photons, but it also endlessly explains light by using wave theory.

It says this on page 51:

Light is absorbed and emitted in tiny discrete bursts, in particles of electromagnetic "stuff," known as photons. That much has been confirmed and is well established, but the question of whether or not light is "really" a stream of photons is far from settled, and that issue will be revisited several times to come.*

Who said light is a stream of photons? Photons do not travel in streams. Photons are usually emitted randomly and travel individually.

The asterisk at the end of the quote leads to a note at the bottom of the page which says:

*Thus whenever, for brevity's sake, an expression such as "a beam of photons" is used, the reader is advised to keep in mind that although the light-is-corpuscular model has wide acceptance (especially in high-energy physics) and is a crucial part of the contemporary discourse, like almost everything else in physics, it is not yet established beyond all doubt. See, for example, the summary article by R. Kidd. J. Ardini, and A. Anton "Evolution of the modern photon," Am. j. Phys. 57 (11, 27 (1989)

How can there be any doubt that light consists of photons, not waves?

I found a copy of the Kidd article, and it does indeed argue that light consists of waves, not photons, and that all the evidence to the contrary could be wrong. But the evidence it uses is historical arguments, not modern-day experiments that anyone can perform to remove all doubt that light consists of individual photons.

Hecht's book also quotes Richard Feynman on page 139 (the same quote that I have used many times on this web site):

Feynman was rather unequivocal in his stance regarding the nature of light:

I want to emphasize that light comes in this form - particles. It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you were probably told something about light behaving like waves. I'm telling you the way it does behave - like particles.

For him "light is made of particles (as Newton originally thought)"; it's a stream of photons whose behavior en masse can be determined statistically.

Again Hecht talks about "a stream of photons," as if that is the only way photons can exist - as streams. And, evidently, Hecht believes photons travel in streams because their "behavior en masse can be determined statistically." So, the only argument against photons is a statistical (mathematical) argument. It appears that Hecht purposely ignores the reason Richard Feynman gave for stating that "light behaves like particles." The quote Hecht used is from page 15 of Feynman's book "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter." On page 14 of that same book it says,:

We know that light is made of particles because we can take a very sensitive instrument that makes clicks when light shines on it, and if the light gets dimmer, the clicks remain just as loud—there are just fewer of them. Thus light is something like raindrops—each little lump of light is called a photon—and if the light is all one color, all the “raindrops” are the same size.

And Feyman then goes into great detail explaining how photomultipliers work, and he even says,

You might say that it’s just the photomultiplier that detects light as particles, but no, every instrument that has been designed to be sensitive enough to detect weak light has always ended up discovering the same thing: light is made of particles.

All this is on the page before the quote that Hecht used to create an argument that the matter is not settled.

I also browsed through the 3rd edition of the book "Polarized Light" by Dennis H. Goldstein. It only uses the word "photon" about a half dozen times, but it uses the word "wave" countless times, and it says this on page 3:

We now know that electromagnetic radiation is a transverse wave; that is, an oscillation of electric and magnetic fields in a direction perpendicular to the direction of propagation.

This morning I looked for the word "photon" in another text book, the 4th edition of "Physics for Scientists and Engineers" by Douglas C. Giancoli. It generally describes light as consisting of photons, but it also says you have to understand wave theory to fully understand light. I also browsed through a couple other books, but they were just more of the same: they explained light as both photons and as waves. One book, "Fundamentals of Photonics," edited by Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri even makes describing "the dual nature of light" a task for the student. It's a "goal" stated on page 2:

Describe the dual nature of light, as a continuous wave and a discrete particle (photon), and give examples of light exhibiting both natures.

To me, if we don't know the exact nature of light - i.e., whether light is a particle or a wave - the #1 task scientists should have in this field is to FIND OUT how a photon works. As anyone can see from Richard Feyman explanation, we know without any doubt that light consists of photons! So, the question becomes: how can a photon appear to be a wave? That question is what my paper tries to answer. It makes understanding light relatively simple and straightforward. But will anyone accept a simple and straightforward explanation for how light works when the whole world seems to be blissfully content with a complex "dual nature" explanation of how light works? Time will tell.

March 29, 2019 - Once again I've managed for several days to focus on writing my scientific paper about photons. But it was done at the cost of not posting any comments here. I'm hoping to be finished with the paper in a week or so. The trick seems to have been to reduce the scope of the paper. As it exists right now, the paper will just be about visualizing photons. It essentially says, "Since we know these facts about photons, a photon must look and work this way." When I've finished the paper and have put it on Vixra.org, I can then move on to work on a separate and different paper about how photons operate in the Double Slit Experiment. That material is no longer included in the current paper.

Meanwhile, I've made Firefox my main Internet browser. I had no choice. I kept running into situations where SeaMonkey wouldn't work. More and more companies with web sites appear to be using new options that SeaMonkey doesn't handle. The first one I encountered was RedBox. SeaMonkey doesn't allow me to access RedBox to see what movies are available to rent. Then the web site run by one of my local grocery stores wouldn't work with SeaMonkey. Then one of my blogs. I still prefer SeaMonkey, but if it doesn't work when I need it to work, I have no choice but to switch to FireFox -- mostly. For some reason, the Amazon site where I check on the sales for my books won't work with Firefox, but it works fine with SeaMonkey. And I need to keep SeaMonkey around because I use it to maintain and update this web site. Firefox has no such capability.

Also meanwhile, my scientific papers seem to be getting more views than was the situation in the past. The increase is particularly noticeable on Academia.edu where I also have copies of most of my papers available. I haven't been putting all of my papers on that site because it is cumbersome to work with and it doesn't get anywhere near the same number of readers as Vixra.org. Right now it shows only 137 total views for all the papers I have on the site. Vixra.org, on the other hand, has 442 views for just my Time Dilation paper, 390 views for my paper on Einstein's Second Postulate, and more than 137 views for each of three other papers. But, when I can find the time, I'm going to have to figure out the best and simplest way to put papers on Academia.edu.

March 26, 2019 - As I mentioned yesterday, I've been studying an article titled
"Introduction to Polarized Light" that I found on the Nikon camera company's web site. The first illustration in the article looks something like this:

That image is very similar to many other descriptions of polarized light that I've seen (and have shown on this web site). The problem I've been having is not the image, it's in the description of what is shown in the image. The article says in the second paragraph:

The basic concept of polarized light is illustrated in Figure 1 for a non-polarized beam of light incident on two linear polarizers. Electric field vectors are depicted in the incident light beam as sinusoidal waves vibrating in all directions (360 degrees; although only six waves, spaced at 60-degree intervals, are included in the figure). In reality, the incident light electric field vectors are vibrating perpendicular to the direction of propagation with an equal distribution in all planes before encountering the first polarizer.

In plainer English, they are saying that light waves are moving in a straight line toward the first polarizer while the light waves are also going go up and down in all directions, not just the 6 directions depicted in the illustration. Okay. No problem. However, it's even easier to understand when thinking of photons. The oscillating photons are oriented in all directions as they travel in a straight line to the first polarizer. The problems come in the next paragraph:

The polarizers illustrated in Figure 1 are actually filters containing long-chain polymer molecules that are oriented in a single direction. Only the incident light that is vibrating in the same plane as the oriented polymer molecules is absorbed, while light vibrating at right angles to the polymer plane is passed through the first polarizing filter. The polarizing direction of the first polarizer is oriented vertically to the incident beam so it will pass only the waves having vertical electric field vectors. The wave passing through the first polarizer is subsequently blocked by the second polarizer, because this polarizer is oriented horizontally with respect to the electric field vector in the light wave. The concept of using two polarizers oriented at right angles with respect to each other is commonly termed crossed polarization and is fundamental to the concept of polarized light microscopy.

Okay. The filter contains long-chain polymer molecules that are oriented in a single direction. Got it. Presumably, "Polarizer 1 (Vertical)" in Figure 1 shows the orientation of those molecules. The molecules are oriented vertically, creating the vertical bars.

But then it says that only the light waves that are going up an down in that same plane are absorbed. Huh? And light waves that are going up and down at right angles to the polymer plane pass through the filter. Huh?!

Isn't that the exact opposite of what is shown in Figure 1? It took me awhile to figure out what I was misunderstanding. It only makes sense if the "long-chain polymer molecules" are oriented so that their electric fields are horizontal and their magnetic fields are vertical. But the word "magnetic" is never used in the article, much less "magnetic waves." The entire article is about electric waves.

When you stretch a sheet of transparent plastic, what happens to the magnetic and electric fields of the atoms in the plastic? A little research found a physics web site titled "Focus: Magnetic Field Aligns Polymer Structures" which is all about how magnetic fields are used to create polymer structures. The article contains this bit of information:

Researchers have previously used electric fields to align block copolymer domains [1], a technique that relies on the difference in the electric field response of the two polymer blocks. However, the effect is weak, which means that strong electric fields are required, and these fields can damage the polymers.

Ah! So polymers are mostly about magnetic fields. Strong electric fields are a problem. That means that, when you stretch a piece of plastic polymer and create a polarizing filter, the filter theorectically looks like the grid below:

The openings in the filter are the spaces between the columns. If a photon hits the filter with its electric and magnetic fields aligned in the same way as the fields in the filter, the photon will be absorbed. However, if the photon hits the filter with its electric field aligned perpendicular to the electric fields in the filter, then the photon will pass. Photons that have electric fields that are not exactly vertical will either pass or be absorbed, depending upon how close the electric field is to being vertical.

The Nikon article also says,

When the polarizers are partially crossed at 30 and 60 degrees, the light transmitted by the analyzer is reduced by 25 percent and 75 percent, respectively.

In other words, when you have two polarizing filters, one vertical and one turned 30 degrees away from vertical, 25% of the light passing through the first filter will be absorbed by the second filter. And if the first filter is vertical and the second is turned 60 degrees away from vertical, 75% of the light that passed through the first filter will be absorbed by the second filter.

It was just this sentence in the article that confused me:

The polarizing direction of the first polarizer is oriented vertically to the incident beam so it will pass only the waves having vertical electric field vectors.

I would have written that sentence this way:

The electrical fields of the first polarizer are oriented horizontally to the incident beam so it will pass only the waves having vertical electric field vectors.

There's another section in the article that I disagree with and would have written it differently. It relates to Figure 6 and starts with this sentence:

Rotating the analyzer [i.e., second filter] transmission axis by 30-degrees with respect to that of the polarizer [i.e., first filter] reduces the amplitude of a light wave passing through the pair

In the Cambridge dictionary, "amplitude" is defined this way:

Amplitude: the strength of a wave of sound or electricity, measured at the strongest repeating part of the wave. Amplitude is also the height of a wave from top to bottom.

Polarizers do NOT change the amplitude of light photons (or waves). Polarizers change the NUMBER of photons that pass through. When you have fewer photons getting through the filter, the light is dimmer, but each photon still has the same amplitude (the same field strength) as it had before reaching the filter. I don't think there is any way to change the amplitude of a photon. The article seems to be totally in the fantasy world of light waves on that subject.

Nevertheless, the article seems to have fully clarified for me how polarization and polarizing filters work. Now, hopefully I can get back to work on my paper about polarization.

March 25, 2019 - This morning I started working on a comment about a web page titled "Introduction to Polarized Light," which is operated by the Nikon camera company. It's a very interesting web page, mostly written in plain English instead of mathematical equations, and it seems to explain a lot of basic things. But you still have to decipher some of what is being said. By lunchtime, I was still working on the comment and it seemed like I was nowhere near being done. So, I saved what I'd written and I'll try to complete it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, yesterday I tried accessing this web site via three different search engines, and I "refreshed" the content each time to make sure I actually accessed my site instead of pulling the information from a cache in my own computer. Here are the log entries to the main page:

255.0.255.0 - - [24/Mar/2019:12:24:35 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 282519 "http://www.yippy.com/search/?v%3Aproject=clusty-new&query=ed-lake.com&xtoken=18427888605c97bd3a546b8" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.4"

255.0.255.0 - - [24/Mar/2019:14:55:58 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 304 - "https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrJ7J7J4JdcyrUAP1VXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEybzQwNWh1BGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ
0aWQDQjI5NDRfMQRzZWMDc3I-/RV=2/RE=1553486154/
RO=10/RU=http%3a%2f%2fwww.ed-lake.com%2f/RK=2/RS=rJ9YMVhpKOQMcWi2oOOvv2wAieE-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.4"

255.0.255.0 - - [24/Mar/2019:14:58:28 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 304 - "https://r.search.aol.com/_ylt=A0PDsBte4ZdcpnEAfFRpCWVH;_ylu=X3oDMTByOHZyb21tBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aW
QDBNlYwNzcg--/RV=2/RE=1553486302/RO=10/RU=http%3a%2f%2fwww.ed-lake.com%2f/RK=0/RS=KCHGvC1leDkjOQ.SsaZ11XUy2aI-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.4"

Note that all three show which search engine visited my site (yippy, yahoo and aol) and yippy shows what my query was: "ed-lake.com". Something must have changed, because years ago the query info or "search string" was part of every search and my statistical reports even included a list of what people were looking for when they accessed my site. Here's part of the December 2002 list for my anthraxinvestigation.com site:

That information is evidently still provided on my statistics files, but lately there aren't more than a half dozen entries per month. I have no idea what changed.

March 24, 2019 - One of the biggest problems I have with completing my paper about photons is that I keep getting sidetracked. Mostly it is because I enjoy research. I enjoy just looking things up and finding articles and web sites about things of interest. That's a problem when the objective is to produce a scientific paper. The things that I find are often not quotable sources. Even worse, the non-quotable things I find are sometimes fascinating, and I spend a long time studying them.

Yesterday, I found a YouTube video about polarized light that I ended up watching parts of over and over:

After watching it, I tried stretching some plastic wrap to see if I could repeat the experiment in the video where stretched plastic is used as a 45 degree angle polarizer between horizontal and vertically polarized lenses. All that happened for me was that the plastic ripped in two.

I thought I had discovered something of interest when I looked at my 46-inch flat screen TV through my polarized sunglasses. It appeared that when I turned my head sideways, the TV image didn't start to go black until I passed the 45 degree angle point. Then I tried the same thing using the 23 inch TV that I use as my computer monitor. With the 23 inch TV, the screen started turning darker as soon as I turned my head just slightly, and the screen just got darker and darker until the screen went totally black at around 90 degrees.

Some videos seem to show this, too. There is no change in the amount of light coming through two polarizing lenses until you pass the 45 degree angle point. Others seem to show the amount of light is reduced as soon as you start turning one lens away from the vertical. I'm not sure what is causing the difference.

Then there is the problem of understanding what the person on the video is actually saying. While researching something else, I found this short video about polarizing light (it's only 37 seconds long):

At one point, the narrator says: "The amount of the ray that passes through the filter is proportionate to its verticality."

What does that mean? He seems to be saying that part of the ray gets through and part does not. What would part of a ray look like? He doesn't say. Or maybe he is saying that the amount of light that passes through the filter relates to the amount that is more vertical than horizontal. That would make more sense. Everything that is closer to vertical than horizontal gets through.

The video ends with this sentence: "The waves that pass through are polarized to be completely vertical."

Ah! The light photons (or waves) that pass through the filter are re-oriented to be "completely vertical." So far, I think that is the only source I've found that makes that point clear.

I generally use Google's search engine when I do Internet research. A couple days ago, someone suggested I try some other search engines, specifically duckduckgo.com. When I search for ed-lake.com using Google, it shows my web site right away. When I searched for ed-lake.com using duckduckgo.com, I definitely got different results than with Google, but I'm not sure that they are "better" results. I got a link to my site, but I also got a link to a Driver's Ed course in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and a link to the Education Foundation of Lake County, Florida.

That caused me to research search engines. Using Google I found a bunch of articles about the "best" search engines. The differences between the lists was interesting, but the best list I found was titled "The Best Search Engines of 2019." It lists only 9 search engines, but it states what is best about each one and what is not so good about each one. #1 on the list is Google. #2 is Duckduckgo. #3 is Bing. #4 is Dogpile.

Dogpile? That's one I never heard of before. I tried searching for ed-lake.com and mostly what I got was web sites for erectile disfunction ("ED").

#5 on the list is Yippy. That's another search engine I had never heard of before. I did a search for www.ed-lake.com and again got very different results. The description for one link informed me that:

There are 90+ professionals named Ed Lake, who use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas, and opportunities

Hmm. I'm not one of them. I do not use LinkedIn.

#6 on the list is Google Scholar Search, which I use from time to time. But I use a different link. The one in the article seems to be for Canadians.

#7 on the list is Webopedia Search, which I had never tried. I tried it, but it didn't give me anything I was really looking for. I'll have to study it when I find some time to see what it is good for.

#8 on the list is Yahoo! I think I used to use Yahoo! before I discovered Google long long ago.

#9 on the list is The Internet Archive Search. I think I've used a version of that in the past when I wanted to see an archived version of some web site created by the "Wayback Machine." When I just now entered www.ed-lake.com, it advised me that the last time the Wayback Machine archived a "snapshot" of the first page of my web site was on November 7, 2018. I then wondered if it also archived my blog. The last snapshot it took of my "My Thoughts on The Changing World" blog was on January 3, 2019. So, if that blog is deleted by Google on April 2, there will still be some partial copies available via the Wayback Machine.

Looking at the other search engines listed in other articles, I found AOL.com. I think that is the first search engine I ever used. I'm surprised it is still around.
I also found Ask.com, which I think I may have used long long ago. Other search engines seem to be Russian or Chinese. I didn't try the Russian one, but I see the Chinese Baidu spider prowling my web site nearly every day. So, I tried it. The page is in Chinese. The search results are similar to Google.

The searches I did yesterday for ed-lake.com made me curious about what my web site logs would show for such accesses via the various search engines.

When I did an image search for www.ed-lake.com via Bing, the logs showed all the images from my site that were accessed, and it showed that they had been accessed via Bing. Here's the entire log entry for the image of the Time magazine article that is at the top of the page (I've replaced my real IP address in the entry with a phony IP address):

255.0.255.0 - - [21/Mar/2019:09:13:36 -0500] "GET /Time-02.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 215858 "https://www.bing.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.4"

When I access my web site by typing in my address in the address box at the top of the page instead doing a search for it, the result for that same Time magazine image looks like this:

255.0.255.0 - - [22/Mar/2019:08:40:49 -0500] "GET /Time-02.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 215858 "http://www.ed-lake.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.4"

Note that they both show I use SeaMonkey as my browser. It is my primary browser. (It also has web site creation and maintenance capabilities that I use to maintain my site.) I'm not sure why the log entries also show I use Firefox.

When I search for my web site using Google instead of going to it directly, and when I use Firefox as my browser instead of SeaMonkey, the result on my log looks like this:

255.0.255.0 - - [23/Mar/2019:09:52:57 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 319269 "https://www.google.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:65.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0"

I looked for log entries for all the accesses I did via other search engines, and I found only one:

255.0.255.0 - - [23/Mar/2019:17:49:04 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 319531 "https://www.discretesearch.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:65.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0"

When I accessed that link, I found there is such a thing as a Discrete Search search engine. But I don't know how I happened to use it. And I'm guessing that none of the accesses I did via the other search engines showed up on my logs because my computer didn't actually access my site those times. After the first time, all the other searches just accessed a copy of my site that was cached in my computer. I should have done a "refresh" each time I accessed my home page.

And I just spent the entire morning writing this comment. Is it any wonder I'm getting very little done on my paper about photons?

Comments for Sunday, March 17, 2019, thru Saturday, March 23, 2019:

March 21, 2019 - Besides checking my web site statistics, another thing I do every morning after turning on my computer is to check my two Blogs to see if there has been any interesting activity:

http://anthraxdebate.blogspot.com/
http://oldguynewissues.blogspot.com/

The last time I put something on the anthrax blog was on April 2, 2018, when Scott Decker's book was published. And the last time I put something on the oldguynewissues blog was on February 26, 2018, over a year ago. I think the last time any reader made a comment about any of my posts was in July 2018.

Starting about a month ago, however, when I went to the owner's page which shows the blog statistics, I started seeing this message at the top:

Following the announcement of Google+ API deprecation scheduled for March 2019, a number of changes will be made to Blogger’s Google+ integration on 4 February 2019.

Google+ widgets: Support for the “+1 Button”, “Google+ Followers” and “Google+ Badge” widgets in Layout will no longer be available. All instances of these widgets will be removed from your blog.

+1 buttons: The +1/G+ buttons and Google+ share links below blog posts and in the navigation bar will be removed.

Please note that if you have a custom template that includes Google+ features, you may need to update your template. Please contact your template supplier for advice.

Google+ Comments: Support for Google+ comments will be turned down, and all blogs using Google+ comments will be reverted back to using Blogger comments. Unfortunately, comments posted as Google+ comments cannot be migrated to Blogger and will no longer appear on your blog.

I had no idea what any of that means. And I didn't have the time to try to figure it out. Then, a couple days ago I got an email from Google that said,

You’ve received this email because you have content in Google+ for your personal (consumer) account or a Google+ page you manage.

This is a reminder that on April 2, 2019 we’re shutting down consumer Google+ and will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts. Photos and videos from Google+ in your Album Archive and your Google+ pages will also be deleted.

Downloading your Google+ content may take time, so get started before March 31, 2019.

No other Google products (such as Gmail, Google Photos, Google Drive, YouTube) will be shut down as part of the consumer Google+ shutdown, and the Google Account you use to sign in to these services will remain. Note that photos and videos already backed up in Google Photos will not be deleted.

I'm still not sure exactly what is going on, but it seems like they are going to delete my two blogs. Clicking on the links doesn't help. They talk in a language that is Greek to me. Evidently, everyone in the world does things with blogs in a different way than I do them.

It's no great loss to me if those blogs are deleted. I will go through the process of saving copies of them, however. The anthrax blog was started on October 6, 2011. So, there are about 140 posts from me with hundreds (maybe thousands) of reader comments in response to my posts. I'm not sure what I will do with the copies, but it's better to save copies than to wonder if I'm making a mistake by not saving them. It's a good thing that I have a 1 terabyte auxiliary hard drive that still has about 25% empty space.

It will be interesting to see what happens on April 2. If the blogs are deleted, then it will mean there are two things that I will no longer have to do each morning. If the blogs are not deleted, then I'll have another unsolved mystery on my hands: What were those messages all about?

March 20, 2019 - Every morning I check my web site statistics to see who has visited this web site in the past 24 hours. This morning, the graph showing "Daily usage" for the month of March looked like this:

Hmm. Obviously, something unusual happened yesterday. The number of visitors was about normal, but there were an unusual number of "hits" and a lot more "files" were visited than was normal. That's usually the sign of a hacker.

But, when I checked the logs to see who it was, it turned out to be the Kentucky Department of Education. Other statistics pages informed me they had visited just 4 times, but they had accessed 34 different "pages" and registered 347 hits. The first "visit" occurred at 8:36 in the morning and lasted until about 8:43 a.m., but it appears to have been seven identical computers accessing my site at about the same time (08:36:41, 08:36:42, 08:39:54, 08:40:15, 08:40:28, 08:41:00 and 08:42:56). Since they all used the same IP address and were accessing my site at the same time, they all registered as just one "visit". (Each seems to have visited the main text file and the 8 picture files that are part of the main page. I have no idea why only 34 files were counted as having been accessed. It should have been 4x9=38.) The second "visit" began at 9:48 a.m. and lasted until about 9:50 a.m., again with multiple computers The third "visit" began at 12:19 p.m and lasted until 12:27 a.m., with about 20 computers accessing my site. The fourth "visit" began at 1:30 p.m. and lasted until 1:49 p.m., with only about 5 computers.

Okay. It seems that a teacher in three different morning classes and one afternoon class had his or her students access my web site. Why? Did it have something to do with my comment about photons on March 17? Or was it something else entirely? None of the accesses went beyond the main page, so whatever they were looking at must have been on the main page.

All the accesses were via Google. They didn't directly access www.ed-lake.com. But I've seen that when most people want to access ed-lake.com, they do not go direct, they type ed-lake.com into Google's search engine and Google provides a link to my page, which they then click on to get to my page.

I suppose it could also have been just the teacher who accessed my page to show something to the class on a big screen TV, then showed some other web site, then back to mine, and then another web site, going back and forth. I don't know what that would look like on my logs, but I suspect it wouldn't show as 347 hits. The first visit would be registered and subsequent visits would get the 8 picture files from the computer's cache, not via totally new accesses to my site.

All I can say with any degree of certainty is that it is something I've never seen happen before.

March 18, 2019 - I recently finished listening to "Trust No One," an audio book which contains a collection of 15 "X-Files" short stories by 17 authors.

I borrowed the audio book on February 27, and have been listening to a short story from time to time when I had nothing better to do. While the book certainly wasn't a waste of time, and there were no stories in it that I just stopped listening to because they were bad, there also wasn't a single story in it that is worth mentioning or discussing. Like the TV series, the "X-Files" short stories generally have some supernatural element to them which FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are never able to fully "solve" and present to the FBI or to the world as a "case closed." Instead, cases are usually closed because the mystery stopped occurring and all the evidence vanished after Mulder and Scully barely escaped with their lives. It's an ending, but it's not a satisfying ending.

Plus, I'm evidently not someone who really likes short stories. I prefer novels, although funny short stores (like those by Spider Robinson) are an exception. I enjoyed those. But are there any other authors of funny short stories? I dunno.

Meanwhile, this morning, I downloaded eleven podcasts by national security expert Richard A. Clarke. I haven't yet fully listened to any of them, but they are discussions with people like President Bill Clinton, Ambassador Susan Rice, Secretary Madeline Albright, and reporters Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz. They were all recorded in 2018, just before the mid-term elections. I heard about them on Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast #334. Clarke discussed his podcasts on that podcast, and it seemed like they could be very interesting and something I really want to listen to. All I need now is to find the time to listen.

March 17, 2019 - For most of the past week I've been working on my scientific paper tentatively titled "Visualizing Photons." I hesitate to write anything about it here, since whenever I did that in the past, I ended up changing things, which would mean that what I had written in a comment here was no longer what I was thinking. Coin-shaped photons, for example. For awhile it seemed that a photon had to be coin-shaped if it is going to fit through the slots in a polarizing filter. But I was misled by all the drawings the text books and web sites have which show how polarization works for waves. One example:

When you see a diagram like the one above, it suggests that only something tall and flat will get through the filter. It also suggests that maybe one wave in ten (or one wave in ten thousand if light waves truly "vibrate in any direction") gets through the filter.

Here's how Encyclopedia Britannica illustrates light waves going through a polarizing filter:

It looks like one wave in four gets through. But, in reality, just about exactly one half of the waves (i.e., half of the photons) get through the filter. That is a VERY important fact, since it means that waves (i.e., photons) that are 1 degree to 45 degrees off of vertical get realigned to be vertical. They are not vertical when they enter the filter, but they are vertical when they come out.

And how can anyone believe that light consists of waves which are comparable to water waves or sound waves? How can you have water waves oriented in every direction? Or sound waves? There is absolutely no comparison between how light works and how water waves and/or sound waves work.

To confuse matters even more, an electromagnetic wave is typically visualized as shown in the illustration below (except that magnetic fields are more often colored blue and electric fields are colored red):

In the illustration above, which wave is depicted in the illustrations showing light being polarized? You have two waves working together. Which gets polarized by a vertical polarizer? The sources rarely say. You have to research that specific question to find that it is the magnetic field that is usually shown in the polarized light illustrations. If the electric field is oscillating in the same direction as the slit-openings in the filter, the entire photon or wave will be absorbed by the filter (and presumably re-emitted in some random direction away from the filter, although the sources never mention that).

Awhile back, I decided that the electric and magnetic fields of a photon must radiate away from the photon itself. So, I decided a photon looks something like the image below when one field is half-way contracted and the other field is half-way extended:

Now I see I'll have to change it to have the blue arrows pointing toward the photon instead of away from the photon, because while the electric field is expanding, the magnetic field is contracting. Again I was misled by what is shown in all the texts and web pages about light waves. They show the two fields extending at the same time, just in different directions.

And, too, the illustration above does not explain how a photon that is tilted less that 45 degrees will get through a filter, or how a photon that is tilted more than 45 degrees will be absorbed by the filter. If you assume that the filter has openings only wide enough to allow photons that are tilted less than 45 degrees to get through without bumping into the sides, you soon realize that makes no sense. It demands high precision that just isn't required when making polarizing filters. The answer seems to be that the fields are not two-dimensional as shown in the illustration. In reality, it appears the photon is spherical, but the intensity of the electric field varies from 100% at vertical to zero at horizontal.

I'm still working out the details, but it looks like a pretty good theory. I have no idea how long it will take me to finish the paper, but I'm hoping it will be a matter of weeks, not months.

Meanwhile, another mystery distracted me for a short time last week. On March 13, nine people accessed my paper about Einstein's First Postulate and six people accessed my paper about Einstein's Second Postulate. That is definitely not normal. Normal for the Second Postulate paper is about 4 unique readers per week, although there have been a few one-day surges in the past. However, there have been only 84 unique readers of the First Postulate paper since I uploaded the first version on September 21, 2017. There were 10 unique readers on the first day, but since that time it's been less than one unique reader per week.

Why did nine people access the paper for their first time on March 13? I have no idea. It can't be just some coincidence, so there must be some "word of mouth" involved. But who? Where? When I checked my web site logs, I found that someone from Drexel University in Philadelphia visited my site for the first time on March 13. Is there a connection? I have no idea. There doesn't appear to be any way to determine where the nine first-time readers were located, much less who they were, or so it's a mystery without any means to solve the mystery.