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My Latest Comments
Comments for Sunday,
March 26, 2023, thru Fri., Mar. 31, 2023:
March 26, 2023 -
I'm a habitual record keeper. Years ago, when I was
renting movies from Redbox,
I kept a computer record of each movie I
watched, so that I would know if it was
worth buying that movie on DVD or not.
One reason I mention that is because that
log says I rented "John
Wick" on Feb. 3, 2015. My
comment about it says, "Mindlessly
bloody. Too farfetched for me."
Nevertheless, I rented "John
Wick:Chapter 2" on June
13, 2017. My comment: "Wick kills 100
people in the first hour, then more."
"John
Wick: Chapter 4" is currently in
theaters, and Keanu Reeves has been plugging
it on nearly every late-night talk
show. The talk show hosts, of course,
endlessly rave about it. You'd have to
pay me to go see
it.
The same seems true of just about every new
movie that gets released these days. I
stopped renting movies from Redbox sometime
in 2018 when it was clear that almost none
of the movies I'd rented that year was worth
watching again, or at all, much less
buying on DVD.
I still love movies. I watch
movies from my DVD collection nearly every
evening, sometimes 2 movies per
evening. Occasionally, if the movies
are just 90 minutes or so, I'll watch 3 in
an evening. I've got about 3,300
movies in my collection.
The same is true about TV shows. I
have episodes from 263 different TV shows in
my collection. On March 15, I was
looking through the DVDs they had for sale
at Best Buy
and found they had a Blu-Ray version of
Season 1 of "Star
Trek: Enterprise" for
$7.99. I bought it and finished
watching the 24 episodes a couple days
ago. It was a lot better than I
remembered it. Coincidentally, some
TV channel I get is airing 6 episodes
of Season 2 each
week, so I'm now recording Season 2 on my
DVR.
I
keep spreadsheet records of movies I
watch, plus movies and TV series I buy
on DVDs. I rarely buy any movies
or TV series these days, but the
spreadsheet I maintain for TV series I own
on DVDs says that I finished watching the
original "Star
Trek" series (3 seasons) for the
third time in 2018. The first time
was when the series first aired in 1966-69,
the second time was when I bought the series
on DVDs in 2013. And I watched all 7
seasons of "Star
Trek: The Next Generation" on
DVDs in 2006, 2013 and 2019, plus when it
first aired in 1987 to 1994.
The spreadsheet also says that the first TV
series I bought on DVDs was Season 1 of "Everybody
Loves Raymond." I bought
it in September of 2004, finished watching
it in January of 2005, and never watched it
again. But last night I took it off the
shelf and watched the first episode.
It was very very funny, so I'll be watching
episodes of that show from time to time for
the next month or so.
I do watch some new TV shows.
4 or 5 evenings per week I record 5
different late night talk shows (most of
which are on at the same time) and then I
watch them the following evening:
Sometimes I just wonder what
it is about new movies and most new
TV shows that I make them so boring
for me. If I haven't watched some
specific movie in 10 or 12 years, I will
usually have forgotten almost everything
about it, and it will almost be like
watching it for the first time again.
The same for TV shows. But nearly all
of them will be far more enjoyable for me
than almost any new movies or
TV shows. The only explanation I have
is something I mentioned in a comment I
wrote a few weeks ago: Today, people's
attention span seems a lot shorter. I
think it is the result of playing video
games and doing tasks on smart phones.
I don't play video games, and I may be the
last person on this planet who doesn't have
a smart phone.
Additionally, nearly all of the
most popular TV shows these days are
on channels that you have to pay extra to
watch, like HBO, Netflix, Disney+,
Paramount+, Hulu, Apple TV+, etc.
Paying $8.99 a month for some TV channel
that probably won't have any movies or TV
shows that I want to watch seems like a
waste of money. While at my sister's
home some time ago, I looked through what
was available on Netflix. The only
show I found that seemed worth watching was
some old episodes of "Peter
Gunn." A couple weeks ago, the
Decades channel on my TV ran about 70
episodes of "Peter Gunn" starting on
Saturday and ending on Monday morning.
I recorded them all on my DVR, and I've
still got about 60 yet to watch.
Some people reading this comment might think
I'm complaining about something. On
the contrary. Every evening I have a
selection of really great
movies and TV shows to watch. I'm just
puzzled over how so many people can enjoy
lousy movies about John Wick and lousy TV
shows like just about every new show that is
aired these days. When I ask them, the
answer seems to be "new is good, old is
bad."
Does
that mean that I think "new is bad and
old is good"? No. All the
old movies and TV shows I like I also
liked when they were new.
There's just something different
about today's "new" movies and TV
shows versus "new" movies and TV shows
from prior to 2018 or so.
Comments for Sunday,
March 19, 2023, thru Sat., Mar. 25, 2023:
March 22, 2023 - So, Trump was
wrong again. He wasn't
arrested yesterday, as he
claimed he would be.
However, it's certainly possible
that he could be arrested today
- or tomorrow - or sometime
soon. So, maybe
everyone just needs to cross
their fingers and think
positive.
Meanwhile, Fox
and TMZ produced a story
yesterday in which it was
speculated that there was a
fifth plane that was going to be
hijacked on September 11, 2001,
but United Airlines flight 23
never took off. The
New York Post has an article
about it. The
evidence is fairly compelling,
but the main question seems to
be: So what? What
is the point of such a "news"
story? The "point" seems
to be the same point that was
exposed when Dominion
recently filed its lawsuit
against Fox News: Fox
doesn't report "news stories,"
Fox just generates stories that
its right-wing viewers like,
stories that get their viewers
angry against the
establishment. They want
their viewers to scream, "See,
the establishment screwed up
again and didn't catch all the
Muslim terrorists they should
have caught and thrown in jail
on 9/11!!!!"
It's the logical thinking versus
emotional thinking issue once
again. Those who think
logically accept the fact that
there may have been some
terrorists on flight 23, but
there wasn't enough evidence
that they actually committed any
crime. Those who think
emotionally will argue, "Who cares
about evidence when terrorists
are getting away! They
should have been locked up
until the evidence could be
found!" There's
something wrong with any
'system' that lets terrorists
get way!"
Who decides when people should
be locked up without
evidence? Answer: Someone
should!!! Who?
Someone!!!Who?
Someone!!!Who?
Someone!!!Who?
Someone!!!Who? Someone!!! And
that argument
can go on for
23 years or
230 years and
more. Of course, there are some who have an answer, but they
do not voice
that answer
except among
themselves.
That answer: "Dictators can do it!We should elect a dictator like Hitler or Mussolini or
Putin or Xi,
so that
suspected
terrorists can
be locked upwithout evidence!
Then we wouldn't have to worry about such things.
Trump would
make agreat
dictator!
That's why so many people voted for him! But the
establishment
undermined him
and didn't let
him do what he
should be able
to do:get rid of the establishment
and just dictate!"
March 20, 2023 - This morning, I
decided to set aside the book I'd been
reading for the past few weeks, titled
"People
vs Donald Trump: an Inside Account",
and to move on to something
else. I was on chapter 17, and
the book only has 23 chapters, but I
simply lost interest. The book is
about the case that the Manhattan
District Attorney is expected to bring
against Trump sometime this
week. The book was written about
a year ago, when it was uncertain
whether they were going to actually
file such a case or not. It
contains just too many legal issues
and technicalities to keep me
interested. Here's the last part
that I underlined in the book:
The right way to proceed,
we thought, was to bring felony charges
based on the full panoply of false
business records that Trump had helped to
generate: the phony documents relating to
the hush money payment and Michael Cohen’s
reimbursement, the false financial
statements, the false certifications
attesting to the accuracy of the financial
statements, the false accounting
spreadsheets that were created to support
the financial statements, and so forth. We
could allege that the records had been
created with the intent to commit or
conceal a variety of state and federal
offenses. Even if the federal offenses
were ruled out of bounds as a legal
matter, we would be left with felony
charges as to the financial statement
records and misdemeanor charges as to the
hush money records. Those charges would be
immune from legal attack, and we were
confident that we would reach a jury with
them.
The author (one of the
Assistant District Attorneys on the case)
was confident, but his boss was not.
Today it appears that the situation has
changed and the
Manhattan District Attorney
is now also confident that Trump can be
convicted of a serious crime.
That means they do not think that Trump's
lawyers can successfully argue that his
crime was just a misdemeanor, or that it was
unintentional, or that there was no crime at
all.
Here's what the book has to say about a previous
crime that Trump had committed:
Trump University closed in
2011, after its operations generated many
complaints and much litigation from
unhappy students. The business became an
issue in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Then–New York attorney general Eric
Schneiderman brought a consumer fraud
lawsuit against Trump and the Trump
Organization, alleging that the training
program had been an elaborate
“bait-and-switch” scheme, involving
teachers that Trump said he had selected
and materials he claimed to have approved.
He had done neither. Cohen confirmed that
the whole thing had been a scam. The
materials had no special value, and most
of the students just lost their money.
When you swindle people, you can
often avoid going to court by getting them
to settle and by paying them back.
When you commit a State or Federal crime,
however, the usual way to "settle" the case
is to put the culprit on trial so that a
judge or jury can decide what the punishment
should be.
Former President Donald
Trump said Saturday he expects to be
arrested in connection with the
investigation by the Manhattan District
Attorney next week and called for protests
as New York law enforcement prepares for a
possible indictment.
In a social media post,
Trump, referring to himself, said the
“leading Republican candidate and former
president of the United States will be
arrested on Tuesday of next week.”
“Protest, take our nation
back,” he wrote.
Here's another relevant
quote from the article:
Some of Trump’s advisers
had urged him privately not to call for
protests, concerned about the optics of a
mass protest in the streets of Manhattan
growing out of control or resembling the
2021 insurrection.
Will there be a mass protest
in Manhattan? Or have most of Trump's
former supporters finally learned what kind
of person he is? The lack of any large
turnouts for his recent speeches indicates
that Trump may have lost most of his
supporters.
Somewhat coincidentally, I'm currently reading
a book written by one of the lawyers
who worked on that same Trump criminal case
and resigned
in protest a year ago when
Manhattan’s district attorney refused to
act. That newly elected district
attorney, Alvin Bragg, was reportedly
skeptical that the evidence his office’s
attorneys had gathered against Trump would
be enough to convict him. Evidently,
Bragg now feels the has enough
evidence. And Trump is also giving the
impression that District Attorney Bragg has
enough evidence.
Jordan Klepper has often interviewed Trump
supporters for The Daily
Show. It seems clear in
virtually every interview Klepper has
conducted that Trump supporters are
acting emotionally, not
logically. Very often their
statements make absolute no
sense. There are
dozens and dozens of interviews at
these links:
The video below contains a
bunch of recent of Jordan Klepper interviews
at a "rally" shortly after Trump announced
that he was going to run for President again
in 2024:
It's a rally where very few people showed
up, so the video contains a lot of opinions
about whether it should be called a "rally"
or not. There's also a strange belief
that "the military" is still under Trump's
control. But only "the good military,"
not "the bad military." At about the
4-minute 20-second mark one Trump supporter
claims there is no war in Ukraine.
She says she gets her news from Newsmax,
and Newsmax had never mentioned any war in
Ukraine. So, the year-long war in
Ukraine is evidently all just "fake news".
Do
these people realize that if Trump is
still the president that he can't run in
2024?
Hmm. That is a
very interesting point.
If Trump is still President, as he and his
fans believe, he cannot run for a third
term. It's against the
law. It violates the
22nd Amendment. That
is totally logical and correct. Unfortunately,
that probably means no Trump supporter would
understand it.
Comments for Sunday,
March 12, 2023, thru Sat., Mar. 18, 2023:
March 14, 2023 - Hmmm.
While looking through newly
available podcast episodes this
morning, I found another podcast
episode about the 3D printed
rocket. It's dated today,
and it's on the Wired
Science podcast.
It's less than 6 minutes long,
but it contains a lot of
information I wanted to make
note of and paste here.
Then I noticed that the podcast
is advertised as "the
spoken edition." Is there
a "printed edition"? I did
a search for it, and, yes, there
is a print format edition HERE.
And here is the key paragraph I
wanted to download:
Despite its unconventional
assembly process, the Terran 1 launch
vehicle looks like any other: The
two-stage rocket stands 110 feet tall and
is 7.5 feet in diameter. Eighty five percent of
the rocket by mass, including its major
structures, were 3D-printed—only the computing
system, electronics, and readily
available parts like fasteners were not.
(The company is shooting for 95 percent
for future rockets.) Other companies have
used 3D-printed parts before, but this is
on another level: Relativity Space refers
to Terran 1 as the world’s largest
3D-printed object.
So, the outer skin of the
rocket and the large internal parts, like
fuel tanks and rocket motors, were all
3D printed.
Here's another interesting paragraph:
Other companies are also
exploring space-related 3D-printing
applications. For example, Australia’s
Fleet Space has already been producing
lightweight, 3D-printed radio frequency
antennas for satellites. Next year, using
printers half the size of a bus, they plan
to create a satellite constellation called
Alpha that will be entirely 3D-printed. An advantage for
3D-printing satellites and their
components is that new versions can be
upgraded and built in 24 hours, without
taking months to gather parts from the
supply chain, says Flavia Tata
Nardini, the company’s CEO.
3D printing is like
something from the future, but that "future"
is already here.
A 3D printed rocket???
The last time I heard anything about
3D printing they were just printing
screws and bolts and tiny statues and
small nick-knacks. The episode
said they planned to launch the "3D
printed rocket" on March 8! What
happened? This morning I
researched it.
3D-printing specialist
Relativity Space postponed its debut
launch on Saturday, stopping one of its
attempts in the final second of the
countdown after igniting the rocket’s
engines.
Relativity’s system
triggered a launch abort with just 0.5
seconds remaining before liftoff, which
shut down the rocket’s engines after
briefly firing up.
The company’s Terran 1
rocket is attempting from LC-16, a
launchpad at the U.S. Space Force’s
facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The
mission is called “Good Luck, Have Fun,”
and aims to successfully reach orbit and
demonstrate the viability of the company’s
ambitious manufacturing approach.
The 3D printer is the robot device on the
left, and it is making the circular rocket
part on the right. The picture below
is of the finished rocket. It's 110
feet tall, and about 85% of its parts are 3D
printed.
According to the podcast, there are about
100 rockets currently being prepared for
launch around the world. Most will
never fly. The satellites they will
launch fall into 3 groups: military
satellites, science satellites, and the
biggest group: commercial satellites.
Satellites have a life-span of from 5 to 20
years. So a lot of rockets will be
needed to send up replacements.
There was a lot of information in that
podcast that was totally new to me.
March 12, 2023 -
Hmm. It appears that I have already
tried twice to write a book
about "Logical Relativity." The
version I mentioned here in my March 9
comment was evidently the second
version. The first version began with
me describing all the arguments about
Relativity that I'd been having on the
Internet, mostly with Bill
Gaede and his followers. I had
argued with Gaede and his followers on the Rational
Scientific Method Facebook group and
elsewhere for years. A
Google search finds I commented on some
arguments from May
of 2015, June
of 2015, and just about every month
from then until January
of 2016.
I got about 14 chapters done of that version
before I gave up. I think I must have
realized that no one would want to buy a
book about people on the Internet arguing
different theories of Relativity.
Then, while doing research sometime later, I
saw that just about every college physics
textbook had a different description of
Einstein's Relativity. And it was
clear that the problem was the
incompatibility between Quantum Mechanics
and Einstein's Relativity. So, I
started a second version of
my book. I gave up on that one when it
became clear that I had to describe
Einstein's Relativity more thoroughly before
getting into Quantum Mechanics. Plus,
there seemed to be endless variations of
Quantum Mechanics, each with a different
argument against Einstein's theories.
Time Dilation was, and evidently still is,
the main point of conflict.
So, if I try a third version of my book, it
would have to thoroughly describe Einstein's
Relativity, and how experiments fully verify
Time Dilation, before I even mention
all the arguments from Quantum Mechanics
mathematicians and how just about every
college textbook has some screwball version
of Einstein's theories.
But first I'll have to regain some of the
will power that is required for such a
project.
Meanwhile, the fact that some people think
logically while others think emotionally
seems to be in the news every day lately,
and they are constantly discussing it on
late night talk shows. Only they talk
about it as being the difference between how
Republicans think and how Democrats
think. Republicans love
Fox News because Fox News doesn't care about
facts, they only want to prey upon the emotions
of their Republican listeners. By
preying on their viewers' emotions, Fox News
can be certain that their customers will
continue listening. It's like getting
them hooked on some soap opera. What
evil deeds did the evil Democrats commit
against the poor honest Republicans
today?
The lawsuit
Dominion filed against Fox News is
exposing everything. All the Fox News
hosts apparently knew that
they were spouting lies just about every
time they opened their mouths. They
exchanged emails stating to each other how
they didn't believe anything they were
saying on the air. It was just
nonsense to please their conspiracy theorist
listeners. The podcast "Pod
Save America" recently had a podcast
about Tucker
Carlson's views and another
about how the owner of Fox News, Rupert
Murdoch "knew that Fox News hosts were
lying about the 2020 election," but he
evidently didn't care.
It was a long time coming, but it's nice to
see Fox New liars finally being
exposed. However, I doubt that it will
change anything about how Fox news operates.
Comments for Sunday,
March 5, 2023, thru Sat., Mar. 11, 2023:
March 9,
2023 - This
morning, after finishing
my regular morning
routines, I sat down on my
easy chair in my front
room and started to listen
to some podcasts.
That's also been part of
my regular morning routine
for quite a while.
But, this morning I only
listened to about 3
minutes of a Profoundly
Pointless
podcast episode that was a
1½ hour interview with Hollywood
Animal Agent Joel Norton.
I'm not sure why it took
me 3 minutes to realize
that listening to an
interview with a Hollywood
agent who represents
animals was indeed
"profoundly
pointless." I think
I started listening
because I knew nothing
about animal agents and
I'm always curious about
things I know nothing
about. But then my
brain told me I should
find something better
to do, something more productive.
"Productive?" What
should I be producing
-- other than a new entry
on this web site?
I should be producing a
book. I've already
"produced" 17 chapters of
my book on "Logical
Relativity."
Why did I stop? I
haven't worked on it since
July of 2022.
Browsing through the
chapters, I can see why I
stopped. Here's the
first paragraph of the
book:
Much has been written
about the “battle between Relativity and
Quantum Mechanics,” a battle that has
raged for over 100 years. Albert
Einstein’s Relativity Theories are
perfectly logical, straight-forward and
fairly easy to understand, since they
mostly apply to the universe we can see
around us. Quantum Mechanics, on the
other hand, works best with atoms and
sub-atomic particles, which we cannot
usually see but can only measure and
approximate with percentages and averages.
And here's the first
paragraph of Chapter 17:
There are at least 4 major
points of conflict between Relativity and
Quantum Mechanics, but there definitely
could be many more, depending upon how you
define “conflict”. The three areas
that I constantly come across are (1) The
size of the Universe, (2) Time Dilation,
(3) the particle-wave duality, and (4) the
“invariance of the speed of light.”
I'm not interested in
arguing with Quantum Mechanics
mathematicians. I did it
for years, and it was totally
pointless! There's no way to change
their minds. Instead, I think I should
be trying to simplify and clarify
Einstein's theories for anyone interested in
science. That is what I was trying to
do in most of my
science papers. Simplifying and
clarifying Einstein's theories is my way of
better understanding those theories myself.
If everything I write is clear and logical
to me and supported by quotes from
Einstein's works, who gives a damn what
Quantum Mechanics mathematicians claim or
believe???
So, does this mean I need to start from
scratch when writing my book? Yes and
no. Nearly all the arguments about
Quantum Mechanics may have to be scrapped,
and then most of the book will relate to
what I wrote in my science papers.
There's already a lot of that in the
book. Chapter 8 is titled "What is
Time?" A lot of it is similar
to what I wrote in my 2016 paper titled "What
is Time?" But I now think
that chapter should probably be earlier in
the book. Here's the table of contents
for the book as it exists today:
Introduction
Page
1 Chapter
1 - What Einstein
Knew
Page 3 Chapter
2 - Stationary
Points in Space
Page 6 Chapter
3
- What is
Light?
Page
11Chapter 4 - c+v and c-v
Page 20 Chapter 5 - Radar Guns and
Relativity
Page 29 Chapter
6
- Time
Dilation
Page 44
Chapter
7
- The
Twin
Paradox
Page 58 Chapter
8 - What is
Time?
Page 65 Chapter
9 - The Variable
Speed of Light Page
69 Chapter
10 -
Inertial
Systems
Page 71 Chapter
11 - General
Relativity
Page 76
Chapter 12 - The
Edge of
Reality
Page 81 Chapter
13 - The
Big Bang
Page 84
Chapter 14 -
Mathematics vs
Reality
Page 94
Chapter 15 - The
Textbook
Problem
Page 101
Chapter 16 - Our
Conflicted
World
Page 119
Chapter 17 -
Physics' Most Sacred
Belief Page 125
Chapter 18 -
Conclusion
Page
About the
Author
Page
Chapter 8 should
definitely be placed before Chapter
4. But rewriting the book could
take many months. And sometime
this year I will be moving from
Wisconsin to Virginia. That is
going to take a lot of planning and
preparing.
Sigh. As usual, I
have a lot more to do than I have time
to do it.
March 7, 2023 - Yesterday, I
finished listening to episode
#30 of the science
fiction podcast
titled "Relativity."
While
there are a total of 60
episodes in the series, I
have no interest in
listening to any
more. What started
out as an interesting show
with lots of snappy dialog
between a man alone on a
spaceship and a woman back
on earth, plus funny quips
when the man talks with
the ship's computer,
turned dull for me when
the story started
involving other
people. The woman on
Earth started arguing with
another woman over
cryogenics and whether it
was "right" to freeze a
terminally ill young woman
for 50 years to a time
when a cure would be found
for her disease. The
young woman's life might
be saved, but she would be
living in a world where
she knew no one. The
sci-fi story turned into a
soap opera.
I now realize I shouldn't
even have mentioned the
podcast. I only did
so because I couldn't
think of anything else to
write about. I'm
overwhelmed with things to
do: I'm reading
another book about Donald
Trump, I'm listening to an
audio book about spies in
World War II, I've
got lots of interesting
science and history
podcasts to listen to,
plus I have all the other
things that "normal"
people do.
I just need to stop
fretting over what to
write comments
about.
March 6, 2023
- Yesterday, I spent about 4 hours
listening to 19 episodes of the science
fiction podcast titled "Relativity."
It's a very strange but also
very interesting show that
consists almost entirely of
discussions between two people,
a man who is on a gigantic
spaceship far out in space, and
a woman who is back on
earth. The fact that they
can have a simple conversation
even though they are many
light-years apart is explained
the same way they explained such
discussions on Star Trek: they
use a "relativity compensator" -
or something similar.
Basically it's just an imaginary
device that allows people to
have such discussions, because
if they couldn't have such
discussions there couldn't be a
show.
The man is the only person left
on the space ship. He's a
doctor, not an astronaut, so he
knows nothing about how to
operate the space ship.
All twenty of the ship's crew
and other people who had been on
the ship inexplicably committed
suicide by jumping out into
empty space via one of the
airlocks. And they left
the airlock's inner and outer
doors open.
The woman back on earth also has
problems. There's some kind of
revolution going on outside of the
U.S. space center where she and some
other scientists are locked
inside. The man doesn't know why
the space ship crew committed suicide,
and the woman doesn't know what the
revolution is all about. Their
discussion is about their attempts to
figure things out. The man's
main goal in the current episode is to
close the airlock's outer door,
because the inner door is also open,
which means there are many rooms in
the spaceship that have been
depressurized and therefore cannot be
accessed.
It's difficult to see how they can
continue their discussions for 60
episodes, but they often talk about
the science involved in their
struggles, and that science is both
interesting and logical. So,
I'll keep listening as long as they
continue to make sense.
March 5, 2023 -
It's another Sunday where I have absolutely
nothing prepared for this Sunday
comment. I want to write something
about the political situation here in
America, but I keep thinking about it as a
conflict between people who think emotionally
and people who think logically, and
I don't want to get into spouting amateur
psychology. I also keep thinking that
Ed Asner's book "The
Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty
Defends Our Constitution Against
Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs"
is still the best book I've seen on
the subject. I wrote a review of it 3
years ago. I listened to the
audio book version, and transcribed quotes
from it. I'm tempted to read the
Kindle version, just to find more things to
quote. But, I also realize that there
are probably other books out there that I
should read before I start reading a book
that I've already listened to.
I also want to write something about
podcasts. I'm constantly finding and
evaluating new
podcasts. Yesterday, while I was
listening to and evaluating some Wired
Science podcasts to see if they were
worthwhile, on one of the episodes there was
an ad about the I Know Dino
podcast. Huh?
There's a podcast about dinosaurs???
Yes, there is, and they have been podcasting
for eight years!
They've done 433 episodes! And each
episode is about an hour long!
While I have no particular interest in
dinosaurs, I enjoyed the movie Jurassic
Park and all of its sequels, and if
there's something about dinosaurs on TV,
I'll usually check it out to see if it
contains anything new and interesting.
So, of course, I downloaded 5 "I Know
Dino" episodes. The plan was
that I'd try listening to them later today
to see if I might want to listen to more of
them.
Then, as I was about finished writing this
comment, I wondered what I'd find if I
simply did a search for podcasts about Relativity.
So, I did such a search. And among the
things I found was a science
fiction podcast
titled "Relativity"
that produced 60 episodes starting in
January 2017 and ending in September
2020. Science fiction??
I love science fiction! Each
episode is about 10 minutes long. I
listened to most of the first episode and
found it very interesting. So,
I downloaded the first 15 episodes into my
MP3 player, and I'll start listening to them
as soon as I finish this comment.
This comment is finished.
Comments for Wednesday,
March 1, 2023, thru Sat., Mar. 4, 2023:
March
3, 2023 - I
decided to give up on regaining access
to my detect at outlook dot com
emails. I only used that email
address when arguing on social media,
and on my
science papers. I haven't
argued on social media in more than a
year, and it's a relatively simply
process to simply change the email
address on the latest version of each
of my
science papers.
I've finished my state and federal
income tax submissions. So, that
issue is no longer hanging over my
head, either.
What I seem to need now is the
ambition to get back to work on my
book about Logical Relativity.
What I'm doing instead is listening to
podcasts. Yesterday, I
learned about a podcast called Wired
Science. I downloaded a
half dozen sample episodes, but I
haven't yet had time to listen to
them. During the process of
downloading the episodes, however, I
have to listen to some of the
beginning and the end of each
episode. And the episodes are
mostly less than 10 minutes long, so
I've listened to enough to be fairly
sure that it will be worth my time to
listen to some entire episodes.
The student winners of a
NASA competition designed a serpentine bot
that could sidewind across lunar regolith
or roll down hills.
That is also news to me and
definitely worth checking out. That's
what I'm going to do right now as I end this
comment.
March 1, 2023 -
The comment I wrote on February
26 about the Profoundly
Pointless
podcast interview with "CERN
Particle Physicist Dr. James Beacham"
caused me to once again want to try to
regain access to my detect at
outlook dot com emails.
It's the email address that I use on all
of my science papers. I
lost access to that email
account months ago when I had
problems with my old computer.
Additionally, since I had that email
account for many years, and the
password was always inserted
automatically, I was no longer certain
about what password to use. For
some reason, the place where I have my
passwords written down has several
different passwords for outlook dot
com. And none seem to
work.
I tried many times to contact
Microsoft about the problem, but I
can't get past their robots.
Someone sent me a link to a web page
that listed 10 different ways to
contact Microsoft: https://www.wikihow.com/Contact-Microsoft.
I
tried 9 of the 10 ways and got
nowhere. The 10th way involved
using a credit card to make a purchase
that didn't actually get processed
(supposedly). I didn't like the
idea of using my credit card that way,
and I never used that option.
But I kept thinking about it.
Then, about a week ago, I decided I'd
give that option a try. But when
I accessed the website with those 10
different ways to contact Microsoft,
it was a totally new web page.
It now has 11
different ways to contact Microsoft,
and none of them is the option I
was going to try.
Instead, they have new options such as
trying to contact Microsoft via
Twitter, or via their FAQ page, or via
their Store Support page, or their
XBox support page, etc. I don't
use Twitter, their FAQ page doesn't
have the question I want to ask, and
my problem doesn't have anything to do
with the other new options. So,
the only options available to me are
the two that were also on the previous
version of that web page: to call
Microsoft or to use their chat
option. Both involve getting
past their robots. They are the
same options I was trying for months.
I need to find some new
way to try those options.
Meanwhile, yesterday I finished filing
my Federal Income Tax forms, and they
were accepted, so now I have to file
my State Income Tax forms. I
probably should do that next, so that
I'll be able to focus on the Microsoft
problem when I get back to trying to
solve it.
Comments for Sunday,
February 26, 2023, thru Tues., Feb. 28,
2023:
February 26, 2023
- Now that I've narrowed down my list of
interesting podcasts from 114 to a mere 60,
I've got the time to listen to some of the
longer episodes. During the past week,
I listened to a bunch of episodes of Something
You Should Know, and about half
the episodes were worth my listening
time. I made a lot of notes. I
thought that the United States was the only
country in the world that allowed
direct advertising of drugs to consumers,
but I learned that New Zealand also allows
it. So, there are two
countries where Big Pharma can pitch some
dangerous drug to consumers on TV, just as
long as they warn them that there could be
all kinds of side effects (including death)
if you do not use the drug properly.
There were also interesting episodes about
"What makes food delicious," "Using too many
arguments to make your case," and "Why we
dream."
I also listened to an episode of the Profoundly
Pointless podcast from August 10,
2022, which was titled "CERN
Particle Physicist Dr. James Beacham",
because that is who was interviewed.
It was fascinating episode,
up until about the 51 minute mark. At
51 minutes and 27 seconds, the host of the
show, Nick VanZant, asks:
Are we going to go back in
time? Can we go back in time? Is that
going to happen?
And Dr. Beacham replies (in
part):
Short answer, probably not.
Time travel? Well, okay. First of all, if
somebody asks, can't will we ever travel
through time? The question is, yes, and
you're doing it right now you're traveling
through time, at a rate of one second per
second. So we're all traveling through
time. And indeed, we are. However, if you
want to do some other kinds of travel to a
time where you're, for example, you know,
traveling at one year per second, then
that's something that we have to work on.
It seems right now, with the kind of
theoretical limitations that we have
within, you know, special relativity and
general relativity, these kinds of things,
we, it seems likely that we'll probably
never be able to do backwards time travel,
I'm happy to be proven wrong. But the
short answer is that we might be able to,
at some point, be able to travel into the
future far future. But traveling backward in
time seems to be less likely. And
there's a lot of reasons for that one of
them is mathematical. Again, at the end
of the day, we have this thing, we have
these mathematical rules that are part
of relativity, it seems as though it's
probably not likely for us to have so
called closed timelike curves. I
mean, I'd be happy to prove or be proven
wrong. But we don't have any evidence that
that's really possible forward time travel
could be possible, but backward might be
impossible.
To me the answer is simply
"IT'S TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO TRAVEL
BACKWARD IN TIME. PERIOD!"
Mathematics has nothing to do with it.
All you have to understand is "What IS
time?" And scientists seem unable to
answer that question. They
inexplicably say it is a "concept" or an
"idea." According to Wikipedia,
Time is the continued
sequence of existence and events that
occurs in an apparently irreversible
succession from the past, through the
present, into the future.
That is an explanation of
how Time WORKS, it's not a definition
of Time.
What is Time? Einstein
described key facts about how
Time works: (1) Time slows down when you
move faster. (2) Time slows down when you
approach a gravitational mass.
Those two facts have been confirmed
by many scientific experiments. We know
that you can "travel into the future" by
moving very fast. But it isn't really
"traveling into the future." It is
simply slowing down time. If you
travel at 185,349 miles
per second, one year for you
will be 10 years for someone who
is "stationary" back on
Earth. So, if that person
back on Earth is your twin
brother, and you spend a year
traveling at 185,349 miles per second, when you return to Earth, you
will be 9
years younger
than your twin
brother. The
traveling twin
will have aged
only 1 year
while the
stationary
twin aged 10
years.
The question then becomes: What is
time if it can be slowed down by motion and
gravity? Years
ago, I wrote a
science paper with the answer to
that question: Time is particle
spin. Atomic clocks
use particles to measure time.
Atomic clocks demonstrate
that particles spin and interact slower
when the clock moves faster.
And slowing down Time has nothing
to do with going backward in
Time. No one is going
backward in time if one person ages 10
years while someone else ages 1
year.
Yet, I have never been able to get
anyone to discuss this.
Mathematician scientists seem
incapable of accepting the FACT that
time can slow down and speed up.
And scientists who know
from experiments that time can
slow down and speed up don't want to
argue with the mathematician
scientists. So, it appears that
by agreeing that "time is just a
concept or idea," they can avoid
fighting with each other.