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Comments for Sunday,
January 22, 2023, thru Sat., Jan. 28, 2023:
January 26,
2023 -
I used to be a systems
analyst. I began as a
computer programmer, then became
a systems analyst, and finally
ended up as head of systems
departments. When I watch
and listen to the news these
days - with all the stories
about misplaced confidential,
secret and top-secret documents
- I see a "systems
problem." Unfortunately,
the news stories don't tell me
enough to fully analyze the
problem.
It could be something as simple
as failing to put documents back
into a FOLDER that is marked
"Confidential," "Secret" or "Top
Secret." Only Donald Trump
seems to have deliberately
taken the FOLDERS home.
The others seem to have just
mistakenly taken home documents
that were from
such folders. The
individual documents may only
have had a file number such as TS1234
in the heading, indicating it is
from a "Top
Secret" folder. The proper
handling of such documents
requires a lecture from
an expert who must explain to
the President or Vice-President
how to properly handle such
documents. But such
lectures might seem demeaning
and therefore are not done
properly - if at all.
One thing seems certain: From
this point onward, most people
with access to such documents
are going to be more careful.
The other item that is all over
the news these says is Congressman
George Santos. I
find it totally unbelievable
that people could elect such a
person to Congress. It's
another "system problem" that
allows such things to
happen. But, the problem
is well known: Republicans do
not want anyone telling
them who they can and cannot
elect. They seem to think
emotionally, not
logically. There is no
other explanation for why they
would elect someone like Donald
Trump or George Santos or so
many others. They simply like
the candidate. He (or she)
tells them what they want to
hear. There is no other
reason necessary. Any
claim that the candidate is an
idiot or a crook is just an opinion
from "the other side" and
therefore has no value and can
be ignored ..... until the
politician is arrested, tried,
found guilty, and locked
up. And even that may
still not be enough to convince
some people that they were wrong
in believing and supporting such
politicians.
There was something "positive"
this morning. SEVEN
different people accessed and
read my science papers on "The
Reality of Time Dilation"
and "Variable
Time and the Variable Speed
of Light." Four
people accessed and read my
paper on "Simplifying
Einstein's Thought
Experiments."
And one or two people accessed
and read each of my
other ten papers.
There may have been others, but
those were the ones with "unique
IP addresses" who accessed the
papers for their first
time. I have no clue what
prompted the reads, and, of
course, if any of the readers
sent me an email about anything,
they would have sent it to the
address on the papers - detect
at outlook dot com - which I am
still unable to access.
So, even good news can come with
a coating of frustration.
January 23, 2023 - Hmm.
I think I'm going through some kind of
"transition." This morning,
after completing my regular morning
chores (which take about an hour), I
turned off my computer and sat down to
listen to some podcasts. But I
found I wasn't really interested in
listening to any of the podcasts still
in my listening queue. I'm
up-to-date on my favorite
podcasts, and the only stuff still in
my listening queue are some celebrity
interview shows, some science shows
where they do a lot of yak yak gabbing
before they get around to actually
discussing science, and a couple
podcasts that I've never listened to
before. However, when
downloading sample episodes of those
new podcasts, I had to listen to brief
bits of the beginnings and ends of the
shows, so I got some idea of what they
are going to be like. They might
be somewhat interesting, but they are
definitely not unique or
attention-grabbing.
I do have some episodes of the
American Scandal podcast that I
want to listen to. However, they
consist of a 4-episode series about Edward
Snowden and a 5-episode series
about "The Breakup of Big Oil," which
tells the story of how Standard
Oil tried to create a monopoly
back around 1900. I want to
listen to both series, but they're so
long it's like listening to audio
books. I might burn them onto
CDs and listen to them while driving,
but the episodes are slightly over 40
minutes, which means they only take
about half a CD, but they are too big
to put 2 episodes on one CD -- unless
I go through the process of trimming
the commercials off of the front of
the podcasts. So, what I'm doing
instead is just sitting around
wondering what I should be
doing.
In other words, I think I'm in a
period of "transition."
Hopefully, I'm transitioning into a
phase where I want to work on writing
a book.
January 22, 2023 -
I keep trying to whittle my
podcast-listening down to something
manageable, so that I'll have the time to
work on a book. But when listening to
podcasts, they often advertise other
podcasts that I've never heard of
before. That happened several times
last week, and two new podcasts made me
really curious. So, I had to check
them out.
The first was titled "Strange Planet" or "Richard
Syrett's Strange Planet." I listened
to episode #840 which is titled "Political
Intrigue in America." Here's the
blurb about Richard Syrett's guest for the
episode:
Joel Skousen is the
publisher of the World Affairs Brief, a
weekly news analysis service found at
worldaffairsbrief.com. Mr. Skousen is a
political scientist by training and speaks
multiple foreign languages which he uses
in accessing information here and abroad.
He specializes in
helping readers understand the hidden
agenda of those that secretly control
both political parties and the US
government.
It's a fascinating episode
because it has two conspiracy theorists
talking to each other as if their crazy
conspiracies make total sense to them
because everyone they know routinely accepts
them and believes them. The term "deep
state" is probably mentioned a dozen times.
The episode is 55 minutes long. I hunted for
a transcript, but couldn't find any.
So, if I ever need to quote from it, I'll
have to do the transcribing myself.
The other new podcast I checked out is
titled "One
Strange Thing." I selected and
listened to a half dozen episodes, each
between 20 and 35 minutes in length.
The first episode I listened to was titled "The
Artifacts" which has this description:
Throughout the history of
conventional archeology, artifacts have
been found that seem to defy what we know
about what we know. Did the Maine Penny,
the Shroud of Turin, and the Antikythera
Mechanism simply evade our previous
understandings of what ancient societies
were doing, and where, and when — or is
there a case to be made for otherworldly
intervention?
I couldn't remember ever
hearing of "the Maine Penny" before. Wikipedia
has a page about it that says it was
probably minted between 1065 and 1080 AD,
and it is believed it was brought to America
by Norse sailors a couple hundred years
before Columbus "discovered" America.
Another episode, titled "The
Incident" is about a UFO encounter in
Texas in 1980 which resulted in injuries to
two middle-aged women and a young boy.
The episode titled "The
Saucer" is about a UFO sighting by a
Socorro, New Mexico, police officer in April
1964. What made the episodes so
interesting to me is that they were
basically just summaries of news reports,
with no attempts to create new theories
about them.
The podcast episode I found most fascinating
during the past week was from the "You
Are Not So Smart" podcast. It
was episode #242, which is titled "Survival
of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the
Tech Billionaires." It's an
interview with Douglas Rushkoff, who wrote a
book with that title, "inspired by his
invitation to consult a group of the world’s
richest people on how to spend their money
now to survive an apocalypse they fear is
coming within their lifetimes." The
interview was so fascinating that I put the
book at the top of my "must read"
list. If you think that Internet
conspiracy theorists are interesting nut
jobs, you need to check out what super-rich
conspiracy theorists are doing
to protect themselves, like building
elaborate underground bunkers in Alaska and
New Zealand (where global warming will be
minimized) and trying to create
self-sustaining "farms" where they can
survive forever without any contact with the
outside world. Rushkoff calls them
"Preppers," because they are obsessed with preparing
for "the coming apocalypse."
Fascinating stuff.
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Comments for Sunday,
January 15, 2023, thru Sat., Jan. 21, 2023:
January 18,
2023 -
While eating lunch this
afternoon, I finished reading
another library book on my
Kindle. The book was "Pictures
at a Revolution: Five Movies
and the Birth of the New
Hollywood" by Mark
Harris.
I "borrowed" the book from my local library
four or five years ago, back when they would
download it into my Kindle and there was no
procedure for removing or "returning"
it. I may have started reading it back
then, too. But then some other book
would come along that interested me more, so
I'd set this book aside and read the new
one. Eventually, I'd get back to
reading this one. I probably read 30
other books between the time I started
reading this one and finished it.
Nevertheless, it's a very interesting book
about the making of 5 movies back in the
mid-1960s:
1.
Bonnie and Clyde
2. Dr. Dolittle
3. Guess Who's
Coming to Dinner
4. The Graduate
5. In the Heat of the
Night
Except for "Dr. Dolittle,
which was a musical fantasy and a major
disaster, the other four movies were very
successful and represented the changing
times that were the 1960s. They were
risky undertakings, since they were about
criminal violence (#1), sex out of wedlock
(#4) and race relations (#3
and #5).
The book is about the making of those five
movies and all the infighting that took
place as they tried to figure out if the
movies would make money, bankrupt the
backers, or start riots.
The only one that lost money was the one
that was "traditional" and non-controversial
- Dr. Dolittle, which was also by
far the most expensive movie of those five
to make. It's also the only one of the
five that I didn't like.
January 17, 2023 - I'm still trying to
find a way to access my detect at
outlook dot com emails. A
few days ago, someone sent me a link
to a web page titled "11
Ways to Contact Microsoft."
Some of the 11 ways don't apply to me,
since I do I use Twitter or some of
the other options they mention.
I also seem to
be one of the last humans on
Earth who does not have a "smart
phone," which another option
requires, and I cannot answer a
basic question required by
another option: I cannot tell
them who I recently sent emails
to via my detect at outlook
dot com account. I
rarely used that account for sending
emails, only for receiving
emails, and I haven't sent any
emails "recently" because I
haven't been able to access the
account since August. The
only reason I want to access my
emails for detect
at outlook dot com
is
because it's the address that is
at the top of all
of my science papers.
I suppose I could simply change
the email address on all of my
science papers, but that creates
a whole new set of problems.
Or maybe I need to write a
science "fiction" story about a
guy in a life-or-death situation
who needs to contact a major
corporation that only uses
robots to respond to outsiders,
and the guy's situation is one
that none of the robots has been
programmed to understand.
But before I can write that
story, I need to figure out an
ending for it.
January 15, 2023 -
The reason I haven't posted any new comments
here since January 9th seems to be because I
seem to be going through a period of "self
discovery." In my January 9 comment I
wrote about how, when listening to podcasts,
I was trying to get out of a "process of
discovery" and into "a regular
routine." I should have realized that
that was wrong, since the "process of
discovery" is what I like best, and I have
no interest in developing any new "regular
routine." What I was really trying to
do was turn "the process of discovery" into
my "regular routine."
When I sit down to listen to podcasts, I
always have a 5" x 7" yellow pad next to me,
on which I make notes. I make notes on
whether I like or do not like a podcast, and
what I like or do not like about it.
And, if a podcast has some interesting new
information, I'll make notes about that,
too.
I'm trying to determine which podcasts are
worth my listening time. And, while
doing that, I'm also learning new
things. For example, in episode #868
of The
Skeptics Guide to the Universe, they
talk about how if gravity is 1.5 Gs on a
planet, you cannot use chemical rockets to
leave the planet. Chemical rockets
simply do not provide enough power to
overcome that much gravity. That's not
a problem of any immediate concern, but I
found it interesting that we just happen to
live on a planet where chemical rockets
work. On that same episode they also
mentioned that the current plan is to
destroy the International Space Station
(ISS) in 2031 by crashing it into an
ocean. It will be worn out by
then. They also expect that all new
American space stations will be built by
private industry, like Space-X and Blue
Origin. NASA's money will be spent on
exploration.
The main problem I have with The
Skeptics Guide to the Universe is that
the episodes are close to 2 hours long, and
if an episode doesn't contain anything of
real interest to me in the first 20 minutes,
I'll probably just turn it off, and I'll
never get back to it because there are just
too many other podcast shows to listen to.
I listen to podcasts when I have nothing
better to do, and I also read non-fiction
books on my Kindle during breakfast and
lunch. I make notes on those, too, by
underling passages and copying the
underlined passages to a WORD file when I'm
done with the book. I underline
passages that contain information I never
knew before, and details that are worth
remembering. It's a more common form
of "learning" than listening to podcasts.
And there's a third method of
learning: I watch science shows on
TV. I record them on my DVR so that I
can watch them when I have the time.
That way, I can watch a 10 to 20 minute
section when I have the time, and another 10
to 20 minute section when I have more
time. And, in the past, instead of
making notes, I would burn a DVD that
contains the entire program, so that I can
watch it again any time I want to. The
only problem with that process is that I do
not remember things I watch as well as I
remember things I write down. As a
result, I have a lot of DVDs
that contain stuff I've totally forgotten
about.
I stopped recording things on DVDs a couple
years ago when the remote control for the
recorder went on the fritz. The last
DVD I burned is dated April 19, 2020, and it
contains an episode of The
Daily Show with Trevor Noah and an
episode of The
Late Show with Stephen Colbert,
which are apparently the first episodes they
recorded from home when the COVID outbreak
prevented them for working in a studio with
an audience. That DVD is on the top of a
stack of 50 DVDs that contain episodes of
all kinds of science and history shows that
I can only vaguely remember, such as the
2008 mini-series "When
We Left Earth," Morgan Freeman's
show "Through
The Wormhole" which ran from
2010 to 2017, "History
Detectives" from 2003 or so, and
"Star
Talk" from around 2015.
Evidently, my plan was to record those shows
so that I could watch them again some
day. The problem is: I have no written
record of those shows. I have a 3-ring
binder with a printed list of movies and
TV shows I have on DVD, but those science
shows aren't on any list. Hmm.
I just noticed I also burned some Sonny
and Cher shows on DVDs. And in
another batch of about 50 DVDS that I put
into "crystal cases" but didn't catalog, I
see that in 2007 I burned 7 DVDs containing
all 7 episodes of "The War." It's
Ken Burns' TV series about World War II.
One thing seems certain: I'm never going to
run out of things to do.
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Comments for Sunday,
January 8, 2023, thru Sat., Jan. 14, 2023:
January
9, 2023 -
I'm still trying to turn listening to
podcasts into a regular routine,
instead of a process of
discovery. If it was a regular
routine, I would just download
episodes of my favorite podcasts once
per week, and then I'd listen to them
when I had nothing better to do.
But it's still a process of discovery,
which means I'm still discovering new
podcasts and I'm still digging through
recently discovered podcasts for
episodes that seem really interesting.
For example, I'm still digging through
the
You're Wrong About podcast to
find interesting stuff.
Yesterday, I listened to an episode
about The
Stockholm Syndrome. The
term refers to a bank robbery in
Stockholm where the hostages in the
bank took sides with the robbers when
the police showed up. The
hostages were more afraid of the
police coming in and randomly shooting
people than they were of the bank
robbers shooting them. The bank
robbers seemed like normal people
caught in a dangerous situation, and
the hostages could sympathize with
that. The movie "Dog Day
Afternoon" is about a similar
situation. And Patty
Hearst, granddaughter of
billionaire publisher William Randolph
Hearst, became famous when she joined
with the bank robbers in another
example of the Stockholm Syndrome.
I also listened to an episode about The
Donner Party. Like the
episode about Flight 571 that I
mentioned in a previous comment, it's
about people resorting to cannibalism
to stay alive. This time it's a
wagon train that gets stuck in the
Rocky Mountains in the winter of
1846-47. The podcast is totally
fascinating when it really gets into
details I've never heard before.
I have a half dozen more episodes I
want to listen to before I turn to
just checking for interesting recent
episodes.
This morning, someone sent me an email
that mentioned another podcast that I
thought I had never heard of
before. It's called "The
Moth." It's evidently been
around for over 25 years, which means
it was a radio show before it
also became a podcast. The
episode mentioned in the email was
from 2012 and was a
20 minute talk by Dr. George
Lombardi, who was hustled off to
India around 1990 to save the
life of Mother Teresa.
It's a fascinating and funny
story that seems like a comedy
routine, but it is totally real.
I knew I'd heard some details before,
and when I researched it, I found that
the same guy sent me the same link
back around February
18, 2019. I still wish I
could download and save it as an MP3
file, but I haven't yet found a way to
do that. I can only listen to it
on my computer. This time,
however, I also downloaded 6 recent
episodes of The Moth into my
MP3 player, just to see if any are
even remotely as fascinating as that
Mother Teresa episode. (None
of them were.)
January 8, 2023 -
When I get four or more people accessing one
of my science papers for the first time in
one day, I have to assume that they are
discussing that paper or all of my papers on some forum
somewhere. Lately that has been
happening fairly often. On January 4,
there were four first-time accesses to my
paper Radar
Guns vs Wave Theory. And on
January 6 there were four more. On
Christmas, there were five
first-time accesses to my paper The
Reality of Time Dilation.
Three days later, on the 28th, there were nine
first-time accesses. And on the 4th of
January there were four more first-time
accesses.
Meanwhile, around this same time, there has
been a small surge in people joining my
Facebook group about Time
and Time Dilation. The group now
has 242 members. Here's a list of the
ten who joined most recently:
Their names indicate to me that most are
probably in India. Yang Ne is probably
in China. The people on this list may
have nothing to do with the people who
recently accessed my papers, but the fact
that they joined my Facebook group says that
they all speak English, which means they
also could have read my
papers. But no one has posted anything
to my Facebook group since June of 2022.
I suppose its also possible that they might
be sending me messages to my detect at
outlook dot com email address, which I
lost access to when my computer was trashed
last September. Sigh.
I'm going to have to try again to find some
way to regain access to that mailbox.
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Comments for Sunday,
January 1, 2023, thru Sat., Jan. 7, 2023:
January 4, 2023 - While eating
breakfast this morning, I
finished reading another book on
my Kindle. The book was "Off
the Edge: Flat Earthers,
Conspiracy Culture, and Why
People Will Believe Anything"
by Kelly Weill.
The book is very interesting and
contains just about everything anyone would
want to know about Flat Earthers.
Before the time of Columbus and Magellan, of
course, most people believed the earth was
flat. But in the past hundred years or
so the idea has gained a new kind of
believer in almost every country on
earth. In 1914, Zion,
Illinois, was a center for Flat Earthers.
The theory was taught in school and preached
in churches. Here's a quote from the
book:
A planned community on the
shore of Lake Michigan, Zion was
established with lofty ideals of moral
righteousness and self-sufficiency. Unlike
Manea Fen’s short-lived commune of
marriage-scorning, laughing- gas-huffing
British socialists, however, Zion operated
with ruthless puritanical efficiency. And
rather than implode after a few short
years, Zion operated for decades under a
genuine Flat Earth dictatorship.
Flat Earthers seem to be
growing in number these days because social
media is a great way for them to spread
their message and get fellow members.
Some Flat Earthers have been killed as they
tried to prove their beliefs by sending
themselves up into the atmosphere in
rockets.
I've got 6 pages of quotes from the
book. Here's one that really surprised
me (I remember the event, but not the
motive):
In
Wisconsin, a pharmacist accused of
deliberately damaging COVID-19
vaccines (which he believed were
harmful) was revealed to be a Flat
Earther, who believed the sky is a
“shield put up by the Government to
prevent individuals from seeing
God,” according to an FBI agent’s
testimony.
Here's a quote that provides
a good example of how they think:
Though many are dismissive
of gravity as a concept, some claim that
the planet is constantly accelerating
upward, while others disagree and claim
that the only reason we don’t drift off
the ground like escaped party balloons is
because humans are heavier than air.
Another:
In short, conspiracy
theories help us feel safe by providing an
explanation for things that feel
incomprehensible and beyond our control.
And one final quote:
Belief in conspiracy
theories is a unifying feature of
extremist groups of every political and
religious stripe. “The frequency of
conspiracy theories within all these
groups suggests that they play an
important social and functional role
within extremism itself,” wrote the
authors of a 2010 study. Conspiracy
theories “hold extremist groups together
and push them in a more extreme and
sometimes violent direction.” Perhaps it
was only natural, then, that some Hitler
apologists and open antisemites would turn
to one of the world’s most extreme
conspiracy theories to infuse their
movements with new urgency. This fusion
means that Flat Earth Nazis are,
unfortunately, real.
"Off the Edge" is a very
interesting and timely book, and I highly
recommend it.
January 3, 2023 - I don't know if I
want to make any New Year's
Resolutions or not. I think
not. If I make a New Year's
Resolution to continue work on my book
about "Logical Relativity," it
might just be a waste of time if I'm
not ready to work on
that book again. I may just read
the Introduction over and over again
until I figure out the best way to
explain everything.
2022 was a disastrous year for
me. I'm still trying to recover
from having my old computer almost
destroyed. It still "works," but
a lot of files were destroyed,
including the copy of WORD I had on
that device. While I had
everything else backed up, my new
computer has a different version of
the Windows operating system, and it
doesn't have the amount of memory that
my old computer has. And my old
computer had a lot of passwords
programmed to work
automatically. I had most of the
passwords also written down, but not
all.
I can no longer access my emails from
detect at outlook dot com.
For years and years I had an
application that accessed those
emails, and I apparently never wrote
down the actual password I used.
I've got several passwords written
down for that application, but none
work. I've tried to get
Microsoft to let me get back into
those emails, but their robots just
lead me in circles and nothing gets
resolved. I almost never used
that email address to send
emails, I only used to to receive
emails. It's the email
address that I put at the top of all
my science papers. I also
used it when accessing some discussion
forums, and for years it was at the
top of this web site. When I had
access to incoming emails from that
address, 99.999% of them were just ads
and garbage. That may still be
the case, but I can't be certain
without having access to them. I
need a plan.
I also can no longer access my
science papers on academia.edu.
If I could, I'd probably delete
them all. A lot of them are old
versions of the papers I have on vixra.org,
but Academia.edu doesn't let you
upload new versions of papers.
All the papers posted there are
supposed to be the "final" published
version.
But, what I'm mostly doing these days
is listening to podcasts. I
listened to a very
interesting podcast the
other day that made a good case for cannibalism.
It was on the You're
Wrong About podcast. The
episode was about Uruguayan
Air Force Flight 571, which
crashed in the Andes Mountains on
October 13, 1972. Of the 45
people on board, only 16 survived.
Their survival made them heroes, until
the world found out HOW they
survived. Their story is told in
an absolutely fascinating
way, and the end result is an analysis
of whether staying alive is socially
acceptable if you have to resort to
cannibalism to do it. (The
survivors of the crash didn't kill
anyone. They were surrounded by
dead bodies.) I'd heard about
that crash before, but never in such a
fascinating way.
January 1, 2023 -
I wish everyone a very Happy New Year!
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Comments for Sunday,
December 25, 2022, thru Sat., Dec. 31,
2022:
December
31, 2022 -
While driving around
doing grocery
shopping this
afternoon, I
finished listening
to CD #9 of the 9-CD
audio book version
of "A
Hunter-Gatherer's
guide to the
21st Century:
Evolution and
the Challenges
of Modern Life"
by Heather Haying
and Bret Weinstein.
Wow! What a great book!
When I was about 1/4th done, I obtained a
Kindle copy of the book and started reading
it, too. But, I soon stopped and just
listened to the audio book. Here's one
passage I underlined:
Our
species’ pace of change now outstrips
our ability to adapt. We are generating
new problems at a new and accelerating
rate, and it is making us
sick—physically, psychologically,
socially, and environmentally. If we
don’t figure out how to grapple with the
problem of accelerating novelty,
humanity will perish, a victim of its
success.
I may
finish reading the Kindle version at some
later date, so that I can underline and
save more key passages. I may also
listen to the audio book again at some
later date. That's something I've
never even considered before for any other
book.
Here's part of Amazon's description of the
book:
We are living through the
most prosperous age in all of human
history, yet people are more listless,
divided and miserable than ever. Wealth
and comfort are unparalleled, and yet our
political landscape grows ever more toxic,
and rates of suicide, loneliness, and
chronic illness continue to skyrocket. How
do we explain the gap between these two
truths? What's more, what can we do to
close it?
The two authors are
evolutionary biologists, and they expertly
explain how humans evolved and how our
current lives are incompatible with how we
have evolved. We evolved to live in
clans and tribes, but today most people do
not even know their next door
neighbors. We were built to adapt to
change, but change is now coming so rapidly
that we cannot easily adapt. As
someone who read the book commented: "The
human brain hasn't sufficiently evolved to
be compatible with Twitter."
That may partially explain why Twitter (and
most of social media) is so dominated by
personal attacks and conspiracy
theorists. Everyone on Twitter is from
"a different clan" and they all are trying
to tell you how "their clan" and their
beliefs are superior to yours.
If or when I finish reading the Kindle
version, I'll write another review and quote
some more key passages.
December 29, 2022 - I
recently discovered a new
science podcast called "The
Science Show."
It's produced in
Australia, so everyone
speaks with an Australian
accent, but the first few
episodes I downloaded and
listened to were absolutely
fascinating.
The first episode that
attracted my attention is
from January 14, 2022, and
it is titled "Hedy
Lemarr actress and
inventor who helped
develop the modern world."
Hedy Lamarr was a very
beautiful movie actress
from the 1940s, who was
sometimes called "the most
beautiful woman in the
world." I've known
for many years that Hedy
Lamarr was also an inventor,
but it was my recollection
that she invented
something to do with radar
range finding. This
episode made it clear that
her invention has to do
with "frequency
hopping." That's a
term that was unfamiliar
to me, until I listened to
the episode. It appears
that, without "frequency
hopping," cell phones
wouldn't be
possible. Nor would
a lot of other things.
If you didn't have
"frequency hopping," every
cell phone would have to
use a different
transmission
frequency. And that
would mean that someone
could just turn on a radio
receiver and start going
through the frequencies to
pick up phone calls from
everyone.
Hedy Lamarr's invention,
patented on August 11,
1942, was to have the
transmitter and
receiver change
frequencies in unison
many times per
second. That way, no
one can tune into your
frequency without knowing
the exact pattern to your
"frequency hopping."
It's the technology
behind GPS, Wi-Fi and
Bluetooth.
I've looked around the
Internet for a simple
description of the
invention, but I couldn't
find one. The
Science Show
podcast, however, explains
things very well.
It's something I never
thought about
before. It showed me
that I've been making
false assumptions about
Wi-Fi communications, but
I never realized it
because I've never really
discussed the issue with
anyone, and therefore it
was never explained to me
how my false assumptions
could not possibly work.
You learn something new
every day. This one
was "jaw-dropping" for me.
The
Science Show
episode about H.G. Wells
was also fascinating and
filled with things I never
knew before.
December 28, 2022 - Sometimes it
seems like I don't do anything
the way "normal people" do
them. I go to the gym 4
times a week to
"exercise." But what I
call "exercise" doesn't appear
to be what everyone else in the
world calls "exercise."
I do the same routine every
time. I walk for 22
minutes on the treadmill, going
3 miles per hour. I then
work out on 6 different weight
machines, doing 75 "reps" on
each machine: lift up weights,
pull down weights, a row, a
reverse row, an arm curl and a
reverse arm curl. And,
finally, I sit on a bicycle and
peddle it for 20 minutes.
It's basically the same routine
I've been doing for nearly 40
years.
What I don't do is huff and puff
and grunt and groan. I
don't do "body building."
I just "exercise."
A couple days ago, while I was
doing my regular 20 minutes
peddling a bicycle at my Planet
Fitness gym, one of the guys who
works in the place started
talking to me. It was a
conversation similar to many
I've had. He asked about
my routine, and when I told him,
he couldn't comprehend that I
did 75 "reps" on 6 different
weight machines. What
"normal" people do is about 10
reps, then they stop to huff and
puff, and then they may do
another 10 reps. How
could I possibly do 75 reps?
The answer is simple: I use 25
pound weights when "normal"
people use 50 pounds or 75
pounds. I use 35 pound
weights when "normal" people use
100 or 150 pound weights.
I just exercise, I don't
do body building.
Here is a
dictionary definition of
"exercise":
activity requiring
physical effort, carried out to sustain or
improve health and fitness.
That's what I do. I
exercise to sustain my heath and
fitness.
Yesterday, I did a Google search for "body
building vs exercise." There were no
sites which compare those terms.
Instead they compare "body building" to a
"fitness session." According to one
site:
Although the two fitness
regimes might seem similar to each other,
they are in fact very different. Fitness
workout/modelling is a more recent
offshoot of exercising, while bodybuilding
has been around since the late 1960’s.
Hmm.
Okay. So, what I do is "a recent
offshoot of exercising." I should be
saying that I'm doing a "fitness
workout." Then people will hopefully
understand.
You learn something new every day.
December 27, 2022 - I've been listening
to a lot of podcasts lately, mostly
podcasts about science. Those
podcasts always have a scientist or
astronomer as one of the hosts, and
the co-host is usually a
non-scientist. Here are 5 examples
from my
web page about podcasts:
The
Infinite Monkey Cage
Hosts: Brian Cox
(scientist) and Robin Ince (comedian)
Big Picture Science
Hosts: Seth Shostak
(astronomer) and Molly Bentley (science
journalist)
SpaceNuts
Hosts: Fred Watson
(astronomer) Andrew Dunkley (journalist)
Astronomy Cast
Hosts: Fraser Cain
(publisher of Universe Today) and Pamela
Gay (astronomer)
Daniel and Jorge Explain
The Universe
Hosts: Daniel Whiteson
(physicist) and Jorge Cham (online
cartoonist)
One thing that is clear to
me after listening to hundreds of these
podcasts is that I'm never in
disagreement with any of those
scientists or any of the other
scientists on the other podcasts I listen
to. However, it is also very rare for
them to discuss time dilation,
which is the subject which seems to be at
the heart of most disagreements I've had on
science forums. And those
disagreements involved mathematics versus
reality. In one recent episode of
SpaceNuts, Dr. Fred Watson did a lengthy
explanation of the difference between
mathematical models and reality, which I
totally agreed with. I just wish I'd
made a note of which episode it was so that
I could quote from it right now. As I
recall, however, it was about warping
space-time, not about time dilation.
Of course, all those podcasts and many
others are created for enjoyment by non-scientists
- for people like me, who aren't scientists,
but who enjoy learning about science.
Science is a fascinating
subject.
My point is: There seems to be a difference
between the way science is practiced and the
way science is taught. And that
difference, of course, is in the way
mathematics is used. It is extremely
rare for any podcast discussion about
science to involve mathematics. But,
if you want to discuss science on the
Internet, it seems that they will only
discuss the math - and they endlessly argue
about the math. While I haven't
participated in any discussions there in a
long time, I check the
sci.physics.relativity forum every
morning to see what is being
discussed. What is always
being discussed and is almost never
being agreed upon is the mathematics
of some science problem or issue.
Of course, the Internet is infested with
trolls. If you have a belief that no
one else on Earth agrees with, the place to
argue it is on the Internet. And the
result is trolls arguing with trolls.
And such arguments produce nothing but
conspiracy theories. After all, if
everyone in the world disagrees with you, it
cannot be because you are wrong, it must
be because of some kind of conspiracy.
And lately there have been a lot of podcasts
about conspiracy theories and
theorists. Fascinating stuff,
particularly the Flat Earthers.
December 25, 2022
- I wish everyone a very Merry Christmas!
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Comments for Sunday,
December 18, 2022, thru Sat., Dec. 24,
2022:
December 22,
2022 -
Yesterday afternoon, I finished
listening to the last of the
Everything Everywhere Daily
podcasts that were
available and of
interest to me. It was the
760th
episode I'd listened to.
As of this morning, there
are 899 episodes available,
but that number includes re-runs
and some episodes about sports
and ancient history that weren't
of any interest to me. This
morning I downloaded today's
11 minute episode about The
Winter Solstice. I
put it into my 2-terabyte
portable hard-drive, where I've
stored the other 760
episodes. Later I'll
transfer that episode from there
into my MP3 player. That
portable hard-drive also
contains 145 episodes of The
Infinite Monkey Cage podcast,
which is my favorite podcast and
the only podcast for which I've
downloaded and listened to every
episode. When I finish
listening to a podcast episode,
I delete it from my MP3 player,
but a copy remains on my
portable hard-drive.
It's somewhat of a relief to be
up-to-date on Everything
Everywhere Daily (EED)
podcasts. Sitting around
and listening to episode after
episode of a podcast is not my
favorite way to pass time, but
"finishing what I started" can
become an obsession
sometimes. On October 19,
I started listening to EED and
printed a list of all the
episodes that had been aired as
of that time. And I
started checking off episodes I
downloaded and as I listened to
them. That created a
"goal" for me. I had to
finished the list. I also noted
which episodes I found to be particularly
interesting, which is about 10%
of them. For example, I
noted the recent episode about NASA's
Human Computers as being
particularly interesting.
Here's a quote from the episode:
The first use of the term
“computer” dates back to the early 17th
century. The first known written reference
to the word computer was actually in 1613.
A computer was nothing
more than a person who computes, in the
same way, that a baker is someone who
bakes and a cleaner is someone who cleans.
And another quote:
There were electronic
computers used in solving equations for
space flight, however, the early engineers
for NASA didn’t actually trust them. They
felt that human calculations would be more
accurate because that was what they had
become accustomed to.
When some of the first
electronic computers arrived, they were
often given to human computers as it was
seen to be part of their job
responsibility. As such, many of the first
computer programmers were the same women
who were human computers.
And another:
In the late 50s and early
60s, as the space program began to launch
its most important missions, it was these
women, who by now numbered in the hundreds
across the country, who were responsible
for calculating the orbital trajectories
upon which the missions would succeed or
fail.
Two days ago, when this
episode of EED was created, there was still
one 85-year-old woman working as a "human
computer" for NASA. Her name is Sue
Finley, and she began working for NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1958.
It's learning interesting stuff like that
which caused listening to EED to become
somewhat of an obsession for me.
December 20, 2022 - According to CBSNews.com,
Trump's NFT cards sold out in less
than a day. When I first saw the
Non-Fungible Token (NFT) cards being
advertised by Trump, I couldn't
imagine anyone being dumb enough to
spend $99 for a digital "card" with
Trump's head photo-shopped onto some
picture copied off the Internet.
Here's a sample:
But, it appears that the collection of
45,000 NFTs sold out in less than a
day, earning someone about
$4,600,000. The cards were owned
by a company called NFT INT LLC, whose
mailing address traces to a UPS store
in Park City, Utah.
Trump evidently just earned some fee
for allowing that company to use his
name. Their web site CollectTrumpCards.com
states:
These Digital Trading
Cards are not political and have nothing
to do with any political campaign. NFT INT
LLC is not owned, managed or controlled by
Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization,
CIC Digital LLC or any of their respective
principals or affiliates.
According to an
article on Yahoo.com, most of the
basic pictures (without Trump's face) are
just taken off the Internet, a lot from web
sites for clothing companies and stock photo
sites. Some even still have logo on
them identifying which site they were copied
from.
While Trump undoubtedly received some fee
for allowing the use of his name and for
providing the filmed announcement that the
cards were for sale, he certainly didn't do
his status any good. A lot of his
major supporters denounced the scheme,
including Steven Bannon. It seems to
be solid evidence that screwball schemes are
Trump's basic method of operation.
I always viewed Trump as a sleazy huckster,
I just never expected Trump to demonstrate
it so clearly and undeniably.
December 18, 2022
- The more I read about Flat Earthers, the
more convinced I become that it is a psychology
subject, not a science subject. And because
it is about psychology, it doesn't matter
how many facts and how much evidence you
present, you won't change many minds.
A Flat Earther just sees facts and evidence
as arguments that you are claiming to be
smarter than he is - or that you are trying
to trick him into believing nonsense.
While
psychology interests me as a subject for
study, it's generally not a very good
subject for discussion. I've been in
countless discussions where nothing can be
resolved because no one can agree on how
to resolve a dispute. I've never been
in an argument with a Flat Earther, but I've
been in countless arguments with
mathematicians. My arguments
with mathematicians always hit a wall when I
want to discuss known facts and logic and
they will only discuss mathematics.
So, we have no way to resolve our
disagreements.
I imagine it would be similar with Flat
Earthers. I would want to
discuss facts and logic, and they would only
want to state their beliefs.
Yesterday,
I decided to do a Google search. I was
going to seek answers to "How do Flat
Earthers explain lunar eclipses?", but when
I finished typing the word "explain" Google
filled in the rest of the question as "How
do Flat Earthers explain time zones?"
So, I hit "enter" and checked that question
first. The answers from various
articles published on the Internet were all
very convoluted and boring, so I went back
and finished typing my original
question. I was then provided with a
link to the answers as given on The
Flat Earth Society's web site."
Interestingly, they provide two
totally different answers. The
first answer is titled "Electromagnetic
Acceleration" and involves curved
light rays. They provide a link
to a
very detailed answer, complete with
illustrations and arguments. The
second answer is a lot shorter and more
interesting. It is titled "Lunar
Eclipse due to Shadow Object."
Here's part of that explanation:
A Lunar Eclipse occurs
about twice a year when a satellite of the
sun passes between the sun and moon.
This satellite is called
the Shadow Object or Antimoon. Its orbital
plane is tilted at an angle to the sun's
orbital plane, making eclipses possible
only when the three bodies (Sun, Object,
and Moon) are aligned.
So, the Lunar Eclipse
doesn't happen because the Earth passes
between the Sun and the Moon, it happens
because some mysterious "shadow object" that
orbits the Sun passes between the sun
and the moon as seen by the viewer on Flat
Earth. And here is their explanation
of a Solar Eclipse:
During the day the
celestial bodies near the sun are
invisible. An example of this is seen in
the appearance of the Moon during the
Solar Eclipse. The Moon seems to appear
out of nowhere to intersect the Sun.
So, the moon can block our
view of the sun, but the Earth cannot
prevent light from the sun from hitting the
moon when both the sun and the moon are
always in orbits above the Flat
Earth.
Browsing the Flat Earth Society's web site,
I found a
page titled "The Conspiracy." It
contains this (mis)information:
There is no Flat Earth
Conspiracy. NASA is not hiding the shape
of the earth from anyone. The purpose of
NASA is not to 'hide the shape of the
earth' or 'trick people into thinking it's
round' or anything of the sort.
There is a Space Travel
Conspiracy. The purpose of NASA is to fake
the concept of space travel to further
America's militaristic dominance of space.
That was the purpose of NASA's creation
from the very start: To put ICBMs and
other weapons into space (or at least
appear to). The motto "Scientific
exploration of new frontiers for all
mankind" was nothing more than a front.
And they support their
beliefs with a very interesting true
quote:
"Control of space means control of the
world. From space, the masters of infinity
would have the power to control the
earth's weather, to cause drought and
flood, to change the tides and raise the
levels of the sea, to divert the gulf
stream and change temperate climates to
frigid. There is something more important
than the ultimate weapon. And that's the
ultimate position. The position of total
control over the Earth that lies somewhere
in outer space."
—Lyndon
B. Johnson, Statement on Status of
Nation's Defense and Race for Space,
January 7, 1958
Click HERE
for one source verifying that quote.
There are lots of others.
But it's a quote from a different era.
We were afraid of things in 1958 that are no
longer obsessed about in 2022. Today
we have other things to worry about.
Control of the world from space is still
something to think about, but we have many
ways to prevent anyone from taking control
that way.
And we have the Internet, which allows you
to get answers from Flat Earthers without
actually having to sit down and talk with
them. If you want to try to change
their minds, then you have to
actually talk with them. But that also
makes you a crusader for your views.
I'm just interested in how people
think. I'm interested in why
they believe what they believe. I have
no interest in converting anyone to my way
of thinking. They, however, are
passionately interested in demonstrating
that their beliefs are superior to mine (and
yours). That seems to be their only
purpose in life.
They're not conspiracy theorists.
They're egotists.
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