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Comments for Sunday, May
28, 2023, thru Wed., May 31, 2023:
May 29, 2023
- I spent all morning yesterday
creating a spreadsheet list of my
84 pop, jazz and blues LP
albums. Then I spent most of
the afternoon producing a
spreadsheet list of my 35 albums
of classical music.
Looking through the albums made me
want to listen to some of
them. I've got 7 Frank
Sinatra albums, 2 Dean Martin
albums, 3 Barbara Streisand
albums, plus albums by Andy
Williams, Cher, Claudine Longet,
Dionne Warwick, Joan Baez, Johnny
Cash, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett,
Peter Nero, Nancy Sinatra, Henry
Mancini, etc., etc.
I don't think I've listened to any
of them in more than 20
years. My record player was
sitting next to my DVD player,
which also plays cassettes and
includes a radio. What it
doesn't have, however, is input
sockets for connecting the record
player. In another room I
have a stereo radio with the right
input sockets, but I use those
sockets for my cassette player,
and there's no place to put the
record player, unless I sit it
atop the cassette player. I
tried that this morning and played
part of a Barbara Streisand album,
but things didn't work quite
right, so I'll have to study the
connections.
Right now I'm more curious about
how much the records are
worth. Is there even a
market for classical albums?
I have a copy of Rachmaninoff
Symphony No. 2 in E, Op. 27
played by William Steinberg and
the Pittsburgh Symphony
Orchestra. A NEW copy
sells for $193.00 on Amazon, but
you can get a used copy
for $8.98.
I just remembered that there's a
record store in the same shopping
center as my gym, and I think they
buy and sell used records.
I'll check it out this
afternoon. If they have used
Frank Sinatra records for sale,
that will give me some idea of how
much my 7 albums might be
worth. Then I'll check the
place about 3 miles west, which
has a much larger record
selection.
May 28, 2023 - It's beginning
to look like I'll be moving to Virginia
sometime this coming summer or fall.
That makes it very difficult to focus on
writing a book about Logical
Relativity. It probably also means
that one of these days I'm going to have to
discontinue this web site.
It will be the first time I've moved in
about 30 years. That means I need to
go through 30 years of accumulated junk in
my current apartment in Wisconsin and get
rid of things I don't want to take with
me. Yesterday I got rid of a
39 volume set of Time-Life books about
World War II. Amazon sells the
set for $545 when new. Used versions
go for $180. I tried finding a local
used book store that might want to buy it,
but every local used book store has gone out
of business. A used book store I found
in Milwaukee wasn't interested, and wouldn't
even quote a price. I have no idea how
much I paid for the set, but if my memory is
correct, I bought the set, one volume at a
time, back in 1978 when Time-Life was
publishing them one volume per month.
I think I was working for Time-Life at that
time and got the books with an employee
discount. Yesterday, I gave them as a
"donation" to my local library. The
set weighed about 95 pounds, so transporting
it to the library was a bit of a chore.
I've got some other collections I should get
rid of. One is a collection of several
hundred liquor miniatures. There are
all kinds of laws regarding the selling of
liquor. Years ago I tried finding the
best way to sell them, but I got
nowhere. I'll probably take them with
me when I move.
I also have a collection of about 120 LP
records. I've never tried to sell that
collection, but there seem to be several
stores nearby that have signs outside that
say "We Buy Records," including one that
Google says is just 3.3 miles away.
That will be my next project. First I
need to take some photos of my collection so
I'll have something tangible to talk
about. Here's a photo I took back in October
2020 when I wrote a comment about the
collection.

At that
time it appears I was only thinking about
selling them on eBay. There's no
mention of me checking for local record
stores. I wrote,
There
are a lot of jazz albums in there,
too, plus Johnny Cash, Peter Nero,
Simon and Garfunkel, Henry Mancini,
and at least 2
Ferrante & Teicher albums.
I need to do an inventory.
Yes, I definitely need to do
an inventory. That's my next
project. Yesterday, I created a
spreadsheet and started making
entries. That will allow me to produce
a list of what I have, and I can add a few
photos. Then I'll visit some of the
record stores to see if they're interested
in buying the collection. The entire
collection weighs well over 100 pounds.
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Comments for Sunday, May
21, 2023, thru Sat., May 27, 2023:
May
27, 2023
- Friday afternoon,
while driving home from
the gym, I finished
listening to CD #9 in
the 9-CD audio book
version of "How
Democracies Die"
by Steven Levitsky and
Daniel Ziblatt.
Wow! What a terrific
book! It's also another book I wish I
had read on my Kindle instead of listening
to the audio book, because there are so many
passages I would have highlighted and saved
for quoting. The authors describe how
democracies in other countries (Italy,
Germany, Turkey, Venezuela) turned into
dictatorships because their citizens turned
from cooperating opponents with different
views into enemy groups, each determined to
destroy the other.
The book was published in January of 2018,
so it's not about Donald Trump's current
attempts to destroy democracy in America,
but it does describe his attempts during his
run for the Presidency and during the first
year of his Presidency. Here's a quote
from early in the book:
Institutions alone are not
enough to rein in elected autocrats.
Constitutions must be defended—by
political parties and organized citizens,
but also by democratic norms. Without
robust norms, constitutional checks and
balances do not serve as the bulwarks of
democracy we imagine them to be.
Institutions become political weapons,
wielded forcefully by those who control
them against those who do not. This is how
elected autocrats subvert
democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the
courts and other neutral agencies, buying
off the media and the private sector (or
bullying them into silence), and rewriting
the rules of politics to tilt the playing
field against opponents. The tragic
paradox of the electoral route to
authoritarianism is that democracy’s
assassins use the very institutions of
democracy—gradually, subtly, and even
legally—to kill it.
Another:
Levels of voter fraud in
the United States are very low, and
because elections are administered by
state and local governments, it is
effectively impossible to coordinate
national-level voting fraud. Yet
throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump
insisted that millions of illegal
immigrants and dead people on the voting
rolls would be mobilized to vote for
Clinton. For months, his campaign website
declared “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary
from Rigging This Election!” In August,
Trump told Sean Hannity, “We’d better be
careful, because that election is going to
be rigged….I hope the Republicans are
watching closely, or it’s going to be
taken away from us.” In October, he
tweeted, “Of course there is large scale
voter fraud happening on and before
election day.” During the final
presidential debate, Trump refused to say
he would accept the results of the
election if he were defeated.
Trump accepted the results
of the 2016 election, when he won, but as we
all know he's still claiming the 2020
election was rigged, because he lost.
There are dozens and dozens of great quotes
in the book, but finding them on-line would
take about as much time as it would to read
the book again on my Kindle. I highly
recommend reading this book, instead of just
listening to the audio book version.
May 25, 2023 - I'm
really finding it difficult to
think of things to write about for
this web site. All I do most
days is stare at my computer
screen for an hour or so, trying
to get started on the final
version of my book about Logical
Relativity. Then I give up
and listen to podcasts
instead.
I had my annual physical at the
Veterans Administration Health
Center yesterday. I'm in
excellent health.
I'm almost done watching season 5
of "The West Wing." It's
the last season I have on
DVDs. It's an excellent show
with lots of insights into what
politics were like before we
became so polarized.
And now I'm just
sitting and staring at this
comment, wondering what else I can
write about. I can't think
of anything, so I guess I'm done
for today.
May 21, 2023 - The
writers' strike has certainly changed
my TV viewing. Normally, four or five
times a week, after eating supper and
watching the NBC Evening News, my evening TV
viewing would begin with watching these late
night talk shows recorded from the previous
night:
The
Daily Show
The
Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Late
Night with Seth Meyers
The
Tonight Show staring Jimmy Fallon
Jimmy
Kimmel Live
Now, because of the writers'
strike, all of them are just
reruns. The
same with Saturday
Night Live.
Fortunately, I have a large DVD
collection. So, some nights I watch
movies, some nights I binge-watch some old
TV series. Right now, I'm watching
season 4 of "The
West Wing," which originally
aired in 2002 & 2003, roughly 20 years
ago. It's
"One of the most critically acclaimed
and lauded shows in television
history." I
bought seasons 1 & 2 in 2013 for $17.99
each, and watched them. Then, in 2017,
I bought seasons 3, 4 and 5 for $4.99
each. I never got around to watching
them until about two weeks ago.
Interestingly, season 3 started airing on
October 3, 2001, a few weeks after
9/11. While there is no mention of
9/11 in the series, the IMDB has this
description of the first episode:
The West Wing goes under
lock down as a suspected terrorist is
found to be working at the White House.
Stuck with a group of high school students
who were visiting the White House, the
staffers, President Bartlet, and the First
Lady all debate the issues regarding
terrorism. Meanwhile, Leo sits in on the
questioning of the terrorist suspect and
learns a lesson about our perceptions of
terrorists.
That episode was written and
filmed after 9/11. The start
of the 3rd season was delayed until that
episode could be completed.
CNN aired Seasons 1 to 4 for 90
straight hours beginning on
Thanksgiving Day, November 21, 2022.
That may be what got me to thinking about
watching the series. Doing so has been
time well spent.
Meanwhile, yesterday I started working on a
new version of my book about Logical
Relativity. Instead of hiding the fact
that I'm not a physicist, the new version is
about how an analyst views
Relativity and Time Dilation. I think
the reason that Einstein supporters and
Quantum Physics supporters have been arguing
for the past 100 years may simply be because
no ANALYST has publicly analyzed the causes
and facts behind their disagreements.
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Comments for Sunday, May
14, 2023, thru Sat., May 20, 2023:
May
17, 2023
- While eating lunch
yesterday, I finished
reading another book on my
Kindle. The book was
"The
Comedians: Drunks,
Thieves, Scoundrels,
and the History of
American Comedy"
by Kliph Nesteroff.
It was a fairly interesting book, but not as
funny as I had expected. The book is
more about the struggles to earn a living as
a stand-up comedian, starting in vaudeville
and nightclubs and then on radio and
TV. Here's an interesting quote from
the book:
Albee-Keith-Orpheum had
seven hundred theaters and twenty-five
thousand performers under contract in
1929. Weekly attendance was an estimated
twelve million. The moguls funded a
widespread propaganda campaign to warn
about “the dangers of radio.” They funded
newspaper editorials bemoaning the hearing
loss radio caused and the house fires
started by receiver sets. Vaudeville
financed aggressive lies, but it was no
use. RCA had developed the all-electric
receiving set in 1925 and a year later
released the “perfected radio tube,” which
operated with alternating current. “This
was a revolutionary advance,” said radio
columnist Ben Gross. “It did away with the
need for those cumbersome acid-seeping
batteries which had disfigured millions of
American living rooms. Radio now was so
simple that even a child could tune it in
without fuss, mess or bother.”
Another:
Criticism of the Nazis was
not allowed on American radio prior to
1941. Powerful radio sponsors frowned on
anything that might offend German
consumers. “One sponsor would own the
whole show, so therefore he was very
powerful,” said radio writer Sol Saks.
And another:
The American Tobacco
Company had been wary of its client Eddie
Cantor ever since he raised eighteen
thousand dollars to help five hundred
Jewish children escape Nazism in 1935.
When Cantor spoke out against Hitler in
1938, American Tobacco wanted to cancel
his show. Fascist sympathizers harassed
Cantor in his own studio audience.
The book mentions just about
every comedian you ever heard of, from
George Jessel to Bob Hope to Jon
Stewart. Much of the book is also
about narcotics and how nearly every
comedian got involved with drugs sometime in
their career. And that meant getting
involved with gangsters, which was hard to
avoid because so many gangsters ran the
clubs where comedians performed.
It was an interesting book, but it's much
more serious than funny.
May 16, 2023
- A couple days ago,
someone sent me an email with
this as the subject: "Good
description of the Religious
CULT around Trump." The brief
text included a link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1657594715670298624.html.
The page at the link begins with
this text:
These comments from Roger
Stone at the Pastors for Trump/ReAwaken
event at Trump's Doral resort this week
are very important. For those who don't
speak "Independent Charismatic," allow me
to translate. Stone is claiming a
prophetic destiny based on a prophecy from
Kim Clement.
I
never heard of Kim Clement
before. Researching him, I found
there's an hour-long video titled "Prophesy
of Trump" with this description:
"The case for Donald Trump being a
modern day Cyrus the Great is shown
through bible prophecy." And Kim
Clement has also produced Tik
Tok videos praising "The Lord
Trump."
Clicking on the
link in the email, I was connected to a
brief Tik Tok video of a talk by political
lobbyist and former Trump advisor Roger
Stone, in which Stone claimed to be "a
soldier in the army of the Lord." The
video now seems to have been deleted, but
while it was available to me I transcribe
some of what Stone said. Here is the
part I transcribed:
Make no mistake, what we
see before us is not just a struggle
between Republicans and Democrats.
Or between liberals and
conservatives. This is a fight
between Light and Dark. This is a
struggle between Good and Evil. This
is an epic fight between the Godly and the
Godless, and we dare not lose, because,
should we lose, America will step off into
a thousand years of darkness.
Hmm. When
talking with Trump supporters it is
frequently like talking with members of a
religious cult. There is no logic or
reasoning behind what they say, it is all
emotion and beliefs. They don't
usually talk of Trump as being a "savior" or
"God," but they seem to believe in Trump
with that kind of intensity. And they
seem to view Trump's arrest and
investigations as if they were religious
(not political) persecutions. They
view Trump as someone who can do no wrong,
even if what he did is recorded.
It's very scary. It might even
explain some acts of mass violence where a
killer shoots many people and fully expects
to be killed by police. I wonder how
many of them view themselves as
martyrs.
May 15, 2023
- A few days ago, I was listening to
podcasts, and an episode of RadioLab
came up. It was from May 5th and
is titled "Ologies:
Dark Matters." Part of the
description of the episode is as
follows:
In this episode, we
introduce you to one of our all-time
favorite science podcasts. Ologies. A show
that’s a kindred spirit to ours, but also…
very different. In each episode, Host Alie
Ward interviews a brilliant, charming
ologist, and wanders with them deep into
their research, quirky facts they’ve
learned throughout their career and their
personal motivations for studying what
they study. “It’s all over the map,” she
says. And we love it.
Ologies?? I'd
never heard of that podcast before! It
was a science podcast and the description
made me curious, so I set aside the RadioLab
episode and downloaded 8 episodes of the
Ologies podcast into my MP3
player. The site has been producing
episodes since September of 2017, and they
currently have 322 episodes to choose
from. I picked some new ones about
Geology, Scotohylology and Domicology and
some old ones about Volcanology,
Paleontology and Cosmology. The first
episode I listened to was the
first part of a two-part discussion of
Cosmology. The episode is from
December 12, 2017. Wow!
What a terrific discussion!
Since I'd never listened to any episodes of
that podcast before, I didn't know what to
expect. Here's the description:
Stars. Black holes. THE
GAWDANG UNIVERSE. Astrophysicist and
cosmologist Katie Mack (@astrokatie) joins
to tell us her most embarrassing moments
as a cosmologist, to debunk some physicist
myths and give the nuts + bolts of
everything form particle physics to
gravitational waves and existential
mysteries. Walk away with cocktail party
comprehension of everything from the
itty-bitty quarks that make you to the
neutron stars banging together across the
cosmos. More than anything, get
perspective about your life on this, our
little pale blue dot.
What made the episode so
great was the fact the host of the show, Alie
Ward knew almost nothing
about cosmology, so her guest,
astrophysicist Dr. Katie Mack, had to
explain a lot of basics. And Alie Ward
was totally fascinated by it all.
There's a lot of laughing in the episode,
since it's all so new to Alie and is
evidently unlike anything she ever dreamed
of. It seems she never heard of black
holes before, nor the Big Bang. It's
truly a enjoyable discussion, every minute
of the 1 hour and 38 minute episode.
It's like all the things that amaze me about
cosmology are being explained to someone
else for the first time, and that person is
tickled pink that the universe is amazing
beyond her imagination.
And I like the way Ward inserts brief
explanations into the conversation whenever
she feels one is needed. I really
enjoyed the episode. The next day I
listened to the
Volcanology episode from 2017.
It was another great episode. I
listened to the entire hour and 3 minute
show.
May 14, 2023 -
Once again I've been pondering how to begin
the latest version of my book about Logical
Relativity. For weeks I've had only
one sentence completed, and I've been
staring at it. The sentence is:
Relativity is very logical
and is fairly simple when viewed
logically.
Yesterday I began to wonder
if the key to viewing things logically isn't
actually visualizing
them. We can start by visualizing an
electron. The problem is that, when
you research what
an electron looks like, you get mumbo
jumbo claiming it looks like a point.
Here is what one
source says:
An electron looks like a
particle when it interacts with other
objects in certain ways (such as in
high-speed collisions). When an electron
looks more like a particle it has no
shape, according to the Standard Model. In
this context, physicists call an electron
a "point particle," meaning that it
interacts as if it is entirely located at
a single point in space and does not
spread out to fill a three-dimensional
volume. If you find the concept of a fixed
amount of mass being contained in the
infinitely small volume of a single point
illogical, then you should. But you have
to realize that the electron is not
literally a solid ball. This means that
the electron's mass is not literally
squeezed into an infinitely small volume.
Rather, in certain cases where the
electron looks somewhat like a
particle, it interacts as if it
were completely located at a single point.
Therefore, in the sense of particle-like
interactions, an electron has no shape.
So, if you were to visualize
an electron, you'd see a "ball" that
consists of the particle and its
oscillating electric and magnetic
fields. The particle itself is much
much smaller than the "ball," and the "ball"
is just the outer limits of where the fields
oscillate. Here's an image which shows
three electrons as part of a lithium
atom. Each electron is viewed as a
sphere (as is each proton and neutron).
Each electron (and each
proton and neutron) is actually a very tiny
particle that is at the center of each of
the spheres shown above. The spheres
are oscillating electric and magnetic fields
surrounding the particle at the sphere's
center. The particle has mass, so it
cannot move at the speed of light. It
can be viewed as a point with a fog
surrounding the point, a fog that consist of
oscillating electromagnetic fields.
Then we have atoms. A lithium atom is
illustrated above. Unfortunately, it's
a 2-dimensional illustration, which makes it
appear that the electrons orbit the center
just like planets orbit the sun - in a flat
plane. In reality, the orbits of the
two inner electrons could be a right angles
to the orbit of the outer electron - or at
any angle.
I think I better end this comment at this
point, otherwise I might end up writing a
book instead of a comment.
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Comments for Sunday, May
7, 2023, thru Sat., May 13, 2023:
May 9, 2023 - I'm back to
listening to podcasts once
again. Yesterday, I
listened to a Wired
Science podcast episode
from April 5th titled "This
Private Moon Lander Is Kicking
Off a Commercial Lunar Race."
You can also read a written (and
longer) version of the episode
at https://www.wired.com/story/ispace-moon-lander/
Until I heard and read this
story, I didn't realize there
were so many plans to send
commercial rockets and lunar
landers to the moon. The
Tokyo-based company Ispace
launched its M1 moon lander on
December 11, 2022. After tracing
a roundabout, energy-efficient
trajectory, it was expected to
reach the surface of Atlas
Crater on the southeastern outer
edge of Mare Frigoris at about
12:40 pm Eastern time on
Tuesday, April 25, 2023.
The lander appears to have
reached the moon's surface at
the expected time, but Ispace
mission control lost contact
with it. The vehicle sent flight
data just before the expected
landing, but the company hasn't
been able to determine its
status since then. It's not
clear yet whether the craft
survived the landing. It
probably didn't.
Here's another part of the
article:
About twice a year, NASA
has been putting out calls for bids to
deliver a science payload—or occasionally
a technology development one—that it wants
shipped to a specific lunar location by a
certain date. Companies then bid on those
transportation services. In 2019, NASA
tapped Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines
for such deliveries, and later this year
one of them will make the program’s first
lunar drop. Each order is worth about $100
million on average, and NASA’s agreements
so far total about $1 billion, says deputy
program manager Ryan Stephan.
NASA plans to land its Viper
lunar lander on the moon in November
2024. As the quote above says, a
different lunar rover is expected to land
later this year to explore and investigate
ice deposits.
After listening to that podcast, I checked
Wikipedia and found a web page titled "List
of Missions to the Moon." It's a
long long list, and it says,
Missions to the Moon have
been conducted by the following nations
and organizations (in chronological
order): the Soviet Union, the United
States, Japan, the European Space Agency,
China, India, Luxembourg, Israel, Italy,
South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates.
In fact, the European Space
Agency has a rocket on its way to the moon
right now. It was launched last month,
on April 14, and is scheduled to do a flyby
of the Moon in August of next year, then two
more gravity assist flybys of the Earth on
September 2026 and January 2029, while on
its way to Jupiter's moon Ganymede. It
should arrive at Ganymede in December of
2034.
And there are 8 "crewed" missions to the
moon in the works, 6 by the U.S., 1 by
Russia and 1 by China. 4 American
missions and 1 Chinese mission plan actual
"crewed" landings on the moon. (Since
some missions will include women, the
mission are no longer "manned," they are
"crewed.")
May 8, 2023
- I just dug through the books in my
Kindle to see how many books about
Trump I have. I have nearly two
dozen. Here are 16 of them (you
can click on the image to view a
larger version):

I also have ONE book about Trump that
has a positive view of him. It
was, of course, written by former Fox
news host Tucker Carlson.
Hmmm.
Whatever happened to Tucker Carlson?
May 7, 2023 - I
don't know if anyone else still reads this
web site, but nearly all my time right now
is being spent on doing an inventory of all
the library books I have in my Kindle.
It's an old Kindle, at least 10 years old,
which means it's from the time when you
could "borrow" a book from the library in
Kindle format, and the book was not deleted
from your Kindle when you "returned"
it. My Kindle currently contains 428
"items," of which 410 are books. This
afternoon I finally produced a catalogue
file that contains the 410 book covers.
I think I've actually read most of them, but
there could be as many as 100 that I haven't
yet read. In the Kindle, the books are
in order by when they were downloaded.
It appears that I was mostly borrowing and
reading fiction books when I first started
using the Kindle. I've got lots of
novels by Kim Stanley Robinson, Spider
Robinson, Lee Child, Agatha Christie, James
Rollins, Michael Connelly, Colin Cotterill,
Janet Evanovich, Clive Cussler and so on and
so on. And I've probably read them
all.
I think I've also read most of the books I
have about Donald J. Trump. I've
probably got about 20 of those. But,
right now, my primary task is to prioritize
the books in my Kindle that I haven't yet
read. While I'm dong that, I'm going
to try and finish reading "The
Comedians."
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Comments for Monday, May
1, 2023, thru Sat., May 6, 2023:
May 5,
2023 - Hmm.
I haven't listened to a single podcast
in four days. Instead, I've been
trying to organize my Kindle
books. My Kindle says it
contains 428 "items," most of which
are books I got from the library as
far back as 2013. I also have a
computer file of about 300 books in
Kindle format, most of which are also
in my Kindle. What I don't
have is an easy-to-view "directory" of
which books I've read and which I
haven't. And for the books I haven't
read, I need a "prioritized" list.
Right now, during breakfast and lunch,
I'm reading "The
Comedians." I'm
about 44% done, but I could actually
be 70% done, or more, if the end of
the book is filled with indexes.
While it's an interesting book, I keep
wondering why I'm reading it instead
of something else. Should
I be reading something else?
I've got at least 10 books about Trump
and his presidency that I haven't yet
read. I've got dozens of science
books that I haven't yet read.
I've got lots of history books I
haven't yet read. Right now, I'm
listening to the audio book version of
"How
Democracies Die" while
driving. It's a terrific
book, and I keep thinking I should be
reading it
instead of listening to it, since it
contains so much I'd like to underline
and quote.
I think I need to go through the
directory in my Kindle and click on
each entry to see if it goes to the
beginning, the middle or the end of
the book. As I do that, I need
to organize my file of book covers to
confirm that each book is in its
proper place, and that the unread
books are prioritized. I think
that will take at least one minute per
book, maybe two. So, for 428
books that should only take somewhere
between 7 and 14 hours. And with
all the other things I have to do,
those hours will probably be spread
over 3 to 6 days.
Groan!
May 1, 2023 -
Yesterday, I was listening to some podcast
or other, and they mentioned a podcast I had
never heard of before: Space
Boffins.
Space Boffins? With a name like
that, it had to be a British podcast.
Curious, I did a Google search for it
and found that the podcast has been around
since June of 2012, nearly 11 years.
During that time they've produced 130
episodes. I downloaded seven sample
episodes, some old, some recent, picking the
ones with the most interesting titles.
The first episode I listened to was Mission
to Europa, from June 14,
2021. It was about an hour long, but
it was an absolutely fascinating hour.
Here's how the episode is described:
Two astronauts, one space
hipster, a writer and a musician all
feature in this month’s Space Boffins. Sue
Nelson and Richard Hollingham are joined
by podcaster and founder of the Space
Hipsters, Emily Carney. They also hear
from pioneering astronaut Anna Fisher in
conversation with astronaut Nicole Stott.
And David Brown, author of The Mission,
talks about Jupiter’s moon Europa and the
chances of finding life on the icy and
watery world.
Anna
Fisher and Nicole Stott are
two female astronauts. Fisher spent
about 8 days in space on the space shuttle,
and Stott spent about 103 days in space,
mostly on the International Space
Station. Among other topics, they
talked about the difficulties of fitting
into space suits which came in only two
sizes: medium and large.
But the most fascinating part of the
discussion was about why going to Jupiter's
moon Europa is so interesting. It
seems there is a very high
probability of finding life on
Europa. It won't be human-like life,
of course. It would be bacteria and
strange life forms like we find around
volcanic hot spots at the bottom of Earth's
oceans. Europa is covered with ice,
but under the ice are hundreds of volcanic
hot spots that are virtually no different
than those found on Earth. So, why wouldn't
we find life there? Life does not move
from one hot spot to another, life evidently
forms independently around each
hot spot.
Of course, we'd have to go there despite the
warning in the movie 2001:
A Space Odyssey, in which humans
are told they can go anywhere in the
universe they want, except to
Europa.
What was most unique about this podcast was
that it was discussions between experts,
not a discussion between a host and a guest
expert, as would be the case on most science
podcasts.
I also started listening to the Cute
Mars Rovers episode. It's also
very interesting because the people who
operate the rovers begin to think of them as
having "personalities". Spirit
was kind of stubborn and clumsy, while Opportunity
was always obedient and careful.
I'm looking forward to listening to other
episodes.
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Comments for Sunday,
April 23, 2023, thru Sun., Apr. 30, 2023:
April 30,
2023 - Hmmm.
I'm having a very
difficult time thinking of
something to write about
for this Sunday
comment. I'm still
spending a lot of time
almost every day listening
to podcasts. I
should probably try
switching to reading books
instead. But, every
day, one of my morning
chores is to see what new
podcast episodes are
available. And if
any of them look
interesting, I download
them onto a hard
drive. Then, when
I've finished listening to
all the podcasts I have
stored in my MP3 player, I
download a new batch from
the hard drive. So,
if I stop listening to
podcasts on my MP3 player,
I'll be building up a big
backlog on my hard drive.
But, I can't really
complain about having so
many things I want to do
and so few hours in a day
in which to do
them.
April 25, 2023 - Yesterday
afternoon, while driving home
from the gym, I finished
listening to CD #5 in the 5-CD
set for "Vacationland:
True Stories from Painful
Beaches" by John
Hodgman.
I recall Hodgman from his
many appearances on The Daily Show
with Jon Stewart. His humor is rather
droll, but very enjoyable.
The book is a memoir mostly of Hodgman's
early life living in the state of
Massachusetts and spending summers in Maine,
which was his family's "vacationland" at
that time. The way Hodgman describes
Maine makes it seem horrific. The
ocean beaches evidently consist of nothing
but sharp rocks and the inland lakes are
described this way:
And the bottom of every
lake is a Lovecraftian hellscape. If you
ever go snorkeling in your father-in-law’s
lake in Maine, you will see for yourself
that it is all ooze and muck and fallen
trees and sunken demonic cities of
impossible geometries. That last part is
not true, but this is: you will see huge
freshwater clams, and you will scream
underwater.
Since I listened to the
audio book while driving around in my car, I
didn't have any capability to make
notes. It seems that Hodgman is a Yale
graduate and lives a very enjoyable and
productive life, but he describes it all the
way a grumpy old man would. Hodgeman
has written several other books, which I am
now tempted to read. While I can
recommend "Vacationland," I think that if I
could do things over again, I would read it
on my Kindle or in paperback instead of
listening to it as an audio book.
April 24, 2023 - Hmm.
Yesterday, 5 different people using 5
different computers viewed my paper on
"Variable
Time and the Variable Speed of
Light." That's the
largest number of views since January
26th, when 7 different people viewed
that paper on a single day.
Normally the number is 1 or 2 on a
given day, with zero being the most
common number of views per day.
The weekly average seems to be less
than 5.
I tend to assume that the surge in
views resulted from yesterday's
comment on this site, but yesterday's
comment makes no mention of any of my
13 different science papers.
It's mostly about math podcasts.
Here's the first paragraph in the most
recent version of my paper on "Variable
Time and the Variable Speed of Light":
The fact that the speed of
light is variable is demonstrated almost
every day. No matter where you measure the
speed of light, if you measure it
correctly, you will get a result of
299,792,458 meters per second.
Does this mean that the speed of light is
the same everywhere? No. It means
the speed of light per second
is the same everywhere. And, according to
Einstein’s Theories of Special and General
Relativity, the length of a second
can be different almost
everywhere. That means that if you measure
the speed of light to be 299,792,458
meters per second in one
location, and if you also measure it to be
299,792,458 meters per second
in another location, if the length of a
second is different at those two
locations, then the speed of light is also
different.
I can see why any science
paper that begins that way could attract a
lot of readers, but that version of my paper
has been on-line since August 17,
2018. Somewhere some group of
people must have discussed it, resulting in
5 from that group accessing my paper for the
first time on the same day. Vixra.org
only keeps track of "unique-IP
downloads." So, if someone from that
group would access the paper again (or any
of its 5 previous versions), it would not
register as a new "download."
There have been 90 "unique-IP
downloads" so far this year for that
paper, which is roughly 25 per
month. It just stirs my
curiosity when there are a bunch of
readers in one day. What
are they saying about the paper?
I'll probably never know.
April 23, 2023 -
In my previous comment dated April 17, I
wrote about switching from listening to
audio books back to listening to podcasts
once again. Yesterday, I tried making
another switch. I wanted to get back
to working on my book about "Logical
Relativity." It's been over a
year since I last worked on it.
So, I studied the first Introduction I wrote
for the book, and then I studied the second
introduction I wrote when I decided I didn't
like the first one. The first
introduction was about how I decided to
write the book because of all the arguments
I had about Relativity on the
Internet. The second Introduction was
all about how I decided to write the book
because it seemed that no two college
physics textbooks quoted Einstein's Second
Postulate the same way. They all
distorted the Second Postulate to fit how
the textbook's author understood Relativity
and Time Dilation. They all understood
(or misunderstood) it differently.
Looking over both Introductions, I decided
that I should probably just explain
Relativity first, and then later in the book
I can get into all the different
interpretations and arguments - particularly
the arguments with Quantum Mechanics.
In all the science books I've been reading
and listening to, and in the hundreds of
science podcasts I've been listening to,
it's extremely rare to read
or hear anything that I disagree with.
If I want to find things I disagree with,
all I have to do is pick up a physics
textbook or visit
some on-line discussion like those at sci.physics.relativity.
They are sources where you can find endless
conflicts between scientists and
mathematician physicists.
As I was writing this, I wondered if there
were any podcasts about mathematics.
So I did a
Google search for "math podcasts" and
found that nearly all such podcasts are
simply about doing math and solving
mathematics problems. They were of no
interest to me.
However, I also found a link to a web page
titled "16
Interesting Math Podcasts for Curious
Minds." It was mostly more
of the same, except for 1 of those 16 which
was titled "The
Universe Speaks In Numbers,"
which can also be found HERE.
When I researched that podcast, I found
there are only 25 episodes in the podcast,
and the last episode was created on April 2,
2020, 3 years ago. So, the
podcast appears to have been
abandoned. But it still looked
interesting, so I downloaded 5 sample
episodes. And yesterday afternoon I
listened to them.
To my surprise, they were actually fairly
interesting. But more importantly,
they also mentioned a book titled "The
Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern
Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets"
by Graham Farmelo. It looked
interesting, so I obtained a copy for my
Kindle and started reading it. Here's
a quote from early in the book:
The very fact that
underneath the diversity and complexity of
the universe is a relatively simple order
was, in Einstein’s view, nothing short of
a ‘miracle, or an eternal mystery’.
Mathematics has furnished an incomparably
precise way of expressing this underlying
order. Physicists and their predecessors
have been able to discover universal
laws—set out in mathematical language—that
apply not only here and now on Earth but
to everything everywhere, from the
beginning of time to the furthest future.
Another:
As Einstein often pointed
out, quantum mechanics and the basic
theory of relativity are devilishly
difficult to meld. Physicists were
eventually able to combine them into a
theory that made impressively successful
predictions, in one case agreeing with the
corresponding experimental measurement to
eleven decimal places. Nature seemed to be
telling us loud and clear that it wanted
both theories to be respected. Today’s
theoretical physicists are building on
that success, insisting that every new
theory that aspires to be universal must
be consistent with both basic relativity
and quantum mechanics.
I fully realize that I'm
ignoring my primary objective, which is to
get back to work on my own book. But I
can justify it by arguing that it is
research for my book. I'm just arguing
with myself, of course, so how can that be a
waste of time?
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