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.

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. 

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.

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.

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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.

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.”

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Relativity is very logical and is fairly simple when viewed logically.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.