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Comments for Sunday,
September 25, 2022, thru Fri., Sept. 30,
2022:
September 29,
2022 -
Did you know that the CIA
has a podcast? It
was recently mentioned on some
late-night talk show. So,
the next day I felt compelled to
research it. It's called The
Langley Files: a CIA Podcast.
It's hosted by Dee and Walter
(no last names provided), and
their guest on the premier
episode was Bill Burns, who is
the current head of the
CIA. So far, they have
only produced one 18-minute
episode. I listened to
it. It was interesting,
and I look forward to listening
to the next episode. It was
produced a week ago, so
there will probably be a
second episode produced
very soon.
I've also added it to my
podcasts web page.
That page provides links to 66
different podcasts, mostly
science related, but also some
about history, comedy, movies
and celebrity interviews.
It seems like every day I hear
about another podcast that it
totally new to me. I feel
compelled to check them out,
particularly if they are hosted
by comedians or by
scientists. There are
definitely a LOT of podcasts out
there that I cannot
recommend. And there seem
to be countless podcasts
about subjects of no interest to
me at all. And yet, it
appears that the average person
has never listened to a podcast,
nor even knows such a thing
exists. Our world is
definitely becoming too
complicated.
September 26, 2022 - I'm still spending
too much time trying to fix the
problems I have with my old
Hewitt-Packard laptop computer.
I've turned it over to the "expert"
who thought he'd fixed all the
problems last week. This morning
we sat down together for almost an
hour as I showed him the problems I
was still having. Some of the
problems seem to result from the fact
that, when I use a "mouse" to move the
cursor around the computer screen,
some actions will be initiated if I
simply move the cursor past
something, without clicking on it. The
expert always uses the touch pad, not
the mouse, and he doesn't seem to
encounter that problem. I never use
the touch pad. I've pretty much
give up hope for every getting my old
computer back in perfect working order
once again.
Meanwhile, I've been going through all
my backup files.
In the image above, my primary backup
hard drive is the big gray one at the
top. It's a FreeAgent drive with
1,000,000,000,000 bytes (1 terabyte)
of storage, and it's about 80%
full. It has to be plugged into
a power source in order to operate,
and I've been putting stuff onto it
for at least 10 years, possibly a lot
longer than that since it seems to
have stuff from 2002 on it, and maybe
even from before that. I used it
as my backup drive when I was still
using a desktop computer.
The red one is another FreeAgent drive
with about 250 gigabytes of storage
space, and it's about 90% full.
It contains most of the stuff that is
on the gray one. I think I
bought the red one to put in my safe
deposit box, but I never got around to
doing that.
The black one is my EasyStore drive,
which I bought about a month ago when
I decided I needed to organize my
backups. It has the capacity to
store 2,000,000,000,000 bytes (2
terabytes) of data and is currently
about 1/4th full with about 470
gigabytes of data. It cost
$60. I don't recall what the
gray and red ones cost, but it was
much more than that.
The picture also shows 13 of my 20
flash drives. When I bought the
EasyStore drive, one of the first
things I did was create a folder for
all of my flash drives, and I copied
19 of my 20 flash drives into that
folder. The 20th flash drive is
in my safe-deposit box.
One thing I know I have is a LOT
of duplication. The files of
photographs I've taken over the years
are on the gray, red and black drives,
plus on one or two (or three)
of the flash drives. But only
the black EasyStore drive and my large
Lenovo computer have the
color-corrected (de-faded) versions of
the pictures I wrote about on
September 11. The question now
is: In how many different places do I
want to store those photos?
September 25, 2022
- I haven't posted anything here in the past
few days because I'm still working on
problems with my old Hewitt-Packard (HP)
computer. I had thought that the
problem was that my security software
provider had installed something other than
Windows 10 Home operating system
into my computer. I now understand
that they apparently just installed a
"wrong" version of Windows 10 Home. I
know this because last week I took my
computer to a local "expert" and he
installed a very different
version of Windows 10 Home. It's also
different from the version I have in my new
Lenovo computer, which is different from the
version I have in my old
Lenovo computer.
The main problem, however, is that I still
cannot use the keyboard on my HP
computer. When the "expert" gave the
computer back to me on Friday morning, he
said it was totally fixed. He said,
however, that they had to wipe out all my
old files in order to install the new
version of Windows 10 Home.
When I got home and turned on the computer,
I found just the opposite. All my old
files were fully intact, and I still
couldn't type more than a single character
into the computer. I could use the
mouse to open Notepad, for example, but I
could only type 1 character onto Notepad and
then I'd get a screen telling me to sign in
in order to get help from Microsoft.
But I cannot type anything into the sign-in
box. When I informed the "expert" of
this, he simply could not believe it.
So, tomorrow I'll take the computer back to
the "expert" so that we can sit down
together and he can show me how to make the
keyboard work. And I'll show him that
all my old files are intact.
My thinking now is that the "expert" is
fully experienced with new computers and is
assuming I know something I do not
know. I've been working with computers
since the late 1960s when I worked as a
computer programmer using COBOL software on
a large "main frame" company computer.
I got my first "personal computer" probably
sometime in the the early 1980s when I
stopped using a typewriter to write movie
screenplays and books, and switched to using
an IBM PC.
It also seems I'm approaching the "problem"
from the opposite direction than the
"expert." He's looking at what new
computers do, and I'm looking at
what my old computers did
and currently do. He's
assuming I know something that I don't know,
possibly because I seem to be the only
person left on this planet who does not own
a smartphone. Additionally, it seems
that everyone is storing files in
"the cloud" these days. My old Lenovo
computer cannot even store anything
without running into problems when it comes
time to download a new version of Windows
10.
But we're making definite progress.
Meanwhile, I really need to find something
else to write about on this web site.
But, about the only other topic I regularly
think about is politics. I
simply cannot comprehend how anyone in their
right mind could vote for Donald Trump, but
there are a lot of people out there who
believe and trust him in spite of all the
illegal and despicable things he does and
has done. How can that be? I
keep thinking it must be
because they are thinking emotionally,
not logically. They want to go back to
the way things were, they
don't want a future where things things seem
unpredictable. They want a dictator
as their leader, someone who will force
everyone to stop arguing and force
them to return to "the good old days."
They don't say that, of course. They
simply say that they "like" Trump and what
he stands for. In other words, their
thinking is purely emotional.
And facts and evidence are just things the
"bad guys" make up and falsely claim to be
true.
Meanwhile, the price of gas at the
station down the street from me jumped
40 cents
yesterday, and it jumped 14
cents the day before that. It's
now $3.999 per gallon. It was
$3.459 just five days
ago. But only for one day.
If I were an emotional person, I'd be
looking for someone to blame. My
governor? President Biden?
Vladimir Putin? The gas
companies? All of
them? How does one decide
without looking at the facts and
evidence? And who has time to do
that?
Groan!
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Comments for Sunday,
September 18, 2022, thru Sat., Sept. 24,
2022:
September 21,
2022 -
I think I finally figured out
what happened to my old
computer. Several weeks
ago, when I contacted my
security software provider about
a minor problem I thought I had,
they downloaded a new copy of
Windows 10 into my HP laptop to
get rid of the problem.
Instead of getting rid of
anything, however, they created
a new problem.
They installed a version of
Windows 10 that is apparently
mostly for hand-held
devices. My computer was
using Windows
10 Home. I
think the version they installed
requires entering my password
via a smartphone.
I didn't realize that when I
contacted them yesterday once
again to try to fix the problem,
and they installed an even more
recent version of Windows 10 for
smartphones.
Now I can't even type anything
into the password box. It
won't accept anything
from my keyboard.
The solution seems to be to
re-install Windows HOME
in my computer. I hesitate
to contact my security software
provider for a third
time on this problem. When
talking with them, they all have
very heavy accents, probably
from India. Plus, they are
a large international
corporation, which means they
try to automate everything,
which means they want you to
answer a whole string of
automated questions in order to
figure out who they should put
on the phone with me.
On the positive side, I'm pretty
sure my computer wasn't
"hacked."
September 19, 2022 - Here's the sign-in
screen I get when I turn on my old
computer. I have no idea what
that box of switches is in the lower
left corner. It wasn't there
when my computer was working
properly. Neither were the
"Sign-in options."
When I try to
sign in on this screen, I'm only
allowed to type 5 digits.
My password was 8 digits.
Clicking on the "Sign-in
options" icons just gives me a
different screen where I'm still
only allowed 5 or 6
digits. Sometimes the
"Narrator" switch turns on and a
narrator starts talking about
things of no interest to me.
I took my computer to Best Buy
to see of their customer service
people could figure things
out. They couldn't, and
they didn't seem to see anything
odd about this sign-in
screen. They just puttered
around for awhile and then told
me there was nothing they could
do.
So, I'm showing it here to see
if anyone who views this web
site can tell me what is going
on. I assume I've been
hacked, but no one has tried to
contact me to "sell" me a
solution to this problem.
Since I had everything backed up, I'm able
to work on my new computer, but I'd like to
know what happened to my old computer.
September 18, 2022
- I'm still trying to recover from no longer
being able to use my old computer.
Yesterday morning, I noticed that at the top
of this web page I had a link to my
oldguynewissues blog. Since I
can no longer update that blog, I've removed
the link. There was also a statement
that "You can email me at" my old
outlook.com email address. Since
I can no longer access that email account, I
changed that link to use my main email
account. Additionally, under the
picture of Humphrey Bogart I had a link to
"movies" which led to a list of screenplays
I'd written long ago, but that list was on
anthraxinvestigation.com, which was shut
down over a year ago. Rather than just
remove the link, I changed it to go to www.imdb.com.
Another problem I now have, which most
others who visit this web site have had for
a long time, is that the screen on my new
computer is 1366x768 pixels. My old
screen was 1920x1080 pixels. So, the
pictures at the top of this web site are
squeezed together to fit the smaller screen
size. I'm not sure what I'm going to
do about that.
I recently bought a 2-terrabyte hard drive
at Best Buy for $60. The hard drive
I've been using as my main backup for a
least 9 years probably cost at least $200
and has about 1-terrabyte storage
capacity. Of that, I've used
779,872,227,328 bytes.
My plan is to copy the essential stuff from
my old backup drive to my new backup drive,
organize it better, and use the new drive as
my main backup from now on. Yesterday,
I copied my folder of Fake Detective files
from the old backup drive to the new backup
drive. The folder contained 294,158
items and it took 2½ hours to do the
copy. (Copying the 5,000 photographs
I've taken over the years took less than a
minute.) That one folder consisted of
over 134,000,000,000 bytes. One of the
sub-folders in that file consisted of copies
of 62 checks I received for my work as The
Fake Detective. The first check is
dated March 13, 2002, and the total amount
on all the checks was well over
$100,000. I doubt that Sam Spade or
Philip Marlowe ever made that much.
I also found Fake Detective stuff going back
to late 1996. At that time, The Fake
Detective was just a web site. Here's
an image I created on The Fake Detective's
second anniversary:
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Comments for Sunday,
September 11, 2022, thru Sat., Sept. 17,
2022:
September
16, 2022 -
Yesterday, the
Hewitt-Packard laptop
computer I'd been using
for about 10 years stopped
working.
Fortunately, I had
everything backed up as of
September 1, and some key
files were backed up as of
the day before yesterday.
But I've lost access to my
detect at outlook dot
com emails.
Most of the emails I get
at that address are junk,
but it's the email address
I use on all 13 of my
scientific papers. I
set up the email account
many years ago, and I've
lost the password I used,
so I could only access the
emails on my old computer
which automatically
inserted the correct
password.
Months ago I tried to get
Microsoft to give me the
password or allow me to
set up a new password, so
I could access the emails
from my "new" computers,
but they assumed I was
some hacker trying to
access someone else's
email account. So, I
got nowhere.
Now it looks like I'll
have to try again.
I also can't find the
passwords I used to set up
my blog files at http://anthraxdebate.blogspot.com/
and http://oldguynewissues.blogspot.com/
But I haven't updated the
anthrax blog since April
2, 2018, and I haven't
updated the issues blog
since April 23rd of this
year, and those blogs very
rarely get any
visitors. So, I
think I'll just forget
about them, instead of
trying to regain update
access.
Meanwhile,
I'll have to figure out
the best way to do things
on my "new"
computer. And the
first thing I have to try
is updating my web
site. If you can
read this comment, then
I've done so successfully.
I see, however, that not all
images I mention in my comments
appear correctly. So, I'll
have to work on that.
September
14, 2022 - A few days
ago, I received the first of two
scam emails that try to get me
to divulge security codes and
other information. I see
news reports about such scams on
TV, but they never contacted me
before, probably because I use a
laptop computer to access emails
and the Internet, not a cell
phone.
Here's what the first of the two
emails looked like (you can
right click on it to view a
larger version):
The first clue
that indicated it was a scam was
the fact that it was addressed
to about 100
different outlook.com
email addresses, all beginning
with the letters "de". My
address was about the 80th on
the list.
The second clue was that I'm
not an Amazon
Prime member.
The third clue was that the
return address wasn't Amazon's
address, but an address at
carid.com. Google
indicates that CARiD.com is
supposedly some kind of
automotive parts retailer, but I
don't know if carid.com is the
same place or not.
The fourth clue was that they
wanted me to click on a link to
t.co which I thought was
in Columbia, but some research
shows it's a Twitter account of
some kind. I don't use
Twitter.
The second email, which I
received yesterday, was
supposedly from Microsoft,
claiming they were going to
"block" my outlook.com email
account due to some "unusual
activity." The return
address on the email was for
someone in Aldegua, Guatemala. There were
two attachments to
the email which I assume
contain the key parts to
the scam. I didn't
open the attachments.
Does anyone fall for such scams?
September 12, 2022 - I found another
photo of that "Laboratory" building
with the Snark cruise missile out
front that I showed in yesterday's
comment. It's possible that
there were two such missiles
out front, since there seems to be
part of another missile at the far
left edge of this photo. The
flat landscape suggests the picture
was probably taken somewhere near Cape
Canaveral, Florida.
I think I drove down the
east coast of Florida to get to Key West,
and then I drove up central Florida when I
was heading home. I've got lots of
pictures of Castillo de San Marcos and
Potter's Wax Museum, which are both located
in Saint Augustine, FL, on the east
coast. I also have pictures of the
Miami Seaquarium. And I have lots of
pictures of Cypress Gardens, Silver Springs,
and the Singing Tower at Lake Wales, FL,
which are all located in central
Florida. And I've got lots of pictures
of places that do not seem to exist
anymore. Or, if they do, they are
located nowhere near where I'm searching via
Google.
I really need to get to work on something
more productive!
Added Note: This afternoon I
used the duckduckgo
search engine instead of Google
to search for pictures of a Snark cruise
missile, and I found the picture
below.
The copyright-free photo was taken in 1960
and is titled "View
of a Northrop SM-62 'Snark' missile at the
Air Force base - Cocoa Beach, Florida."
Cocoa Beach is just south of Cape
Canaveral. The location is Patrick
Air Force Base, and if you do a search
for that name you will find all kinds of
pictures of the same building as it looks
today with many more missiles on display out
front. And I found that the name I
couldn't read on the building next to the
missile is "Technical Laboratory."
September 11, 2022
- Hmm. It's rather difficult
to write a comment on September 11 without
mentioning the Twin Towers attack on 9-11
and the two batches of anthrax-filled
letters that were mailed a short time later.
This morning I checked a
conspiracy theorist's web site to see
if he was still in business. The web
site still exists, but there haven't been
any new comments posted since April
12 of this year. I shut down my
web site anthraxinvestigation.com over a
year ago, on August 4, 2021. I hadn't
updated it since December 2014. I created
this web site in January 2015. Conspiracy
theorists seem incapable of changing their
minds, so there are undoubtedly still a lot
of them out there on the Web. And
there are still people interested in the
anthrax attacks. I sold a Kindle copy
of my book A
Crime Unlike Any Other less than
a month ago.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to move on to other
things. For the past few days I have
been puttering around with my photo
collection. I have about 5,500 photos
in the collection. Some of the oldest
were slides. In late 2012, I bought a
gadget that converts slides and photographic
negatives into digital images. I
converted my entire photo collection.
Most of the pictures were taken on trips I
did alone. My first trip was a drive
from Racine, Wisconsin, to Deadwood, South
Dakota. My plan was to drive to
Yellowstone National Park, but repeated car
problems caused me to turn around at
Deadwood. My gas tank fell off just
outside of Deadwood, and I toured the town
while the tank was being re-attached.
I took only 95 pictures on that trip. All
are still in excellent condition.
I spent nearly all day on Friday going
through the images I took the following year
when I drove down to Key West, Florida,
stopping at many famous locations along the
way. I took 254 color slides on that
trip. Every single one of the
slides is faded. When I did the
digital conversion in 2012 there was no way
to "un-fade" them. All I could do then
was create black and white versions of them,
which I did for a few. Today I have
paint.net installed in my computer, and with
just one click I can do an "auto level"
adjustment to a faded photo and create an
un-faded version of it. Below is an
example. The top picture is the faded
version, and the bottom picture is the
corrected version.
I spent
all day Friday un-fading the 254 slide
pictures I took on that trip.
Unfortunately, while I can remove the
fading, I can't remove all the dust and dirt
particles. I would have to dig out the
slides, clean them and then reconvert
them. Or I could use paint.net to edit
them, if I had all the time in the world to
do that.
My immediate problem, however, was to figure
out what is being seen in the pictures
above. I did a Google Image search to
see if I could find anything matching the
pictures, and I found nothing. There's
a name on the front of the building, but all
I can make out is the bottom word:
"Laboratory." The top word might be
"Technology," but it could also be a name of
some person or city. It seems a
virtual certainty that none of it exists
today. A Google Image search finds
nothing like it.
The
next year I drove to Washington, DC,
New York, and Boston, turning around
just inside the Maine border (so I can
say that I've been to Maine) and
returning via Niagara Falls, Canada,
and Upper Michigan. I took 300
pictures on that trip. They're
all faded, too. Here's a
faded and unfaded example:
The next year I joined the
Air Force. Something must have
changed, because I have no faded pictures
from that time onward.
I definitely need to find
some better way to spend my time than
sorting through pictures.
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Comments for Thursday,
September 1, 2022, thru Sat., Sept. 10,
2022:
September
5, 2022 - While
driving home from the gym
this afternoon, I finished
listening to CD #3 in the
3-CD audio book "The
Daily Show with Jon
Stewart Presents Earth
(The Book): A
Visitor's Guide to the
Human Race" by
Jon Stewart. I
"borrowed" it from my
local library on Feb. 19,
2021, and it finally
reached the top of my
listening queue.
The Daily Show
premiered on the Comedy Central
Network on July 22, 1996, when
it was hosted by Craig Kilborn.
Jon Stewart became
the host of The Daily Show on
January 11, 1999, and continued until August
6, 2015, when Trevor Noah took over.
This audio book was
produced in 2010 and consists of Jon
Stewart reading about fairly serious
subjects with a undertone of humor,
and fellow comedians from the Daily
Show add humorous comments.
Sigourney Weaver reads the names of
the sections and chapters. The 3rd CD,
for example, contains a lengthy
discussion of "The Scientific Method."
The audio book was funny in parts, and very
interesting in parts, but it was also a bit
annoying, because Stewart and the others
would sometimes talk in very soft voices,
which is difficult to hear while
driving. I would recommend listening
to it in a quiet room using headphones or
some kind of speaker system.
Fortunately, the whole book totaled only
about 3½ hours of listening time.
There are hardcover and paperback versions
which seem to be about 80% illustrations,
and the other comedians on the audio book
basically just read a small fraction of the
captions for the photos. Reading the
actual book is - by far - the best way to
access this book. The illustrations
give you a much better idea of what they are
talking about.
September 4, 2022 - My niece and
her husband paid me a visit
about three weeks ago, and
somehow the discussion got
around to places I've been and
things I've done over the
years. To aid the
discussion, I began skimming
through my digitized photo
collection, showing them
pictures on my big flat screen
TV. They seemed very
impressed by all the places I've
been. They even suggested
that I should write an
autobiography. That is
never going to happen, but since
that time, I've been
periodically looking through my
photo collection, which consists
of several thousand photos
At the top below, is a photo I
took myself at Misawa Air Base
in northern Japan many many
years ago. I was a weather
observer. I think that's
some kind of atmospheric air
pressure measuring device next
to the phone. You can see
part of the airfield runway
outside the windows. I
took the picture in order to
create some "trick" photos.
The bottom picture is a
"trick" photo I created a day or two
later. This was long before there was
any such thing as "photoshop." I think
I printed a copy of the original picture of
me at the base recreation center, I then cut
out the windows, and I then laid that cut-up
photo atop a photo I found in a
magazine. Then I took a picture of the
combo. I repeated the procedure with
three other magazine photos in the
background, one of giraffes, another of a
rhinoceros, and another of the string of
bars in "MP Alley" in the town of Misawa.
Years before that, when I was still in my
teens, working in my basement I created the
two "trick" photos shown below. It was
called "table top photography" back then.
Experience
with creating "fake photos" like those shown
above eventually led to me becoming "known
around the world" for my detective work in
debunking photo-shopped fake pictures being
circulated on the Internet. I even had
a weekly feature about photo fakery in an
Australian magazine for about ten years.
While it might be interesting, it's not the
kind of stuff that makes a top-selling
autobiography. Neither is writing 13
science papers that only a handful of people
have read. But it was definitely
interesting for me.
September 2, 2022 - Hmm.
I decided it was time to fill up my
gas tank. So, this afternoon I
stopped at the gas station down the
street from me where they are
advertising regular gas at $3.949 per gallon on the big
sign out front. To my pleasant
surprise, when I looked at the price
on the pump it was "only" $3.899 per gallon. So I
filled up my tank with 8.983 gallons,
for a total cost to $35.02. I
saved a whopping 45 cents!
Somehow I suddenly feel very positive
about things.
September 1, 2022
- Yesterday, the price of gas at the station
down the street from me jumped 15 cents to
$3.949 per gallon. And, of
course, it's getting to be about time for me
to fill my gas tank.
Meanwhile, since I'm not working on any
science papers, and I'm not working on my
newest book, I just sit around and listen to
podcasts and watch TV. And I
think about what I should work on
next. That doesn't give me much to
write about in my comments here. Sorry
about that.
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Comments for Sunday,
August 28, 2022, thru Wed., Aug. 31, 2022:
August
30, 2022 -
Yesterday, I submitted my "new" paper
"Radar
Guns and Relativity" to vixra.org,
and this morning I was advised that it
is now on-line as my
13th paper.
It's not really a "new" paper, of
course. It's a revision to a
paper that I deleted because vixra.org
wouldn't let me post an 11th version
of it.
It could also
very well be my last
paper. My
13 papers seem to say all I want to
say about physics and Relativity --
except for my wanting to say something
about all the incorrect
information in college physics
textbooks. But, if I write something
about that, it would probably have to
be in the book I might someday finish.
I still find it incredible that nearly
every college physics textbook has a
different version of Einstein's Second
Postulate.
But, it sometimes seems like I'm the
only person on this planet who cares
about such things. With
America's democracy being torn apart,
and with blatant liars and
crooks running for office
all over the country, there are much
more important issues to think
about. However, I find it very
difficult to write about them, since
there's not much I can add to what is
in the news every day. And there
seems to be an endless stream of new
books about the subject.
Luckily, I can still find enjoyment in
listening to podcasts.
August 28, 2022 -
I'm continuing the process of examining all
my science papers to see which need
correcting due to my misunderstanding of
what happens when light photons hit a moving
object (i.e., my "c+v error").
Yesterday I deleted my paper "Radar Guns
and Einstein's Theories" when vixra.org
made me aware of their new policy
that only 4 revisions to a
paper are allowed. My latest change
would have been the 10th revision.
They didn't allow it, so I had no choice but
to delete the original and all 9 previous
revisions. I still think it's a very
important paper, so I'll make some more
revisions (or I'll totally rewrite it) and
then I'll post it as a "new" paper, probably
with the title "Radar Guns and Relativity."
Meanwhile, I made some revisions to my paper
"Relativity's
Fundamental Ideas" and submitted
them. They are now in version #2 of
the paper on vixra.org.
There are three other papers that I
decided I had to delete. The first is
my paper "Relativity: The Theory vs The
Principle." It's a paper I
always regretted writing, since it is mostly
about terminology. And since it
contained the c+v error, I decided
to delete it.
The second paper I deleted is "Pulsars
and Special Relativity." It also
contains the c+v error and would be
just too much effort to correct.
The third paper I deleted is "An Analysis
of Einstein's Second Postulate to His
Theory of Special Relativity." I've
already revised that paper 4 times, so they
won't allow me to revise it again. But
any new version would be a total rewrite
anyway.
When I was reading my paper "Radar Guns
and Einstein's Second Postulate"
(which I've deleted and won't replace), I
studied one of the college textbooks I cited
which contains a "wrong" version of
Einstein's Second Postulate. The 1,322
page textbook is titled "Physics
for Scientists & Engineers"
and it was written by Douglas C.
Giancoli. On page 957 it contains
this:
In his famous 1905 paper,
Einstein proposed doing away completely
with the idea of the ether and the
accompanying assumption of a preferred or
absolute reference frame at rest. This
proposal was embodied in two postulates.
The first postulate was an extension of the
Galilean-Newtonian relativity principle to
include not only the laws of mechanics but also
those of the rest of physics, including
electricity and magnetism:
First
postulate (the relativity
principle): The laws of physics have
the same form in all inertial
reference frames.
The first postulate can
also be stated as: There is no experiment
you can do in an inertial reference frame
to tell if you are at rest or moving
uniformly at constant velocity.
The second postulate is
consistent with the first:
Second
postulate (constancy of the speed of
light): Light propagates through
empty space with a
definite speed c independent of the
speed of the source or observer.
These two postulates form
the foundation of Einstein’s special
theory of relativity.
That is NOT
Einstein's Second Postulate.
Einstein's Second Postulate is:
light
is always propagated in empty space
with a definite velocity c which is
independent of the state of motion of
the emitting
body.
Einstein's
version says nothing
about what an observer would see, so Prof.
Giancoli's is an "incorrect" version of
Einstein's Second Postulate. But is
Prof. Giancoli's version scientifically
"incorrect"? Regardless of any motion
by the emitter or receiver, light is emitted
at c and it is received at c.
That seems to say that there's nothing scientifically
wrong with Prof. Giancoli's version.
It's just not an accurate quote.
There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with
what Prof. Giancoli writes about Time
Dilation in his textbook. So, it
appears he just produced an "incorrect"
version of Einstein's Second Postulate so
that he could explain Relativity in
his own way. Einstein created two
postulates that appear to conflict,
and then Einstein explained things to show
that they do not actually
conflict. Prof. Giancoli evidently
simply decided to explain things without
any conflicts.
Nearly every college physics textbook
contains a different version of Einstein's
Second Postulate, evidently all created to
allow the author to explain things in his
own way. I'd have to study each of the
textbooks to see if the author actually
describes Velocity Time Dilation
correctly. As I recall, some of the
textbooks that have different versions of
Einstein's Second Postulate do not mention
Time Dilation at all. Others say that
time dilation is reciprocal, which it is not.
And others seem to say that Time Dilation
only applies to inertial systems.
Do I want to write a new paper that analyzes
all the different ways that college
professors teach Relativity? No.
So, I just deleted my paper "An Analysis
of Einstein's Second Postulate to his
Theory of Special Relativity."
It's the 6th paper I've deleted, but there
are still 12 that seem to be correct
or correctable. And one of the 6 that
I deleted will be rewritten and posted as a
new paper.
To err is human. I seem to have just
demonstrated that I'm very human.
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Comments for Sunday,
August 21, 2022, thru Sat., Aug. 27, 2022:
August
25, 2022 - I've
begun the process of
examining all of my
science papers to see
which need correcting due
to my misunderstanding of
what happens when light
photons hit a moving
object. The first
step was to delete my
paper on "Analyzing
'Constancy of the Speed
of Light'"
from vixra.org
completely. It
wasn't worth
correcting. It's
still available on academia.edu
because I've somehow lost
the ability to delete
anything from that
forum. If I regain
that ability, I'll delete
it from there, too.
I also examined my paper "Variable
Time and the Variable
Speed of Light"
which I last updated on
August 14, 2018. It
appears that that paper
needs no corrections.
Moreover, it explains the
"problem" very well.
If the speed of light is different
virtually everywhere,
is the speed of light
"variable" or
"invariable"? If you
consider it to be
"invariable" because it is
299,792,458 meters per
second everywhere,
and you do not care
that the length of a
second is different
nearly everywhere, then,
to you, it is
"invariable." If you
are fascinated by the fact
that the length of a
second is different (i.e.,
"varies") nearly
everywhere, then it is
difficult to consider the
speed of light to be the
same everywhere.
I next examined and then
overhauled my paper "Radar
Guns and Einstein's
Theories."
It only required "minor"
changes if you accept that
"minor" means changing a
sentence here and
there. The changes,
however, are "major" when
you view how those "minor"
changes altered the validity
of the paper. I
submitted the revised
paper to vixra.org, and
I'm now waiting for it to
become version #11
of the
paper. No other
paper of mine has been
revised more than 5 times.
I'm now going to go
through the other 15
papers one by one to see
if they need to be
corrected.
August 24, 2022 - While driving
around doing errands this
afternoon, I finished listening
to CD #9 in the 9-CD audio book
set for "Last
Words" by George
Carlin.
I "borrowed" it from my local library on
March 11, 2021, and finally got around to
listening to it. It's certainly an
interesting book, even though it has more
X-rated language than any book I've ever
read or heard before. But Carlin was
noted for his use of X-rated language, and
he was even arrested for it more than
once. His court cases went to the
Supreme Court and changed the laws about
such things.
Carlin began as a kid in New York, where he
learned to joke about things. He joined the
Air Force and was stationed in the South
where he learned to love jazz and was hated
by the local white population because he
hung out in colored jazz joints. He
also probably took more drugs than any
person alive today. He appeared 19
times on the Johnny Carson show, and he did
13 HBO specials. Of the 23 solo albums
he recorded, 11 were Grammy nominated and
he took home the coveted statue 5 times,
including a 2001 Grammy win for Best
Spoken Comedy Album for his reading
of his best seller Brain Droppings.
In 2002, Carlin was awarded the “Freedom
of Speech Award” by the First Amendment
Center in cooperation with the US Comedy
Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, and
he was the named eleventh
recipient of The Kennedy Center Mark Twain
Prize for American Humor in June of 2008.
George Carlin passed away at age 71 on
June 22, 2008 in Santa Monica, California.
His was an interesting life, and it made a
very interesting book.
August 23, 2022 - Yesterday via the
Internet, I contacted one of the large
computer software corporations to ask
a question. They began with them
using "intelligent software" to find
out what I wanted. That didn't
work. Nothing I was saying
fitted any of their algorithms.
So they switched to talking with me on
a chat app (after a 30 minute wait for
someone to be free to talk).
That didn't work, either, because the
person I was talking with kept making
false assumptions. Finally we
ended up talking on the
telephone. I had to give him all
sorts of information to verify that I
was who I said I was. We talked for
well over an hour. He evidently
never encountered anyone who used a
Hewitt-Packard laptop before. He
assumed I was using Windows-8 or
Windows-XP. I told him I was
using Windows-10, but I didn't know
how to verify that, and he evidently
didn't, either. I had to
research it this morning. Yes,
I'm using "Windows-10 Home." I
ended up never really getting an
answer to my question. My
question was why they changed
something that previously provided
valuable information to something that
contained no information, and
their answer was because they changed
it. I can't say anything more
about it without identifying which
corporation I was dealing with.
But it's another part of today's world
that sometimes really scares me -
dealing with robots, and dealing with
people who think like robots.
I'm in a similar situation with
academia.edu. I posted my latest
paper "Analyzing the Invariant Speed
of Light" to their web site, but it
didn't go where
all my other papers are located.
And I don't know where it went or how
to find out where it went. I
just get messages from academia.edu
telling me that people are reading the
paper - somewhere.
Meanwhile, I went through one of my
science papers yesterday to see how
much I needed to correct as a result
of what I've learned about "stationary
points in space" and the Doppler
Effect with light. I was
surprised to find that it just
required changing a few sentences here
and there.
All I need now is some ambition to
proceed.
August 21, 2022 -
Former U.S. Senator and comedian Al Franken
was the guest host on "Jimmy
Kimmel Live" on Tuesday night.
As usual, I recorded the show and watched it
the next evening. During Franken's
monologue he mentioned that he had a
podcast. So, naturally, I had to check
it out the next day. The Al
Franken Podcast has evidently been in
existence since May of 2019, and he does a
new show every Saturday.
Looking through the selection, most of them
are very heavy topics, such as politics and
poverty, but Franken also interviews
comedians like Martin Short, Conan O'Brien
and Sarah Silverman. I found about a
dozen episodes that looked very interesting,
mostly comedian interviews, and I downloaded
them into my MP3 player. Then I listen
to two of them, a nearly 2-hour interview
with David Letterman, and a 50-minute
interview with California Democratic
Congressman Adam Schiff.
The
Letterman interview was a fascinating
discussion about late night talk shows, but
the
Adam Schiff interview really grabbed
me. Schiff has written a new book, "Midnight
in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our
Democracy and Still Could."
It contains all kinds of fascinating details
about what Donald Trump did to get impeached
as a result of trying to force Ukraine to
find dirt about Joe Biden's son. Even
though I'd sworn off of reading any more
books about Trump, I immediately put the
book on my "must read" list. At about
the 45 minute mark in the interview, Schiff
talked about sitting next to Republican
Kevin McCarthy on a plane trip, having an
brief confidential discussion with him, and
then watching McCarthy blatantly lie about
the conversaiton when they were interviewed
by the press after landing. The next day, in
Congress, Schiff asked McCarthy about
it. I found a copy of that part of
Schiff's book, and it says,
“Kevin, if we were having a private
conversation on the plane, I would have
thought it was a private conversation. But
if it wasn’t, you know I said the exact
opposite of what you told the press.”
“I know, Adam,” was his reply, “but you
know how it goes.”
I
was incredulous. “No, Kevin. I don’t. You
just make shit up, and that’s how you
operate?”
He just shrugged. That was simply how he
operated, and how he still operates today.
He was comfortable trafficking in his own
“alternative facts” even before the advent
of Trumpism.
Every evening while waiting
for the weather forecast to come on, for
about 15 minutes I watch back-to-back TV ads
where one Republican after another lies
about fellow Republicans as well as
Democratic candidates for various
posts. It is clear their only
objective is to win the election, and
they'll lie endlessly if that helps them
win. The Democrats often show clips of
a Republican saying one thing and then
saying the opposite thing, depending upon
the audience and the subject under
discussion. And the Republicans don't
care. Some of the
Republican candidates are really scary.
I wouldn't even want to be in the same room
with them. They come across as truly
evil, yet one of them (the
one endorsed by Trump) could become
Wisconsin's next governor.
During the following evenings, I listened to
more of the Al Franken podcasts.
During an
interview with comedian Sarah Silverman,
at about the 15 minute mark, Silverman
mentioned how a catholic priest in Florida
had told his TV audience that
Silverman should be killed
because of things she'd said about Jesus in
her comedy act. And they played a
recording of the priest's comments as he
prays for Silverman's "untimely death" and
how murdering her would be "God's will."
Wow!
I keep telling myself that I should be
revising some of my science papers which I
now know contain errors, and I
should be working on my book about "Logical
Relativity," but all I want to do
right now (as soon as I finish this comment)
is listen to some more Al Franken podcasts.
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