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Comments for Sunday,
March 7, 2021, thru Sat., March 13, 2021:
March 7, 2021 - Hmm.
Last Monday I wrote about joining a couple
Internet forums where I thought I might be
able to promote my new sci-fi novel "Time
Work." One was the
Facebook forum "Science
Fiction," and the other was a blog
called "Science
Fiction and Fantasy Chronicles," also
known as "SFFC." I mentioned how
"tinkerdan" had read the first three
chapters of my book via Amazon's "Look
Inside" feature, and on SFFC he pointed out
two typos that I had failed to notice.
It appears that "tinkerdan" then bought
a Kindle copy of "Time Work" and went
through the entire book twice,
making notes of my typos. Then he
displayed all 30 of the typos in a comment
on the SFFC blog, along with several other
errors he found. In effect, he
proof-read my book. With a
couple exceptions about punctuation,
everything he pointed out was worth
correcting.
For example, on page 9, I wrote:
I could a vaguely make out
what looked like a bank of some kind of
large batteries.
And "tinkerdan" pointed out
that it should be "I could vaguely make out
..." without the "a" between could and
vaguely.
It's a true typo that I somehow failed to
see in the many times I read the book,
although it's totally possible I created the
typo while fixing something else on the
final version.
There were about 29 more such typos.
And then he mentioned some errors. For
example, he wrote:
FYI: I'm not sure how you
are using the word davit in relation to
the trucks.
I did a search through the
manuscript for the word "davit." I
only used it once. I used it in this
sentence:
McGinnis then tied the
chopper owner to a tie-down davit
on the wall near the front of the
helicopter.
I checked the definition for
"davit" and found I'd used a totally wrong
word. A davit is defined as "a small crane on board a
ship, especially one of a pair for
suspending or lowering a lifeboat." I
meant "cleat," which is defined as "a
T-shaped piece of metal or wood, especially
on a boat or ship, to which ropes are
attached." So, I fixed that.
"Tinkerdan" also thought that my use of the
word "mufti" might offend
some people. Huh? I had
written:
A few military people in
camouflage fatigues were enjoying a meal
there. But, mostly it was just
smiling and hungry people in mufti.
Looking up the word, I found
it has two definitions. The first is "a Muslim legal expert who is
empowered to give rulings on religious
matters." The second meaning of mufti
is "'ordinary clothes,' when they're worn by
people who usually wear a uniform. So a
soldier wearing civilian clothes might be
said to be in mufti."
I changed it to "civilian clothing."
I also wrote, ""I woofed down a cup
of yogurt and then headed to the health club
for a workout." Tinkerdan pointed out
that the word should be "wolfed." He
was right, so I corrected it.
When I made all the changes to the
manuscript, I decided I'd see if I could
make the changes to the Kindle and paperback
versions on Amazon.com. No problem. I
made the changes in less than a half
hour. I also thought about thanking
"Tinkerdan" in the acknowledgments section,
but it didn't seem right to use a screen
name, so I didn't do it.
Then, when I was finished updating the
Kindle and paperback versions, I returned to
the SFFC forum and found that "Tinkerdan"
had posted a message saying that, if I
wanted to thank him, I could use his real
name, which he provided. I tried to
make that change, but Amazon hadn't yet
completed work on my previous changes and
wouldn't let me make any more. So,
I'll try applying that change later today or
tomorrow.
Someone else had offered to proof-read my
manuscript a couple weeks ago, but I turned
him down because I was afraid of getting
opinions about the story before
publishing it, which could delay publishing
indefinitely. Plus there didn't seem
any easy way to provide him with a copy of
the book in manuscript format.
"Tinkerdan" simply bought a
Kindle copy and proof-read it.
"Tinkerdan" also provide my first review of
"Time Work." He wrote on the
SFFC forum: "It's a good story. The
science is a bit wonky; but that always
happens with time travel stories."
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Comments for Monday,
March 1, 2021, thru Saturday, March 6,
2021:
March
3, 2021 - Hmm.
A few days ago, I mentioned that I had
joined a couple Internet forums where
I thought I might be able to promote
my new sci-fi novel "Time
Work." One was the
Facebook forum "Science
Fiction," and the other was some
kind of blog called "Science
Fiction and Fantasy Chronicles."
When I joined the second one, I was
advised that I could not promote any
book or story on that forum until
after I had posted 100 messages on
other subjects.
Then I promptly forgot which forum had
the restriction. And in
the SFFC forum they had a lot of
discussions about time travel and
about searching for new books that
might be interesting. So, I
mentioned that my book was about time
travel, and I mentioned that I'd
written a new book they might find
interesting. This morning, one
of the administrators deleted my
mentions of my book and wrote me a
message explaining what he'd done and
why.
Before I read his message, I had
mentioned my book once again in
another post. The post was in
reply to a comment from "tinkerdan"
who had read the first three chapters
of my book via Amazon's "Look Inside"
feature. He pointed out two
typos that I had failed to notice, and
he then commented:
Also that Donald Trump
line goes flying in the face of your
disclaimer at the beginning about all
persons and events being fiction.
There might even be room
for liability in the statement made.
Did I mention Donald Trump
in the first three chapters? I
checked, and yes I did. In Chapter 3, when
the main character is in a discussion with
his brother, who is President of the United
States, and they are talking about a
possible upcoming Right Wing attack on
Washington, there is this sentence:
We all remembered the
Right Wing attack on the Capitol Building
back at the end of Donald Trump's term as
President.
I wrote the book in
2014. It was about thwarting a Right
Wing attack on Washington, which also seemed
like a definite possibility back then.
Now, the guy on the forum was apparently
suggesting that I wrote the book in the past
month to take advantage of the January 6,
2021 Right Wing attack. No, all I did
was add 3 or 4 mentions of that "previous"
attack.
I was hoping that the mentions of my book on
those two forums might generate some sales,
and when I checked Amazon's site this
morning I found I did sell one copy
of a book yesterday, only the book was "Clipper."
It's probably the first copy of that book
I've sold in years. I have to
wonder what prompted the sale. It
can't be anything I posted to those two
science-fiction forums, since I made no
mention of "Clipper" in any of my
posts there.
But it makes me wonder if there aren't some
history forums out
there that I should join to promote "Clipper." And
"A
Crime Unlike Any Other."
March 2, 2021 - At 1:55 this afternoon, I
got my second Covid vaccine shot. Just
like what happened on February 9, I was in
and out of the building in less than 20
minutes, 15 of those minutes being spent
waiting to see if I suffered any ill effects
from the shot. Of course, I didn't
want to take any chances about being late
for my 2 p.m. appointment, so I arrived 15
minutes early, which meant I had to wait
before entering the building. I spent
those 15 minutes walking around the parking
lot to get some exercise. The
temperature was about 35 degrees.
So, now I should be able to focus better on
some projects, and in a couple weeks I may
join a gym and start exercising on a
treadmill indoors instead of walking around
shopping center parking lots.
March 1, 2021 - I
keep wanting to write something about what
is happening in the news. For example,
there was a news story a couple days ago
about a woman in Wisconsin who tried to get
the Wisconsin Supreme Court to dismiss her
citations for "operating
a motor vehicle without insurance, not
registering the vehicle, operating a
vehicle without carrying a license and
providing false information to mislead
an officer after being pulled over for
expired plates."
She argued in court that "she has a right
to drive on public highways
'freely unencumbered' under the
constitution and that state laws
requiring insurance, licenses
and vehicle registration
infringe on her constitutional
rights."
No doubt she also voted for
Trump.
Can you imagine what the world would be like
if there were no laws? Or even if
there were no driving laws? You could
get into a car and drive it without even
taking a test, there would be no laws about
how fast you could go, and no laws about
what side of the street you must drive
on. If you want, you can drive on the
sidewalk.
Does she also think there should be no laws
against negligent homicide?
Probably. We should all be able to
kill whoever we want, as long as we can
argue that it was the dead person's fault.
Logic and reason have no place in such a
world. It's a world where emotions
are the basis for law. So, the laws
would be about what you can do, not
about what you cannot do. The
law should say you can drive
on the sidewalk if you want to.
It seems like it could be the basis for a
science fiction novel, a novel about a world
where science and reason are outlawed.
What's truly scary is that there are hundreds
of thousands of people who
would vote to have such a world.
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Comments for Sunday,
February 21, 2021, thru Sun., Feb. 28,
2021:
February 28,
2021 -
Groan! There just
aren't enough hours in a
day! I've been looking around
for ways I might promote my
sci-fi novel "Time
Work," and I found a
couple interesting places where
they discuss sci-fi
novels. The first was the
Facebook group "Science
Fiction." It's a
"private" group, so I had to
join, and in the process I had
to promise not to promote
anything until after I've posted
100 messages to the
discussions. The
group has over 68,500 members,
and over 15 messages get posted
there every minute.
One problem with the group is
that there are so many
interesting things being posted
that, if you enjoy science
fiction (which I do), you can
spend all day just looking
through them. And there is
a lot of interesting science
FACTS, too. Did you know
that there's
a company that plans to start
building a space station
four years from now that will
have artificial gravity just
like the space station in the
movie "2001:
A Space Odyssey"?
Also, most threads in the forum
begin with images. Here's
an example:
Another more serious problem is
that anything that gets posted
gets quickly lost.
Yesterday, I posted a response
to a comment about the 1979
movie "Alien,"
and today it took me ten minutes
to find that thread, and I found
no one had responded to my
comment.
The other place I found to
discuss sci-fi novels is a
massive blog or web site called
"Science
Fiction & Fantasy Forum."
It has 19,306 members and 95,629
different discussion
threads. So, anything
posted there is also likely to
be quickly lost in the
deluge. After I joined,
just to make sure everything
works properly, I posted to a
thread about the last time you
visited a used book store.
But there are so many threads
that I'll need some time to
figure out where and how to post
a comment about my book.
Some threads have been going on
for 6 years or more.
Meanwhile, the discussions I was
having on the
sci.physics.relativity forum
seem to have come to an
end. People are still
arguing in the thread I started
about my book, but they are
arguing with each other
- mostly about words and their
proper usage. However, I
was the last one to post to the
thread, and it's possible that
the person I was exchanging
messages with just hasn't been
on-line since I posted.
That thread, and another titled
"About
Time Itself," were very
interesting while they
lasted. In one
discussion I mentioned an idea
that had just occurred to me: If
you are in a spaceship that is
accelerating at 1 g, that means
that you can walk around on the
rear wall as if it was a
floor. You can sleep and
eat normally using the rear wall
as the floor. But the
constant acceleration means that
you are going faster and faster,
and that means Time for you will
be going slower and
slower. As I recall, it
was also how the spaceship in
the sci-fi novel "Variable
Star" worked.
I found a
science web site that
says,
If you’re accelerating at
a fast enough rate to produce a constant 1
g, then sure, you’ll be able to create
artificial, Earth-like gravity. From
Earth’s frame of reference, if you’re
accelerating at a constant rate of 1 g,
then you’d reach near the speed of light
in about a year, having covered about 0.5
light-years in distance. While
ramping up to near light speed, you’d
theoretically be able to to eat your
breakfast of champions as you would on
Earth.
On the flip side, you have
to be prepared to decelerate properly as
you get closer to your destination. This
could take months or even years—it sort of
depends on what is tolerable to the
travelers inside the spacecraft. If you’re
trying to emulate a 1 g environment again,
then you basically have to plan for a
year’s worth of deceleration en route to
your destination.
And, more interestingly, Wikipedia
says,
At a constant acceleration
of 1 g, a rocket could travel the diameter
of our galaxy in about 12 years ship
time, and about 113,000 years planetary
time. If the last half of the trip
involves deceleration at 1 g, the trip
would take about 24 years. If the trip is
merely to the nearest star, with
deceleration the last half of the way, it
would take 3.6 years.
What I wondered about was
how a pendulum clock would work in
such an situation. When talking
about Time Dilation and clocks slowing down,
someone always brings up pendulum clocks,
because they do not work in zero gravity,
they probably wouldn't work properly if you
are accelerating at less than 1 g, and they
do not work if you are accelerating
laterally. But they should work at 1 g
if the rear wall of the ship is the floor
upon which the clock stands.
I could spend all day researching this kind
of stuff, and that is what I've been doing
for the past few days. Meanwhile, I
haven't had time to listen to any
podcasts. I feel like I'm standing
under a waterfall of interesting stuff.
February 25, 2021 - Hmm.
I've now sold a grand total of 2
copies of my sci-fi novel "Time
Work." Both copies
were Kindle copies, the first one was
paid for in British pounds, and the
second was paid for in German
marks. If you buy a Kindle copy
of the book, you can be reading it ten
minutes later. If you buy the
paperback version, you won't be able
to start reading it for a couple
weeks. My copies are expected to
arrive late next week, maybe the week
after. It seems very possible
that Amazon does not record a
paperback sale until they actually
ship the book. I'll find out
next week or the week after.
(They have to print the book before
they can ship it.)
Hoping to make more people aware of
the book, a couple days ago I decided
to start a discussion about it on the
sci.physics.relativity forum.
Of course, making people aware of a
book doesn't mean they will actually
buy it. But I wanted to see what
would happen.
What happened was what always happens
when I post comments to that
forum. They endlessly argued
over words. They argued that, if
the book is "science-fiction,"
then there can be no science in it, it
can only be pure fiction.
When I argued with them, I used "The
Martian" as an example. In that
movie, a man is mistakenly thought to
be dead and is left behind on Mars
when a group of explorers return to
earth. The man doesn't have
enough food, water or oxygen to
survive until they can send a rescue
mission. So, the man has to use
science to create the
food, water and oxygen he needs in
order to stay alive.
The response from Eber Sandrelli was
"No, he uses fiction, not science.
Movies and scifi books are fiction."
Then I wrote, "If someone in a novel
uses heat to boil water, does that
make it fiction? A fictional character
used a fictional stove to heat
fictional water, BUT THE SCIENCE IS
REAL."
The response from Sandrelli was,
"Boiling water isn't science."
With "Odds Bodkin" I argued that
Einstein came up with his Time
Dilation ideas through thought
experiments. But Mr. Bodkin
argued that thought experiments were
just what Einstein used to explain
things to laypeople, the
train-embankment "thought experiments"
for example. I didn't see them
as thought experiments, I saw them as
ways to describe ideas to
laypeople. So, all we did was
argue about what is a "thought
experiment" and what isn't.
Meanwhile, someone named "Mitch" was
arguing "You have to stop time before
you can make it go backward."
That's not exactly an argument over
words, but I tried to explain that
people in my book do not cause
time to go backwards, they transfer
from one dimension to another, they
transfer from our dimension where time
moves forward to the anti-time
dimension where time moves
backward. When they return to
normal time, they return to the point
where they left it. Did they
"stop time." No, they left
normal time and then returned to the
point where they left it.
So far, there has been no name
calling, and it has all been fairly
interesting. There are still
people who will argue by making the
exact same claim over and over, and I
will counter-argue by explaining
things in a different way each
time. They learn nothing, but
explaining things in many different
ways helps me make certain I am
correct in what I understand.
And there are indications that Eber
Sandrelli believes the moon landings
were a hoax. If I get tired of
arguing about what is science and what
is not, I might question him on that
subject.
February 22, 2021
- There was an email from Amazon in my inbox
this morning, time stamped 1:07 a.m.,
informing me that the paperback version of "Time
Work" is now available for
purchase at Amazon.com. So, I
immediately ordered some copies.
I skipped the "proof copy" step, where the
author gets copies before they officially go
on sale, so he/she can look the book over to
make sure everything is okay. That
step would delay making the paperback
available for at least 2 weeks, maybe
3. It appears I can make changes to
the Kindle and paperback versions any time I
want to, and they'll go into effect almost
immediately. Unlike "normal"
publishers who send copies to bookstores,
Amazon is a "print on demand" publisher,
which means if you want to buy a copy of a
book they sell, they will print one for you.
My daily sales reports still show just one
copy sold. So, that single Kindle copy
I sold in England on the first day wasn't
the start of a frantic rush to buy copies.
I still don't know whether or not I'll go
through the process of creating a paperback
version of Clipper.
All I'll have to do is spend is a lot of
time putting it into paperback book
format. But, right now my thoughts are
on getting the paperback copies of Time
Work, and on a new book
I want to write, tentatively titled "Analyzing
Relativity." In fact, I'm going
to end this comment right here so that I can
start working on that book.
February 21, 2021
- Whew! On Friday afternoon,
after a lot of stumbling around by me, the
Kindle version of my sci-fi novel "Time
Work" was finally "published"
and made available for sale on
Amazon.com. Amazon sent me an email
time-stamped "4:02 p.m.," advising me "Your
book is available in the Kindle Store!"
And, just to demonstrate that everyone makes
mistakes, I used the wrong version of the
cover on the Amazon page. The "final"
version uses a different, less-weird font
for the lower three lines. You can see
it in the upper left corner of the main page
for this site. Notice, too, that after
weeks of experimenting with different cover
designs, I finally settled on just plain
black on white.
If you click on the "Look inside" feature on
Amazon's site, they show the first
three chapters and part of the fourth
chapter.
When I checked the sales reports for all of
my books this morning, I expected there
would be no sales for Time Work.
To my great and pleasant surprise, someone
presumably in England bought a copy.
(Their payment was in British pounds.)
Of course, it's too early to expect anyone
to write a review for it.
My WWII novel "Clipper" was
published for Kindle in September of 2010,
and it has never received a
review. I didn't keep any record of
how many copies it sold, but in my
October 28, 2011 (A) comment on my
anthrax site, I wrote about how sales for Clipper
"have suddenly picked up" as a result of a
TV series about Pan Am that was airing
at that time, so I must have sold at least a
few copies.
In order to get sales for a new book, people
have to know about the book.
And, except for readers of this web site, no
one knows about "Time Work."
Plus, according to some surveys, 41% of
Americans haven't read any books in
the past year. And only about 20%
have read an e-book. I would have
guessed the numbers to be a lot lower than
that. And science-fiction readers are
probably a tiny portion of the total.
How the buyer in England discovered the book
will probably always be a mystery to me.
My next task is to produce and publish a
paperback version of "Time Work."
I almost gave up on doing that when I
learned that printed books for sale must
have an ISBN number, and if you buy just one
number, it
costs $125. But, I quickly
learned that it all depends upon where
you buy the ISBN number. If you
self-publish via Amazon, they will give
you an ISBN for free. However,
your book will not be
included in the
"Books In Print" database used by
libraries and book stores. None of my
books are in that database.
Of course, there is a positive side
to publishing Kindle books on Amazon.
Publishing is FREE if you know how to follow
the directions. So far, getting my
Kindle version of "Time Work" on
Amazon hasn't cost me a cent (except for the
$65 fee for registering it with the
Copyrights office at the Library of
Congress). And it won't cost me
anything to make the paperback version
available for sale on Amazon, either.
Of course, I will have to pay for
the copies I plan to buy for myself and to
give away.
As far as I know, as of this moment no one
else on Earth (other than me and possibly
that person in England) has read "Time
Work." I don't think I've ever
before felt so tense and uncomfortable about
what people will think of a book I've
written. The story involves a very
unique and different form of time
travel. It's totally mind-boggling to
me. And I wonder what others will
think of it. Will conspiracy theorists
think that kind of time travel actually
exists? Time will tell.
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Comments for Sunday,
February 14, 2021, thru Sat., Feb. 20,
2021:
February
19, 2021 - A
couple days ago, I was
looking for something in
the news when I noticed an
article which said The
National Geographic
Channel is planning a
multi-part series about
the anthrax attacks of
2001. I was in the
middle of researching
something else, so I
didn't do any more than
glance at the
article.
Checking further into it
this morning, I was
puzzled that they were
saying that it was Part 2
of the series "The Hot
Zone."
But it turns out the first
part was about the Ebola
outbreak in 1989. It
aired last year. The
second part will be about
the anthrax attacks and is
titled "The Hot Zone:
Anthrax." Filming
starts in Toronto this
month. An
AP article in the
Valdosta Daily Times
seems to be the most
informative. It and
the
Press Release say it
will be a six-part series,
each part 1 hour
long. It's going to
be a scripted docu-drama,
not a documentary.
Harry Hamlin will play
news anchor Tom Brokaw,
Dylan Baker will play FBI
agent Ed Copak, Daniel Dae
Kim will play FBI agent
Matthew Ryker, and Tony
Goldwyn will play Bruce
Ivins, "a brilliant
microbiologist who becomes
embroiled in the hunt to
find the 2001 anthrax
killer. While he works
closely with the FBI to
uncover who is behind the
deadly anthrax letters,
his growing instability
and paranoia give way to
even deeper and unnerving
discoveries."
I'll definitely be on the
look-out for the series
when it finally airs,
probably this fall.
My
book about the anthrax
attacks doesn't
mention Ed Copak or
Matthew Ryker. So,
it will be interesting to
see how they fit into the
"drama."
February 17, 2021 - Once again I
accomplished something!
Yesterday, while watching the
last of 17 inches of snow bury
everything outside, I finished
listening to another audio book
I'd obtained from my local
library. The book was "The
Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Presents Earth (The Book): A
Visitor's Guide to the Human
Race."
Unlike the audio "book" I listened to the
day before, there are actually printed
versions of this 3-hour, 37-minute audio
book. And they all got rave reviews
when they were published in 2010. I
looked at some pages on Amazon's web site
and was stunned to see the printed versions
are very heavily illustrated. The
audio book is mostly just John Stewart,
Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Wyatt Cenak, and
Jason Jones from The Tonight Show
reading the text and the captions to the
illustrations, assisted by Signorney Weaver
who helps put everything into context
(probably because she knows how to talk to
aliens).
The book is written as a history of the
human race for extraterrestrial aliens who
might visit Earth after we've wiped
ourselves out by wars, plagues, climate
change or other methods. It's not only
very funny, it's also very profound
and thought-provoking. Sigourney
Weaver also introduces the FAQs (Future
Alien Questions) at the end of each
chapter. Even though the book was
written in 2010, here's a question and
answer from page 145:
Q. You had
the word "Trump" on many of your
buildings. What did that word mean?
A. A
Trump was a demon who sometimes
appeared to us in quasi-human form in
order to fire us from a job we never
wanted in the first place.
It is a terrific book,
probably best enjoyed in printed book form,
since while listening to the audio book I
constantly kept wanting to write down some
of the thought-provoking things that were
being said.
February 16, 2021 - Okay, I
accomplished something
yesterday. I finished listening
to another "audio book" I'd obtained
from my local library. I put
"audio book" in quotation marks
because there is no print version of
the "book." The "book" was "The
Best of the Second City."
It features comedy skits by The
Second City comedy troupe that has
operated in Chicago since 1959 and starred
Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Marsha Mason,
Tina Fey and Ed Asner, among many many
others. The "audio book" is just 2
hours and 46 minutes long, and was produced
in 1993. I was surprised to hear Ed
Asner featured in some of the
skits. His was about the only voice I
definitely recognized, although I'm pretty
sure I could occasionally pick out Colbert
and Carell, too. While there were
definitely a lot of laughs in the "audio
book," there were also a lot of skits that I
can only describe as "strange." They
may have been hilarious 30 or 40 years ago,
but some of the humor is lost when you have
to try to recall what various politicians
were doing and saying back then.
Overall, though, it was an interesting and
enjoyable 2 hours and 46 minutes.
February 14, 2021
- Damn! I really need
to stop writing comments about what I plan
to do. And maybe even about what I am
doing. When I write such comments, and
then I appear to finish nothing,
it must be very tedious and disappointing
for the readers of this web site.
To me, it is all part of the creative
process.
Last week was particularly bad. I'd
created the text for the Kindle version of
my sci-fi novel, and I was trying to design
a cover. Then on Thursday my computer
seemed to be running very
slow. I would have to stop typing
every few seconds because my computer
couldn't keep up. It's a common
problem caused by having too many programs
running in my computer at the same
time. They aren't things I
am running, they're things that Microsoft
Windows does. So, I had to shut
down everything and do a re-start to get
things working properly again. I did
that on Thursday.
Then on Friday I discovered that, when I did
that re-start, all the stuff Kindle was
doing in my computer was deleted. They
were running their "Kindle Create"
software in my computer. It's
a program to create Kindle and print
versions of books. I thought it was
software I'd downloaded into my computer
like an app (application), but the software
was just running in my computer, it
wasn't actually stored there.
And when I did the re-start, the connection
to Kindle Create was broken and the software
was deleted by the re-start. So, I
have to do a lot of things over again.
Fortunately, I saved all the changes I made
to the text, so I didn't lose that. I
have the .DOCX version of the book, but the
.kpf version I saved is useless. I
have to restart the Kindle Create program
and it assumes I'm starting from scratch,
so I'll have to convert my WORD .DOCX
version to their .kpf format once again.
But I need to have the cover art ready
before I do that, or I'll just run into the
same problems with my computer slowing down
again.
And what I've just written is another
comment about what I am doing and what I
plan to do, which I assume no one cares
about. I also plan to combine all my
science papers into a book, but what I'll
most likely actually do is lay down
on my couch and listen to some podcasts
while pondering how to organize the book.
Also, except for my Sunday comments, I plan
to stop wasting time writing comments here
about what I'm doing and what I plan to
do. I'm just going to write comments
about what I've actually
accomplished. And maybe some
comments about strange or fascinating things
that I've discovered or observed.
That's the plan.
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Comments for Sunday,
February 7, 2021, thru Sat., Feb. 13, 2021:
February
11, 2021 -
Tuesday morning, while waiting for it
to be time to go get my first Covid
vaccination, and being unable to
concentrate on anything else, I
listened to some podcasts. I'd
found a new series of science podcasts
on the Internet, and I decided to
listen to a sample episode. The
series is called "The
Titanium Physicists Podcast."
They've produced 86 podcasts so far,
less than one a month, and looking
through them I chose episode #20 to be
my first listen. The episode
from July 29, 2012, is titled "Time
Dilates When You are Having Fun."
Wow! What a
disappointment!
It's hard to describe why I was so
annoyed by it. It seems to be
some physicists goofing around and
talking about how crazy
Relativity is. The host is Dr.
Ben Tippett, who is a theoretical
physicist specializing in General
Relativity. He is currently an
instructor of Mathematics,
Astronomy and Physics at the College
of the Rockies in British Columbia,
Canada. You can download a
transcript of the show. I
did, and they used the word "crazy"
twelve times. Here's the first
time:
Michael: Have they ever
decided on whether light is a wave or a
particle?
Jocelyn: They've firmly
decided that it's both.
Laughter
Ken: Firmly decided not to
decide.
Jocelyn: Yeah but that
get's into quantum theory which is the
other crazy
modern physics thing.
Michael: Oh, god, is that
being discussed tonight too?
Ben: No.
Ken: Ok, good.
Jocelyn: We're going to
stick to one sort of counter-intuitive
understanding of the universe at a time.
Ken: Alright, good.
To me, that is like crazy
people discussing science. Here are
four more uses of the word "crazy":
Ben: Actually it's kind of
a crazy
thing because the way we are intuitively
used to the world, in Galilean relativity
if something's moving, when two people see
it moving, they can disagree on how fast
it's moving. So imagine that you are
driving in the car and you look out the
window and there's a seagull sitting in
the air just outside, you know flying, but
kind of outside your window abreast with
your car. You look out and you see that
seagull and you say hey that seagull is sitting still. Whereas
somebody standing on the side of the road
would see your car go past and then a
seagull flying 60 miles an hour next to
your window and he'll say that's seagull
is flying 60 miles an hour.
Michael: Right, right.
Ben: It's crazy
windy today.
Laughter.
Ben: The crazy
thing about what Einstein said, was he
said, well what if this doesn't happen for
light. What if, regardless of whether
you're in a car, whether you're in a
rocket ship, whether you're sitting still,
you're always going to see light traveling
at the same speed. It's a little bit crazy
but as Jocelyn said it's entirely
equivalent to what Michelson Morley
findings were.
I don't find Einstein's
theories to be "crazy." I find them to
be awesome. When
they talk about Einstein's Relativity
Theories being "crazy," they are talking
about how "counter-intuitive" they
are. And they basically say that even
though time dilation is "crazy," you still
have to believe it.
NO!!! I do NOT
have to believe something that is
"crazy"! I believe
that Time Dilation is real because I believe
I UNDERSTAND IT. And it is AMAZING.
It is "counter-intuitive" only if you have
some fixed belief that Time is the same
everywhere. But who has such a
belief? To have such a belief you
first have to think about how Time works.
I never thought about how Time works until AFTER
I read about Time Dilation. And the
more I studied it, the more sense it made.
I'd downloaded about ten episodes of the
podcast, but after listening to the episode
on Time Dilation I just briefly sampled some
of the others before deleting them all from
my MP3 player. It's really annoying to
me to listen to "physicists" laugh about how
"crazy" Relativity and Time Dilation are.
In sharp contrast, yesterday afternoon I
listened to a
Big Picture Science podcast from
January 25, 2021, titled "Skeptic
Check: Shared Reality." Big
Picture Science is my second-favorite
podcast after The
Infinite Monkey Cage. I've
listened to every episode of The Infinite
Monkey Cage, and I think I've listened to
just about every Big Picture Science
episode. The "Shared Reality" episode
is one of their best. Here's their
description of the show:
One of the many shocking
aspects of the Capitol attack was that it
revealed how thoroughly the nation had
cleaved into alternate realities. How did
we get to this point? How did
misinformation come to create beliefs
embraced by millions?
In this episode, experts
in social media, cults, and the history of
science join us for a discussion about how
these alternative realities formed, why
people are drawn to them, and the benefits
of a shared reality.
I wish I had a transcript,
but all I have are a few notes. Here
are some of my notes:
"Reality" depends upon the
quality of evidence supporting it.
"Malignant Narcissism" =
"The Cult of Trump."
Disinformation is created
intentionally!
"All truth is relative" is
the claim of NUT CASES.
"You can't reason someone
out of something they weren't reasoned
into."
The episode begins with the
hosts talking about the January 6 attack on
the Capitol building and about conspiracy
theorists and how they think. The
episode is about 54 minutes long, and I
enjoyed every second of it.
And now I'm going to listen to Monday's
episode of The
Infinite Monkey Cage, which is titled
"The
Fundamentals of Reality." The subject
of "what is reality?" seems very important
when you have mobs of angry people who think
"what is reality?" is a something that each
person decides for himself, and everyone's
opinion is as just as valid as everyone
else's.
February
10, 2021 - I
got my first Covid vaccination
yesterday. It was the Pfizer
vaccine. I think the experience
is worth mentioning because it was
absolutely nothing like what you see
on TV, and it was very
different from what I expected after
reconnoitering the vaccination site on
Monday afternoon. Evidently they
weren't giving vaccinations on
Monday.
Things looked about the same when I
arrived. The two story USBank
building was mostly hidden behind snow
piles that lined the highway in
Franksville, Wisconsin, about 8 miles
from where I live. The village
of Franksville is located inside
the village of Caledonia,
Wisconsin. (I have no idea how
that happened, but I assume one is
mostly Democrat and the other is
mostly Republican.)
There were 3 gaps in the snow piles
and no indication as to which led to
the bank. Just as I had done on
Monday, I missed the first one, the
second one looked very narrow, so I
turned into the third one, which was
also the entrance to a Subway sandwich
shop. But they shared a parking
lot with the bank. The parking
lot was nearly full, which was very
different from Monday. I sat in
my car waiting until 5 minutes to my
appointment time. Then I walked
to the rear door. Unlike Monday,
on Tuesday there were folding signs on
the sidewalk, signs which stated that
you should not enter more than 15
minutes before your appointment
time. The rear door was still
covered with "Exit only" signs, but it
was clearly the entrance.
Inside it was very busy, with at least
fifty people sitting or moving around
in the open area between the empty
teller widows on my right and the bank
offices and waiting area on my
left. The Central Racine County
Health Department was actually located
on the second floor, but the USBank at
that location had closed about a year
ago, so the vaccination area was on
the first floor. Ropes guided me
to the first desk where I had to wait
for about 30 seconds while the guy
ahead of me explained that he was 30
minutes early but hoped he'd get in
anyway. They sent him to a
chair to wait. The woman at the
first desk took the form I'd filled
out at home and then sent me to the
next desk where another woman asked
some questions, handed the form back
to me and sent me down a rope corridor
to the vaccination area. There
was one guy ahead of me for about a
minute. Then I was ushered into
one of the offices and a woman in
white gave me the shot.
From there I was taken to chair #10 in
a waiting area where a town of
Caledonia police officer and a medic
noted my presence by setting a tiny
timer about the size of a D-cell
battery. There were about 40
such timers on the table in front of
the police officer. The chairs,
of course, were about 6 feet
apart. While I was being
observed for 15 minutes to make
certain I had no adverse reactions to
the vaccine shot, a guy with a
portable computer briefly crouched
down next to me and arranged for my
second shot, which will be on March
2nd. I also heard some employee
tell another employee that they had
just given 11 shots in 16
minutes. Exactly 15 minutes
after I sat down, the police officer
picked up timer #10 and told me it was
okay for me to leave.
So, I was in and out in about 20
minutes. It was all very
efficient and well organized in spite
of the odd location and the chaotic
first impression.
And now I can think of other things besides
how and when I can get my Covid
vaccine shots.
February 8, 2021 -
Today was somewhat of an eventful day.
I was working on a cover for my sci-fi novel
this morning when I got an email from my
local county health department asking if I
wanted to sign up for a Covid shot. Of
course I did, and I signed up to get the
shot tomorrow afternoon. That
automatically puts me on the list for my
second shot 27 days later. I only need
to pick the time of day.
After lunch, I drove to the place where they
give the shots, just to see where it was
and how long it would take me to get
there. It takes about 15 minutes, and
the health department is in what looks like
an abandoned bank building. There are
what looks like abandoned (snow covered)
cars in all the bank's drive-through
lanes. And it appears I have to enter
through the door that is marked "Exit
Only." I think I read somewhere that
the health department is on the second
floor, but the instructions say the shots
will be given on the first floor.
Anyway, while driving there to look the
place over, I finished listening to CD #7 in
the 7-CD audio book set for "The
Art of Thinking Clearly" by Rolf
Dobelli.
It's a very interesting book containing 99
"cognitive errors" that are commonly made by
people, and suggestions on how to avoid
them. One such error is called
"cognitive bias," and is described this way:
The confirmation bias
is the mother of all misconceptions. It
is the tendency to interpret new
information so that it becomes
compatible with our existing theories,
beliefs, and convictions. In other
words, we filter out any new information
that contradicts our existing views
(“disconfirming evidence”). This is a
dangerous practice. “Facts do not cease to
exist because they are ignored,” said
writer Aldous Huxley. However, we do
exactly that, as super-investor Warren
Buffett knows: “What the human being is
best at doing is interpreting all new
information so that their prior
conclusions remain intact.”
and
The Internet is
particularly fertile ground for the confirmation bias.
To stay informed, we browse news sites
and blogs, forgetting that our favored
pages mirror our existing values, be they
liberal, conservative, or somewhere in
between. Moreover, a lot of sites now
tailor content to personal interests and
browsing history, causing new and
divergent opinions to vanish from the
radar altogether. We inevitably land
in communities of like-minded people,
further reinforcing our convictions—and
the confirmation bias.
Needless to say, this is the
primary thinking-mode of most conspiracy
theorists. And it seems to be the
thinking mode for most Trump
supporters. Weighing facts and
evidence is not part of this kind of
thinking. They just look for support
for what they already believe.
One type of thinking that I hadn't thought
much about is #9: "authority bias."
The book gives an interesting example:
Over the past decade,
airlines have also learned the dangers of
the authority
bias. In the old days,
the captain was king. His commands were
not to be doubted. If a copilot
suspected an oversight, he wouldn’t have
dared to address it out of respect
for—or fear of—his captain. Since
this behavior was discovered, nearly every
airline has instituted crew resource
management (CRM), which coaches pilots and
their crews to discuss any reservations
they have openly and quickly. In other
words: They carefully deprogram the
authority bias. CRM has contributed
more to flight safety in the past twenty
years than have any technical advances.
There are 97 more such
"cognitive errors," some of which are very
similar to others. Some are also
questionable. #99 on the list is "News
Illusion" or "Why you shouldn't listen to
the news." Here's one quote from that
section:
News is to the mind what
sugar is to the body: appetizing, easy to
digest—and highly destructive in the long
run.
The author seems to be
talking about "news junkies," people who
spend hours reading newspapers and news
magazines. I check the news on-line
every morning, basically just looking at the
headlines. I don't read any articles
unless there is something particularly
interesting about them. And I watch
the evening news to get the weather
forecast, and to see if anything truly
important has happened. So, I think
some of the "cognitive errors" are a lot
more common than others. But, it was
an interesting book and well suited for
listening to for ten or fifteen minutes
every time whenever I have to drive
somewhere.
February 7, 2021 -
Hmm. I seem to be still frozen in
front of my computer, unable to decide about
what do do next. If I could put my
mind to it, I could have a Kindle version of
my sci-fi novel available for sale on Amazon
in a day or two. But, I'd still like
to produce a paperback version first, even
though the previous novel I sold via Amazon
only
has a Kindle version.
However, I also wish I'd created a paperback
version for that book. It would just
be nice to have some copies on my bookshelf,
and I'd like to give a couple copies to my
local library. But
self-publishing was a very different kind of
enterprise back then. Although I wrote
that Kindle version in 1995, I don't have it
in my Kindle, because I didn't own a Kindle
until my sister bought one for me about
15 or 20 years later.
I have the computer-printed manuscript for "Clipper"
stuck away in a closet, and I just found the
.DOC files on my backup hard drive.
They are all D.O.S. files that can't even be
correctly viewed by today's WORD software,
although it seems clear I could extract a
readable version from those files if I
wanted to. I'm not sure how many
Kindle copies I sold. Amazon shows NO
reviews for it. They also show a Sept.
12, 2010 publication date.
I checked my anthraxinvestigation.com web
site and found lots of information about the
book in an
entry dated December 7, 2014.
Here's part of the first paragraph:
one reason I got interested in
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was
all the conspiracy
theories that were spawned by Pearl
Harbor Truthers in the decades
that followed the attack. I've
actually met some Pearl Harbor
Truthers over the years. I
remember talking with one at the Austin
Film Festival in 2001, just a few weeks
after 9/11. I don't recall his
name, but he was rail-thin, in his 50's
or 60's, very tense and driven, and also
thoroughly dedicated to spreading his
theory that Pearl Harbor was made
possible via a U.S. government
conspiracy: President Roosevelt allowed
Pearl Harbor to happen so that America
would be drawn into World War II.
The Truther didn't particularly like me
telling him that my novel "Clipper"
debunked all such conspiracy
theories. It was like he was on a
mission, dedicating his life to getting
people to learn "the truth" about Pearl
Harbor. Of course, he was also at
the Austin Film Festival to try to sell
his screenplay about the conspiracy.
That comment also contains a
lot of details that I'd largely
forgotten. I remember printing about
20 or 30 copies of the manuscript and
shipping them to my agent who sent them to a
couple dozen publishers, but to no
avail. We couldn't get a
sale. Here's another part of
that 2014 comment from my anthrax site:
(Somewhere
in a closet I have copies of
manuscripts for three or four other
novels I wrote before "Clipper" (and
before the age of home computers,
which means they're not on disks) but
couldn't get an agent or publisher
interested.
So, if I wanted to
self-publish those earlier novels I'd either
have to retype them, or I'd have to scan
each page of each book and then convert them
from printed text to computer text (which
also usually involves a lot of re-typing).
Plus, I assume they are all somewhat
"dated." In a previous comment I
mentioned that in my sci-fi novel some of
the villains drove a 2 or 3 year-old Mercury
Sable, which they stopped making in
2009. My sci-fi novel also has the
main character use the Internet to find the
nearest payphone so that he could
make an anonymous phone call. Do they
still have payphones? Yes.
There are still about 100,000 in operation
around the United States. When I
wrote the sci-fi novel there were ways to
find payphones by using the Internet.
There
still are. But will readers of
my novel believe it? Time will tell.
And, of course, I also keep wanting to work
on science papers. I'm now thinking
about overhauling my paper "What
is Time?" to add a suggested
experiment that compares time measured by an
atomic clock in a centrifuge to time
measured by an atomic clock that is
stationary next to the centrifuge. The
more I think about it, the more it seems
that centrifuge experiment would be just as
mind-blowing for closed-minded
mathematicians as my
suggested moving truck experiment.
Plus, the paper I last revised six years ago
probably needs better illustrations.
This cartoon illustration of Einstein's Time
Dilation example involving someone at the
North Pole and someone at the equator
doesn't seem to belong in a "serious"
science paper:
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