January 18, 2020 - In response to the comment I wrote yesterday about bitcoin ATMs, someone sent me a picture of a bitcoin ATM outside of a convenience store near Lansing, Michigan.  Here's a picture of a road sign advertising the ATM:



And here is  a picture of the actual bitcoin ATM:

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door

Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker

Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know®   and

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World

Hacking For Dummies  and

Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain

Use a bitcoin ATM in your city.  A bitcoin ATM is a machine that accepts cash and sends bitcoin to your smartphone bitcoin wallet.  Find an ATM close to you using an online map from Coin ATM Radar.

Coin ATM Radar showed me that Bank of America has ATMs that dispense bitcoin.  But first you have to set up a "bitcoin wallet."  I have no interest in buying any bitcoin, but there were clearly things about bitcoin that I might find interesting.  So, I borrowed both books for my Kindle.  They are at the bottom of my priority list, so I should get to them sometime in late 2035.

January 16, 2020 - I'm still somewhat overwhelmed with things to do and a lack of time in which to do them.  I was planning to work on my paper about "The Two Big Bang Theories," but when I awoke yesterday my subconscious was only interested in the Doppler Effect. My subconscious had come up with a question overnight while I was sleeping, and it fed the question to my conscious mind when I woke up.  The question was about how a moving radar gun measures the oscillation rate of a returned photon without also measuring any Doppler effect. 

The question came from a patent description that I mentioned here previously:


 
The question was about the #3 item in the formula.  As I see it, the Doppler effect in the #1 item does not exist because of Einstein's Second Postulate.  The speed of the emitter does not affect the speed of the light being emitted, therefore there is no "Doppler change in the frequency of the transmitted radiations due the the absolute velocity of the transmitter."  But the question was about item #3, which I concluded was also untrue: But why is there no Doppler effect due to the absolute velocity of the receiver?  There is when the receiver is the target (item #2).  When the radar gun "beats" the emitted signal together with the return signal, it measures the speed of the oncoming vehicle.  But to do that, it must somehow ignore or avoid any "Doppler shift" in the return signal.  I've thought about that often, and I had an assumption, but my subconscious evidently wasn't satisfied with that assumption.  It wanted a firm answer.  And it had determined that the "firm answer" was that the radar gun doesn't compare the oscillation frequencies of the emitted and returned photons, it only compares the difference in the amount of electric energy. 

When a photon from the radar gun hits an atom in the moving target, the amount of energy that is absorbed by the atom is the amount transmitted plus the kinetic energy from hitting a moving target.  When the atom sends back a new photon, that new photon has that extra kinetic energy in the form of a higher frequency.  However, when the radar gun's receiver receives the returned photon, it does not absorb it into an atom, which would add the Doppler shift to the photon, the gun receives the photon unaltered as a quantum of electricity.  In doing so, the Doppler shift has no effect.  I can visualize this, but it is difficult to explain.

Electrons move through a copper wire at nearly the speed of light as they carry electricity from a power plant to my reading lamp.  The amount of electricity is not greater if the power plant is at the equator and the lamp is to the east of the plant versus to the west.  Going from atom to atom in a moving wire does not change the amount of energy in an electron.  And when a radar gun receives a returning photon, it receives it as electric energy to move from atom to atom, not as energy to be absorbed and emitted back into space again.

Groan!  I had all that in my mind when I awoke yesterday, and I was planning to write a comment about it here, but when I was on my computer I got into some more discussions on the sci.physics.relativity group.  Then I suddenly decided my top priority should be to get some help in obtaining a Type-1 radar gun.  So, I composed an email to a nearby college physics professor I know via the Internet, and I sent it out.  And in the process of thinking about  that, I forgot about the Doppler shift problem.  Then, this morning my subconscious was nagging me about it again.  There was no response from the college professor as of this morning, so I composed a much better email and sent it out.  Then I started on this comment.  Now that it is done, I can hopefully get back to work on my paper about The Two Big Bang Theories.

But first I see I need to respond to a very interesting question someone just asked me on the sci.physics.relativity group.

Groan.  

January 14, 2020 - This morning, I awoke with lots of ideas for the paper I've been trying to write about the Big Bang, but before I could write them down I encountered two new puzzles that I had to think about.  Yesterday, for the first time since I started this web site five years ago, no one attempted to POST hacker crap into it.  People in Quzhou, China try several times a day to hack into this site, but not yesterday.  But it wasn't a puzzle that needed solving, so I just moved on. 

Then, when I tried to access the statistics for my anthraxinvestigation.com web site, and I found that the domain name had expired.  I was locked out.  It took me about 30 minutes to resolve that problem.  Then, when I tried to move some emails from one folder to another, an error message informed me that they could not be moved.  It took me about an hour to figure that one out.  Then, finally, I had the time to access the sci.physics.relativity discussion group to see what reactions there were to what I had posted yesterday.

They were mostly just arguing that I needed to learn more about mathematics if I wanted to understand physics and how the Big Bang worked.  I had asked how something like the universe could expand if they believed that there was nothing outside of the universe to expand (or explode) into.  One mathematician responded:

No, there is no space into which it could explode, rather even the most
elementary presentations start by emphasising [sic] that you should not think about it as literally an explosion, it does "explode" (read, inflation), but *within itself*, i.e. producing the very fabric of space-time in the process! 

"The big bang is how astronomers explain the way the universe began.  It is the idea that the universe began as just a single point, then expanded and stretched to grow as large as it is right now (and it could still be stretching)."

"In 1927, an astronomer named Georges Lemaître had a big idea. He said that a very long time ago, the universe started as just a single point. He said the universe stretched and expanded to get as big as it is now, and that it could keep on stretching."

"When the universe began, it was just hot, tiny particles mixed with light and energy. It was nothing like what we see now. As everything expanded and took up more space, it cooled down.

"The tiny particles grouped together. They formed atoms. Then those atoms grouped together. Over lots of time, atoms came together to form stars and galaxies.

"The first stars created bigger atoms and groups of atoms called molecules. That led to more stars being born. At the same time, galaxies were crashing and grouping together. As new stars were being born and dying, then things

There is SOME physics that can be described without math but it is precious little. Most physics can be described well ONLY by using mathematics.

555.66.24.22 - - [29/May/2018:14:36:20 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 408288 "https://www.google.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0"

In an exchange from 2015, a Boeing employee said that a presentation the company gave to the F.A.A. was so complicated that, for the agency officials and even himself, “it was like dogs watching TV.”

One of the main gripes by employees was that the managers and superiors didn't have the requisite technical understanding of the aircraft and couldn't fix its problems.

The illusion is that the cyber environment is safer than real life—and connecting with other people online somehow carries fewer risks than face-to-face contact. But our instincts were trained and honed for the real world, and in the absence of real-world cues and other subtle pieces of information—facial expressions, body language, physical spaces—we aren’t able to make fully informed decisions. And because we aren’t face-to-face when we are communicating and interacting with others online, we can be anonymous or, more important, we feel we are. As discussed in the prologue to this book, we can feel freed up and emboldened online. People can lose their inhibitions and in a way “act drunk” because, for some, being in the cyber environment can impair judgment and increase impulsivity, somewhat similar to the way alcohol can. 

In other words, dopamine fires each time the rat (or human) explores its environment. [Jaak] Panksepp, who has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain, calls seeking “the granddaddy of the systems.” Emily Yoffe in Slate explains: “It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world.” Seeking is so stimulating, according to scientist Temple Grandin, that animals in captivity would prefer to hunt or seek out their food rather than have it delivered to them.

Another trait of the hypochondriac is a distrust of the medical profession—and a subconscious wish to undermine the authority of the doctor. The patient knows best. When a doctor can’t seem to find a problem—and therefore no cure—the hypochondriac will move on to a new doctor. The hiring and firing of many physicians in an unreasonably short period of time is another indication of the condition.

The Deep Web was first used by the U.S. government, and the protocols for the browser Tor were developed with federal funds so that any individuals whose identity needed to be protected—from counterintelligence agents to journalists to political dissenters in other countries—could communicate anonymously with the government in a safe and secure way. But since 2002, when the software for Tor became available as a free download, a digital black market has grown there, a criminal netherworld populated by terrorist networks, criminal gangs, drug dealers, assassins for hire

Simply put, the Deep Web refers to the unindexed part of the Internet. It accounts for 96 to 99 percent of content on the Internet, vastly larger than the Surface Web, where regular traffic is occurring. Most of this content is pretty dry stuff, a combination of spam and storage—U.S. government databases, medical libraries, university records, classified cellphone and email histories. And, just like the Surface Web, it is a place where content can be shared.

What makes it different? The content on the Deep Web can be shared without identity or location disclosure, without your computer’s IP address and other common traces. The sites are not indexed and therefore not searchable if you’re using a Surface Web browser like Chrome or Safari or Firefox. For software that protects your identity, an add-on browser like Tor is one of the most common ways in. The name Tor is an acronym for “the onion router” because of the layers of identity-obscuring rerouting.

(The actual theory is there is no center, everything moves away from everything else, like dots painted onto an inflating balloon. No one particular dot can be singled out as the center of the balloon's surface, but all dots will see all other dots moving away from it)    

Yes. But that is an ANALOGY that misses a key aspect of the universe. On the balloon, Ed Lake can use a pen to place a mark on the balloon midway between two dots, and his discussion makes sense (the mark persists and remains midway between the dots).

But in the universe, which we model as a spacetime manifold, Ed Lake cannot "draw" any marks, and in any case he would have to mark a WORLDLINE, not just a single point. There is no a priori way to determine the inclination of that worldline, and one simply cannot say "the EARTH is moving away from that point midway between us and Galaxy-X", because there is no such POINT, there is at best only a
WORLDLINE, which could be inclined toward earth, toward Galaxy-X, or neither. So his discussion presumes he can do something (mark a "midpoint") that is not possible.

        Remember that a point in spacetime has zero duration and
        no permanence, like snapping your fingers. To have
        duration or permanence requires a worldline, not just a
        point.

Ed Lake keeps making stuff up out of his personal FANTASIES, and
pretending it is what "relativity says". And since he does not know what many of the words he uses actually mean, he gets VERY confused.

The most direct and strongest evidence for the accelerating universe with dark energy is provided by the distance measurements using type 1a supernovae (SN 1a) for the galaxies at high redshift. This result is based on the assumption that the corrected luminosity of SN 1a through the empirical standardization would not evolve with redshift.

New observations and analysis made by a team of astronomers at Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea), together with their collaborators at Lyon University and KASI, show, however, that this key assumption is most likely in error.

We use the brightness of Type Ia supernovae to measure distance. Even though supernovae aren't identically bright, their brightness follows a curve which lets us calculate their peak brightness (they are standardizable).

This paper argues that the calculations cosmologists use to standardize supernovae brightness fail to take into account the age of the progenitor stars, as far as I can tell. If true, this means our distance measurements are inaccurate and these stars are actually closer than we thought, enough to restore to linear relationship between distance and redshift that one would expect in a universe expanding at a constant rate.

In other words, their redshift is lower not because the expansion rate of space was lower in the past, but because they're not as far away as we thought they were.

 Abstract:  Radar guns seem to be a simple way to illustrate some of the biggest misunderstandings in science.   Radar guns demonstrate that the speed of the emitter (the radar gun) does not affect the speed or oscillation frequency of the photons being emitted, thereby verifying Einstein’s Second Postulate.  This means that distant galaxies are not red-shifted because they are moving away from the Earth, they are red-shifted because the Earth is moving away from those galaxies.  Similarly, if light from a galaxy is seen as blue-shifted, it means the Earth is moving toward the point in space where that galaxy was located when it emitted the light.

Abstract:  Simple experiments performed with radar guns demonstrate that most college textbooks (and countless scientific papers) are totally wrong in their descriptions of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity and particularly his Second Postulate, and the errors have existed for over a hundred years. 

Abstract:  Police radar guns routinely demonstrate Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, and particularly its Second Postulate, but radar gun patents seem to avoid all mention of Einstein, Relativity, the Second Postulate and even waves and photons. Instead, a survey of radar gun patents shows how even inventors can misunderstand the basic concepts behind their own inventions.

Abstract:  Basic radar guns are capable of performing measurements that countless mathematician-physicists will argue are totally impossible.   Experiments with basic radar guns, moreover, show that Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity depends upon “frames of reference” that many mathematician-physicists argue cannot possibly exist.  This situation appears to result from the same source of arguments that have been going on for over a hundred years: misinterpretations of Einstein’s Second Postulate. 

Abstract:  Even though many experiments show them to be wrong, countless mathematicians appear to believe that, without an imaginary ether to measure movement by, light must always be measured to arrive at c, regardless of whether the observer is stationary or moving.  Other mathematicians who use experiments to demonstrate that light can arrive at c+v or c-v, believe such experiments demonstrate that the ether must actually exist.  Both sides evidently simply misunderstand Einstein’s Second Postulate in his Theory of Special Relativity.  According to Einstein, all motion can simply be measured relative to the speed of light, making the imaginary ether “superfluous.” 

Abstract:  A vehicle traveling under power at a steady speed is not an inertial system.  Einstein’s Train-Embankment experiments involved only non-inertial systems, since an embankment is one type of non-inertial system and a train moving under power is a different kind of non-inertial system.  Basic radar guns can demonstrate that the same experiment will work differently in different types of non-inertial systems.

Abstract:  Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity says that the faster an object moves, the slower time will pass for that object.  The Hafele-Keating experiment (and others) confirmed that theory when they showed that the spin of the earth on its axis affects the passage of time.  Time slows down more when a clock moved with that spin than when a clock moved against that spin.  Logically then, time should also move slower for a clock that is moving with the movement of the Earth in its orbit around the sun versus a clock that is moving against the movement of the Earth in its orbit around the sun.  That means that a clock runs slower at night than it does during the day. 

All those papers really need to use some experiments with a "Type-1" radar gun as support for the ideas described in the papers.  In one way or another, all the papers are about the conflicting interpretations of Einstein's Second Postulate, i.e., what Einstein wrote and argued versus how for more than a hundred years mathematicians have distorted what Einstein wrote in order to promote their own dogma.  Using a "Type-1" radar gun to demonstrate something that countless mathematicians believe is totally impossible would not only cause a lot of people to perk up and pay attention, it would also change my 99.9% certainty into a demonstrated fact.  Richard Feynman's famous quote keeps popping into my mind:



Of course, there are a lot of people out there whose motto is: "It doesn't matter what the facts and evidence say, I'm going to believe what I want to believe."

What that also means is that there is no way I could convince any of them to buy a "Type-1" radar gun to prove me wrong.  They already know beyond any doubt I am wrong, so they cannot be bothered with proving it.

Maybe 2020 will be the year when they are asked to explain how what they firmly believe is "totally impossible" can be easily done by anyone with a "Type-1" radar gun.

The project was announced in early 2016, with [writer, producer, director James] Gray saying he wanted to feature "the most realistic depiction of space travel that's been put in a movie".

who is also the actor's stunt double.  That is what the trailer showed - interesting activities by those two characters.  But the movie is mostly just about that, about the daily lives of that actor and his stunt double in the 1950's and 1960's.  There doesn't seem to be any story.  But, if you remember your Hollywood history, you begin to suspect that there is something else going on.  One of the lesser characters in the movie is Sharon Tate, who was brutally murdered in 1969 by members of the Charles Manson Family when she was 8½ months pregnant.  When you recall what happened to Tate, you begin to dread where the movie is headed.  But then Tarantino gives the story a fictitious and somewhat spectacular happy ending.  Huh?  Is that what the movie is all about, a trick to make you think the story will end badly, then giving a fiction ending?   

Both movies were interesting examples of how movies differ today from all the movies I recall enjoying in the past.  They are mostly about visuals and special effects.  The story is just something slapped together to provide a reason for the special effects.  And the characters are dull and tedious to watch.

It must be the result of the changes in technology, and the fascination so many young people have with computer games.  When I go to the gym there are always a half dozen (or a dozen) machines or more that are being "used" by people as nothing more than a place to sit while they putter around with their cell phones.

Fortunately, I enjoy old movies.  So, I'm not dependent on new movies.  I have a large collection of old movies to watch, movies I know I like.  And, I cannot imagine are worse way to spend my time than playing computer games.  Fortunately, I have an endless list of better ways to spend my time.

January 1, 2020 - I'm wishing everyone a happy New Year!



I'm pondering some New Year resolutions.  But the first one is to never tell anyone what I plan to do, since I seem never able to stick to my plans. 

They start with a vague, hard-to-describe sense that there’s an interesting solution to a problem that hasn’t yet been proposed, and they linger in the shadows of the mind, sometimes for decades, assembling new connections and gaining strength. And then one day they are transformed into something more substantial: sometimes jolted out by some newly discovered trove of information, or by another hunch lingering in another mind, or by an internal association that finally completes the thought.

Coral reefs make up about one-tenth of one percent of the earth’s surface, and yet roughly a quarter of the known species of marine life make their homes there.

To understand atoll formation, Darwin realized, you had to imagine a volcanic island slowly subsiding into the sea. As the banks of the volcano disappeared beneath the ocean waves, those slopes would become prime breeding ground for coral colonies, which thrive in shallow water at depths up to around 150 feet. (Their diet relies substantially on photosynthetic algae that cannot survive too far from the sunlit surface of the water.) Eventually the summit of the mountain slides into the sea, leaving a circle of shallow water defined by the periphery of the volcanic crater. Because the mountain is subsiding so slowly, the coral are able to build their reefs faster than the mountain can descend. Like overzealous developers, the coral colonies keep adding new floors to the structure they’ve erected at the top of the volcano, limited only by the water’s surface. As the original peak descends further and further into the sea, the older reefs die off, but continue to give structural support to the new, thriving reefs above them. Darwin had no way of measuring this precisely, but he predicted that fossil coral would extend as far as five thousand feet below sea level before hitting a volcanic foundation, a number that was confirmed more than a century later with modern drilling technology. As the Beagle departed, Darwin captured the miraculous nature of this explanation in his diary. “We must look at a Lagoon [island] as a monument raised by myriads of tiny architects,” he wrote, “to mark the spot where a former land lies buried in the depths of the ocean.”

The beaver builds a dam to better protect itself against its predators, but that engineering has the emergent effect of creating a space where kingfishers and dragonflies and beetles can make a life for themselves.

Who had jurisdiction for this matter? Was it the police in the United States, where the victim (Citibank) was located? Was it the cops in St. Petersburg, where the suspect carried out the alleged offense? Or was jurisdiction held in Israel or Finland, perhaps, where the ill-gotten funds were electronically delivered to fraudulent accounts? Levin never physically entered the United States to commit the crime. He left no fingerprints or DNA and was never marked by an exploding dye pack. Importantly, he never needed to physically carry the thousands of pounds of cash out of the bank; it was all accomplished with a mouse and a keyboard. No need for a mask or sawed-off shotgun either; Levin merely hid behind his computer screen and used a circuitous virtual route to cover his digital tracks.

The nature of the Internet means that we are increasingly living in a borderless world. Today anybody, with good or ill intent, can virtually travel at the speed of light halfway around the planet.

An investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee revealed that “more than a dozen American utility companies reported ‘daily,’ ‘constant,’ or ‘frequent’ attempted cyber-attacks ranging from phishing to malware infection to unfriendly probes. One utility reported that it had been the target of more than 10,000 attempted cyber attacks each month.” The report concluded that foreign governments, criminals, and random hackers were all hard at work either planning or attempting to take down the grid.

All told, between thefts of commercial, governmental, and military intellectual property, China’s hacking efforts have netted the nation the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.

in early 2012 Google announced it was merging its data across all of its seventy products and services. The result: a unified, profound, and unprecedented view of you and your world. Previously, your searches in Google, what you did on your Android phone, and the videos you watched on YouTube were data that in theory Google held separately. Not anymore; now Google has a single unified, highly detailed picture of you and everything you do across its Googleverse. Many have even argued that Google knows you better than you know yourself.

After a lawsuit by thirty-eight American state attorneys general in 2013, Google admitted that its bizarre-looking Street View cars, those outfitted with high-tech 360-degree roof cameras, were not just taking photographs for its Street View mapping product as they drove down the streets of our neighborhoods but also pilfering data from computers inside our homes and offices, including passwords, e-mails, photographs, chat messages, and other personal information from unsuspecting computer users.

In October 2013, a federal judge refused to dismiss a class-action lawsuit against Google claiming its practice of reading and scanning users’ Gmail accounts violated U.S. laws against unlawful interception and wiretap. Before that, in 2012, Google was fined a record $22.5 million by the Federal Trade Commission when it was revealed it routinely circumvented privacy settings on Apple computers and for those using Apple’s Safari Web browser to track users across the Web against their clearly stated wishes.

Acxiom, Epsilon, Datalogix, RapLeaf, Reed Elsevier, BlueKai, Spokeo, and Flurry—most of us have never heard of these companies, but together they and others are responsible for a rapidly emerging data surveillance industry that is worth $156 billion a year. While citizens around the world reacted with shock at the size and scope of the NSA surveillance operations revealed by Edward Snowden, it’s important to note that the $156 billion in annual revenue earned by the data broker industry is twice the size of the U.S. government’s intelligence budget. The infrastructure, tools, and techniques employed by these firms rest almost entirely in the private sector, and yet the depth to which they can peer into any citizen’s life would make any intelligence agency jealous with envy.

Data brokers get their information from our Internet service providers, credit card issuers, mobile phone companies, banks, credit bureaus, pharmacies, departments of motor vehicles, grocery stores, and increasingly our online activities. All the data we give away on a daily basis for free to our social networks—every Like, poke, and tweet—are tagged, geo-coded, and sorted for resale to advertisers and marketers. Even old-world retailers are realizing that they have a colossal secondary source of income—their customer data—that may be even more valuable than the actual product or service they are selling.

Put another way, every ten minutes, we created as much information as did the first ten thousand generations of human beings. The cost of storing all these data is dropping exponentially as well. For instance, as of late 2014, a six-terabyte hard drive can be purchased on Amazon.com for just $300 and store all of the music ever recorded anywhere in the world throughout history.

According to the International Telecommunication Union, there were a mere 360 million people online in the year 2000. Though it took nearly forty years to develop, by 2005 the global community that is the Internet reached its first 1 billion members. The second billion were added just six years later, achieving the milestone in March 2011. The greatest growth has been in the developing world, with Asia and Africa experiencing an 841 percent and a whopping 3,606 percent rocketing climb, respectively, since 2000. And while half the world regrettably does not yet have access to the Internet today, Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has boldly predicted that by 2020 everybody in the world will be online.

I highly recommend "Future Crimes."  It's a book I'll never forget.

December 29, 2019 - From time to time I've been trying to work on a scientific paper about radar gun patents, but it's extremely difficult to decipher exactly what the patent documents are saying about how they calculate the speed of a target when the radar gun is also moving.  To me, what the patents say simply makes no sense.  However, I think that is because I view radar guns as emitting photons, not waves.  And the patents usually do not use either term.  Instead they are about "signals," specifically "Doppler signals."  For example, patent US3936824 is for a "Method and Apparatus for Digitally Measuring Speed."  It appears to be a very important patent, issued in 1976 to Kustom Electronics, Inc., the maker of the Stalker II SDR radar gun.  The Stalker II SDR is a "stationary only" radar gun, and Kustom Electronics is said to be the first company to produce a radar gun that can be used while moving.  I haven't been able to find any patent by Kustoms Electronics that says it is for a moving radar gun.  This patent never uses the word "gun," it just talks about a moving "radar platform."  The first page of the patent contains a brief description of how the "radar platform" works.  Here is a screen capture of that description in its entirety with my highlighting of key passages:



The first two passages I highlighted illustrate the problem.  The first passage is highlighted in yellow, which simply means it is worth remembering.  The second passage is highlighted in green, which means I see something wrong with it.  The part in yellow says:

The incoming doppler signal, which in the moving mode, represents both speed of the radar platform and speed of an approaching target vehicle, is separated into two signal components by selective filtering.

One component represents the sum of the ground speeds for the radar platform and approaching vehicles.

Each doppler signal component is converted to binary coded decimal (BCD) information and a digital counter counts the cycles of each received doppler signal and compares the count with an amount previously stored.

The radar signal component representing the ground speed sum for the radar platform and the approaching target vehicle, and the component representing radar platform speed are combined. The radar platform speed is subtracted from the combined component, resulting in a digital count representing approaching target vehicle speed.

Combined speed minus gun speed equals target speed.
(60 + 0) - 0 = 60      or      (60 + 50) - 50 = 60

Target speed minus zero equals target speed.
60 - 0 = 60

In the stationary mode, there is no radar platform doppler pulses in the radar return and consequently, the returning pulses may be processed directly and no subtracting function is performed.

Doppler effect

Speed guns use Doppler radar to perform speed measurements.

Radar speed guns, like other types of radar, consist of a radio transmitter and receiver. They send out a radio signal in a narrow beam, then receive the same signal back after it bounces off the target object. Due to a phenomenon called the Doppler effect, if the object is moving toward or away from the gun, the frequency of the reflected radio waves when they come back is different from the transmitted waves. When the object is approaching the radar, the frequency of the return waves is higher than the transmitted waves; when the object is moving away, the frequency is lower. From that difference, the radar speed gun can calculate the speed of the object from which the waves have been bounced. This speed is given by the following equation:

where c is the speed of light, f is the emitted frequency of the radio waves and Δf is the difference in frequency between the radio waves that are emitted and those received back by the gun. This equation holds precisely only when object speeds are low compared to that of light, but in everyday situations, this is the case and the velocity of an object is directly proportional to this difference in frequency.

Stationary radar

After the returning waves are received, a signal with a frequency equal to this difference is created by mixing the received radio signal with a little of the transmitted signal. Just as two different musical notes played together create a beat note at the difference in frequency between them, so when these two radio signals are mixed they create a "beat" signal (called a heterodyne). An electrical circuit then measures this frequency using a digital counter to count the number of cycles in a fixed time period, and displays the number on a digital display as the object's speed.

Since this type of speed gun measures the difference in speed between a target and the gun itself, the gun must be stationary in order to give a correct reading. If a measurement is made from a moving car, it will give the difference in speed between the two vehicles, not the speed of the target relative to the road, so a different system has been designed to work from moving vehicles.

Moving radar

In so-called "moving radar", the radar antenna receives reflected signals from both the target vehicle and stationary background objects such as the road surface, nearby road signs, guard rails and streetlight poles. Instead of comparing the frequency of the signal reflected from the target with the transmitted signal, it compares the target signal with this background signal. The frequency difference between these two signals gives the true speed of the target vehicle.

As far as empirical evidence supporting time dilation, we have 3 known facts, correct? The "tick" of a clock, the speed of a clock, and the distance from a significant gravitational mass. The "tick" of the clock changes in a predictable way when we change two variables, speed and distance from a massive object. Is there any other proof?

Those 3 items aren't "facts." They are parameters or tools or means of doing things.

This is a "fact": "The 'tick' of the clock changes in a predictable way when we change two variables, speed and distance from a massive object."

"Proof," therefore, would be experiments which demonstrate that the "tick" of a clock changes when the clock's speed or distance from a massive object changes.

And all the experiments on my list do just that.

This invention relates to apparatus for measuring the speed of a body relative to a surface over which it is moving, and more particularly, to such apparatus which is mounted on a second body adapted to move over the Surface and operates on the Doppler principle to measure the speed of the first body with respect to the surface while the second body is moving.

high frequency energy is radiated toward the moving object under observation, and the radiations reflected from the object, which are modified in frequency by the relative motion of the object with respect to the measuring device, are mixed or beat with the transmitted signal to determine the frequency change of the reflected radiations with respect to the transmitted radiations.

The relative speed of the object under observation with respect to the measuring device is proportional to the degree of frequency change of the reflected radiations and therefore can easily be determined.

Since these devices measure the relative speed of the object under observation with respect to the measuring device, the absolute speed of the object, i.e. the speed of the object with respect to the surface over which it is moving, can be determined by such devices only if the measuring device is stationary.

So, it is saying that, unlike all previous radar guns, this new invention allows the speed of the target to be determined from a moving vehicle.  And how it does that is very interesting.   The patent is 6 pages long and contains four illustrations to help explain things.  Below is one entire illustration that shows the patrol car (Item #10), the radar gun emitter (Item #14) and the target (Item #12).  I'm also showing a closeup of just the more complex left part of Figure 1.


The radar gun emitter

It has been discovered that the difference between the frequencies fR1i and fR2 is proportional to the speed of the automobile 12 relative to the surface 11.

A speed indicating device 18 mounted in the automobile 10 measures the difference between the frequencies fR1 and fR2 and gives a direct reading of the speed of the automobile 12 in response to this measurement.

Those radiations received by the transducer 15 have a frequency fR1 which differs from the transmitted frequency fT by an amount proportioned to the speed of the automobile is relative to the surface 11. Those radiations received by the transducer 16 have a frequency fR2 which differs from the transmitted frequency fT by an amount proportional to the speed of the automobile 10 relative to the automobile 12.

The difference in frequency between fR1 and fR2 is directly proportional to the speed of the automobile 12 irrespective of the speed of the automobile 10. This is demonstrated mathematically hereinafter.  

It may further be seen that the apparatus of the present invention will also give a direct reading of the speed of the automobile 12 if the automobile 10 is backing up, or if it stopped, or if the heading of the automobile 12 were reversed and the two automobiles were proceeding toward each other.

And, the reason it can do that is because, in full agreement with Einstein's Second Postulate, the radar gun measures the speed of the ground as zero, no matter how fast the radar gun and the patrol car are traveling.  The fact that the inventor believes just the opposite doesn't change how his device actually works.
 
This also means that this particular radar gun will do what a "Type-1" radar gun does.  As shown in the illustration, if the patrol car is traveling at 60 mph and is following a target going 60 mph, the gun will show the target speed as 60 mph. 

In that situation, my "Type-2" radar gun will show NO speed for the target because, supposedly, the gun shows the relative speed between the radar gun and the target.  My "Type-2" radar gun also shows combined speeds when the moving gun is moving toward an oncoming target.  The radar gun in the patent described above shows the "relative speed" between the ground and the target, not between the two cars.

I need to study this patent further, since it 100% supports my understanding of Einstein's Second Postulate. 

In today's comment, I was planning to go also into details about a couple other patents, but I'll just show an illustration and a brief comment about one of them.  Here's the most interesting illustration in patent #3517998 from June 30, 1970:


It's an interesting patent because the radar gun atop the guy's helmet emits laser light in visible light frequencies instead of radio frequencies or microwave frequencies.  So, it is technically a "LIDAR gun," but two versions of the gun work like radar guns and compare frequencies, while a third version does work like today's LIDAR guns by measuring distances traveled in units of time. The first two versions appear to measure speeds just the way a "Type-1" radar gun does, by comparing frequencies.  Here's a brief quote:

it is a primary object of the invention to provide a compact optical radar that can be used in a fixed position or from a moving vehicle or aircraft, or made integral with an observer's helmet for determining the speed of vehicles moving away or towards it,

Specifically, I wanted to show that the gun must be measuring its own speed by bouncing photons off of the radome.  I have a copy of a book, Principles of Modern Radar, which describes in Chapter 16 how Kustoms Signals Inc., in 1970 discovered a way to build radar guns that can be used while moving by bouncing photons off of the radome, but I've also had several arguments about what the book actually says and what it means.

I also figured that there should be a patent somewhere for what Kustom Signals invented, but I was never able to find it.  That made me wonder how all the others could use the same technique without someone patenting it.  But every Google search I did found nothing that describes the technique.

Yesterday, I did another Google search for "radar gun patent" and once again I found found nothing new.  Then came the "DUH!" moment.  I accessed the Kustom Signals Patent US5528246 and glanced over it for the umpteenth time, seeing nothing new in the text.  But then I noticed the "References Cited" section.  It listed other patents mentioned in this patent. 

Duh!  I'd never checked any of those patents.  So, I did.  And those patents all had their own "References Cited" sections with other patent numbers related to radar guns.   I spent hours downloading patents that looked like they might be of interest, all of which I had never seen before.

One patent, US3118139, dated January 14, 1964, was for "Speed Measuring Apparatus" and contained this information in the text:

This invention relates to apparatus for measuring the speed of a body relative to a surface over which it is moving, and more particularly, to such apparatus which is mounted on a second body adapted to move over the Surface and operates on the Doppler principle to measure the speed of the first body with respect to the surface while the second body is moving.

A digital display doppler radar unit has a moving mode and a stationary mode. The incoming doppler signal, which in the moving mode, represents both speed of the radar platform and speed of an approaching target vehicle, is separated into two signal components by selective filtering. One component represents the sum of the ground speeds for the radar platform and approaching vehicles.

Mathematicians, or people who have very mathematical minds, are often led astray when “studying” physics because they lose sight of the physics. They say: “Look, these differential equations — the Maxwell equations—are all there is to electrodynamics; it is admitted by the physicists that there is nothing which is not contained in the equations. The equations are complicated, but after all they are only mathematical equations and if I understand them mathematically inside out, I will understand the physics inside out.” Only it doesn’t work that way. Mathematicians who study physics with that point of view—and there have been many of them—usually make little contribution to physics and, in fact, little to mathematics. They fail because the actual physical situations in the real world are so complicated that it is necessary to have a much broader understanding of the equations.

What it means really to understand an equation—that is, in more than a strictly mathematical sense—was described by Dirac. He said: “I understand what an equation means if I have a way of figuring out the characteristics of its solution without actually solving it.” So if we have a way of knowing what should happen in given circumstances without actually solving the equations, then we “understand” the equations, as applied to these circumstances. A physical understanding is a completely unmathematical, imprecise, and inexact thing, but absolutely necessary for a physicist.

My guess is that it is expanding at different rates. The farther you are from the point of the Big Bang, the faster you are moving away from that point. The closer you are to the point of the Big Bang, the slower everything around you is expanding. And, meanwhile, everything that is equidistant from the point of the Big Bang is moving apart even slower.

Michal Karsznia: is cosmological constant a phenomenom answering this question? Universe expand everywhere equally. If what you are saying was t true, we could determine where center is. As we all know this is not the case. Scientifically speaking i am correct when i say each one of you reading this, is the actual center of the universe

Ed Lake: I would say that what we can measure in the OBSERVABLE universe could be very different if we could see the entire Big Bang universe.


Michal Karsznia: that is of course true as well. But i am still pretty sure that given all of observable universe we could determine that majority of its mass is slightly repelling from certain point in space. We do not see any evidence of it happening. Tho its interesting, we can see clearly that galaxies near end are influenced by much bigger clusters actually outside of visible universe

Ed Lake: I keep wondering if the blue shifted group of about 100 galaxies around Andromeda is moving toward us or are those galaxies just ahead of us as we all expand with the Big Bang. Why are all the blue shifted galaxies in the same general area? What is in the opposite direction from those blue shifted galaxies?

Daniel P. Leo: there is no origin point of expansion... All points have all ways existed since the big bang... All points are expanding from each other

Ed Lake: That is something that only makes sense to mathematicians. In reality, the Big Bang theory SAYS that everything was once in the same place and expanded outward from there. So, the Big Bang STARTED at some location in space. WHILE expanding, of course, everything is also moving away from everything else.

Daniel P. Leo: from my understanding essentially all points existed at the origin, and all points are expanding away from each other... space is expanding and as all space is the origin there is no center to the expansion. So there really isn't an origin point in space so much as an origin in time

Ed Lake: But that is totally MATHEMATICAL reasoning. It is about POINTS which do not exist. In reality, all the MATERIAL in the universe MUST have existed in some form prior to the Big Bang. Many people figure that form must have been some kind of super-hot, super-dense sphere. So, there would be NO space between the material in that sphere.

Then, for some reason, the pressure became too great and the sphere began expanding. It took 500 million years for the material in that original sphere to condense into the first stars and for the lights to turn on.

The material in that sphere must have expanded into "space." To argue that there was no space to expand into makes NO SENSE.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please sit down as we are approaching the equator. We must be prepared for the bump." The kids’ eyes would get a little wider and sure enough the plane would bounce up and down (lightly). There would be a little cheer and then he would look back at us with a big grin and comment on the mysteries of nature. 

Time works like a percentage of the speed of light. If a stationary object can be found in the universe, that object is moving at zero percent of the speed of light and a "second" has its maximum value. If an object moves at 100 percent of the speed of light, time is stopped and a second has its minimum value of zero. Anywhere in between, you can use this calculator: https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1224059993 

So there’s one company that makes all the eyewear you’ve ever heard of. It’s called Luxottica. They bought every single eyewear brand. First they bought all the major retailers, Sunglass Hut and Sears Optical and Target Optical and LensCrafters, and then they refuse to carry any eyewear brand that wouldn’t sell to them until they drove them to their knees and picked them up for pennies. And literally, if you’ve got any of the major eyewear brands, it’s Luxottica, and if you bought from any of the major retailers, it’s Luxottica, and if your lenses came from SLR, which is the largest lens manufacturer in the world, they came from Luxottica, and if your eye insurer is EyeMed, which is the largest insurer in America, it’s also Luxottica. And they’ve raised prices a 1000% in 10 years.

But there used to be 30 wrestling leagues, and now there’s one, and it’s owned by this billionaire, Trump donor, called Vince McMahon. He reclassified all the wrestlers as contractors, took away their health care, they’re dropping down in their 50s, and GoFundMe is full of famous wrestlers begging their fans for money to pay their medical bills. So if you’re a wrestling fan, you’re with the eyewear people.

Now, there are three talent agencies left in Hollywood, and all of the screenwriters fired all of their agents because the talent agencies are now all owned by private equity funds, and those private equity funds have decided that to increase their return on investment that the agencies are gonna start doing what’s called packaging, where they package a writer and a director and a whatever and they collect a fee from the studio for that package, and in exchange they agree to take less money for each of their clients. And so every screenwriter in Hollywood is there for you to fight for wrestlers and eyewear.

So if you talk to somebody on the street, and say, “What was the Big Bang?” People will say, “Well, it was an explosion where the universe started as a single point and then exploded out and that was the Big Bang.” And if you talk to a physicist usually what we’re talking about is something really different called the Hot Big Bang, where what we’re talking about is just simply the fact that the universe was hotter and denser and smaller in the past. And that just comes from the fact that the universe is expanding now and cooling and so if we go back in time we can dial that back and we see that the universe was hotter and denser and more compressed in some way. And that is completely incontrovertible, like that…

Mack: Yeah, the fact that the universe was hotter and denser and in some sense smaller in the past, and we can actually see it. And one of the things I think is kind of neat is the TV show, The Big Bang Theory, the beginning of the theme song is actually a really nice encapsulation of the Big Bang Theory. The whole universe was in a hot dense state nearly 14 billion years ago expansion started, just stop there that’s the Big Bang theory, that’s it.

Carroll: It’s exactly right, it didn’t use the word explode…

Mack: Nope.

Carroll: It didn’t say there was a point.

Mack: No, didn’t say there was a point, no singularity, and there may have been a singularity, it’s possible that before that fiery state that the universe was infinitely dense. It’s possible that we get back to that point, but there’s that fiery state was… We see the part that was about 380,000 years after the beginning. In the 380,000 years a lot happened and we don’t know at the very beginning of that if there was a singularity, we think probably there was this rapid expansion, inflation and what happened before that super rapid expansion in the first billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, we don’t really know.

Most people, however, think this is impossible.  Even though the gun is moving, and photons emitted at the back end have to catch up with the front end, most people believe you cannot measure the gun's speed unless the front end (the radome) actually moves away from the back end.  So, they believe the gun actually measures two speeds from two "targets" and, even when moving, the radar gun somehow magically knows which "target" is the ground and which "target" is a speeding car.  How?  They don't say.  The subject is avoided.



The image above (from the video HERE) shows the radar gun measuring its own speed and showing it as 31 miles per hour in the display window on the right. 

The image below (from the same video) shows the same radar gun measuring a target's speed as 67 mph and showing it in the display window on the left.



How does the gun know if it is moving or not?  It's a simple matter if the gun can measure its own speed internally, but how is it done when the gun can only measure the speed of external objects?  How does the gun know where to put the measured speed?  Does it go in the window on the right or on the left?

I was a computer programmer for many years, before becoming an analyst and a programming manager.  How would I program the gun to determine its own speed?  Do I program the gun to assume that the ground is the biggest "target" that sends back the most photons?   Would that be true if the gun was pointed at the back of a truck that was 40 feet away?  The calculator HERE says that at 40 feet, with a beam width of 12 degrees, most photons will hit the back of the truck within a circle that is just 8 feet wide.  And a 53 foot long semi-truck is 8½ feet wide.  Would the gun put the truck's speed on the "patrol speed" display?  If not, why not?

Things would be simplified so much if I could just borrow a "Type-1" radar gun for a half hour!  And then I could complete my paper about radar gun experiments.

The other unfinished paper is about the Big Bang and Einstein's Second Postulate.  There's nothing preventing me from working on and completing that paper -- except that I want to finish the experiment paper first.   Sigh.
 
Meanwhile, on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum, I saw someone who calls himself "Starmaker" had started a new thread titled "Who Built the Pyramids?"  Curious, I read the first comment and found it was about a Fox News Story titled "Pyramid-shaped 427-foot asteroid set to whiz past Earth."  The Starmaker's comment included this statement:

I don't know who built the pyramids but it had to be from outer space. Martians maybe...