The Royal Society (it became royal with the granting of a charter by Charles II in 1662) invented scientific publishing and peer review. It made English the primary language of scientific discourse, in place of Latin. It systematised experimentation. It promoted – indeed, insisted upon – clarity of expression in place of high-flown rhetoric. It brought together the best thinking from all over the world. It created modern science.

In the fifth century BCE Pythagoras posited that the structure of the world was determined by mathematics: ‘All is number’, he famously declared.

A small band of medieval thinkers took Pythagorean precepts and transformed them into a Christian context, giving rise to the then-novel idea that God had created the material world according to mathematical rules. Among God’s primary tools was Euclidean geometry and in 1267 the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon argued in a treatise to Pope Clement IV that artists ought to follow their Creator and construct images accordingly with geometric relationships. Bacon called the new style ‘geometric figuring’ and he proposed that the Church encourage painters to adopt it as a matter of principle.

Even the hardest of hard sciences is replete with assumptions that may fairly be classified as metaphysical. Almost all mathematicians, for example, presume that they are discovering, rather than creating, mathematical truths.

A priori mathematics, according to Galileo, does not entirely obviate the need for observation (only the most extreme of rationalists, Spinoza and Leibniz, were to argue the expendability, at least in principle, of all empirical knowledge, claiming that all could be a priori deduced from first principles); but mathematics does allow us to deduce unobservable properties and thus to penetrate into the structure of nature.

Unlike Galileo or Descartes, Newton distinguishes between mathematical truth and physical truth (echoing the intuition in Boyle’s complaint against the rationalists). That the resistance of bodies is in the ratio of the velocity, ‘is more a mathematical hypothesis than a physical one’, he says in Principia II, 9, and makes similar statements in connection with his discussion of fluids (Principia, II, 62). A mathematical truth that has not been made manifest in experience has not advanced to a physical truth. And experience must be experimentally manipulated in order for the mathematical truth to be made manifest in it.

To paraphrase Immanuel Kant (who was three years old when Newton died in 1727): Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.

This reflection on the symmetries behind the laws of Nature also tells us why mathematics is so useful in practice. Mathematics is simply the catalogue of all possible patterns. Some of those patterns are especially attractive and are studied or used for decoration, others are patterns in time or in chains of logic. Some are described solely in abstract terms, while others can be drawn on paper or carved in stone. Viewed in this way, it is inevitable that the world is described by mathematics. We could not exist in a universe in which there was neither pattern nor order. 

When a police radar shoots out a pulse, it echoes off of all sorts of objects -- fences, bridges, mountains, buildings. The easiest way to remove all of this sort of clutter is to filter it out by recognizing that it is not Doppler-shifted. A police radar looks only for Doppler-shifted signals, and because the radar beam is tightly focused it hits only one car.

  For those who believe that radar guns emit waves, that means the gun emits 35 billion waves per second, and it gets back even more than that.  Yet, this is how those waves are visualized on one college web site:



Does it look to anyone like the radar transmitter in the police patrol car is emitting 35,000,000,000 waves per second?

If photons oscillating 35 million times per second hit a car that is approaching at 70  mph, according to that college web site those photons hit the car is if they were oscillating at 35,000,007,291.6666 times per second.  (It's like a motor boat heading into waves and hitting the waves faster than the waves are actually traveling.)  Rounding off the reflected frequency, atoms in the car then emit NEW photons that oscillate

 

No radar guns are that exactly tuned, nor are they that stable in frequency. Even if you aligned two guns yourself so they were exactly on the same frequencies, the next time you pulled the triggers they would be off frequency from each other. For a K band gun a speed of 200 MPH is only a Doppler shift of 14.4 kHz. My K band guns all drift much more than that in just a few seconds of operation.

September 24, 2020 - The debate on vixra.org is still very interesting to me.  The debate shows me how mathematicians think, and that enables me to develop new and better ways to argue with them.  I see now that I probably should have used illustrations like the two shown below in my new paper about Relativity vs Quantum Mechanics Experiments.


The illustrations show two different "reference frames," an inside and an outside reference frame.  According to mathematicians, the two people in Figure 1 are stationary - even though the truck is moving at 30 mph.  They are in a "reference frame" where no point moves relative to any other point.  Therefore,

In the introduction an experiment with two radar guns is proposed. Although the experiment is in principle doable, it cannot be done as proposed. The accuracy and stability of the frequency of any real radar gun is insufficient to produce any speed value when one radar gun receives the signal from the other -- the difference would be outside of the range of measurable speeds.

The article claims that all radar guns perform two measurements but that is not true. First radar guns performed only one measurement. Moving mode was possible only after an invention of a method to perform two measurements at the same time (U.S. patent 3,118,139). Still many radar guns work as the old models as the design is simpler and less expensive and sufficient for many users. Even those that can perform two measurements have a stationary mode where they work as the old models. The reason is that the measurement method used in typical radar guns does not work on low speeds so in the moving mode no measurement is possible unless the radar gun really is moving sufficiently fast.

It might seem so to a mathematician who believes zero is something a machine can understand, but when you ask a former computer programmer like myself, the first question he'll ask is "How can you measure a speed if you have nothing to measure the speed against?" 

The radar system in the image above shows a old fashioned radar transmitter measuring the speed of the oncoming car.  But what is that speed relative to?  What is the car's speed measured against?  Obviously, it must be measured relative to the ground.  When there is no oncoming car in the beam of the radar, the gun still gets back lots and lots of photons from the ground and those trees, and possibly the telephone pole, and the meter on the fender of the patrol car shows zero as the speed of those objects.  So, the gun must perform two measurements, it measures the speed of the ground as zero and it measures the speed of the oncoming car relative to that zero measurement. 

Also, to produce a maximum arm speed of 50 mph at the relevant frequency of (say) 4480 Hz would require the arm to swing a distance of 78 mm, whereas a typical tuning fork of this size has a maximum arm displacement of only about 0.02 mm, so the maximum speed of the arms of such a tuning fork is less than 0.1 mph, orders of magnitude less than the speed that corresponds to the induced simulated beat frequency.   

 

For more than a decade, I was Trump’s first call every morning and his last call every night. I was in and out of Trump’s office on the 26th floor of the Trump Tower as many as fifty times a day, tending to his every demand. Our cell phones had the same address books, our contacts so entwined, overlapping, and intimate that part of my job was to deal with the endless queries and requests, however large or small, from Trump’s countless rich and famous acquaintances. I called any and all of the people he spoke to, most often on his behalf as his attorney and emissary, and everyone knew that when I spoke to them, it was as good as if they were talking directly to Trump. Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did. In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did, because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.

I was beginning to understand what Trump wanted from me. He didn’t want me to be like his other lawyers, measuring the merits of a situation and providing advice based on sound legal reasoning. He had lawyers who could provide that kind of guidance. He didn’t need me to be a lawyer when he was in the right. He needed a lawyer for when he was in the wrong: when he was trying to go around the law, or offer a twisted or tortured interpretation to an agreement that could be used to screw the other side.   

He wanted a lawyer who would fight when the cause was clearly racist and illegal.

It turned out that the businessman managing my taxi medallions, Evgeny “Gene” Freidman, had defrauded hundreds of medallion owners, as well as the city of New York, for more than $20 million. He was facing serious prison time, but he didn’t do a day behind bars because he’d talked to the FBI and testified against me.

Please remember what I testified to Congress, the second time: There is a serious danger that Donald Trump will not leave office easily, and there is a real chance of not having a peaceful transition. When he jokes about running again in 2024 and gets a crowd of thousands to chant “Trump 2024,” he’s not joking. Trump never jokes. You now have all the information you need to decide for yourself in November.

The conflict between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity has raged for about a hundred years and is interpreted in at least a hundred different ways.  It appears, however, that a simple experiment involving radar guns can demonstrate which theory is valid in our visible universe and which theory is best relegated to the invisible universe of subatomic particles.

September 14, 2020 - Okay, version 9 of my paper "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories" is now on-line at this link: https://vixra.org/pdf/1806.0027v9.pdf

It contains a totally new way of measuring the speed of a truck from inside the truck.  All you need is two identical radar guns, instead of just one gun of some special kind as previous versions of the paper said.  One of the two guns is positioned at the rear of the truck with the gun pointed at the other gun, and the other gun is at the front of the truck pointed at the first gun.  Here's the illustration I used in the paper:


What this should do is cause each gun to show a "patrol speed" of zero for the far wall, but the gun should also show a "target speed" that is the speed of the truck. The photons emitted by Gun-B in the illustration travel through the truck at the speed of light, c, and will hit Gun-A at c+v where v is the speed of the truck (and Gun-A) toward the oncoming photons.  That gives a "target speed."

Meanwhile, photons from Gun-A that hit the receding front wall will hit at c-v.  New photons emitted by the front wall will return to Gun-A and hit the receiver at c+v.  This means the gun computes c+v-v=c, which converts to no measured patrol speed. (Moving mode guns assume that the slower speed is the speed of the ground, i.e., the patrol speed.)

A "stationary only" gun like my TS-3 would show 40 mph if that is the speed of the truck.  It only shows one number, adding together the "patrol speed" and the "target speed." 0+40=40.

A radar gun with "moving mode" would show 0 in the "patrol speed" display and
40 in the "target speed" display. 

Of course, as soon as I submitted the paper to vixra.org I noticed an error in the paper.  On page 16, I quote Einstein's First Postulate and use a reference number of 20.  I should have used reference #1.  But it's not a serious enough problem to fix and create another new version of the paper. 

This morning, I put another copy of the paper on Academia.edu at this link: https://www.academia.edu/44085471/Radar_Guns_and_Einsteins_Theories

It has the correct reference number.

After doing that, I composed and sent an email to four physics professors who seemed interested in my views about radar guns.  I asked their opinion of the paper.  I'm hoping at least one of them will reply.  They may not want to get involved with anything "controversial," and a science paper that describes an experiment that will show most college physics textbooks to be wrong is definitely something "controversial."

And, of course, if anyone sees an error in the paper, I'm hoping they will explain the error in plain English.  Calling me names, demanding that I read more college text books, and simply declaring an opinion that I am wrong won't do anything but cause me to yawn.    

September 13, 2020 - My plan is still to upload the revised version of my paper "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories" to vixra.org later today, so that it will be on-line as version #9 tomorrow morning.  However, this morning I awoke with the realization that I need to make some more changes.  While writing the paper and designing the experiment that would show that a radar gun can measure the speed of a truck from inside the truck, I was just thinking about "stationary only" radar guns like my TS-3 and the Bushnell Velocity.  I awoke this morning realizing that  "moving mode" radar guns should be able to do things more clearly and undeniably.   I'll find out for sure as I modify the paper and go step by step through exactly what would happen and exactly what a "moving mode" radar gun would measure.  

At 17 pages, the paper is currently 3 pages longer than version #8, even though it seemed like I was deleting more material than I was adding.  I suspect the  additional changes will add another page.

I have been exchanging emails with some scientists who I will ask to check my logic after I finish the revised paper and put it on-line.  I'm hoping they will also attempt to perform the experiments described in my paper, since they almost certainly have the means to do it.  The folks on the RDForum might also have the ability to perform the "moving mode" radar experiment.   

There's no point in deleting old versions of the paper.  The purpose of the paper was to explain how radar guns demonstrate Einstein's theories, particularly his Second Postulate in his Theory of Special Relativity.  I uploaded the first version of the paper on June 4, 2018, more than two years ago.  It had the same error that version #8 has, it assumes that a moving radar gun will both transmit and receive photons at the speed of light.  It can't. 

Here's the abstract from that first version:

Abstract: Radar guns provide an excellent and inexpensive means of explaining and demonstrating some of Einstein’s theories in a very simple and undeniable way. Specifically, radar guns demonstrate how the speed of the emitter cannot add to the speed of the light being emitted, but the speed of light can be combined with the speed of the receiver. In practice, this appears to conflict with a basic tenet of mathematicians who believe that motion is reciprocal, and therefore radar guns must show that motion is reciprocal. A step by step analysis of how radar guns work shatters that basic tenet.

Looking out of the half of the window left above water was Mrs. Ellis, who is in feeble health, whilst at the door were her seven children, the oldest not fourteen years. One side of the house was given up to the work animals, some twelve head, besides hogs. In the next room the family lived, the water coming within two inches of the bedrail. The stove was below water, and the cooking was done on a fire on top of it. The house threatened to give way at any moment: one end of it was sinking, and, in fact, the building looked a mere shell. As the boat rounded to, Mr. Ellis came out in a dugout, and General York told him that he had come to his relief; that the Times-Democrat boat was at his service, and would remove his family at once to the hills, and on Monday a flat would take out his stock, as, until that time, they would be busy. Notwithstanding the deplorable situation himself and family were in, Mr. Ellis did not want to leave. He said he thought he would wait until Monday, and take the risk of his house falling. The children around the door looked perfectly contented, seeming to care little for the danger they were in.

  

September 8, 2020 - I spent that last couple days trying to understand the implications of the false assumption I made years ago about how the receiver in a radar gun works.  I've also been working on a major overhaul of my paper on "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories."  When I finish the overhaul, it will become version #9.  For awhile I was afraid that I'd have to scrap the idea of doing a radar gun experiment that measures the speed of a box truck from inside the truck.  But after thinking about it very carefully, I realized there are still two slightly more complicated ways of doing it.  And neither way requires a "Type-1" or "basic" radar gun, which I'm now pretty sure do not exist.  Almost any "stationary only" gun should work - including my TS-3.  But it still requires a truck, helpers and some new equipment, so it's not anything I can afford to do.  I'll just describe the two experiments in my paper and leave them to others to verify or debunk.

Meanwhile yesterday, I learned what the Kustom Signals procedure involving bouncing photons off of the radome was all about.


I thought it was a way of measuring the speed of the gun.  But that thought was based upon my false assumption that radar guns could receive and interpret photons arriving at c+v as if they were arriving at c.  In reality, when the gun is in a vehicle that is moving, the gun's transmitter emits photons that travel to the radome at the speed of light, c, and hit the radome at c-v, where v is the speed of the radome away from the oncoming photons.  Atoms in the radome absorb those photons and then emit new photons (with a slower oscillation rate) back into the radar gun.  The new photons travel at c but hit the oncoming receiver at c+v, where v is the speed of the receiver moving toward the oncoming photons.  The result is that the photons received back from the radome have the same oscillation rate as the photons the gun originally emitted: c+v-v=c.   

After communicating with the Georgia Tech professors who wrote the book where the procedure for bouncing photons of the radome was mentioned and described, I then very carefully studied chapter 16 of their book "Principles of Modern Radar - Volume 3."  It turned out that the procedure simply provides the gun with more emitted photons to use for comparison when photons that bounce off the target are returned.  Photons bouncing off the radome are received together with the photons bouncing off the target and off the ground, and the differences in oscillation rates provides the means to measure the speed of the target and the speed of the gun (not the speed of the ground).

I'll explain it all in great detail in my revised paper, which I hope to have ready in a week or less.     

September 6, 2020 - Groan!  Yesterday, as I was digging through radar gun patents for the umpteenth time,

I suddenly realized something.  A year or two ago, while studying how radar guns work, I made an assumption about how the receiver in the gun works.  I remember trying to research it to verify exactly how it works, but I couldn't find anything that helped.  Eventually, I just gave up and assumed it worked in a way that it seemed it must work.  Now it appears I made a false assumption. 

The realization doesn't make the mathematicians and naysayers right.  You could say it makes them doubly wrong, but it also significantly changes my thinking.  So, it now seems that radar guns do not work as the mathematicians claim, nor entirely as I've been arguing, but in a third way - a much simpler way.

The realization came as I was studying Patent #3,118,139, which was issued to Gerald Durstewitz of Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, on January 14, 1964.  It appears to be the first patent for a radar gun that can be used while moving, and a lot of other radar gun patents use it as a reference.  It seems I neglected to pay sufficient attention because the radar "gun" looks silly by today's standards.  The transmitter (#14 below) sits on the roof of the patrol car, and there are two receivers (#15 & #16) attached to the front bumper.  
  Somehow I convinced myself that the inventor made a false assumption about how the receivers worked, particularly receiver #15.  But it now seems I was the one making the false assumption.  Somehow I thought that the returning signal would be received by a "tuner" in the receiver just as it would if the patrol car was stationary.  Now it seems clear that, if the patrol car is moving forward, the signal bouncing off the ground will arrive at c+v where c is the speed of light and v is the speed of the patrol car (NOT the speed of the ground).  Airplanes use the same technique to measure their "ground speed."

In addition, yesterday and this morning I received emails from a couple college professors who have written a book about radar guns and how they work.  They appear to merely confirm things I already knew, but I'll have to dig through their technical language to make sure I'm not making another false assumption.

I stated in a previous comment that I wasn't going to write any more comments about radar guns.  But, if I didn't write this one, I wouldn't have anything to write about this morning.  Plus, I need to get this comment written so that I can study Durstewitz's patent further and go through the steps one by one to make sure I've actually figured things out correctly.  I'm doing a major overhaul to my paper "Radar Guns and Einstein's Theories."  I'll do the step-by-step analysis there.      

Why should we trust science? If you ask scientists, it’s because science is based on a careful study of the outside world—not guesses, hunches, philosophizing, or rumors—and because science is a self-correcting system, continually revising theories and updating facts to reflect new evidence.

When the British Royal Society was founded in 1660, its mission was to “improve natural knowledge” and its motto was nullius in verba — Latin for “take nobody’s word for it.” In the Society’s view, it was wrong to accept any claim based simply on the authority of who said it—the church, the king, the ancient philosophers. Their principle was “to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.”

This idealized vision of science has been with us ever since: claims are true or false because of what experiments say, not what a particular person says.       

   

September 1, 2020 - Yesterday, I found a very interesting web site titled "The History of the Radar Gun."  It appears to have started out to be about sports radar guns, but the author ended up researching a lot of other things.  For example, he found that the first arrest for speeding involved an Electrobat taxi driver on May 21, 1899, in New York City.  This is what an Electrobat taxi looked like:      



The Electrobat was traveling at the reckless speed of 12 miles per hour down Lexington Avenue where the speed limit was 8 miles per hour.  The driver, Jacob German, was thrown in jail. (This was before the invention of the speeding ticket.)

There were about 60 Electrobat taxis in use at that time.  Electrobats apparently went extinct around 1910.  It may have been because Ford's "Model T" came out in 1908, and its top speed was about 45 mph.

Radar began being used by police around 1947, but it was stationary only radar that has to be set up next to the road:

 

None of the companies producing traffic radars back then is still in business today.  The oldest radar gun company around today is Decatur Electronics of Decatur, Illinois.  It evidently started in business around 1955 as Muniquip, which is short for Municipal Equipment.  It became Decatur Electronics in 1966 and went bankrupt around 1989, which brought in new owners who restarted the company.

Kustom Signals of Lenexa, Kansas was evidently founded in 1965, and 

In 1969, Kustom produced the first digital display radar, the TR-6. The TR-6 was also the first radar to use a solid-state electronic Gunn Oscillator rather than the Klystron tube of previous units. This was a single window stationary unit operating on the X-band.

We introduced the first digital readout radar, the industry's first moving radar, and the first hand-held option.

To a remarkable degree for a couple, Melania and Donald Trump have always lived quite separately; they are often in the same building but rarely in the same room. That, however, is part of their deal, and it suits both of them.

Asked years ago if she would be with her husband if he were not rich, she shot back, “If I weren’t beautiful, do you think he’d be with me?”

She was a fashion model before meeting Trump, doing well, but she never really hit the "big time," even though she got a lot of fame when she appeared on a 9-story high billboard for Camel cigarettes on New York's 42nd Street.

Kustom developed a plastic radome that fit over the end of the horn to purposely reflect a small amount of RF power back into port 2 and create an LO reference signal at the required mixing level.

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.

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. 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.

A total of the radar gun's speed and the target speed is further combined with the radar gun's speed.  The radar gun's speed is then subtracted from the combined number to produce the speed of the target.

The radar gun's speed is combined with the target speed, and then the radar gun's speed is subtracted from that combined speed to get the target speed.

Racine police say they've been inundated with rumors about Jacob Blake-related protests happening in Racine, but they've been "all false."
...
Several business in the Highway 20 corridor in Racine and Mount Pleasant have been taking precautions this week. Earlier, Festival Foods shut down early and workers were seen boarding up the front doors of Kohl's Department Store at the intersection of Highways 20 and 31.

Hmm.  Kohl's and Festival Foods are in the strip mall that is kitty-corner from the one I visited.  So, the boarding up is mostly "better safe than sorry" but maybe with a dash of panic added in for flavor.

August 27, 2020 - I spent most of yesterday studying and researching the patents behind radar guns that can be used while moving.  There seem to be basically six of them.  Most of my time was spent creating versions of the abstracts that I could highlight and easily read.  Then I began studying the first one, which is patent #3,118,139 by Gerald Durstewitz of Pompton Lakes, NJ.  The patent was issued January 14, 1964, and it is for a "Speed Measuring Apparatus" which definitely cannot be called a "radar gun."  The transmitter is a big box that sits atop the police car's roof, and there are two large receivers fixed to the car's front bumper, one to measure the return signals from the target and the other to measure return signals from the ground.  This is the first paragraph of the patent description:

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. 

 

          FOR A MAN who changed the world, Henry Ford travelled in very small circles. He resided his whole life within a dozen miles of his birthplace, a farm at Dearborn, just outside Detroit. He saw little of the wider world and cared even less for it.
          He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of the New Yorker, ‘mildly unbalanced’. He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street, overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan & Co., capital punishment, tall buildings, college graduates, Roman Catholics or Jews. Especially he didn’t like Jews. Once he hired a Hebraic scholar to translate the Talmud in a manner designed to make Jewish people appear shifty and avaricious.
          His ignorance was a frequent source of wonder. He believed that the earth could not support the weight placed on it by skyscrapers and that eventually cities would collapse in on themselves, as in some kind of biblical apocalypse.

Now a team of European researchers have found that people with blood type A had a 45% higher risk of catching coronavirus and developing "COVID-19 with respiratory failure," compared to people with other blood types. On the other hand, people with type O blood had a 35% lower risk for this more serious form of COVID-19.

Blood type is not associated with a severe worsening of symptoms in people who have tested positive for COVID-19, report Harvard Medical School researchers based at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Their findings, published in the Annals of Hematology, dispel previous reports that suggested a correlation between certain blood types and COVID-19.

The study did find, however, that symptomatic individuals with blood types B and AB who were Rh positive were more likely to test positive for COVID-19, while those with blood type O were less likely to test positive.

“We showed through a multi-institutional study that there is no reason to believe being a certain ABO blood type will lead to increased disease severity, which we defined as requiring intubation or leading to death,” said senior study author Anahita Dua, HMS assistant professor of surgery at Mass General.

“This evidence should help put to rest previous reports of a possible association between blood type A and a higher risk for COVID-19 infection and mortality,” Dua said.

I searched around, found a web site which lists what that site considers to be the best episodes, and I downloaded 31 of them into my laptop.  I then transferred 7 to my MP3 player.  On Friday evening I listened to 3 of them: #60 "The Comet Panic", #401 "The Bridges of Milwaukee"and #271 "Uber," which the web site lists as the #1 best episode.

I had no idea what to expect, and it took awhile to figure things out.  On Saturday I found that they also put their more recent podcasts on YouTube, which helped explain things further.  The show consists of Dave Anthony reading notes from his I-Pad, as shown in the screen-shot below:



That explains the strange pauses in the show.  Evidently they occur when Dave Anthony (on the left in the image above) is thumbing through his notes looking for the next thing to read.  When he finishes reading some short passage, he and Reynolds (on the right) then discuss it.  The notes are evidently from what Anthony has previously read and researched about the topic of the day.  And it is all totally new to Reynolds, who knows nothing about the topic of the day until he hears what Anthony reads to the audience.

"The Comet Panic" was about the appearance of Haley's Comet in May 1910 and the total panic it caused.  Anthony and Reynolds then discussed and joked about how totally clueless people where in those days.  Millions were told (and fully believed) that the comet's tail contained cyanide and would poison everyone as the Earth passed through the tail.  One scientist predicted that the comet would become so bright it would blind everyone on earth.

Unexpectedly, the 51-minute podcast was very interesting and very enjoyable.

The next episode I listened to was "The Bridges of Milwaukee."  It was 1 hour and 29 minutes long, and it was also very interesting and very enjoyable.  It was about a weird feud that took place in 1845 between different settlements on two sides of what is now the Milwaukee River.  Wikipedia even has a page about it, and they call it The Milwaukee Bridge War.  The podcast was evidently done in front of a live audience at Turner Hall in Milwaukee.  I recall hearing about the Milwaukee Bridge War before, but never in such graphic detail. 

The episode about the ride-share service Uber was not only very interesting, it was absolutely mind-boggling. It's 1 hour and 39 minutes long.  It's about how Uber operates. In the podcast it's described as a legal "scam."  Riders aren't scammed, but the drivers are and the stockholders may be.  The drivers aren't employees, so they get no company benefits.