Tag Archives: Education

The Sophomore Scientist – Philosophy by Limerick

Posted on July 23, 2012 by | 3 comments

Absent-mindedly played his Nintendo
While debunking by innuendo.
Everything his gut feel
Said thereby wasn’t real
He denounced in constant crescendo.

Old Jules

3 Comments

Posted in 2012, Relationships, Science

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Earth in Upheaval – Immanuel Velikovsky – Book Review

Posted on July 23, 2012 by | 10 comments

During the last 18 months of Albert Einstein’s life, November 1953 until April, 1955. he sat around with Immanuel Velikovsky on numerous occasions mulling over the implications of the historical/geological evidence described here.  Largely ignored, met with a shrug by the scientific community because no explanation within accepted scientific theory could account for the massive physical evidence, the two men examined other possibilities, no matter how unconventional.

Mountain ranges yanked from their roots and moved laterally, sometimes as much as 100 miles during a short passage of time.  Megafauna stacked like cordwood in cracks from southern Asia to the Arctic Circle by the millions, perhaps hundreds of millions.  Countless among them quick-frozen rapidly enough to leave them relatively undecayed for examination by modern man thousands of years later. 

Entire tropical forests uprooted, moved by massive waves and left to petrify when the water receded.   When Bad Things Happen to Good Megafauna

If Einstein had lived to see the publication of Velikovsky’s book his interest, prestige and comments might have provided the momentum to carry the discussion into the overall scientific community and more widespread recognition.  Might have forced the unpalatable conclusions to which examination of the evidence leads without leaving many alternatives.

Instead, Planet in Upheaval was published quietly, largely ignored by science, Velikovsky vilified and often denounced by his peers.

But the book’s still out there, used.  Probably available from Amazon for pennies.  I bought my copy in a thrift store in Kerrville for $.25.  I couldn’t have afforded it, wouldn’t have bought it had it cost a buck.

But I bought it for quarter and have now read it enough times to make up for a lot of the people who never did.  Pick up a copy somewhere and you can make up for a few others.  I suspect you won’t be satisfied with a single reading.

If you do read it you’ll be forced to conclude, Stuff Happens.  Sometimes it happens fast and big.  And it doesn’t need man to push it along, make it happen.  Doesn’t even pause to explain itself and why it happens for the benefit of the best minds of humanity to carefully ignore.

Old Jules

Afterthought – Edited in to avoid confusion:

The book referred to here is not Chariots of the Gods.  The author is not Erich von Daniken, of whom you probably have a vague recollection as a discredited ‘scientist’, author of half-truths, incomplete truths, and fig-newtons of the imagination. 

Erich von Daniken.  Immanuel Velikovsky.  Two entirely different individuals.  They even spell their names differently.  Admittedly both foreigners by heritage, but they had little else in common.  Von Daniken actually had a following and readership.  Velikovsky, on the other hand, was a scientist.

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Posted in 1950's, 2012, Astronomy, Nature, Science, Thrift Stores

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The Occasional Crisis of Values – Philosophy by Limerick

Posted on July 21, 2012 by | 24 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Eavesdropping on a conversation between young adults at a nearby table in a restaurant Thursday led me into a lot of pondering afterward.  All these rosy-cheeked youngsters believed they had long lives ahead of them, believed a human life can be lived performing occupations and activities to give it value and meaning.   They wanted this for themselves and were searching the databases of wisdom available among the young for answers to where it might be found.

They didn’t want to waste their lives, as they believed their parents, other older folks they observed, were doing and have done.  They examined and discarded dozens of avenues of human endeavor as meaningless, having no worth. 

Buying and selling almost anything from automobiles to insurance to consumer products found no home with them.  Lawyering, law enforcement, engineering, health care, drew closer examination, but were found wanting.  They’d had been damned by close observation of these fields as manifested in their own homes and the homes of acquaintances.  

They’d seen the inside of the lives of people who spent their days doing these things, experienced their interactions with their children and other family members.  Judged the professions to be worthless as a way of passing time because the dysfunctional home lives of so many served as a testimony no relationship existed between earning an affluent lifestyle and anything admirable in personal behavior outside work environments. 

But underlying the entire conversation was the assumption some profession, some job, some means of earning a living, could provide value to their lives in ways they’d be able to recognize afterward.  The unspoken determination that when they reached, say, the age of that old cowboy-looking guy over there reading a book, they’d be able to look backward with confidence and satisfaction their lives had been worth the effort of living.

A few years from now they won’t be thinking of those things anymore, most likely.  They’ll become involved in trying to scratch out a living, satisfy a mate’s desire for a new car, trips to Europe, big house.  Keep kids in new clothing and whatever else people buy for their kids these days.  There’ll be no place left, no niche of yearning they’ll be able to allow.  The value of the lives they’re living will be manifested in the cars they drive.  The homes they sleep and entertain themselves inside.

By the time they arrive at the age of that old cowboy-looking guy over there they’ll be so far removed from concepts of life being worth living the default position will be a habit of thinking assigning it intrinsic value.  Worth prolonging at any cost, no matter how it’s been spent, how it’s currently being spent.

They’ll mercifully be spared asking themselves whether they’ve wasted their lives doing things that didn’t need doing, might well have left the world a better place if they hadn’t been done.

What’s important in life is official
Sign-painters declare, and initial,
“Portfolio sums
When we die, keep the bums
From the ponderous and superficial.”

Old Jules

24 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Communication, Current Issues, Human Behavior, Parents

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Beggars in Uniform – US Military 2012

Posted on July 13, 2012 by | 14 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I was walking around in the Dollar Tree Store [Everything’s a dollar or less] when the manager came on the intercom:

“Dollar Tree shoppers!  Don’t forget to pick up an item of school supplies for military dependents starting school in the fall.  Pencils, pens, tablets, erasers, any item related to school.  Dollar Tree will make sure it reaches the dependents of active military personnel.”

My hand stopped midway to a jar of Kosher dills.  “Eh?  My hearing’s really going to hell.  For a minute I thought she said something about donating school supplies to military kids.  Sheeze!”

But when she finished ringing up my purchases the cashier smiled and met my eye.  “Would you like to buy some pencils or a tablet for military dependents starting school?”

I went snake-eyes.  “You think I’m stupid for shopping here, don’t you?”  I slid my hat back exposing my forehead.  “Do I have a sign saying STUPUD tattooed up there?”

She tried to say something but I butted in.  “Got a program so’s I can buy schools supplies for kids of crack whores?  Kids of people in prison?  Likely they really need it.”

The lady blushed.  “They make us ask.  I didn’t do it.”

“Here!”  I pulled a dollar bag of flour out of one of the sacks.  “Give them that if you can find one who knows how to cook something.  Otherwise give them shopping carts and point them to your dumpster.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No problem.  I give food to beggars.  Not something they can sell or trade for drugs and whiskey.”

Soooo.  Evidently the military folks aren’t even giving their families money for school supplies these days.  Shouldn’t be long before their kids are darting out of alleyways surrounding people waiting at bus stops or traffic lights.  “You wanta buy watch?  Ring?  Skivvy pictures?

Learned it from mom and dad who learned it overseas.  Nice scam.

Back when they had the draft, conscripting people for $100 per month, wives and kids moving in with relatives, nobody thought of that one.  Now they’re all volunteers for undeclared presidential wars, helping bankrupt the federal budget with their salaries and benefits, they’re panhandling.  Trying to mooch off hamburger flippers and other minimum-wage-earners scrimping by shopping at Dollar Tree. 

Old Jules

14 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Current Issues, Government, Military, US Army

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The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test

Posted on June 29, 2012 by | 13 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by.

Maybe the reason I lured myself into allowing my hopes to include that 1977 C60 school bus was just a time warp slipped in briefly.  Fond memories have a way of coming back to haunt folks as they approach the jumping off place, I reckons.

A million years ago, Back Just Before Hippies Were Invented, summer, 1964, when KoolAid was just KoolAid and acid was still just something to excite a strip of litmus paper, I had my first experience driving a school bus.

As described in the post linked above, I’d gotten out of jail in Rochester, NY, walked halfway down Ohio, been picked up by a taxicab going deadhead back to Terre Haute, Indiana, after taking a drunken businessman to Columbus, OH, to see his estranged wife and kids.  He left me on a street corner in Terre Haute, where I dodged beer bottles thrown by kids the rest of the night.

Mid-morning a yellow school bus pulled across the intersection where I was standing, a car pulling a trailer pulling in behind it.  Loma Linda Academy painted on the side.  The door popped open and the driver yelled, “Do you know how to drive this thing?”

I had a middling amount of experience driving dump trucks and such when I was younger, and I was hungry enough for a ride to lie through my teeth.  “Sure thing.  Nothing to it!”  He vacated the driver seat, I took it, and we said goodbye to Terre Haute.

Turned out he was a Baptist minister moving his family to Las Vegas, New Mexico.  He’d contracted with the manufacturer to take the bus to Loma Linda, California, figuring he’d stack the seats in back, load up his belongings in the empty space, and get the hauling expenses paid for by delivering the bus.

Rick Riehardt was his name.  Young, 30ish man with a nice family.  One of several Baptist ministers I’ve met in my life I came to respect and was able to enjoy their company.  But a menace behind the steering wheel of a school bus.

The rear of the bus was loaded with his belongings, forward of that, loose seats stacked, with about half the seats still bolted to the floor, up front.  Rick had a five-gallon jug of KoolAid and a cooler loaded with Bologna sandwiches behind the driver seat.  He was “a loaf of bread and a pound of red” sort of man when it came to eating on the road.

We struck up a salubrious acquaintance as we motored along in that bus, picking up other hitch-hikers as we came to them.  Enough, at times, to fill the intact seats in the bus.  College kids, soldiers on leave or in transit, bums, beatniks, people who didn’t care to admit where they’d been, where they were going. 

One kid who’d just been down south working with SNCC and marching with emerging civil rights movement, marching, getting beat-hell-out-of by redneck sheriffs, getting treated like a stinking step-child by a lot of the blacks he was supporting.

The hitchers rotated on and off the bus as we drove southwest, Rick and my ownself being the only constants, me being the only driver.  We hadn’t gone far before Rick began cajoling me to drive the bus on to California after he’d unloaded it in Las Vegas, re-installed the seats, and he’d leave the family behind.  But I was headed for Portales, New Mexico.  Figured on getting off and heading south at Santa Rosa, well east of Las Vegas.

Eventually I agreed to it because I didn’t think there was a chance in hell he’d get the bus to California in one piece driving it himself.  That, and I was probably hallucinating on KoolAid and bologna sandwiches by that time.

We parted as friends, him offering to buy me a bus ticket back to Portales, me insisting I’d ride my thumb.  Caught a ride in Needles, CA, with four drunken US Marines in a new Mercury Station Wagon on 72 hour pass.  Headed for Colorado Springs.  All they wanted from me was for me to stay sober and awake watching for Arizona Highway Patrol airplanes.  Every time I dozed they’d catch me at it and threaten to put me back afoot.

We made it from Needles, CA, to Albuquerque alive, about 1100 miles in 12 hours.  I was ready for a rest.  Crawled into a culvert and slept until I had my head back on straight enough to stick out my thumb again.

Rick and I used to exchange post cards for a decade or so, but I lost track of him somewhere back there.  Never lost track of the KoolAid and bologna, though.  I still keep it around in my head in case I ever need it.

Old Jules

13 Comments

Posted in 1960's, Adventure, hitch hiking, New Mexico, NM, Portales, Relationships, Transportation, Trucks

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Flux Transfer Event Topology

Posted on June 29, 2012 by | 4 comments

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/30oct_ftes/

Good morning readers.  I’m going to have to kick this around with Old Sol while I’m coaxing him up this morning.  Meanwhile, I’ll tell you it’s nice seeing something coming out of NASA occasionally a person could consider useful and exciting.

The whole 2008 business about the 8 minute cycling had completely escaped my notice until I came across this at http://spaceweather.com/this morning.

HIDDEN PORTALS IN EARTH’S MAGNETIC FIELD: A NASA-sponsored researcher at the University of Iowa has developed a way for spacecraft to hunt down hidden magnetic portals in the vicinity of Earth. These gateways link the magnetic field of our planet to that of the sun, setting the tage for stormy space weather. [video]

Then, a bit of searching turned up this:

Magnetic Portals Connect Earth to the Sun

 http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/30oct_ftes/

“We used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active,” says Sibeck. “We were wrong. The connections are not steady at all. They are often brief, bursty and very dynamic.”

Several speakers at the Workshop have outlined how FTEs form: On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth’s magnetic field presses against the sun’s magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or “reconnect,” forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth. The European Space Agency’s fleet of four Cluster spacecraft and NASA’s five THEMIS probes have flown through and surrounded these cylinders, measuring their dimensions and sensing the particles that shoot through. “They’re real,” says Sibeck.

Now that Cluster and THEMIS have directly sampled FTEs, theorists can use those measurements to simulate FTEs in their computers and predict how they might behave. Space physicist Jimmy Raeder of the University of New Hampshire presented one such simulation at the Workshop. He told his colleagues that the cylindrical portals tend to form above Earth’s equator and then roll over Earth’s winter pole. In December, FTEs roll over the north pole; in July they roll over the south pole.

Sibeck believes this is happening twice as often as previously thought. “I think there are two varieties of FTEs: active and passive.” Active FTEs are magnetic cylinders that allow particles to flow through rather easily; they are important conduits of energy for Earth’s magnetosphere. Passive FTEs are magnetic cylinders that offer more resistance; their internal structure does not admit such an easy flow of particles and fields. (For experts: Active FTEs form at equatorial latitudes when the IMF tips south; passive FTEs form at higher latitudes when the IMF tips north.) Sibeck has calculated the properties of passive FTEs and he is encouraging his colleagues to hunt for signs of them in data from THEMIS and Cluster. “Passive FTEs may not be very important, but until we know more about them we can’t be sure.”

There are many unanswered questions: Why do the portals form every 8 minutes? How do magnetic fields inside the cylinder twist and coil? “We’re doing some heavy thinking about this at the Workshop,” says Sibeck.

If NASA’s going to be throwing money around like a drunken sailor it’s good to know sometimes it hits something worth knowing.  Even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then, I reckons.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in Astronomy, Government, Nature, Science

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Roswell – 1947

Posted on June 25, 2012 by | 13 comments

Just so’s to clear up my own position regarding the ‘Roswell Incident’.

After I read Witness To Roswell I came away convinced all those interviews had put the ball into the other end of the court insofar as what happened back then and who needed to carry the burden of proof.  I carried that line of thought around a few years, including the time of the visit with Loretta.

But my second-thoughts about whether I’d trust the book began when, maybe a year ago, I began getting emails from one of the authors of the book.  I’m not certain what it was about his emails cause me to experience a growing body of mistrust, suspicion and dislike, but something did.  My gut feel left me thinking I wouldn’t trust the guy far enough to want to step on him barefooted.

So, I’m back where I was from the beginning.  I have no idea what happened out on wossname’s ranch in 1947, other than what Loretta said about it during our conversation.  And I quite honestly don’t think it much matters in the overall scheme of things, what happened, what anyone believes happened, nuthun.

Nuthun at all.  I couldn’t care less whether there are aliens zipping around this planet, time travellers, government flying machines, new world order robots, Roswellcrucians, ghosts, phantoms, vampires, or just bored people making things up.

Old Jules

13 Comments

Posted in 1940's, UFOs

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RC Royal Crown Cola and Tom’s Toasted Peanuts

Posted on June 24, 2012 by | 10 comments

Despite the fact of Asians having become so much more intelligent, better educated, industrious, innovative, inventive and economically responsible than westerners during the last half-century, a few things are still out there they’ll never catch up on.  One of those is RC Royal Crown Cola with a bag of Tom’s Toasted Peanuts or Planter’s Peanuts floating in it.

A couple of other things they’ll never surpass us on include the kind of Italian food you’ll get down at the Fongoul Restaurant, Mexican food New Mexico style with green such as you’ll get at Cojone’s Mexican Cafe, and those fantastic Greek sandwiches I can’t recall the name of.  Guido? 

You’d have to have peeked into the kitchens of a few Chinese restaurants during your lifetime to know that, though all other Asians have it figured out, the Chinese got left behind about 10,000 years ago in matters of basic food sanitation.  If you eat in Chinese food joints much there’s a middling good chance you’ve eaten something that’s already been through a Chinese digestive tract, introduced to the food when he clipped his toenails into the egg drop soup.

That’s the reason Chinese restaurants use all that MSG, even though they know it will probably give you a stroke one of these days.  Covers up the taste of other things got in there, either by accident, or design.

I don’t claim to understand why it’s so.  Koreans, Japanese, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Thai, they’re all probably more concientious about food sanitation in their restaurants than the average westerner.  But the Chinese restaurant that isn’t feeding customers cockroaches, toenails and spit is by far the exception, rather than the rule.

I’ve heard the matter discussed among health department inspectors more times than I can remember [none of whom would dare eat Chinese without having gone over the food preparation area before-hand].

Maybe they’re still trying to get even with Christian missionaries for the Taiping rebellion and figure everyone else qualifies as collateral damage.

Old Jules

10 Comments

Posted in 2012, America

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Keeping the Sacrifices Hidden – Straw Men, Trojan Horses and Pick-Pockets

Posted on June 20, 2012 by | 19 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I’ve been pondering this strange dearth of political bumper-stickers, which seems to me to be unprecedented for a year of national elections.  Particularly contests over who’s to be king.  Maybe it’s just the fact it doesn’t matter anymore.  The scrapings of US production so far gone what’s left isn’t worth stealing. 

But maybe there’s another factor at work.

One of the big let-downs of the post WWII era for kings, king-makers, wannabe kings and king-makers, war profiteers, and economic shell-game artists, was the citizenry.  They were stupid, but not as stupid as they needed to be to satisfy the hopes and expectations of those who needed their [preferably active, but at leat tacit] consent to be gang raped.

By the end of the Vietnam War it became obvious that, aside from a few mindless flag-wavers and a re-definition of the word ‘patriot’, most of the citizenry wouldn’t support long-duration undeclared wars, for instance.  Even when the body-bags only contained volunteers.  Even when the sacrifices were disguised in exponential growth of national debt.

Frustrating, tricky business.  Constantly having to dream up Wars on Poverty, Wars on Drugs, Wars on Terrorism to keep them from  noticing their pocketbooks and jobs were going away.  Convincing them  the reason was undocumented workers, non-Christian religious fanatics, and the folks who couldn’t find jobs.

Maybe there’s just a growing realization within the population that it’s already been robbed of everything of value, that it allowed itself to be surrounded with cops, mercenaries, a huge prison system, sophisticated weaponry, and personal debt it can never repay.

And not a single name they could put on a bumper sticker who isn’t a part of what did it, will continue doing it.

Maybe they’re finally just saying, “To hell with it.  They can kill me, but they can’t eat me.”  At least not until someone discovers a way for politicians, bankers, multi-national chief executives, and dynastic wealthy to live longer by ‘donated’ body parts of the citizenry as a means of collecting personal debts or paying off national ones.

Old Jules

19 Comments

Posted in 2012, Government, Human Behavior, Liars, Military, Police, Politics

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Talking the Walk – Higgs Boson and ‘Science’

Posted on June 6, 2012 by | 9 comments

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9307672/CERN-director-says-LHC-will-find-God-Particle-by-end-of-the-year.html

“Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director of CERN where the LHC is based, said he was confident that by the end of the year it will be possible to say whether the Higgs Boson, the particle which is responsible for giving mass to the universe, exists.

“The theoretical particle, nicknamed the God Particle due to its central role it has in explaining modern physics, has never been detected and scientists have been working for decades to prove its existence.

“Scientists hope that high energy collisions of particles in the 17 mile underground tunnel at CERN will finally allow them to create the conditions to allow them to spot the elusive Higgs Boson.

“Dr Heuer, who was speaking at the Hay Festival, said the LHC is scheduled to be closed down at the end of this year for up to two years in order to carry out upgrades that will increase its power and allow it to continue with more experiments.”

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Those guys over at CERN need to think of something else to call themselves.  They’re inadvertently allowing their use of language to act as a confession booth.  “. . . scientists have been working for decades to prove its existence,” says just about everything needs saying about the difference between science and engineering.  Or whatever it is they think they’re doing.  “Got me a theory, now I’m going to PROVE it,”  ain’t science.  But the difference is too subtle to penetrate the ice surface those folks are skating on.

For several years now they’ve been bragging about creating ‘baby black holes’ that ‘dissolve’ [they say the little guys dissolve because they don’t know what the hell happened to them – spang lost track of them].  There’s a body of opinion among outcasts and heretics from the ‘science’ religion that some of what’s going on stands a shot at creating black holes that don’t do any vanishing.  Black holes, or something else nobody anticipated. 

At CERN, though, they’re got things to prove and they’re not going to let anything stand in the way of proving it.  When a physicist somewhere raises his hand to suggest they mightn’t know what the hell’s going to come out of this or that, they shout him down.  “There’s an extremely LOW probability of it.”

Back before they detonated the A-bomb at the Trinity Site a group of the physicists there expressed similar concerns.  “We oughtn’t do this.  There’s a minute chance it will set fire the atmosphere of the planet.”

“Why hell, the probabilities for that are low.  How the hell can we know whether it will without TRYING it?”

So guess what!  Trinity didn’t set fire to the atmosphere.  All manner of other great things grew out of it, though.  Hiroshima, Nagasaki.  The Cold War.  Mutually Assured Destruction.  ICBMs.  Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and a lot of potential today for more drama in the North Pacific centered around Japan.  Countless people born deformed downwind from the low-probabilities that became high-probabilities with Chernobyl.  Arms races all over the world and weapons of mass destruction used as an excuse to invade any country with something worth stealing.

As nearly as I can figure, those Higgs Boson particles [or something rhyming with them] are out there doing their thing all by their lonesome selves without needing permission from physicists.  They do what they do without needing some airhead calling them God particles, Higgs Boson particles, or anything else.

The people at CERN are doing something they’re calling ‘science’, throwing up their hands calling it the innocent pursuit of knowledge, wanting to prove things.  Hopefully one of the things time will prove is they were right about those baby black holes dissolving instead of going into orbit around the sun.

Hopefully they’ll prove the human species wouldn’t have been better served hanging them upside down from lamp posts when they had the chance.

Old Jules

9 Comments

Posted in 2012, Education, Human Behavior, Los Alamos, Science, Survival

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