Leveraged Intelligence

If I could travel in Time, I would …

This is the Friday offering of the Loose Bloggers Consortium, a list of the members with links to their blogs on the left.  We write on the same topic each Friday without knowing in any way what the others have written.  This should be VERY interesting to see what the different members come up with and I want to personally thank Judy Harper, the Creative Writer in Progress on the left for such a delightful suggestion.

How many of you have seen the Will and Grace show when Jack met Cher?  This clip is so funny, because Jack always imitated Cher – and you will see by the end of it how it fits in with our time travel theme.

Jack meets Cher

If I could turn back time … what the heck would I do with it?

I put this together with certain assumptions.  First, I assumed that I would not be visible to anyone in the circumstance, would not be able to interfere, just observe.  Second, I assumed I could not be harmed by events or the environment.  Third, I assumed I could place myself anywhere in space as easily as I could in time.  In other words, I would be kind of a ghost!

Then I decided to just start free associating.  My interests are always so eclectic, as anyone who has read this blog for awhile knows.  I knew that if I had this ability, I would have a large number of interests that would be continually changing.  In fact, what I can’t actually put in place here is how my next target would change depending upon the experience at the current and last place.

Also, note that none of my travel is to the future!  I would only want to learn things from he past … but I wouldn’t want to screw up my present by knowing anything of the future.  Besides, I think that any future would be a probable outcome anyway.

So, enough with the prelims.  Here is the list of times / places that flowed out of me.  And, let me tell you, this list would just grow and grow and …

• Go back to see how the pyramids were constructed!
• See if I could find Jesus, Joseph and Mary, John the Baptist, the Disciples.
• Check out the events surrounding Moses at various points!
• Check out the first humans at Olduvai Gorge.
• Go see the Founding Fathers, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin.
• Go to the School Book Depository in Dallas to see if Lee Harvey Oswald really did do it alone.  Also, I might have to multiply locate to the Grassy Knoll.
• Visit Einstein in his study at the point that he boiled the essence down to E=mc²
• Return to the Renaissance and watch Michelangelo at work on David, on the Sistine Chapel.
• Go to the moon to watch the first landing, the first steps.
• Watch Mozart and Beethoven compose.
• See how Shakespeare wrote and directed some of his plays.
• Watch Krakatau explode and Vesuvius erupt!
• Watch DaVinci painting the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.
• Watch Babe Ruth and Satchel Paige, each in his prime.
• Watch and listen to Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address.
• Watch Orson Wells and crew create War of the Worlds for the radio.
• Go to China and observe the life and surroundings of Confucius.
• Go to old Tibet, with one of the early Dalai Lamas – or, at least the Dalai Lama in early incarnations – at the Potala.
• Check out some of my early ancestors in Germany and see, in about 1630, where Barthold Hake came from.  He lived in Hemeringen, ten miles from Hameln, but … before that we do not know.

And on and on.  Where would you go?  What would you want to see?

A Person, Place, Thing or Idea

They call it the Annus Mirabilis of Albert Einstein, the year 1905.  In one burst of genius virtually unparalleled,  he produced four papers that year and a doctoral thesis.  Every one of the papers was Nobel Prize caliber and every one of them helped shape our modern world.

The first three papers, remarkably were all published in the same journal, Annalen der Physik 17.  This is what they each essentially accomplished:

Explanation of the Photoelectric Effect – for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 – described light as composed of photons and led to the quantum revolution in physics.

Explanation of Brownian Motion of small particles in liquids.  This indirectly confirmed the existence of atoms and molecules.

Special Relativity.  Perhaps you have heard of this one!  It ushered in a whole new way of understanding space and time and tossed our understanding of what we perceive on its head.

His fourth paper was a further work on Special Relativity and introduced the famous E = mc2.

And, did I tell you he also did a Doctoral Thesis that year?

Years later, after the Nazis had run him out of Germany in 1933, he was courted by the best American academic institutions.  He was at Stanford and they were showing him all the magnificent scientific instruments and tremendous facilities they had and he was like a kid in a candy shop.  When one of the professors turned to his wife Elsa and asked her if she thought he was impressed, she told them that he loved it – but that they needed to realize he could do more than all that on the back of a postcard.

From his theories, nuclear energy has grown, the LASER – which he spelled out as possible – was developed, and the list of derivative inventions in many ways frame the Twentieth Century and beyond.  But, he only invented and patented one item himself – a refrigeration unit.

Just think.  Instead of all that academic stuff in his head … we could be seeing a quite wealthy Einstein legacy of Frigidaires with his picture right on the front!

This is another Friday offering in the Loose Bloggers Consortium, the list of whom are on the left.  The Magpie came up with this topic – so I tried to channel him in its creation!  Please take some time to enjoy the writings of the others on such a broad theme.  I have no idea what they will write, but it is always interesting, fun and thought provoking.

Just Play the Hand You Are Dealt

Friday I went for my semi-annual physical.  My numbers were pretty good.  But, I described the last two months of 2009 to my physician and what I experienced from them.  So … he took me to the woodshed …

Let me back up a bit for you.  My father had his first heart attack at the age of 46.  Then in 1984, he had a triple bypass – and the doctors told Mom that his prognosis was probably about five years.  So, he’s already beat them by about twenty-one years and he is cranking along as we speak, mostly because he has followed a strict physical regimen of exercise and diet.  It’s always been more struggle than he would have wished since that heart attack, though.  And, he passed a whole lot of those genes along to me!

Like him, I am determined to hang around as long as possible.  I have a lot that I want to share with my family and friends, a lot that I want to experience and learn – and I’ve really got some questions about how this world will turn out!  Add to that the fact that I didn’t have Carly until I was 40 and would like to watch her and her kids go as far as possible.  Besides, if she feels anything about me like I do my folks, I want to be here for her as long as I can.  I want to be healthy enough to travel to where she is, too, as far as that goes.

So, I am shooting for my nineties with an option to extend the warranty.  That’s why I took all the stern advice my physician gave me on Friday to heart!  He said that with my family inheritance (genes), he already was treating me in the same way that he treats people who have had a heart attack and he wants me to do the same.  So, he told me to control those factors that I can control and control them strictly.  To underline the importance of rest, exercise and diet, he told me that if I find a time constraint where I can’t eat and exercise both during the day – skip eating!  And, if someone requires me to work late hours to make money or keep people in a warehouse in business – go poor and let others find a way to keep going temporarily by other means.  And, last, he told me to keep my emotions under control.  To stay calm.

These are all things I can and will do.  And, I add another healthy hand to this, dealt to me by Maynardo the Magnificent:

I’ve got to see how these characters grow up.

As Ramana would say, “Thathaasthu.”  Or, as we would say in America – Amen to that Brother!

3D Movies – Cool!!

Yesterday afternoon, Carol and I went to see the 3D movie Avatar.  Conrad’s review: Wow, that was cool!!!  Carol’s review: Yeah, it wasn’t too bad, but it drug in the middle.  Conrad’s response: What??

The deal for me is multi-fold.  First, it is an action movie to a large extent and that kind of makes it a guy movie to begin with.  Second, it is a genre that I like and Carol just can’t stand science fiction of any kind or fantasy that isn’t maybe Alice in Wonderland or something.  Third … to do this requires some cool gadgets!!!  I’m in Heaven.

Note at this point: if in a 3-hour movie Carol didn’t go to sleep or walk out, you know the story was actually pretty good.  For $400 million, it damn well should be – and I heard this morning that it has sold over $1 billion so far.  It takes a James Cameron for a studio to risk this much.

But, anyway, back to the gadgets, back to the magic.  How the heck do they do it?  And, is it really that much better than the old 3D with glasses that were red and blue plastic?  The answer to the second question is that it is in a totally different league than the old 3D movies where they tried to scare you by having a pole stick out or a monster come out after you.  Then, you would take the glasses back off and they would tell you the next time to put them on.

Now, the entire movie is 3D.  And, the 3D image is extremely realistic.  For one thing, there isn’t any of that color bleed like the old ones had, the colors are the normal colors start to finish.  And … this is how they do it.:

There is a spinning disk spinning at 3 revolutions for each frame of film.  It has to go fast so you don’t see a flicker – and so that it doesn’t induce an epileptic seizure in susceptible people.  Seriously!  When I became a science teacher, one of the items we were sent was the frequency at which to never set a strobe light.  There is some kind of a resonance that can induce seizures and the spinning disk has to be sure to not hit it – like that Japanese movie a few years ago that nailed a bunch of folks!

Half of this disk is polarized vertically and half of it is polarized horizontally.  By polarization, it means the plane in which a wave oscillates.  In plainer plane language, if it is polarized vertically, that means the waves only go up and down.  If polarized horizontally, they only move side to side.

You have had sunglasses the had polarization filters in them, because reflected light tends to bounce in one plane predominantly, the horizontal plane.  So, they have vertical striping that only allows vertical waves to pass through, just like you can only go through a door standing up and not laying sideways on a cart.  They hand our polarized lens glasses to you when you enter the theater, but they are not dark glasses and each lens is polarized in the opposite orientation.  So, the left eye, for example can only see vertical waves and the right can only see horizontal waves – or vice versa.

Now, there is a hole in my knowledge right here.  I don’t know why this disk spinning three times per frame would divide images appropriately – I think it has to do with Red, Green, Blue presentation – but there are alternating images that are cast on the screen, one that can only be seen with the left eye and one that can only be seen by the right eye.

This is happening so quickly that the brain thinks each eye is seeing one image continuously.  Well what is the brain doing with these two images that is so special?  The same thing it does every day.  Your right eye is never seeing exactly the same thing as your left eye.  The closer something is to you, the more the difference in what the two eyes see.  Want an example?  Look down and tell me how many noses you see.  Didn’t know you had two of them, did you?

When something is far enough away, then the two eyes distinguish no difference whatsoever.  Neither eye can tell any difference when it looks at a star as compared to the other eye.  So, giving the illusion of depth is conceptually fairly simple.  If the object you are showing is supposed to be close, give the two images a fair amount of separation, each image looking at the object from a slightly different angle.  If the object is supposed to be far away, present the two images pretty much together.

Voila!  3D.  Cool!!

Emotions and Weather

Part of the continuing Blogger’s Consortium series with simultaneous posts on the topic being done by Ashok, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Helen, Judy, Magpie 11, Maria, Marianna and Ramana – in alphabetical order. Today’s topic hatched in my owned fevered imagination! 

I watched a marvelous explanation of the weather extremities of Tornado Alley as the area from Texas up into South Dakota is known.  It is called this because it has the highest incidence of tornados in the world!  However, as much as I looked, I didn’t note what 1 day/decade, 60% near peak means, LOL.  All I know is, growing up out there, they were around a lot!  It is no accident that The Wizard of Oz used Kansas as its locale, as I’ve said before on this blog.  My family and many of my classmates are still back in that target zone, many of them who correspond on this site.

But, back to our explanation which only looks at one aspect of major storm creation in this area, what some of the conditions are that form what are called supercells in Tornado Alley.

Supercell: a thunderstorm that is characterized by the presence of a mesocyclone; a deep, continuously-rotating updraft.  For this updraft to be powered and continuous, it requires cold, heavy air over warm, light air.  The lighter, warmer air wants to rise and the heavier cold air wants to descend.  But, they need to find a pathway past each other to do this.

This brings me to part of the marvelous explanation.  A physicist had two bottles attached to one another at the neck.  One bottle was filled with water, one was filled with air and it was sitting on her desktop with the airy bottle on top.  That is a very stable configuration and that air loves to stay where it is and the water loves to stay where it is.  It will just sit there.  Without moving.  Happy.

Then, she turned the bottles over and the demonstration started to become interesting.  The water was heavier than the air and was unstable until it could get back below it.  These two fluids – it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about gasses or liquids, they are fluids that can flow around – want to flow past one another.  And they just didn’t do a very smooth job of it.  There would be a BLOOP as a bubble made its way past the water, then nothing, then seemingly randomly another bubble.  Slow.  Inefficient.  Turbulent.

Then she did a simple thing: she took the bottles and swirled them around a vertical axis.  In other words, the water stayed above the air, but now a vortex developed from the angular momentum in the water.  The water went to the bottom bottle very quickly and likewise, the air to the top.

So, what happened?  The water flowed down the outside of the vortex interface and the air up the inside of the interface.  Now, the two different density fluids could slide efficiently past one another.  They achieved laminar flow.  Soon, all was stable again.

These inversion layers – cold air above hot – happen pretty often all over the place.  We have it happen in the Bay Area.  So, what makes Tornado Alley so special?  The northern hemisphere polar jet stream carries air in general across the US moving from West to East – or else it is part of the same effects of planetary rotation, I am uncertain which – and air is carried slamming into the Rocky Mountains from the West.  This is like a skateboarder heading quickly into a ramp and going airborne.  It is cooling rapidly as it ascends and shoots right on over the Eastern Slope of the Rockies hell bent for the Great Plains.  And they call those winds “Mariah.”  Joe and Tess aren’t part of the game yet.

But, there is another player in the game.  This is the warm, moist air that sweeps north from the Gulf of Mexico.  And where does it sweep to?  Why, right up Tornado Alley, don’t you know?  And that warm, moist air is whistling along like a freight train at ground level.

So, what do you end up with?  A big sheet of cold air at higher altitude moving East above a sheet of HOT air moving North.  But, it isn’t like the Bay Area inversion layers, these two layers are SO different, they REALLY want to trade places.  And then, there is a little wind shear somewhere that causes that air to turn a bit and WHOOOSH!  It’s like someone pulled the plug in the bathtub.  We have a supercell!  And one in four of those supercells gets carried away and generates major and sometimes long-lasting violence.

So, oh perceptive ones, you are wondering if I have forgotten about the connection to emotions!  I have not.  The connection that I see is the propensity for any system to return to stasis, to stability, to equilibrium.  We sit in a stable emotional state.  At least a lot of us do (although some seem to experience turmoil continuously).  Then something happens and our world turns upside down.  We have an emotional inversion!  Our internal system REALLY starts experiencing those “bloops” of turbulence.  Everything is chaotic – until the cathartic storm cuts loose!  Something sets a vortex of e-motion in motion and we have a rush of anger and grief and terror!

At the end … there is debris to clean up and we feel spent.  But, somehow, we are stabilized again.  And oddly relieved …

LATE BONUS ADDITION TO THIS POST!!!  Sent to me by Maynard, so that it is possible to tell what the weather really is:

Now … I feel secure again!

Twenty Years Ago the Earth Moved!!

Today is the Twentieth Anniversary of the Loma Prieta Earthquake here in the San Francisco Bay Area. This map shows the location, with the red being the epicenter, the green star showing where I was working, and the lavender heart showing where Carol was, about seven months pregnant with Carly!

First, let me tell you how big this thing was on the Richter scale.  It was 6.9 underground and 7.1 on the surface.  And I live on the surface!  As you can see, I was also only about 15 miles or less from the epicenter and it was a ride!

I was working in Silicon Valley.  I grew up with tornadoes, but come on!  These things hit with no warning whatsoever!   Here is a video showing what they are like and let me tell you, they really get your attention right out of the blue:

I was under my desk and moving about one foot each direction and thinking the building was going to come down.  It was so severe, that it buckled our floor and left a ridge.   The other thing about an earthquake is that you don’t know whether it is going to just settle down or increase and get worse.  I don’t want worse, but we probably have it coming in the next quarter century or so, about the amount of lease I have left on being physical if a bus doesn’t run over me.

The other thing that no one had considered was that phones would not work!  It took well over two minutes to get a dial tone if you could get one at all – and usually you couldn’t.  It wasn’t that there was that much damage to the phone system, it was that everyone was trying to call at once.  I had no way of knowing where the epicenter was, how my wife was or how to let my parents know that I was OK.  Fortunately, some radio towers survived, although not the high powered ones.

Driving home took me about 2 hours, because some essential bridges had been shut down.  Part of the Bay Bridge had actually collapsed.  The Cyprus Structure, a two-deck freeway in the East Bay through Oakland had collapsed killing about 60 people.  If they had not been home watching the beginning of a World Series game between the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants, it would have been hundreds if not thousands killed at that point.

Many of the communication towers alongside the road were bent in half.  It shook so much that a friend of mind pulled off the road thinking the front end of his car had gone out.

These are not mild events and they tell us that the next likely big one will be on a fault that runs about 2 miles from my house.  That one could, if the timing is bad and the location on the fault is bad, kill as many as 100,000 people.  We pray it is not so.

And, although they tell us to be ready to go three days without outside water, etc., some reports tell us that we could be without an external water supply for as much as a year!  I hope they are being alarmist.

Oh, Lord.  Thank you for the human capacity for preparation and denial.

Speed

Part of the continuing Blogger’s Consortium series with simultaneous posts on the topic being done by Ashok, gaelikaa, Grannymar, Magpie 11, Maria, Marianna and Ramana – in alphabetical order.  And … did you notice the new member in the lineup, gaelikaa??  Be sure to visit and say hi!

At first blush, speed might seem like a superficial topic for discussion.  It’s not.  It is one of the most essential concepts of reality.

Einstein’s development of his Theory of Relativity is hinged upon the concept that the speed of light in a vacuum is the one constant you can hang your hat on.  Someday, I will go into this properly, but for now, realize that his most famous equation, E=MC², relies upon C, the speed of light.  This speed is the key to understanding that mass can convert directly to energy and that a small amount of mass yields a LOT of energy as in nuclear power plants and atomic bombs!

But speed has more mundane meanings that impinge in easily perceptible ways upon our daily lives.  Feeling the need to go more rapidly than I want to has always been a source of stress for me.  A deadline that is forcing my performance can cause me to become shorter tempered and brittle in my dealings with the world.  As Mom tells me, these are the problems of a Type-B in a Type-A world.  When hurried, I have difficulty finding rhythm, harmony, the proper reflection that I like to give life.

Speed in youth becomes a goal in and of itself.  There is a desire to get into a car and go as fast as possible or to throw a ball as fast as possible.  With maturity, comes the realization that the proper speed is much more important, for a top level hitter can often catch up to the fastest pitch, but can be totally fooled by expecting the fastest and getting something somewhat slower, starting his swing too early.

Likewise, coordinated speed is the essence of team play.  A quarterback must not just be able to throw a football rapidly, he needs to be able to throw it to arrive at the same time and place as his receiver.  The same with business projects, delivery of product at the right time is essential.  It can be the difference between a company’s success or failure.

Learning to play within oneself becomes another essential concept to a good athlete.  Don’t do something with more speed than you can control.  Jack Nicklaus once said that he never swung at more than 95% of his top speed because that was the limit of what he could control.  The limit of what I can control in a swing is probably much less.  Anything over about 80% speed and I think I start distortion of my swing and my body parts get out of sync and misaligned, producing a bad shot.  But I saw Tiger Woods hit two drives from up close yesterday and must say that he has mastered control of a lot of speed!!!  However, it is the speed of his putts that wins holes and tournaments for him.

Isn’t our mastery of speed in our lives one of the most meaningful achievements of a day or a life?  Even for a society, the speed of change and development is totally essential to peace, harmony and success.  Speed isn’t the goal, proper speed is the goal.  Coordinated speed.  Speed within our control. 

Now, it’s time to drink a cup of coffee.  I’m going for a nice cruising speed.

Can You Spell Green Using Four R’s?

I have a friend who teaches at a small private school with somewhere around 50 elementary kids.  She started noticing that each day, they filled a very large trash can, larger than the ones pictured above, to overflowing.  And she wanted to see if she could do something about it!  So, she taught her class the four R’s in Green.

REDUCE.  Do you really need to use that?  Just as idle eating leads to obesity, idle use of items and food leads to trash obesity!

REUSE. Don’t bring bottled water or use a sandwich bag unless you really need to.  Use a refillable bottle or cup and wash it each night.  Use a sandwich container rather than a bag and refill it.  Use a lunchbox, rather than a bag.  Use really silverware rather than plastic.

RECYCLE.  Sometimes it is unavoidable to have packaging that cannot be reused – although not THAT often.  Still, if you need to do this, use something packed in materials that are recyclable and recycle them.

ROT.  If it is organic, compost the leftovers if possible.  We have a compost unit beside our house.  No smell.  It is very active now, after two years of use.  And the soil it produces is incredibly rich and fertile!

Well, she had all her kids doing this in class and – well you know kids – the TOTALLY got into it.  They learned every day more things that they could cut down on the waste from.  Then, the other classes and teachers started getting into it.  Pretty soon, the whole school was AFTER it.

And now they don’t need that big trashcan.  The total waste for the day of all classes is down to one small wastebasket – and she says it doesn’t get very full.

It’s a start … and not really that hard to do.

How Language Shapes Our Thoughts

I was just reading a posting the other day on a person at Stanford, Lera Boroditsky, who studies how language shapes our thoughts!  About the only acquaintance with the idea I had seen before that was the old one of the Eskimos having about 27 words (or something like that) for snow.  And bloggers have 300 words to describe blogging?  uh…maybe the trend isn’t universal.

In any case, with the Eskimos, we are assuming that it just gives them more nuance and detail about snow than those of us (other than GL in Minnesota) need.  However, Ms. Boroditsky takes it to a very new level.  Different cultures with different language right beside one another describing something with, one would assume, equal significance to each, view things very differently based upon the way it is described by their languages.

The first example she gives is how Germans and French reports on a bridge described it very differently, the Germans seeing the beauty and the French seeing the power, the massive presence … wait, are we talking about the Germans and French in reverse here?  French seeing power where Germans see beauty???  Well, cultural traits aside, it turns out that in German, bridge is Brücke, which is feminine, while in French it is pont which is masculine.  It seems, as she goes on to point out with other examples, that the gender of a noun in many languages determines the way we perceive the object it refers to.  Masculine tends to point to rugged, powerful, muscular, massive.  Feminine tends toward light, delicate, beautiful.

Remember our piece on stereotypes?  Well, it seems that we actually stereotype objects by assigning gender at the same time that we reinforce the stereotypes of gender itself in the reference.  Interesting.

English does not assign genders to nouns.  Does that mean we see things as asexual eunuchs?  I need some readers who speak other languages to give me a little perspective here.  Help me Rhonda, what are the implications for cognition?

And … what do you think they call the world’s biggest functional spur, found at the Abilene, KS rodeo grounds?

So, you’ve got common sense. Uh huh.

Well, we’ve established that you have common sense, because you are after all reading this blog.  So, I’ve got an offer that I know you will nail first shot!

Here’s the situation and the rules:

• There are three doors in front of you and you do not know what is behind each.
• Two of the doors have a goat behind them.
• One of the doors has a nice sports car.
• You start by selecting one of the doors.
• I then open one of the other two doors to show you a goat.
• You are then given this choice: would you rather stay with the door you originally picked – or would you rather switch to the other unknown door?

Now, if your common sense is like mine, your response is that it makes no difference whether I stay or switch, because I picked randomly so I have even odds of picking a car or a goat regardless of whether I stay with my original door – or whether I switch to the other available door.

I’m here to tell you that you double your odds if you switch!

Now, what kind of snake oil is this that I’m trying to sell you?  Well, let’s lay out the cases first:

Well, how about that!  If I switch, I have two chances out of three of getting a Car.  If I stay, I have one chance out of three of getting a Car.

Think about it.  Counter intuitive until you ponder for awhile.  How many other situations do we face that are like this?  What does this imply about our decision making, our common sense – and our prejudices?