Apollo11MoonLanding
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Posted:Jul 25, 2018 5:05 am
Last Updated:Jul 27, 2018 3:11 am
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Five days ago, July 20, 2018 was the 49th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing which took place on July 20, 1969. I vividly remember that event like it was yesterday. At that time, I was a skinny, very naïve 9 year old and staying with my family, which were my parents and two brothers in a summer vacation resort called the Willow Bungalows located near the town of Kerhonkson in the Catskill mountain region of southern New York east of the Hudson River. We vacationed there in the summer months of July and August in the years from 1967 to 1971.
The building where we watched the moon landing was the largest building in the bungalow complex they called the casino which had a large open assembly area where they usually showed theatrical movies on film projectors on the weekends. Now, that was several decades before home video came out now in the form of modern DVD players. We saw the event on a by now primitive black and white television set receiving broadcast transmissions before cable television.
I was lucky enough to present there at around 1:00 pm (Eastern Standard Time) in the afternoon. At that time, about a quarter of a million miles (250,000) away in the immediate vicinity of the moon, the lunar module Eagle had undocked from the command/service module Columbia about 70 miles in attitude above the lunar surface and was descending to attempt a soft landing on the Sea of Tranquility, one of the lava plain Maria visible on the near side of the moon. I remember hearing a lot of the radio chit chat between Mission Control in Houston, TX and the three astronauts in the vicinity of the moon. Now, at the time I was just a naïve small and I couldn't really understand exactly what was going on. But all of a sudden I remember the astronaut Neil Armstrong suddenly stating, "Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed." and then hearing all the excitement and jubilation taking place over in Mission Control at Houston, TX and I distinctly recall seeing on the small black and white television screen, the look on Walter Cronkite's face, he was the chief CBS television anchor person at the time. Now at the time, I did not really realize the significance of the event and after when I talked with my father about it, he stated that was the first time ever in history that a manned vehicle from Earth had ever made a successful landing on another celestial body other than the Earth.
That event took place in the afternoon of 7/20/1969. Then afterward, I had dinner that evening which I always enjoyed as my mother was a great cook. I still miss her cooking. Then in the evening that day I was back again in the casino were there were perhaps a couple of dozen people and we were assembled sitting on chairs. I remember that around 9:30 pm (EST) observing that Neil Armstrong was emerging from the lunar module Eagle and then descended down the ladder and then made the statement, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Now, I actually learned as an adult, several decades later, that he did not quote that statement correctly, he was supposed to state, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Then after that, about half an hour later, Buzz Aldrin joined him on the first moon walk. As it was just a small black and white television set and I was sitting quite a distance from it, I didn't really get a good look at the events of the moon walk which included setting up the American flag on the moon's surface. Now, I was just a little 9 year old and I couldn't stay up until the conclusion of the moon walk which ended several hours later at around 2 am (EST).
Later that summer in August 1969, Life magazine published an issue which included all the color film photographs Buzz Aldrin had taken which included a lot of vivid detail much more than what I saw on that small black and white television screen earlier in July 1969. Another publication I remember was a small book which explained most of the technology of the Apollo spacecraft of the Saturn 5 rocket and the three module Apollo spacecraft which I found very interesting. But, in particular what I recall was a couple of pages stating what we know about the other planets of our solar system, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Now, back in 1969, we had only very limited knowledge of the other planets and the book only had very fuzzy pictures of them taken through large telescopes. In the following decades, the interplanetary probes of Mariners, Pioneer, Voyager, Venera, Viking, Magellan, New Horizon's, etc. and we now know what those planets look like in close up detail. In particular, I remember the two Viking probes that landed on Mars in 1976 and the vivid photographs they took of the landscape of the red Martian surface which had hitherto unknown. I remember as a small always reading in astronomy books that Venus was the planet of mystery as its surface is forever shrouded by yellow clouds, ever since Galileo looked at its crescent shape with his primitive 33 power telescope , four centuries ago in 1609. Then in the decades after Apollo 11, the Soviet Venera and American Magellan arrived there and revealed to us that its surface is covered by a very dense carbon dioxide atmosphere with sulfuric acid clouds with a atmospheric pressure of 90 times that of Earth and hotter than an Earth oven with a surface temperature of around 900 degrees Fahrenheit. The surface environment of our other neighboring planet Mars is also extremely hostile to human beings being covered by thin carbon dioxide atmosphere of only 0.6% Earth atmospheric pressure and usually very cold most of the time, being below freezing. As I type this, Mars is in opposition to Earth now being brighter than Jupiter and I saw it the other night.
Right now today it is the 46th anniversary of when my family first moved out east on Long Island from where we had previously lived in a six story apartment complex in Rego Park, Queens, NY. I was 12 years old on July 25, 1972 and one thing that year I was looking forward to a big blizzard to arrive that winter which to my great chagrin never came. But, in the years since then, there have been several very snowy winters which have compensated for it.
In December 1972, the last Apollo mission to the moon, Apollo 17 which was unusual in having a nighttime liftoff of the Saturn 5 rocket. Now, that's the last time that the human race has left the vicinity of immediate orbit. I have seen the Apollo 18 lunar module on display in the Cradle of Aviation museum in Garden City, NY in the vicinity of my house on Long Island. The lunar module was in fact, the world's first true spacecraft, a manned vehicle designed exclusively to operate only in the vacuum of outer space with no aerodynamic shielding at all as is observed in conventional aircraft. It weighed only 16 tons. As the moon has a mere 1/6 the gravity of the Earth, when the two astronauts in the ascent stage when they blasted off the surface of the moon only had to fire the ascent stage engine to raise it to an attitude of 10 miles high which was high enough to enter lunar orbit. In the lunar orbital rendezvous maneuver, the command/service module actually did most of the maneuvering to achieve it while the lunar module was relatively passive.
One thing I am always thinking about was that the computer system of the Apollo spacecraft circa 1970 was very primitive by today's standards. Today anyone can walk into a chain drug store or a Walmart, etc. and buy a graphing calculator for less than $100 that actually possesses much more computing power than the very limited ability of the NASA spacecraft back then. Most teenagers in middle and high school use them all the time now. When I attended middle and high school in the 1970s, that was before the advent of electronic calculators. I remember it was a real annoyance to do chemistry problems involving long division when I took high school chemistry in 1976. When I took algebra in middle school in 1974, I had to laboriously plot with pencil and graphing paper the linear algebraic equations. I also had to look up laboriously the trigonometric and logarithmic ratios and values in a table located at the back of a mathematics book. Now anyone can easily punch up those numbers in two seconds with an electronic calculator.
When I was a in the 1970s, I used a small 2-inch refractor telescope to look at the moon, the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as well as all the familiar bright stars visible in northern hemisphere skies. I remember being excited to look at the craters and Maria of the moon. Now, in fact, nobody on Earth never knew anything about the surface features of the moon until a mere four centuries ago in 1609 when Galileo first looked at the moon back with a primitive telescope. He also noticed all these hitherto unseen stars in the band of the Milky Way galaxy invisible to naked eye observation.
Actually going all the way to the moon wasn't really that big a deal as the moon isn't really that far away at a quarter of a million miles. If the Earth were inserted in the center of the Sun, the moon's orbit would lie entirely inside the confines of the Sun as the Sun's diameter is around 864,000 miles. Now, anyone who takes a casual glance at a clear night sky will usually notice mostly blue/white stars in our part of the Milky Way galaxy and if fact, all of those stars are much brighter than our own feeble sun which has an absolute magnitude of a mere +5. As seen from a distance of ten parsecs or 32.6 light years away, our sun would be very hard to make out, shining with a +5 magnitude and most probably invisible to me where I reside in the very light polluted region on Long Island off the east coast of the United States.
Presently, the moon is the only celestial body than mankind has visited. Hopefully in the future, the planet Mars and then the four large Galilean satellites and the other satellites of the four Jovian planets will eventually be visited by manned space vehicles and maybe the nighttime side of the planet Mercury. When I was a in the 1970s, I was hooked on watching reruns of the original Star Trek series made from 1966-69. Now, that space opera is supposed to take place a mere 3 centuries from now in the 23rd century. Now, when I think of that, the whole concept of interstellar travel is by leaps far beyond our present technology. One astronomical unit ( 1 A.U.) or 93 million miles, the distance from the Earth to the Sun on a scale represented by one inch, then the distance from the Sun to Pluto would be 5 feet away and the nearest star to our solar system, Alpha Centauri at 4.3 light years distant would lie a staggering 4 miles away. Also, since Sputnik 1 was launched 61 years ago on October 4, 1957 it is still extremely difficult to launch space vehicles to achieve Earth orbit as it takes a speed of 7 miles/second to achieve escape velocity. Clearly, a much cheaper and efficient technology of space travel must be figured out in the next few centuries.
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My Interest in Microbiology
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Posted:Apr 10, 2018 12:45 am
Last Updated:Apr 13, 2018 1:24 am
3764 Views
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Since the turn of the new year in the winter of 2018, I have renewed my interest in microbiology. When I was a and in the 1960s-70s, my parents gave me two microscopes, one from a microscope kit and the other a used microscope. I vividly remember being fascinated at looking at microscopic protozoa, algae, bacteria and my own body cells with were epithelial skin cells from the inside of my cheeks, blood and sperm cells. Those microscopes had a maximum magnification of 400x power.
This February 2018, I mail ordered two microscopes on eBay and several biology kits for growing bacteria and protozoa cultures. This past year I have been examining bacteria cultures at 40x, 100x and 400x magnifications. I have been successful at seeing their tiny wobbling shapes of about 1 micron or one millionth of a meter in size which I find to be quite fascinating. I also grew a protozoa culture simply by gathering up some dry leaves, soil and eggs and mixing them with water. Hay or grass clippings obviously weren't available as I did it in the middle of the winter. I put the culture in a small quart sized container. I was amazed to observe a lot of ciliate protozoa at around 50 microns in diameter swimming around vigorously along with a lot of much smaller bacteria. Now, when I looked at those extremely tiny microscopic organisms I am very well aware of the fact that for most of the vast majority of the history of life going back to around 3.5 billion years to the origin of life in the Precambrian era, for the immensely long stretch of some 3 to 2.5 billion years, those extremely tiny prokaryotic cellular organisms were in fact, the only life forms present on the completely barren land massed Earth in the shallow freshwater and saltwater bodies of the Earth. Any contemporary human somehow transported to that vast era as depicted in a science fiction time portal would find the entire surface of the Earth apparently devoid of any life at all and would require the assistance of a modern microscope device which was only invented less than 400 years ago back in Holland in the 17th century to actually observe any life at all as tiny one micron sized bacteria.
About a month ago in early March 2018, I also mail ordered from a biological supply company, a small container of blue/green algae or cyanobacteria which in fact I never saw before in my life. Of course I kept a 15 gallon aquarium as a in the 1970s and a 55 gallon aquarium from March 1986 to July 1993 in which a major problem was having to scrape off the growth of green algae off the sides of the tank wall glass. That green algae was composed of eukaryotic green plant cells similar to the eukaryotic cells of our own bodies. But blue/green algae which first evolved some 1.5 billion years ago is actually a prokaryotic bacterial like form of plant life. When that life form first evolved on Earth a couple of billion years ago, it used the chemical process of producing glucose sugar from carbon dioxide and water which we call photosynthesis from sunlight as a source of food. That photosynthesis process produced free oxygen gas as a waste product which in fact is a very chemically reactive gas not natural to be in the Earth's atmosphere as anyone who has ever observing iron objects rusting or a fire burning. That free oxygen gas was actually a deadly poison to the vast majority of then extant what we would call anaerobic bacteria then living on Earth and most of the them became extinct, and a few managed to survive and still do in regions of the Earth not exposed to the atmosphere as deep in the oceans and freshwater bodies of the Earth or deep underground in the soil. Some of familiar to the layman as causing tetanus and botulism poisoning in humans. But the bacteria left of the Earth's surface exposed to the atmosphere which survived, evolved a tolerance and use for oxygen gas in respiration and are now what we would call aerobic bacteria which eventually evolved into more advanced eukaryotic cells called protozoa which eventually evolved into us humans a billion and a half years later. Actually aerobic metabolism using oxygen gas is far more efficient than anaerobic metabolism and yields something like 19 times the amount of energy carrying molecules in cells.
In addition to observing bacteria and protozoa with a microscope I have also observed microscopic invertebrates including rotifers and tiny annelid worms. I also looked at tiny insects. Actually when you are doing that you begin to realize that on the absolute size scale of living things, we human beings are in fact really immensely large multicellular organisms. For the vast majority of the Earth's existence all the life present was only microscopic and completely invisible to naked eye observation. It was only in the Cambrian era starting some 600 million years ago in the event called the Cambrian Explosion that the first primitive multicellular organisms started to evolve most of which were extremely tiny at first at less than one inch in length. I have often read about and saw on television about a famous fossil site of the organisms of that era called the Burgess Shale located off the Pacific Ocean in British Columbia, Canada which includes a lot of fossils of weird looking marine organisms most of which didn't survive and were the failed experiments of evolution. The major animal phyla which came out of it and survived to this day were the Chordata or vertebrates, the arthropods, the mollusks, annelid worms and a lot of other minor ones. The familiar present day jellyfish, sea anemones, hydras and coral organisms are of the phyla, the coelenterates which have a much more simple body design than the vertebrates, arthropods, etc. The ides that germs cause diseases in humans and other animals and plants wasn't actually realized until a mere 400 years ago in the 17th century or so when the first primitive microscopes were invented in Holland which were about to observe protozoa, bacteria and other organisms which were originally called "animalcules". Viruses which cause the common cold, measles, smallpox, polio, A.I.D.S. are other dreadful human diseases are actually not really complete living organisms but in fact giant protein and nucleic acid molecules which are too small to be able to observe with a light microscope which only magnifies at the most 1200x and a much more powerful electron microscope is needed which is also able to observe the intricate organelle cellular structure of our body cells.
A few days ago, I placed the small amount of cyanobacteria I mail ordered into a much larger two quart plastic container full of aged tap water and I was surprised to observe that it appears to be thriving exposed to full sunlight on a kitchen windowsill.
I attended S.U.N.Y. at Stony Brook on Long Island from 1977 to 1981 and majored in biology but didn't graduate. In 1980 and 1981 I took courses in cell biology and biochemistry. I found biochemistry to be very interesting as it involves the process of nucleic acid or DNA and RNA molecule replication taking place in cells and the gene operan system mainly studied in prokaryotic bacterial cells which is how the genes which regulate glucose sugar metabolism will operate. Earlier than that in 1977 and 1979 I took chemistry and organic chemistry which explain that there are 92 naturally occurring chemical elements in the universe and all the chemical reactions involve the various changes in the orbital electron shells of the atoms. I find it very interesting to know that for a microscopic bacterial cell about 1 micron in size, the atoms of which it is composed in comparison to its size are still extremely tiny as we humans are in comparison to tiny particles of dust we observe as atoms are in the size of Angstroms or 1 x 10^-10 meter or one ten millionth of the length of a millimeter which we humans can observe as an extremely tiny notch seen on a metric ruler. If you look at the history of the duration of the life on Earth since the origin of life is speculated to have first started something like 3. 5 billion years ago after the end of cometary and meteor bombardment when the surface environment of the Earth became relatively stable, the very first life forms were would we would consider very tiny microscopic prokaryotic bacterial cells more primitive than anything found on Earth today. Actually, the basic definition of what life is exactly is a three nucleic acid coding system of a DNA molecule strand with instructions for a peptide or protein molecule polymer of amino acids. Then the proteins in the cell cytoplasm act as what are called enzymes which catalyze or facilitate chemical reactions which are the metabolism of the cell. One common misconception is we contemporary humans tend to think of the lifeforms on Earth as being relatively large easy to observe multicellular plants and animals when in fact for most of the immense length of the history of the life stretching from perhaps 3.5 billion to about 700 million years ago virtually all the life present on Earth consisted of microscopic single celled bacteria and then protozoans and algae. No life at all would be visible to casual naked eye observation except in the form of stromalite formations built up by colonies of microscopic bacteria. The life on Earth is classified as being in several kingdoms starting with very primitive prokaryotic bacteria which are divided separately further based on the way they operate biochemically. Then there are more advanced eukaryotic single celled protozoa and algae after that the much larger multicellular fungi, plants and animals. Actually, the vast majority of the total biosphere of of the over 99% consists entirely of green plants and bacteria. The fungi and animals are a mere less than 1%. In fact, all of the 20% of the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere is produced entirely by the photosynthesis and all of the nitrogen atoms present in the amino acids of the proteins of all the life on Earth is fixed from the 80% atmospheric nitrogen by the biochemical activity of anaerobic bacteria present in the soil and water bodies of the Earth
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Winter Thoughts 2018
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Posted:Jan 15, 2018 12:15 am
Last Updated:Apr 10, 2018 12:49 am
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As I type this it is the middle of January 2018. Where I live on Long Island, New York, we have been experiencing unusually cold weather. When I was taking my usual short walk to the local supermarket last week, the very cold wind was blowing straight into my face in the early evening which I found to be extremely uncomfortable. It felt like my ears were about to freeze off. I was wearing a heavy winter coat and a black sunhat, but not a face mask or a hood, so my head was feeling very chilled to my great chagrin. Most of the time, I usually can't stand having to walk on the streets and roads in the winter months as the sidewalks are often covered with snow making them impassable and I have to resort to walking off the side of the road and then have to dodge the automobiles rapidly driving past me at 30 to 40 miles per hour.
I always look forward to the beginning of the new year after the winter solstice when the days finally start getting longer and the sun's arc starts rising in the sky. Last week, I was looking at where the sun was in the sky around noon and saw it appeared to have declination of about 30 degrees above the horizon as I saw it through the hazy sky. I was thinking that at this time of the year, I am looking forward five months to the month of June, which is the beginning of summer and the sunniest month, when the sun's arc across the sky is very long, going by the zenith and the days are around 16 hours long.
During the autumn of 2017, I was hooked on using two Photoshop software programs I had recently bought that year, Photo Explosion Deluxe and Adobe Photoshop Elements 15 on my Dell Inspiron desktop computer. I found that many of the photoshop ways to modify digital photographs were quite fascinating. I must have modified and merged over a 1,000 photographs and stored the results in the memory bank of the desktop computer and two flash drives. I usually also recorded black and white versions of the photographs. I started to think that in using photoshop, it actually qualifies as another art genre, akin to pencil drawing, charcoal, pastel, watercolor, oil painting, etc. In 1999, I first became interested in drafting, which then led to an interest in pencil drawing and other art genres. I also became interesting in studying art history going back to the stone age around 40,000 B.C.E. when the Cro-Magnon people would draw charcoal images of animals and other objects in the caves of France. In the summer of 1999, I regularly practiced pencil drawing using an 11" x 14" sketchbook drawing still lifes from photographs I found in magazines and catalogs. After several weeks, I developed a considerable level of skill in being able to accurately depict line drawings of furniture and model airplanes, etc. I did find that doing artwork like drawing actually is very hard work, much more difficult than taking pictures with a camera which is 's play by comparison.
I find that in using photoshop software to modify photographs, you are in effect altering our perception of reality in viewing those modified photographs just like in looking at very interesting film photographs or artwork. Now in fact, humans are mostly visually oriented animals after all as we evolved originally from more primitive primates or monkeys which developed strong visual ability in order to navigate through tree foliage and look for food in the past 60 million years or so in Africa. So when you look at man made visual media including artwork, photography and movies, etc. you are in effect looking at a distorted version of reality.
Among the significant news events of January 2018 were the offensive expletive language used by United States President Donald Trump he used to describe people from Haiti and Africa. I found that very appalling and I thought he seems to be in league with Adolf Hitler in his racist philosophy. Actually, when you look at it, all Americans except a small minority of Native Americans are all descended from immigrants that came to America mostly from Europe and Africa starting in the 16th century after the voyage of Columbus to the West Indies in 1492. His whole attitude seems to be completely inconsistent and ridiculous. I have read "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler which I took out from a local library and studied all about World War II and the Holocaust. I myself am half American English and half Mexican descent and I am most probably about 25% Native American descent.
Another major news event I saw this week was about the missile scare over in Hawaii, I thought it was very similar to the "War of the Worlds" martian scare by Orson Welles in the 1930s, about a supposed invasion by Mars of Earth which I found it hard to understand why anyone would actually believe that nonsense. Of course in this case, that missile threat was much more credible as the North Korean regime could actually launch a ballistic missile warhead towards Hawaii. Another similar event was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, which took place when I was a 3 year old small and of course, I was too young to remember that. I have since seen some movies and documentaries about it as an adult since then.
I vividly remember the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969 when I was a 9 year old . I am always thinking that I read a small sky observers guide which in the section about the moon, stated that the nearby moon is in fact, the only celestial body that humanity has ever visited until now and maybe in the future, the planet Mars and the moons of the giant planets may be visited by man in the future, but at present only the moon holds this distinction. In my basement room where I usually spend about 12 hours a night, I have three, one foot diameter globes of the Earth, Mars and the moon. Now, the surface area of the moon is about equal to the continent of Africa and that of Mars is about the entire continental land mass of the Earth. Now those are pretty big areas to explore and if any future astronauts ever do go back to the moon and then to Mars, a thorough reconnaissance will clearly occupy us for centuries. In the 1970s, when I was a , I looked with a small 2-inch refractor telescope at the the 4 large Galilean satellites of Jupiter and Saturn's moon, Titan. The two largest moons of Jupiter, Ganymede and Callisto are larger than the planet Mercury but not quite as heavy, as the planet Mercury is actually a heavy iron ball with an 80% iron core while Ganymede and Callisto are very much lighter in composition being composed mostly of ice and rock. I am always thinking that in future centuries, maybe the moon, the planet Mars and the larger moons of the gas giant planets maybe first reached by astronauts from Earth and then colonies may be settled on those worlds. Also, as the human race expands into the nearby solar system, new subspecies and species of the human race may start to evolve, which mirrors the situation that actually existed in Africa over the last 7 million years or so, when most of the time, there were several distinct species of competing early humans. The modern racial differences between modern humans are actually very superficial in comparison. There was a brief hint of that in the movie "Total Recall" (1990) where a race of human mutants that inhabit a future Martian colony a century from now was depicted.
In the 1970s, as a , I was hooked on watching the original Star Trek on local television station reruns. I have since seen all the television spinoffs and movies. Now, when I've thought of it, the whole perception of the future some 3 to 4 centuries from now as depicted in those television shows is actually a very narrow and crude conception of what life in the future might actually be like. The whole thing is based on what our very limited contemporary minds are able to conceive of what is possible. Also, I find it very far fetched that advanced interstellar travel into the local region of the Milky Way galaxy could actually be possible in the 23rd and 24th century. Actually, most people on Earth have absolutely no conception at all at just how incredibly vast interstellar space is in comparison to our own solar system. I f you represent the Earth/Sun's 93 million mile gap or 1 astronomical unit (1 A.U.) by one inch, then Pluto would lie about 5 feet from the sun and the nearest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, would lie some 4 miles away at 4.3 light years distant or over 24 trillion miles distant. It is completely ridiculous to believe that mankind could actually achieve interstellar travel in so short a time scale.
Another complete misconception that those Star Trek television shows will depict is that a few centuries from now, mankind from Earth is out there exploring the entire universe in advanced space vehicles, when in fact, they are actually just exploring our local region of the 100,000 light year diameter Milky Way galaxy which is actually just an extremely tiny portion of the entire observable universe. In "Star Trek: Voyager" the premise is that the Voyager starship is exploring the other side of the Milky Way galaxy , which is still very confined within our own galaxy.
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Different Times of the Year, my viewpoint
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Posted:Sep 25, 2017 12:42 am
Last Updated:Nov 4, 2017 1:39 am
6652 Views
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Now, in the autumn of 2017, my 58th birthday is coming up on September 30th. I have lived almost my entire life on Long Island, New York at 40 degrees, northern latitude. One thing that I have always noticed since my childhood are the constant seasonal changes that take place in the immediate outside environment where I live.
I first became acutely aware of the temperate zone seasonal changes when my family moved to central Nassau county to the Village of Hempstead in late July 1972. That autumn of 1972, I had just turned 13 years old and noticed the shorter days and darkness of the autumn months. I used to rake leaves in the house lawn as it was getting dark from October to December. That winter of 1972/73, I kept eagerly looking forward to a big snowfall or blizzard of several feet of snow to arrive which to my great chagrin never came that year.
The next year my favorite course in middle school which I walked back and forth 2 miles every school day was Earth Science. It was a very diverse course covering meteorology, geology and astronomy. I learned in the class how in the temperate zone where I live, the angle of the sun's path varies greatly throughout the 12 months of the year. Right now as I'm typing this, it is around the autumnal equinox, when the length of daylight and night are both equal at 12 hours each and the sun rises and sets at nearly a right angle to the horizon. Then in the course of the next 3 months until the winter solstice on December 22nd, I always notice that the day lengths gradually become shorter and the weather slowly becomes colder and more windy. I only became acutely aware of that when as a young adult, I was employed as a night watchman at Jones Beach State Park on the south shore of Long Island on the Atlantic Ocean from 1986 to 2008. I the summer months, I could easily get through the nighttime hours just wearing a shirt and jacket, but all of a sudden beginning in mid September, I immediately noticed that it started to get very chilly at night and I would have to put on a sweater under my jacket to keep warm. Then it gradually becomes colder in October and November and the first frost arrives around Thanksgiving Holiday.
In December as the Christmas holiday approaches, the days are very short, only 8 hours long. I always distinctly notice that around noontime during the day, the sun only rises to an angle of only 23 degrees above the horizon in the southern sky while all the trees are by now completely bare, having shed their leaves. I usually can't stand the month of December which I perceive to be very dark, cold and gloomy. About the only thing I might enjoy are looking at the colorful Christmas decorations on house lawns which contrast greatly with the bleak winter cold weather and looking forward to the new year in January.
Since my childhood, I have always thought of January as being the bleakest, coldest month of the year and the third week of January is usually the coldest part of the year. Then as February arrives, I notice that is slowly starts to get brighter in the late afternoon hours. I always can't stand the local television weather reports of snow accumulations taking place in January and February which seem to imply that the fact that it would be snowing is somewhat of a novelty like it has never snowed before in the history of the Earth and you very well know it most obviously has as every adult has remembered the snows of the past winters in their lives.
I always look forward to the beginning of March which marks the end of the winter and heralds the beginning of spring. In the first week of March, I always look for the first small flowers of the spring to emerge, the crocus flowers in the backyard of my house. The angle of the daytime's sun's path gradually gets higher in the sky from the spring equinox of March 21st, through the months of April, May and June. My favorite time of the year is from mid April through May after the last frost of the season and the green foliage starts to emerge and the deciduous tree leaves finally emerge. I especially like the month of June as the weather becomes very balmy and the sun's angle extends well over the zenith of the sky. Then the hottest time of the year arrives in late July and August as it takes time for the accumulated light radiation from the sun to build up the temperature levels of the lower atmosphere.
When I was employed as a night watchman at Jones Beach State Park on Long Island in the winters from 1986 to 1989, I always noticed that in December on clear nights, the path of the full moon in the nighttime sky is actually the same exact path as that of the sun in the daytime sky in June, 6 months later and it is in the same Zodiac constellation. Now, if you were to put together a model of a globe of the Earth and Moon and of the Sun in the solar system, you could clearly see why that was true. It is plainly evident that the position of the full moon in the night sky is always exactly where the sun will be in the daytime sky, 6 months later.
Another aspect of the year I have always been very aware of, are the various holidays. In January at the beginning of the year, there is New Year's Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Then in February, we have Valentine's Day and President's Day. In March, there is St. Patrick's Day then later in April there is Easter and after that is May with Mother's Day and Memorial Day. In June, there is Flag Day and Father's Day, after that the 4th of July. I have always thought of the month of August as being very weird, having no holidays. In September, there is Labor Day and Rosh HaShanah. Then in October, there is Columbus Day and Halloween. In November, there is Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving. Finally in December, there is Hanukkah and Christmas.
Now, back when I was a little in the 1960s and 1970s, I always thought of the time of December and the Christmas season as being quite a big deal as I always looked forward to receiving Christmas presents from other members of my family usually. Now, as a mature adult, I never look forward to the holiday season anymore and I spend the month of December just looking forward to New Year's Day which heralds the beginning of the new year and also signifies that the days will be gradually getting longer and brighter in the next 6 months until June.
My other favorite holiday is probably Halloween. Since I was a , I have often wondered a great deal that the Halloween holiday on October 31st, is in the mid autumn when obviously the days are shorter and darker than the preceding summer months, so the general idea is that in the dark gloom of the autumn months, we will make a holiday celebrating the dead and the spirit world where the mood of that goes along with darker theme of the autumn. But then after that it most obviously gets even darker and gloomier in the months of November and December when the general mood of the Christmas holiday is much more cheerful. From my point of view, the whole thing doesn't make any logical sense at all.
Another thing that I have noticed since I was a young adult in the 1980s is that the vast majority of adult people I have encountered in the northern hemisphere simply do not care or be aware at all of the nuances of the constant seasonal changes that take place in the northern hemisphere where I've lived all my life. The whole thing seems very insane. For one thing when I was and , I always thought of the months of July and August as being summer months, when everyone would always have the time off. But yet, as an adult, all of a sudden I will discover that in most employment situations and at this supposed mental health center in Hempstead, NY I attended for a while, there is in fact, no time off at all in the summer months, no, the work schedule is exactly the same as the rest of the year, the whole thing seems blatantly extremely moronic. Only when I was employed as a seasonal employee at Jones Beach State Park from 1986 to 2008 was that clearly true.
When as a male adult, I have made several systematic efforts to try to meet women as in systematically answering newspaper advertisements and more recently being on internet social media sites, I have very well obviously noticed that virtually all the women I have tried to establish some sort of rapport with will blatantly and completely ignore any form of reference to any seasonal holiday like Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day. Halloween, Christmas, etc. as in sending stickers or downloaded visual internet images. It is as if no one else on the planet Earth really cares at all what holiday it is or what time of the year it is. It completely and simply cannot comprehend this total insanity in this small planet Earth I have found myself inhabiting.
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My Interpretation of History
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Posted:Sep 10, 2017 3:37 am
Last Updated:Sep 19, 2017 4:23 am
6615 Views
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Hi, my 58th birthday is this coming September 30, 2017. Actually, the first historical event I distinctly remember as a small , 4 years old is the news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Tx on November 22, 1963. I vividly remember a black and white printed newspaper photograph of his American flag covered coffin during the funeral procession in Washington, D.C.. The other significant events of the 1960s are the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. I heard about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in the spring of 1968 while I was attending third grade in elementary school in Middle Village, Queens, NY when I was 8 years old. Now, I was just a little and was completely naïve about the nature of race relations in the contemporary United States, about the fact that there was this big distinction between Black, White and Asian people and what the reason for it was. About the same time, my parents mail ordered for us this first volume of a series of books called the Time Life Nature Library which was called "Early Man". When I looked through the book, I was too young to understand the textual material but after each chapter was a pictorial section of photographs and paintings which I found to be very interesting. A lot of them had artist's conceptions of what early more primitive bipedal humans looked like in central Africa around 4 million years ago. There were several artist's depictions of rival species of hominids fighting each other in the plains of eastern Africa around that time. I sort of got the idea that I was this small or immature human being looking at all this violent rivalry that took place among my human ancestors several million years before in the evolution of mankind that led up to my birth in the mid 20th century.
Another book I looked at was one about dinosaurs, which had a lot of by now outdated conceptions of what dinosaurs were actually like. Anyway, the main feature of that book was that it had a colored timeline on the page bottoms of the book which went backward in time about 300 million years in Earth's past all the way to the end of the book to the Carboniferous Era when the first amphibians were emerging onto the land. Now, what struck me was at the extreme very beginning of that line was this extremely thin line, less than a millimeter in width was signified the total length of recorded or written human history going back some 5,000 years in the past to when the first civilizations were emerging in the river valleys around the world. The line had lines spaced in 1 inch intervals each signifying a million years of geologic time. I have since learned that the age of the Earth and the rest of the solar system is estimated to go back a staggering 4.54 billion years, so the length of geologic time signified in that book only goes back a mere 6.6% or so into the past. Another thing, the beginning of one of the chapters in that book mentioned was that most of the animals we contemporary humans are very familiar with like familiar warm blooded mammals and birds have actually existed in their present form for the last 65 million years from the beginning of the Cenozoic Era or age of mammals after the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs and other large animals that then lived on Earth. I then realized that for the vast majority of Earth's history in the Precambrian Era going back over 3.5 billion years there actually was no life on Earth visible to the unaided naked eye, but only microscopic single celled microbe life and one would need the aid of a microscope to see them in the bodies of water on the Earth and that all the continental landmasses were completely barren in appearance like a desert landscape.
In the 1960s, I also remember the Apollo moon landing program and some events of the Vietnam War. The first United States Presidential election I remember very well is when Richard M. Nixon won in November 1968. When I attended 6th grade in 1970/71 at 11 years old I had my first introduction to ancient history about the early civilizations of Mesopotania, Egypt, Greece, Rome and China and India. I remember the class didn't go all the way to the end of the textbook. Then in the spring of 1974, I had a social studies course in African and Asian history in middle school. Later in high school in 1975, I think my favorite course was one in medieval European history going from the fall of the western Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D. all the way to the modern era of the 20th century. I thought that the teacher was very effective in the way he interpreted events in history.
In the mid 1970s, I was hooked on the BBC television series "The World at War" about the events of World War II from 1933 to 1945 which was on television every Sunday night. I found it to be a very fascinating depiction of history. I then studied a lot about the following events of the Cold War and the rivalry between the United States, the Soviet Union, Red China, western Europe and other nations of the world in the following decades of the 1950s to 1990s. At the time in the 1970s, I was also hooked on watching television reruns of the original Star Trek series as well as the prime time television series "Happy Days" which gave a conception of what life was like in America in the 1950s. Earlier around 1970, one of the first movies I saw in a theatre was "Gone With the Wind" (1939). Being 10 years old, I was too young to understand what was going on in the plot but it gave me an inkling of what life was like in the divided United States during the Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Then 20 years later in the autumn of 1990, I saw the Ken Burn's miniseries about the Civil War which I thought had an excellent depiction of what it was like back then.
I have seen a lot of movies based on major historical events including "The Ten Commandments"(1956), "Ben Hur"(1959), "Spartacus"(1960), "The Longest Day"(1964), "Anne of a Thousand Days" (1970), "Troy", "Tora, Tora, Tora", (1970), "Patton"(1970), "MacArthur"( 1976), "Flags of Our Fathers", "Letters from Iwo Jima", "The Right Stuff"(1983), "Gladiator", "Cleopatra"(1963) etc. When I've thought about it, all of those moves give this entirely phony conception of what those events that took place in history were actually like. In all the films depicting events in ancient history like in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, you will blatantly notice that all the actors are speaking contemporary English when in fact, the English language didn't even exist at all, several thousand years ago. Also, most of the behavior of the people in those films closely resembles the way contemporary American or European people behave and is totally unlike the way the people depicted at the time really were like. If you watch a lot of American westerns or other historical movies, you blatantly notice that Caucasian actors are playing American Indians and don't resemble Native Americans who they really were.
One thing I've always noticed since childhood is that most contemporary people seem to have this ridiculous conception of what prehistoric or stone age people going back some 5 million years into the past mostly in Africa really were like. For example, all these depictions of prehistoric people encountering dinosaurs, when in fact dinosaurs became extinct some 60 million years before human evolution even started. Another thing is that early modern humans were always enduring the rigors of the ice ages or lived in caves, calling them "cave men". Now, I don't think that most stone age people going back some 100,000 years into the past ever actually lived in caves and geological structures like caves are really that common on the Earth's surface. For most of human evolution, our ancestors were really inhabiting this sort of lush savanna, grassland, jungle environment that exists in eastern Africa were all the aspects of our human bodies and brains evolved into our present form for the past 5 million years into the past.
When I visited my uncle in Mexico City in June/July 1978, I did get to go on an automobile trip north of the city to the Aztec Pyramid complex built around 600 A.D..
I found it amazing as an 18 year old to actually be visiting a major historical site. Earlier that year in April 1978, I visited the still standing World Trade Center and looked out at New York harbor from the observation deck of one of the towers and I vividly remember looking at the tiny bright green figure of the Statue of Liberty over the blue water of the harbor. Technically, that was a major historical site in view of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 16 years ago which I remember like it was yesterday. The other major historical events I can remember vividly are the space shuttle Challenger disaster of January 28, 1986, the Columbia tragedy of February 1, 2003, the tragic automobile accident that killed Princess Diana on August 31, 1997, 20 years ago. When I heard about all these tragedies I could simply not believe at the time that they had actually occurred. I remember the events of the Watergate Scandal in the early 1970s which as a I interpreted as complete phony nonsense. I remember the events of the Gulf War in the winter of 1990/91 very well. The first thing I remember about the Space race was a Surveyor probe landing on the moon in the mid 1960s and the tragic Apollo Fire in February 1967. I remember how exciting it was to see those color photographs of the red surface of Mars when the 2 Viking probes landed there in 1976 and then later those detailed photographs of the structure of Saturn's rings when the Voyager space probes arrived there in 1980. As a in the 1970s, I vividly recall the launch of the Skylab space station and the events of the conclusion of the Vietnam war in April 1975
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The Women that I have been infatuated with.
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Posted:Aug 29, 2017 3:50 am
Last Updated:Oct 17, 2017 3:04 am
5964 Views
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Since I was a in the 1970s, I have always been a strongly heterosexual male. I was able to get connected on the internet 4 years ago in August 2013 and of course I have used to look up on the Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines, a lot of information and photographs of the contemporary woman in the world.
I guess the woman that I've been most infatuated with is Beyoncé Knowles, then Katy Perry, Tiffany Trump, Whitney Cummings, Aisha Tyler, Ivanka Trump, Mindy Kaling, Chloe Bennet, Ming Na-Wen, Abney Her, Julianne Moore, Monica Lewinsky, Kathleen Turner, Geena Davis, Cote de Pablo, Natalie Portman, Alyssa Milano, Karen David, Sharon Leal, Taraji P. Henson, Daisy Ridley, Felicity Jones, Sofia Vergara, Aarti Mann, Torrey De Vitto, Mekia Cox, Emily Blunt, Rihanna, Gabrielle Union, Olivia Wilde, Elvy Yost, Rose Rollins, Cobie Smulders, A.J. Cook, Lucy Hale, Jamie Chung, Viola Davis, Ellen Page, Jennifer Hudson, Paula Patton, Kimberly Elise, Anna Sophia Robb, Marion Cotillard, Amy Smart, Rebecca Romijn, Peyton List, Angelina Jolie, Ellen Page, Julia Stiles, Ali Larter, Sienna Miller, Elisabeth Shue, Christina Ricci, Amanda Seyfied, Ashley Judd, Halle Berry, Caitlin McHugh, Monica Barbaro, Kelly Hu, Adria Arjona, Philippa Coulthard, Theodora Miranne, Rachel DiPillo, Alyssa Diaz, Jeananne Goossen, Jill Flint, Brenda Song, Reshma Shetty, Katrina Law, Aubrey Plaza, Melissa O'Neill, Zoie Palmer, Ziyi Zhang, Lisa Vidal, Liz Vazzey, Chandra West, America Ferrera, Hayley Kiyoko, Ginger Gonzaga, Summer Glau, Amy Adams, Gal Gadot, Sanaa Lathan, Rosario Dawson, Tika Sumpter, Monica Bellucci, Rachel McAdams, Stacey Keibler, Sarah Hyland, Olivia Williams, Liv Tyler, Gina Gershon, Kaley Cuoco, Kim Fields, Linda Harrison, Linda Park, Sharon Stone, Vivica Fox, Helen Hunt, Audrey Tautou, Martina Sirtis, Rosalind Chao, Piper Perabo, Vinita Nair, Phoebe Cates, Tia Carrera, Laura Dern, Ellie Kempler, Brigette Nielson, Sandra Bullock, Meg Ryan, Natasha Kinski, Rachel Ward, Jodie Foster, Solange Knowles, Charlize Theron, Jolene Balock , Shakira, Amy Grant, Kim Delaney, Katherine Heigel, Grace Park, Allison Eastwood, Nana Visitor, Alyson Harrigan, Ileana Douglas, Monica Raymund, Kim Catrell, Lindsay Price, Ashley Benson, Rochelle Aytes, Yunjin Kim, Emily Van Camp, Christa B. Allen, Elena Satine, Gail O'Grady, Stephanie Jacobsen, Ana Ortiz, Samantha Mumba, Kate Walsh, Greta Saachi, Olivia D'abo, Jaime Turner, Virginia Madeson, Penelope Ann Miller, Jennifer Connely, Moon Bloodgood, Jennifer Hudson, Summer Glau, Etc.
There are obviously a lot more than I can think of offhand. Of course, I can think a lot of the women in the past who were very attractive like Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow and a lot of other actresses that I've seen in old movies made earlier in the 20th century. In the past centuries of human history of course there existed a large number of very attractive women in their prime that I've read about in history books, but unfortunately photography to record their images for posterity did not exist yet as film photography was only invented in the mid 19th century. Even then the first cameras were very primitive black and white wet plate devices which usually took like half an hour to properly expose the film negative. I have looked in history books about the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865 and seen a lot of black white photographs of that war. Now, in the early 21st century we have digital camera technology and are able to photograph and record digital photographs with ease which can then easily be posted on the internet for everyone around to see.
I can remember that until I was a young adult in the early 1980s, it was always a very fleeting experience to actually observe a television show of a movie as you were completely limited to just quickly observing a television show that on at the time or a movie being played in a movie theatre. Then the first video discs came out along with VCR magnetic tape cartridges and I was able to play and look at a movie with relative ease. From the mid 1980s, I had my first VCR machines and I got into the habit of programming them to record several hours of television shows and I wore out several VCR machines in the process. Then later, more advanced DVDs came out which have made it very easy to watch a movie. I have since bought over 200 mostly movie DVDs. Now, if I have an infatuation with a particular movie actress, I have absolutely no trouble at all in playing a particular movie several times if I want to.
I have often thought that before the modern era of mass media communication starting in the 20th century, the actual physical appearance of most people was completely and utterly unknown to almost everyone in the world except those that lived in their immediate vicinity of their town or city. Then with the development of drawing, oil painting and other art media, usually only wealthy people could afford to have their likenesses copied by a skilled artist. I have practiced pencil drawing of still life subjects in the summer of 1999 but never to portrait level skill. Then things changed when photography was first invented in the mid 19th century and now in the early 21st century we have modern digital photo technology which now makes it very easy for any average person to easily transmit their digital image around the world via the internet after taking digital photographs with a smartphone or digital camera as I myself have been doing diligently over the past 4 years.
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My Knowledge of Mathematics
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Posted:Aug 22, 2017 3:01 am
Last Updated:Nov 4, 2017 5:24 am
6485 Views
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I had my first exposure to mathematics when I was 6 years old in first grade in the autumn of 1965. I learned the 10 Hindu/Arabic numerals, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 which were introduced into Europe by Leonardo Fibonacci in the 12th century. The curriculum started with simple addition, that is, 1 + 1= 2, then 2 + 2= 4, etc. Then subtraction was introduced, that is 5 - 3= 2, etc. Back in the 1960s, electronic calculators and desktop computers did not even exist then. I remember that I had great difficulty in learning the multiplication tables ranging from 1 x 1= 1, 2 x 3= 6 all the way to 10 x 10= 100, when I was 10 years old attending 5th grade in elementary school in Middle Village, Queens, NY in 1970. After learning multiplication, the much more difficult reverse division was introduced which I recall used to be extremely difficult to figure out by pencil and paper before electronic calculators were introduced around 1976 when I was in high school. Then I learned other concepts like fractions, or ratios of whole numbers and the concept of irrational numbers, starting with pi= 3.141592654.... the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference and the the square roots of integers like the square root of 2 = 1.41421233562. . .Actually I first learned the concept when a friend told me that he learned them in school and not in class. In 2nd grade, I learned how to tell time by reading a clock face. I also learned about the Sieve of Eratosthenes which is a method of figured out all the prime integers up to a certain point, say up to 100, by writing them down on a grid and systematically crossing out all the multiples of the numbers up to 10. I much later learned out as an adult, that there is in fact no end to the progression of prime numbers by a method explained in "Euclid's Elements" written back in the 3rd century B.C.E. In Alexandria, Egypt. Later in middle school, I learned a lot about set theory, the use of a number and the concept of logarithms which were developed in the 16th century as a convenient form of multiplication. The outdated slide rule works by the addition and subtraction of logarithms for multiplication, division and extracting roots. My paternal grandfather gave me a slide rule as a which I still have and is now technically an antique as no one used them anymore having been replaced by electronic calculators and other modern computing devices.
In the autumn of 1972, I took elementary algebra in middle school and at first it was very difficult to understand. One new concept I learned in algebra was the concept of negative numbers or numbers of a value lower than zero as a solution to algebraic equations. Then when I took more advanced algebra next year, I learned about the concept of imaginary numbers based on the square root of -1 which technically can not have a solution in real numbers. I learned about the quadratic formula as a solution for second degree algebraic equations which I saw the teacher derive on a blackboard in front of the class. Now, when I was a in the mid 1970s, they never taught the class about the solution to higher degree equations, starting with the third degree cubic, the fourth degree quartic. Most especially they did not explain at all that the fifth degree quintic and all others of higher degrees are completely insolvable by the use of algebraic formulas as discovered by the European mathematicians, Galois and Abel with the idea of group theory, early in the 19th century. I only found that out much later as an adult.
Back in the spring of 1974, I recall having to laboriously use paper and graph paper to plot out and graph, algebraic equations of two variables, x and y, which was often very difficult. Now since 1994, we now have advanced electronic graphing calculators which can easily do that and are available to any middle and high school student. It was also an ordeal to have to look up logarithms and trigonometric ratios in a table in the back of math textbooks and now we have electronic calculators to easily look them with ease by just punching in the numbers.
I think the mathematics course I enjoyed the most was when I took high school geometry in the autumn of 1974 and the spring of 1975. As the teacher explained, the concept of geometry is very different from the more logical approach of arithmetic and algebra. The whole concept of geometric proof is based on logical deduction, that is making a proof by the process of elimination.
The whole basis of modern high school geometry is based on the concepts laid out in "Euclid's Elements" composed back over 23 centuries ago. Actually, it was the second biggest bestseller in the world next to the Bible, throughout the middle ages and into the modern era. In fact, it was written before the more modern concepts of trigonometry and algebra were developed as it contains no concepts like measuring angles in triangles by degrees, etc.
When I learned geometry, it starts with a progression of dimensions, starting with specifying a position by a point, then a one dimensional line, ray, line segment, etc., then to a two dimensional plane, with the basic shapes, of triangle, quadrilateral, more sided polygons, then to circles, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas, etc. I then learned the more complicated solid geometry with basic three dimensional shapes like a cube, pyramid, sphere, etc. In the third book of Euclid's Elements, he lays and explains the properties of the five Platonic Solids, that is solid geometric figures where all the sides and angles are equal, the one most familiar to the layman is the cube. I find it to be rather amazing that he figured out that stuff way back then , three centuries before Christ without the aid of any modern computing devices.
In high school in 1976, I took trigonometry which I found is really just an extension of the concepts of geometry based on the trigonometric ratios of the sides and angles of right triangles, that is triangles where one angle is 90 degrees. Of course, figuring out problems in trigonometry is very much easier today with the use of modern graphing calculators. Those calculators can also do complex problems in geometry.
When I attended S.U.N.Y. at Stony Brook in the autumn of 1977, I first learned calculus, that is using to concept of computing very small limits as in differential and integral calculus to do problems in the trajectories of moving bodies like artillery projectiles and space probes around the solar system. Actually our modern space program would be completely impossible without calculus. In the few centuries before Christ, the ancient Greeks were beginning to stumble upon the fundamental concepts of calculus, like Zeno's Paradox of an arrow in motion, or the race between the tortoise and the hare, etc. But then the middle ages arrived and no one was interested in mathematics. In the 17th century, Newton and Liebnitz figured out the basic concepts of calculus. It's interesting that we now use Leibniz's notation in calculus and not Newton's today. Calculus is used extensively in engineering and architecture to figure out things like areas under curved lines and surfaces.
In the spring of 1994 while in my final semester in S.U.N.Y. at Farmingdale taking Technical Speech, I became obsessed with solving the original 3 x 3 Rubik's cube puzzle which first came out in the Christmas season of 1979/80. Then, I went to the campus library and took out several puzzle books on how to solve it. When reading them, I discovered the whole principle of being able to solve it depends on a branch of mathematics called group theory which was first developed by mathematicians in the 19th century. I was able to solve the cube even without the sight of the manual. But then, I became very curious and went to the local bookstores on Long Island and bought more books on the subject. Actually group theory is really an elaborate form of algebra and it can used too solve problems in physics and chemistry. I also tried to learn abstract algebra and Galois theory.
Of course, I started to buy several books on topology. In the 18th century, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler tried to figure out the problem of the Seven Bridge of Konigberg, where modern Poland is now. That is actually a problem in graph theory. In studying topology, you find that it is a study of spatial relationships of a very different nature than geometry. In geometry, it is a study of specific measurements and shapes, like the length of line segments, angle measurements, etc, and specific geometric shapes, etc. In topology, it is more of a study of just how two and three dimensional figures are connected together. Actually, most people tend to think more topologically than geometrically in doing things like reading a map, walking around the house or walking to familiar destinations in the local neighborhood. One concept that most people are really not aware of is the four color map problem, that in fact, in drawing up the political divisions within any two-dimensional map, it actually only takes 4 colors to separate any region from any other. There is an elaborate computer proof and I've read a book about it and began somewhat to understand it. In topology, a coffee cup and a donut are very similar because they are both three-dimensional figures with a single hole in them. If you squeeze the hole out of it, the figure becomes a solid three dimensional figure and is thus very different topologically.
When you think about the basic geometric ratio, pi= 3.141592654... it was figured out by the ancient Greeks by dividing a circle into ever smaller triangles. The use of the Greek letter pi to designate it wasn't until the 17th century. Now, even though it has probably been computed by modern computers extending into billions of decimal places, there is in fact, no actual circle that has ever been found that is accurate to the full figure of pi than at most five decimal places.
I first learned the fundamentals of set theory when I was elementary school around 1971. I have since learned the mathematician Georg Cantor used it in the late 19th century to prove that there is in fact, no actual correspondence between the irrational numbers which have decimal components stretching into infinity and the much more familiar rational numbers , like whole numbers, integers and the ratios of integers or fractions, like 1/2. 3/4, 7/8, etc. In fact, the vast majority of all real numbers are in fact, irrational numbers and the rational numbers are actually extremely rare intervals among them.
Back in the stone age, actually most hunter/gatherer people only thought in terms of the natural numbers, that is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,. . . . The concept of 0 as a numerical place holder signifying nothing wasn't until the 6th century in India. Virtually no one ever thought in terms of fractions or ratios of whole numbers. The use of the term a million to specify a thousand thousands or 1,000 x 1,000= 1,000,000 did not arise until the 15th century in Italy, when bookkeepers and merchants would come upon numbers that big in their computations. Then the term billion equals a thousand millions and trillion which means a thousand billions did not come about until more recently. The notation the ancient Romans used were Roman numerals which are very clumsy and completely useless for numerical computation.
The way a number of n objects can be arranged differently is n! or n factorial or the specific in integer being multiple by all the integers smaller than it to 1. A prime number is one which has no factors other than itself and 1. All other numbers are composite numbers which are all the product of a specific combination of prime integers and no other. Modern electronic calculators can be used to compute and figure out all these basic mathematics concepts.
In the summer of 1994, the first electronic graphing calculators came out and I bought my first one, the Texas Instruments TI-85 which hitherto to the earlier calculators could do advanced problems in algebra and calculus. I spent most of my 3 days off from employment at nights working out computer programs on the calculator involving problems in those mathematical disciplines. I found it amazing that the calculator could plot two variable algebraic equations. Then in 1996, the more advanced Texas Instruments TI-92 which can do problems in geometry and 3-dimensional graphing along with a lot of other interesting applications. That would have been very handy to use when I took geometry in high school, 20 years earlier. They've since come out with more advanced calculators with color screens.
I have also studied a lot about number theory which is about the properties of the whole numbers or integers but actually that is a misconception since a significant portion of number theory is about studying the aspect of numbers with fractional components being irrational that technically are not integers. One interesting concept is of continued fractions and there are degrees to how irrational a number can be as to whether the continued fraction that computes will have an entirely random pattern or that it ever forms a repeating pattern. One interesting concept is that there in fact are no uninteresting numbers as if any particular number is always interesting for some reason and in fact if it were perceived to be uninteresting, it would in fact be interesting for that reason.
An other thing is the concept of very large numbers. Although we human beings have among the longest life spans of any animal and we measure our lifespan in years so at the most we are very lucky to reach the age of 100 or a little above it. My paternal grandfather lived to be 98 years old. If we measure our lifespan in seconds, a person has to reach the age of nearly 32 years old to be a billion seconds old and if we're lucky we may live to be over 3 billion seconds old. But that is actually less measured in seconds than the Earth and the rest of the solar system are old in earth years, as the estimated age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years. The age of the universe since the Big Bang event is estimated to be something like 13.8 billion years. When you study chemistry and physics you come across extremely large numbers like Avogadro's Number equals 6.02214179 x 10^23 which is the number of atoms or molecules of an element or compound respectively as measured in grams. The number of possible combinations of 52 deck of playing card is 52!= 8.065817517. . x 10^67. Now, that number is extremely huge, being by degrees immensely greater that the age of the Earth and the universe as measured in seconds. That obviously explains as to why there is an immense variety to all the different ways, most games of playing cards can be played. The same is true for a lot of other games like chess as when playing a game of chess there are in fact, about 4 billion combinations of moves that the first 4 moves can be played.
When I took high school geometry in 1974/75, of course I learned the Pythagorean Theorem, that is for a right triangle, a triangle where one angle is 90 degrees, the square of the hypotenuse of longest side is equal to the sum of the squares of the two smaller sides or legs of the triangle and this can be expressed in integer or whole number values as Pythagorean triples as a^2 + b^2= h^2. This is in fact an example of a Diophantine equation, that is an algebraic equation which only has solutions in integer values. Actually the ancient Greek Pythagoras wasn't the first mathematician to discover the Pythagorean theorem in the 6th century B.C.E. as it had been known to the ancient Babylonians, several thousand years earlier towards the beginning of history. They have found ancient writings of written numerical figures that showed that they were able to compute very high integer values for Pythagorean triples, of integers in the thousand number range that could have not possibly come about by mere chance. In the 17th century, the French mathematician Pierre Fermat claimed to have come up with a proof called Fermat's Last Theorem as to why the Diophantine Equation, a^n + b^n= h^n in fact only has integer solutions for n= 2 and no higher exponential power above it, which he actually didn't. Then in the late 20th century, the mathematician Andrew Wiles did come up with an actual proof to Fermat's Last Theorem. Now I have taken out several library books on the subject and looked it up on Wikipedia and I still cannot understand exactly how his proof works and I do have a lot of experience in understanding most mathematical concepts.
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My Knowledge of Physics and Chemistry
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Posted:Aug 19, 2017 3:16 am
Last Updated:Oct 17, 2017 3:09 am
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Since I was a little in the 1960s, I sort of noticed that all the matter around me is composed of materials in 3 states, solid, liquid and gas. When I was 6 years old in 1966 I think, I went with my father on an all day fishing trip to Bear Mountain State Park just north of New York City and west of the Hudson River. He rented a small fishing boat and we went fishing for sunfish, bass and perch with live bait and lures using a nylon line reel fishing rod. I distinctly remember that me and my father were standing on the rocky shore of one of the lakes there in the afternoon and I was looking at the shallow lake water covering the flat rocks on the lake bottom and being a very curious little , I asked my father as to just why at the same temperature, the rocks were composed of solid matter and the water above was in a liquid state of matter. Of course, I also noticed that I am surrounded by air composed of 80% nitrogen gas, 20% oxygen gas, 1% argon gas, along with water vapor. Later, I read books about chemistry and learned about the naturally occurring chemical elements ranging from atomic number 1, hydrogen gas all the way the atomic number 92, uranium with a usual atomic weight of 238. I used to melt and burn table sugar on the kitchen stove in our small apartment and noticed that as the sucrose sugar burned, only the brown carbon remained on the metal spoon as the hydrogen and oxygen molecules of the sugar molecules were released as carbon dioxide and water vapor from the chemical reaction of the fire. Then I often noticed the brilliant light of the sun shine overhead on sunny days in the spring and summer months. I later read that the sun is actually a G type yellow star, a 864,000 mile diameter wide gaseous sphere of mostly hydrogen and helium gas which is 330,000 times the mass of the Earth, usually 93,000,000 miles away ( 1 astronomical unit), I also read that the sun shining in the sky is not a chemical fire at all like those we are familiar with seeing on Earth, but is actually powered by the nuclear fusion of 657 million tons of protons in its core being fused into 654 million tons of helium nuclei with the release of 4 million tons of gamma radiation every second. Our tiny planet Earth only receives a mere 4 pounds of light energy every second which is two billionth of the sun's total output of radiation. The process of nuclear fusion and nuclear fission is based on energy derived from the nuclear strong and gluon forces which are entirely different and much more powerful from energy derived from the familiar chemical combustion on Earth and the chemical energy derived from the biochemical and organic chemical reactions taking place in living things on Earth
I learned as a that all matter is composed of atoms in the form of pure elements and compounds. The elements on the periodic table are divided into nonmetals on the right side and most elements are metals on the left side with some in-between the semiconductor elements, germanium and silicon used i n electronics technology. The alkali metals on the far left and the halogen gases on the far right are the most extremely reactive elements and never, ever found in their pure form on Earth. By contrast, the noble or inert gases on the right side of the periodic table are completely chemically inert and consist of monatomic single atoms which are the elements Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon and Radon.
I have studied geology and mineralogy and know about elements found in their pure form on Earth, including of course, the gases found in air, carbon, sulfur, copper, silver, gold and several others. Actually helium gas was first discovered by analyzing the spectrum of sunlight before it was discovered existing in natural gas deposits on Earth. The word helium is derived from helios, Greek for sun. Most people are very familiar with table salt, sodium chloride, but actually the term salt designates a whole class of compounds which are an ionic chemical combination between an alkali metal and a halogen gas. When I took biology class in high school and college I learned that the plasma membranes that surround all the cells of there life on Earth are composed of soap like molecules with have a hydrocarbon covalent bond interior while the ionic bonded polar ends face the surrounding water. I kept a couple of aquariums and became very familiar with water chemistry that all the fish and other water animals are very sensitive to changes in the water's pH which is the extent that the water molecules are divided into hydrogen ions and hydronium ions as are our own body cells being very sensitive to the pH of our blood. When I took High School chemistry in 1976 I observed some sulfuric acid which is used in car batteries. When you look at the planet Venus in the dawn or dusk sky, the yellow color you see is actually the sulfuric acid droplets dissolved in its thick carbon dioxide.
In chemistry, I studied the gas laws which state that the pressure of a gas at a given volume and pressure is actually dependent on its absolute temperature above absolute zero, 0 degrees Kelvin or -273 degrees Centigrade or -454 degrees Fahrenheit. By contrast in the interior of stars like the sun, the temperature must be in the orders of like 20 million degrees Fahrenheit, but actually it consists of hydrogen ion protons moving around constantly at high velocity and to use the concept of temperature to describe it like the matter on the Earth's surface really makes no sense at all. The surface of the sun is around 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit which is twice as hot as any fire produced so far on Earth.
I took physics in high school and college and became familiar with the basic laws of mechanics as Sir Isaac Newton figured out back in the late 17th century as he did with the basic laws of gravitation. First the principle of inertia, that all bodied tend to remain at rest or in a constant state of motion unless acted upon by an external force and second that the acceleration of motion of a material body is directly proportional to the force applied to it. Then the law of rocket propulsion, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Even as a little , I sort of noticed that objects tend to fall to the ground when you drop them. I have since learned in physics that gravitation is indistinguishable from the acceleration of moving bodies, on Earth at the rate of 32 feet/second squared or 9.8 meters/ second squared. In the early 20th century, In one second, an object will fall 16 feet, the second second 64 feet, etc, not counting for air resistance. Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity reasoned that gravitation is really the curvature of space/time by the presence of material bodies and that a sufficiently powerful gravitational field could bend light rays, thus he predicted the existence of black holes which weren't detected by astronomical observation until much later. The gravitational constant of Newton's law of gravitation has been used to figure out the mass of planet Earth at a little less than 6 sextillion tons. Then the mass of the sun and other planets can be derived from that.
From the moment I began to see with my eyes as a , I have always wondered as to what exactly light is. I have since learned that light we observe in the 7 colors of the rainbow is actually just an extremely narrow band in the range of electromagnetic radiation ranging all the way from extremely short wave gamma radiation produced by atomic nuclear processes all the way to very long wave radiation of electric alternating current. In the first decade of the 20th century, Albert Einstein figured out in the Special Theory of Relativity that in fact the speed of light at 299,792.458 kilometers/second or 186,282.3971 miles/second is in fact the absolute and ultimate speed of the universe. As any material body in the universe approaches to as close to the velocity of light, even to within 99.9999% of it, the basic laws of physics including the rate of time flow, physical length and the mass will increase to compensate for it as to make the measured observed speed of light always exactly the same no matter what. I read that in a imaginative book about science that light and other electromagnetic radiation is actually caused by vibrations in the fifth dimension of the universe. We three dimensional contemporary human beings going through the fourth dimension of time passage can have absolutely no way of being able to visualize in out finite three dimensional brains, the whole concept of a universe in more than three dimensions. When you watch the Star Trek and Star Wars space operas you will very blatantly notice that they will utterly and completely ignore the theory of Relativity as well as other basic concepts in physics like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principles as well as most principles in biology, etc.
In the summer of 1994, I became interested in quantum mechanics. The basic principle is that on the subatomic level, both matter and energy possess a wave/particle duality, which is a totally different thing to those of us human beings on the macroscopic level. In 1900, Max Planck figured out from analyzing black body radiation that when a piece of matter is heated up, the emitted electromagnetic radiation is only in specific wavelengths and no intermediate values are possible. Niels Bohr's analysis of the hydrogen atom proved that the single electron orbital of the hydrogen atom only shifts in specific increments. The basis of chemistry is that in every atom from hydrogen to uranium, no two electrons within the atom can ever possess the exact same quantum state, the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Actually, every atom we are familiar with on Earth consists of a central nucleus on the size order of a fermi in length or 1 x 10^-15 meter in size. The nucleus is composed of hadron particles, protons and neutrons which can be further subdivided into three smaller quark particles which are held together by the gluon force, which is very weird as no individual quarks can ever be isolated as the gluon force becomes stronger with increasing distance. The protons and neutrons are held together in the atomic nucleus by the strong nuclear force. The electrons which are lepton particles are held together in wave/particle shells around the central nucleus by the electromagnetic force or electroweak force. Atoms are on the size order of Angstroms in length of 1 x 10^-10 meter in size, vastly larger than the central nucleus. When I took chemistry in high school in 1976, I learned about Avogadro's number or that 1 mole of an element or compound is composed of 6.02214179 x 10^23 atoms or molecules which is the atomic or molecular weight of the substance measured in grams. If a drop of rainwater were blown up to the size of the planet Earth, the water molecules composing it would be the size of marbles. In the early 20th century, the physicist Ernest Rutherford did an experiment in which he used a very thin piece of gold foil, still thousands of gold atoms thick and then place a piece of the radioactive element radium which emits a stream of alpha particles or helium nuclei, beta particles or electrons and gamma rays our very short wavelength electromagnetic radiation. What he discovered is that the vast majority of the alpha rays went through the gold foil which must mean that the gold atoms composing the thin gold foil must actually be very empty space, but very rarely some of the particles would be deflected backward by the positive charge of gold atomic nucleus. Werner Heisenberg proposed the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which states that on the subatomic level, it is completely and utterly impossible to know the exact position and momentum of a subatomic particle at the exact moment of time as any type of electromagnetic radiation we would use to "look" at a subatomic particle would only serve to deflect its measured position. Now, this is very unlike the way we observe the familiar macroscopic world as in using a camera to take a photograph of something. Actually, as atoms increase in size going up the periodic table, they do not significantly increase in size as the stronger positive pull of the central nucleus serves to pull in the outer electron shells tighter and closer to the nucleus, going up all the way from hydrogen gas to uranium metal.
I saw a television PBS documentary on uranium metal and it is interesting to note that until the discovery of elements including radium and uranium being radioactive was discovered in the late 19th century, uranium being colored green was primarily used as a green dye in stained glass. One way that radioactivity was discovered was that it was realized that ordinary photographic film would be exposed and react to the emitted gamma radiation as it would be to visible light. Most radioactive elements will emit alpha rays or helium nuclei, beta rays or electrons, sometimes neutrons and protons and high energy electromagnetic radiation or gamma rays. The clicks of a ginger counter instrument used to detect radioactive material actually detect the ionization caused by the emitted alpha, beta rays or emitted protons but not the gamma radiation. It is only the emitted gamma radiation which is very harmful to humans or animals and not the emitted atomic particles which are completely harmless.
I have studied about radioactivity and the basic principle is that certain atomic nuclei of radioactive elements will have this tendency to be unstable and thus spontaneously break apart into the nuclei of 2 lighter elements with a certain mathematical probability of an amount of time called a half life. The half life of some uranium isotopes is extremely long on the orders of several billions of years and thus can be used to determine the age of the Earth and the solar system at around 4.54 billion years old. No igneous rocks found on the Earth's surface are that old, but iron meteorites which have crashed onto the Earth are fragments of the original solar nebula from which the Earth formed from and thus can be accurately aged by radioactive dating. The lengths of the half lives of some isotopes including Carbon-14, Potassium 40 etc. can be used to accurately age a lot of artifacts found in archaeology and human evolution.
I have studied a lot about organic chemistry and biochemistry. That is actually what all the life on Earth is based on. The whole principle is that the carbon atom is able to form 4 covalent bonds with other elements and thus provide for a great variety of organic compounds. The French scientist Louis Pasteur discovered in the late 19th century that all carbon based compounds possess a chirality or that all organic carbon compounds can possess mirror images of themselves. I have studied biochemistry and found out that the biochemistry of all living cells is actually very complex which involves the processes of nucleic acid DNA and RNA synthesis and the coding process for protein synthesis in all living cells. Our entire knowledge of the whole process is still in its early infancy as in fact, the structure of the genetic coding molecule, DNA was only figured a little over 60 years ago in the 1950s. Before that the whole process of how genetic traits were passed from one generation to the next was a completely mystery, even after Gregor Mendel figured out the basic principles of genetics and Charles Darwin figured out the basic mechanism of evolution in the mid 19th century.
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My Visual/Spatial and Language Skills
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Posted:Aug 18, 2017 2:36 am
Last Updated:Oct 18, 2017 2:56 am
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As I type this, it is the mid August 2017 on Long Island, New York when the weather has been hot since June. My paternal grandfather who was Roy G. Metcalf was a railroad engineer who also took up the hobby of oil painting after his retirement. He lived to be very old, dying at the age of 98 in 1995. My father also named Roy only lived to be 85 and he was an English major in college and was first employed as a reporter for the New York Mirror newspaper in the late 1950s and 1960s. Then later he worked as the newspaper editor for the Housing Authority Journal in New York City until his retirement. My younger brother was also an English major in college and graduated from Columbia University in Manhattan, NY.
Now, I seem to have inherited a substantial amount of verbal, mathematical and visual/spatial ability. When I was a in high school, I achieved a high score on the SAT (scholastic aptitude test). In middle and high school, I had no trouble at all in picking up the principles of mathematics in classes including algebra, geometry, trigonometry and later calculus in college. In verbal ability, I have almost completely mastered the English language as well as taught myself Russian, German, French, Spanish and Latin to an adequate level. I actually never really learned much Spanish in middle school, I only picked it up after teaching it myself from books as an adult.
In the human brain, the left cerebral hemisphere specializes in arithmetic/verbal ability while the right cerebral hemisphere specializes in visual/spatial ability. For me, both hemispheres appear to work equally well. Even when I was a and since then, I have absolutely no trouble at all in reading maps and then walking or driving around hitherto unknown areas. I have gone on a number of job interviews and blind dates into previously unknown areas on Long Island and have absolutely no difficulty in getting to know my way around. In my 20s, I visited Mexico City, Los Angeles, CA and central Florida and within a few days became very adept at knowing my way around those other regions of North America.
In March 1994, I became obsessed in figuring out how to solve the original 3 x 3 Rubik's Cube. I was attending my last semester at S.U.N.Y. at Farmingdale taking Technical Speech. I went to the campus library and took out some puzzle and mathematics books on the subject. I thoroughly studied the instructions on the sequences of how to turn the 6 cube faces and was able to solve it and I was even able to memorize the instructions well enough to solve it without looking at the puzzle manual. The goal is to make each of the 6 sides of the cube a solid color and there are over 4.3 quintillion possible configurations of the 6 cube faces.
In the summer of 1999, I became interested in pencil drawing, mainly because I had been driving my mother to a local art supply store on Long Island the previous spring and saw all the various art media supplies for sale in the store. For 3 days a week, I rigorously practiced in my house basement on a 11" x 14" white paper sketchbook and I did achieve a considerable level of skill in being able to depict accurately still life subjects like tools. model planes and items of furniture, etc. But I still have yet to master the ability to draw landscapes or portraits accurately. I did read a lot of art technique books from the local libraries in Nassau County, Long Island, NY.
When I was a , I started playing my father at chess and became well enough to beat him. In the winter of 1981, I bought my first portable chess computer and have since bought a dozen more and well as over 70 chess books. Over the last year since spring 2016, I have played the Fritz 14 chess computer on my desktop computer over 2,300 times and I haven't beaten it once. The MacBook Pro computer I am using now comes with a built in chess program and I still haven't beaten it. I find that playing chess is a terrific test of visual/spatial skill. I once saw the Russian Grandmaster Boris Spassky give a simultaneous exhibition at the Freeport Library on Long Island, NY of about 30 games but I didn't stay until the conclusion in the evening.
I have also become very adept since the summer of 1994, at using electronic graphing calculators which can all do advanced problems in algebra, calculus and geometry which hitherto as a in the 1970s, I was completely limited to using pencil and paper to solve those problems in middle and high school.
I almost forgot to mention that as a in the 1970s, me and my younger brother used to build plastic polystyrene model kits and a few balsa wood model kits of most of the airplanes used in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War and a few from World War I. I also build a few ship, submarine and World War II armored tank models. It takes a lot of skilled manual dexterity to be able to build model kits like those and following the sometimes complicated instructions that explain how to assemble them. It was a very educational experience in learning about the various military hardware used in the wars of the 20th century, almost like reading a history book.
A couple of years ago, I bought from a toy store, a plastic block set that was derived from the Soma Cube puzzle developed back in the 1930s. The puzzle box kit includes a set of three or four connected small green plastic cubes and a set of instruction cards that have a diagram on how to assemble the various cube sets into these different geometric constructions as well as how to assemble all nine cube combination segments into the original large Soma Cube. I spent all night working on it and achieved perfect success in being able to assemble almost all of the geometric combinations that came in the puzzle kit. I don't think that there exists a more definite proof of excellent visual/spatial ability.
When I was a back around 1970, my mother made me take recorder lessons, a recorder is musical instrument similar to a flute. When I was in middle school in Glendale, Queens, NY, in the spring of 1972, they said I had great instrumental musical ability as in being able to play the drums or other percussion instruments. I have studied on how to read musical notation from books. But I have never seriously pursued any musical ability in my life. I have never sung in my life, except to sing "Happy Birthday" very badly.
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My Interpretation of the Movies
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Posted:Aug 13, 2017 1:27 am
Last Updated:Aug 13, 2017 4:56 am
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I was born in 1959 and spent my early childhood in a 6 story high apartment complex in Rego Park, Queens, NY. My family had a Zenith vacuum tube black and white television which as a small I thought was a big deal at the time, but it now would seem to be very primitive by today's standards. The first movie I ever saw in its full entirely when I was 7 years old in 1967 was the (1939) "The Wizard of Oz" in but I didn't notice the transition from black and white to color when Dorothy first steps out of her house when she first arrives in Oz on a black and white television set. There was a movie theatre a few blocks from my apartment where the first movie I saw was "Crack in the World" (1965) about a scientific mining project to drill into the interior of the Earth's crust. I thought the conclusion of the movie was quite dramatic as the experiment goes awry and a small chuck of the Earth is propelled into outer space. Of course, I was just a little and didn't understand at all what the adult actors of the movie were talking about. In 1970, when I was 10 years old I saw "Gone with the Wind" (1939) about the American Civil War and the following era of southern reconstruction but I didn't understand it then at all being just a naive . Of course now as a mature adult, I now know full well about all the events that occurred in the 19th century that the movie depicted mostly from history books. I also saw "Anne of a Thousand Days" (1970) about the reign of Henry VIII in England in the 16th century and the beheading of his second wife, Anne Boyeln for adultery.
When my family moved to Hempstead in Nassau County on Long Island, NY, the first movie I saw was "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" (1972) which I thought was very dramatic and violent about enslaved apes in the near future taking over the human race. Then in the next summer of 1973, "Battle of the Planet of the Apes" came out which wasn't as good. Later that summer, in a local movie theatre in Hempstead, NY, I went to see a film festival of all the 5 Planet of the Apes movies that took all day and early evening. I was very impressed by the first movie, "Planet of the Apes" (1967) about 3 male astronauts and an ill fated woman astronaut traveling in a small spaceship approaching the speed of light and accidentally arriving on the planet Earth some 2,000 years in the future in the year 3978, where it turns out a nuclear war has completely devastated the Earth and intelligent speaking apes have taken over and enslaved what's left of the human race. In that movie theatre as a I also saw several Bruce Lee movies.
Another nearby movie theatre was the Uniondale Mini Cinema, about a mile south of my house, where in the spring of 1976, me, my younger brother and a friend of ours saw a film festival of movies about human miniaturization, all of which were completely implausible scientifically. I also saw the movie "Forbidden Planet"(1956) and was very impressed by the special effects.
The first James Bond movie I saw in a theater was "Live and Let Die"(1972). I have since seen all the rest, most of them on television. As a in the 1970s, I saw the movies "Jaws" (1975) and "2001: A Space Odyssey" (196 and was very impressed. Then in May 1977, me and my 2 brothers saw the first Star Wars movie, "Star Wars IV: A New Hope" in a movie theatre in Hicksville, New York and were completely enchanted by the special effects having previously only been limited to watching the much more primitive original Star Trek reruns on television. In May 1980, I took an MTA Nassau County bus trip of 4 miles east to Levittown , NY to see the first sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back" and was equally impressed.
The year 1982 had the largest release of science fiction and fantasy movies to date including "Krull", "Conan the Barbarian", "Tron", "Blade Runner", "Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan", John Carpenter's "The Thing", "Rocky III", etc. and I regularly went to the movies and saw them all. In 1983, when I obtained my full time electronics job on Long Island, me and my older brother got into the habit of going to the movies every Saturday afternoon to the movie multiplex in Valley Stream, NY.
I have seen several pornographic movies, but never in a movie theatre, but only as small screenings like in high school, college or on home DVD video. Currently, I usually never go to see movies playing in a theatre and usually wait for them to be sold on DVD several months later. The last movie I saw in a theatre was "Rogue One" (2017) last January 2017.
As a , I did get a film Super 8 movie camera for the Christmas of 1975. In the summer of 1982, I did shoot about 20, short 3 minute Super 8 films of various things going around the house which I still have. Much later, I bought several VCR and DVD camcorders and acquired some experience in shooting videos around 28 minutes long in the last few years.
I have seen most of the super hero movies including Superman, Batman and a lot of the Marvel franchise movies. I have seen all the space opera movies of the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises. I have seen most of Arnold Schwarzenegger's and Sylvester Stallone's movies. My favorite genres are science fiction, action adventure and romantic comedy movies but I can't stand most horror movies. I am usually in the habit of watching on television broadcast, any movie I haven't seen before out of curiosity. I also like crime melodramas. I also like movies on intellectual subjects like mathematics and chess.
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My Perception of the Solar System
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Posted:Aug 9, 2017 2:54 am
Last Updated:Sep 6, 2017 3:33 am
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Now that I'm a mature man, 57 years old, I often think of the way I first perceived the Earth and the solar system since I was a in the 1960s. Of course, even as a small , I remember looking at the sun and the moon. When I was 11 years old in 1971, I recall observing the planet Jupiter as a very bright white appearing star in the sky above Rego Park, Queens, NY. About the same time, my parents gave me a small 2-inch refractor telescope painted white. I vividly recall using it to look at the sun's surface and observe sunspots with a sun filter in the summer of 1971 at a bungalow colony in Kerhonkson, NY. I was very much aware that those small sunspots I was observing were much larger than our Earth in size. I also saw the craters and maria of the moon and the planet Jupiter around the same time. I saw the colored cloud belts and 4 large satellites of Jupiter. In the autumn of 1972, I was looking at this ordinary looking 1st magnitude yellow star in the constellation Taurus low in the evening southeastern sky with my telescope and I had difficulty getting the tiny image into focus as these two small "holes" in the image kept appearing. After a few minutes, I finally realized that I was in fact looking at the planet Saturn and those two "holes" were in fact the space between the planet's disc and its ring system. That was quite a revelation for a naive 13 year old .
Then in 1985, I purchased a much larger 8-inch reflector telescope which was too large and very awkward to use. The major observation I made with it was to observe and make out the disc of the red planet Mars on one of its very close every 15 year oppositions when it becomes brighter than Jupiter for a few weeks in the month of August low in the southern sky and is only 35 million miles away from Earth opposite the sun. I could distinctly make out the tiny disc and see a dry ice white polar cap. I gave my mother and brother a chance to observe it.
When I was a until the mid 1970s, that was before the launch of the interplanetary probes, Pioneer, Viking, Venera, Magellan and Voyager, etc. So, we still didn't know exactly much about the appearance and surfaces of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and their satellites. I recall reading by now outdated astronomy books about them. Then Voyager 2 and New Horizons showed us what Uranus, Neptune and Pluto look like close up later on. I still look forward to someday observing Uranus and Neptune through a telescope.
When I was employed as a night watchman at Jones Beach State Park on Long Island, New York on clear nights, I became very aware of the rising times and phases of the moon. I noticed that the full moon appeared very bright and lit up the entire landscape while 2 weeks later, the half moon hardly lit up anything.
I have seen the planets, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in the sky but I've always wanted to see Mercury, Uranus and Neptune. Often in the autumn night sky I have always desperately tried to look for the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.3 million light years distant from our Milky Way galaxy, which is supposed to be visible to the unaided human eye but I've never been able to see it, obviously because of all the annoying light pollution prevalent over the eastern United States where I live. They say it is about 3 times the diameter of the full moon.
I vividly remember the Surveyor probe landing on the moon in the mid 1960s and then all the Apollo missions to the moon. I have seen a couple of moon rocks at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, NY. Actually, Earth rocks and minerals are a lot more interesting. As a , I used to read in astronomy books, all the statistical facts about the planets and moons of the solar system including their masses, physical dimensions, orbital characteristics, axial tilts, etc. Back then, those books had just artist's conceptions of what those planets looked like, before the later interplanetary probes arrived and took close up photographs.
I saw a television documentary that explained that the Earth and the other planets condensed from a debris ring orbiting the sun composed of sand sized particulate matter over 4.6 billion years ago. I have seen several ton iron meteorites in museums. One thing I've always wanted to see is the Zodiac light produced by small particulate debris orbiting in the plane of the ecliptic which is supposed to be seen at dawn or dusk in March and September, but I've never seen it because of all the urban light pollution.
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My non existent Sex Life
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Posted:Aug 5, 2017 10:24 pm
Last Updated:Aug 12, 2017 6:02 am
6099 Views
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Now that I am a mature man of 57 years old, one thing I always am thinking about is the year 1971, when I was 11 years old and just a pretty naive little who was attending sixth grade in an elementary school in Middle Village, Queens, New York. My teacher that year was a very pretty, red haired, 26 year old woman named Patricia Tactktill. In that class, I had my first introduction to ancient history as we were assigned a textbook about it which was never finished. I learned about the first civilizations that started in river valleys around 5,000 years ago or around 3,000 B.C.E. in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China, the same time that writing and history had begun. I have since studied a lot more about it.
In the spring of 1971, the class went on on field trip to nearby Kennedy Airport in southern Queens, NY. We first arrived at one of the airport's hangers then walked maybe several hundred feet to go aboard a 747 jetliner. As I was walking with the rest of the class, I noticed my very sexy young adult woman teacher walking ahead of me wearing a black and white dress and her legs were exposed. All of a sudden I developed this penile erection which made it very difficult to keep my pace with the rest of the students. As I was just an inexperienced preteen , my young adult woman teacher appeared to be this incredibly sexy goddess. I had no idea exactly what sex was then. Then later that spring in June 1971, I was unfortunate enough to rub my arms and face in some poison ivy and developed a rash, she called me to the front of the class and said, "From now on, you will stay out of gardens."
I have a woman first cousin named Beverly, about 4 months older than me and on one occasion in the summer of 1973, when I was 13 years old, I was very strongly sexually aroused in her presence on a family visit in upstate New York and had an inconvenient erection which was embarrassing. She is a grandmother now.
I had my first exposure to pornography when I was probably 7 years old in 1967 and saw in a magazine, a black and white photograph of a naked woman's breasts. Of course, I have seen a lot more pornography since then.
One thing I am always thinking about is in having observed other animals having sex. In September 1972, my family had just moved into a two story house in Nassau County I still live in now. We had a three year old female black and white tabby cat named Fuzzy. On one afternoon, I looked out a front north facing window of the house and all of a sudden noticed that she was having sexual intercourse with another black colored male cat from the local neighborhood. The male cat was mounted on her on the top, a little different from the way most humans have sex. She then became pregnant with four kittens. Two months later around Thanksgiving in November 1972, she was going through labor in an upstairs bathroom near my bedroom in the house. I then firsthand observed a male kitten being born before my eyes. She then delivered three more female kittens. We only kept the male kitten we named Ruffy or Rufus. A few years later, I was petting him in my room and he developed an erection and I saw his penis which was colored light pink. I was a still a and hadn't masturbated yet so I didn't really understand what I was looking at.
In the spring of 1984, I took a sightseeing automobile trip around May in the Catskill mountains of southern New York state. I was taking a short hike around a small creek near one of the rivers there and I suddenly stumbled upon two small green newts around three inches in length which appeared to be tightly clutching each other and having sex. I was suddenly thinking that I was observing these two tiny amphibians which were having a much better sex life than I have ever had in my life, even though I know that I am a much more highly evolved very intelligent modern human being, it was sort of a weird feeling. Then of course in the summer months, I often find myself observing insects like flies, beetles and dragonflies which are mounted on top of one another having sex, sometimes even flying while doing so. When I was a , I used to look at single celled protozoa swimming around in the water on the microscope slide around only 100 microns in size and I sometimes noticed that I occasionally that I observed two of them being conjoined together as they appeared to be mating and exchanging genetic material from one cell to another. When I kept a small vegetable garden near my house from 1982 to 1990, I used to get into the habit of hand pollenating the sweet corn plants as corn plants are grass plants which are wind pollenated.
When I attended middle and high school in the 1970s, I have a lot of vivid memories of being very strongly sexually aroused by several of the female students and teachers I was in the immediate vicinity in, in the school building. Around that I of course watched several television programs and usually noticed attractive women present in them. I often find that the main motivation for watching a lot of television shows or movies is just to observe the attractive women present in them
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My ideal first date with a woman
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Posted:Aug 3, 2017 3:27 am
Last Updated:Oct 20, 2017 4:22 am
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Hi, I am not totally inexperienced in having a date with a woman. Since my mid 20s, I have been on about 10 blind dates and 3 rounds of speed dating all of which were utterly and totally fruitless in terms of getting a normal heterosexual relationship with a woman. So far, my entire sexual experience has been just limited to self sex or masturbation which I have indulged in for the past 36 years since the spring of 1981 usually every other day.
In a very pleasant hypothetical situation, since I haven't driven a car in almost 5 years on Long Island, I would probably take mass transit to arrive at the location of the blind date. We should have absolutely no problem in recognizing each other as we've both seen each others photographs on the internet. Of course, I know full well, when you see someone in person in 3 dimensions, the experience Is actually very different from just looking at a 2 dimensional photograph on a computer screen. Upon first meeting, we would then exchange pleasantries like talking about the weather or commenting on the appearance of the place we find ourselves in.
My conception of having a first date is to maybe see a movie, a play or a musical performance or walk around sightseeing like on a beach or a museum. Then afterward, we could grab a bite to eat even at just a fast food restaurant which I do all the time. This ideal date would then conclude with just a very platonic superficial kiss. Any potential sexual relationship we might have would only occur after maybe several months of us seeing each other. The whole thing would be pure heaven to me.
I went on my first blind date 33 years ago in August 1984 and my last one was in January 1992. None of them obviously went very well as I am still single. I found that the main obstacle on going on a blind date was the initial first meeting. I have studied a lot of psychology and found that people will make their first initial impression and conception of what another person is like within the first 5 minutes or even less time upon a first meeting. I've read that most women will make the decision of whether or not they will have sexual relations with a potential male partner within a mere 3 minutes or so after first meeting them and exchanging initial pleasantries. On all the blind dates I've been on so far, they have all been in the evening and the activities we did together were limited to just going to a bar or a fast food restaurant and having a small amount of conversation to get to know one another. On one occasion in October 1989 we went to see a movie playing in the Commack multiplex in Commack, Long Island to see "Crimes and Misdemeanors" which I sort of enjoyed. I did have a blind date with a 29 year old woman named Carrie at a fast food restaurant in Bethpage, Long Island around noon on a sunny spring day on March 20, 1990. We didn't hit it off, for one thing she was a very physically large woman, 6 feet tall, bigger than me and I'm a rather large person at 6 ft. tall, 280 lbs.,
In addition to being on blind dates, since the autumn of 1981, I have been on numerous job interviews usually at electronic companies located in Nassau or western Suffolk county on Long Island, New York. On most of those occasions, the whole experience is an annoying ordeal as I have to wake up early in the morning, put on an uncomfortable suit and tie then figure out how to drive to the company building location from reading the directions on a street atlas and then drive over to make it in time and look for an available parking spot. Then upon arriving in the building and announcing my presence, some woman receptionist sitting at a desk gives me a job application to fill out which is often very lengthy and annoying to do so. Then after that, I will meet the job interviewer which is never, ever an attractive young woman but usually an obnoxious middle aged male interviewer usually dressed in an informal manner. In the course of the brief interview, we always never hit it off as being a very shy person, I obviously give this impression of being too socially awkward and clumsy to fulfill the requirements of the job description and that really pisses me off as I have gone to all the trouble to wake up early, drive over to that company location and I am wearing this very dignified appearing suit and almost everyone else I see in that building is usually dressed very informally in contrast. The job positions I have usually applied for are electronic technician and electronic assembler. I haven't been on a job interview since 2006.
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