I saw in a number of places that the lunar eclipse, which is theoretically happening right now (but since I am in a snow storm I can only imagine…), hasn’t come on the winter solstice for 456 years. I guess that large number s are always an attractive idea. The fact is that with the exception of solar eclipses, this is one of the most noticeable and obvious events in the sky that you could see (save for snow…).

The thing about this which I find interesting is that so few people actually look at the night sky these days (these days being anytime in the last 40 years or so…). This is the original nightly entertainment which our ancestors spent millennia wondering about.

Nowadays the only real irony is that there are so many science fiction TV shows, Movies, and books based upon the notion that we will ultimately end up living in outer space… I wonder why anyone would want to go there…if they are reticent about spending the time to walk outside and to merely look up…

In any case for those who do have weather conducive for evening watching…good luck, and for the rest of us who are ‘socked in’, here are a couple links to fill in for the experience:

Solstice-eclipse overlap first in 456 years

Lunar Eclipses for Beginners

Solstice Lunar Eclipse

As a final perspective about this longest night of the year, for me, especially since it is overcast and snowing, I can spend time wondering what this experience must have been like in…let’s say, the 13^th century. This was a time where other than candles and fires…there would have been no other light after dusk…except for the night skies. I guess that while our ancestors back then didn’t have to deal with light pollution…there were a few other detractions to compensate (the Black Death, small pox, and an expected longevity of on about 40 years…).

 

I was strolling through the internet the other day, and ran across an article (and a few related pieces…) which represent what the best of cosmology is…to me. The article covered an idea, and some measured data…about how some galaxy super clusters are moving away from us at additional (and incredible) speeds. The thought is that they are being gravitationally attracted to some large cluster of galaxies beyond the edge of what we can see (i.e. the observable universe…).

The article: Trans-cosmic flow broadens our horizon, in the online portion of discover magazine (under: blogs/bad astronomy) has a good (as in non-technical) presentation of this concept, and what it means.

The fabric of space is expanding, with the cosmos getting bigger every day. This has an odd effect: objects farther away appear to be moving more rapidly away from us. Eventually, an object can be so far away that the space between us is effectively expanding faster than the speed of light! This doesn’t violate any physical laws, because nothing material is actually moving at transluminal speeds; it’s just that there is more space itself between us and that object all the time.

This effect naturally provides us with a cosmic horizon. Any object “moving away” from us faster than light can’t be seen by us; the photons it emits can’t keep up with the expansion of space. They lose energy and fall away from view (like a slow walker on a fast treadmill… or better yet, an ant walking along a rubber band that is being stretched). So, to us, an object far enough away is invisible, beyond the Universal horizon.

Weird, huh? Yeah, as usual, things get even weirder.

Now imagine a third object, say a cluster of galaxies that lies between us and the one that is beyond our horizon. To the cluster, the object may still be visible, because it’s closer, and therefore not receding as rapidly. It’s like an island just over the horizon to you as you look seaward from the beach; to you the island is invisible, but to someone a few kilometers out to sea in a yacht the island is still visible.

That cluster can still be affected by the more distant object, pulled by its gravity, for example. To us, farther away, we don’t see that distant object, but to the cluster, it is sitting right there and still, literally, a force with which to be reckoned

Since reading this article, I’ve found a few more covering this idea:

Top 100 Stories of 2010 #76: What Lies Beyond the Edge of the Universe

Mysterious “Dark Flow” Is Tugging Galaxies beyond the Universe’s Horizon

Dark flow (this Wikipedia article has some related (as always) topics which are as interesting!)

On YouTube, I found some other resources which are worthy of checking out:

The YouTube SpaceRip channel, a strange video blog called imagining the tenth dimension.

All of these online magazine articles and YouTube channels are quite interesting, perhaps as an additional mental trinket that I could add is yet another physics/cosmology related article: Do Physical Laws vary From Place to Place? As I started to mention, I find that these sorts of topics are a great mental cleanser in that they REALLY give you a broader frame of reference with regard to the tiny world we live in.

 

Over the last couple of weeks I have been slowly accumulating some interesting bits of new from various online sources. I usually don’t keep my finger too close to the current events pulse, but since I have a couple, I guess that it’s time to look them over…

First off (to whet one’s appetite for this stuff), I have what appears to be comment fodder from a New York Times editorial page article. I say comment fodder, if only because I see these sorts of articles every so often on various editorial; pages. They are mostly to incense readers to the degree that they will write comments to the author (99% disagreeing…). It must be great for circulation (when performed in moderation).

So, to start: There Is No College Cost Crisis (by Stanley Fish) is a typical blood pressure inducing screed, but with a rather interesting twist. You see the author of the article is taking the position of a fence sitter, he is merely relaying the authors position (economists Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman), that rapidly increasing college costs are directly related to the fact that colleges have been impelled to spend seemingly horrendous amounts of money on infrastructural improvements and technology (I personally found this assertion to be intentionally vague…).

If you are in college, have college student loans (still paying them…), or if you have children either about to enter or are currently attending college, this article will likely not assuage any of the reasonable doubts you may have felt about what you were paying for…

In the center right political blog Powerline, one of the authors (Scott Johnson) has a post: Coming soon to a neighborhood near you, which discusses an alarming addition to the South and Central American political (and military) landscape. It seems that part of Venezuela’s continuing accords with Iran includes basing of surface to surface missiles (Iranian Shahab 3 (range 1300-1500 km), Scud-B (285-330 km), and Scud-C (300, 500 and 700 km)).

I remember the Cuban missile crisis (arguably the closest we (as in the world) ever got to a REAL thermonuclear war!). If you also throw in some things like the Munroe Doctrine…it makes you wonder why there has been so little news coverage of this rather important development.

To start to add a little lightness to this post I have (for a slow start)an article from Mashable, which shows a wonderful graphic of the growing inroads which Facebook has been making (if only in the last two years…). Mapping Facebook’s Global Takeover, the actual graphic can be seen here.

And finally, as a shallow means to cleanse your palate of some of the darker elements of this post, I have this. There are no comments I could come up for this…

 

This series of posts I am writing about social networking is not some sort of marketing method or a means of proselytizing the wonders of using these online tools. I only want to show you the possible advantages that could come from into looking into these new networks. I mentioned the fact that Facebook has gotten so big so fast (at last count well over 500 million and counting…), that it is as complex as any other human society (replete with good and bad actors). Beyond the Facebook phenomenon, there are plenty of related kinds of sites out there: MySpace, Orkut, various instant messengers (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, Gtalk, etc.), and video calling programs (Skype, Vonage, et.al.), and finally we come to a tool that almost everyone I that I have met knows the name, but almost always doesn’t get it…Twitter.

Twitter for those few of you who have never heard of Twitter or ‘tweets’, is a free online service where you can post ‘tweets’ (140 characters maximum per tweet). I think that Twitter has gotten a bad rap by being tied to closely to young Hollywood narcissists who tweet to their breathless throngs about what they had for breakfast, and where they buy their shoes… The fact is Twitter has slowly become a necessity for those who really want to keep track of breaking news events, sports scores, and any other perishable information.

I wonder how the chattering class (mainstream media types, journalists, and pundits) could live without this tool.

For someone who may be interested in…let’s say…Notre Dame football, NC State basketball, the Big Ten results, or almost any sporting event result. Twitter can be a pretty simple thing to set up and use…the ‘tweets’ come to you automatically.

Since it came out on the online scene, there have been some worthwhile additions to Twitter. There are plenty of URL shortening services which allow you to tweet long addresses, there are services which allow you to tweet pictures (even directly from your phone (like an MMS text message). I have checked out some video services which allow you to create 12 second videos as tweets.

If you add in the topic of Hash tags, Twitter becomes even more powerful. By and large, or those who use the internet to gather information, especially current event or time sensitive information, Twitter is slowly becoming a practical replacement for those who use RSS readers (another topic which you should look into , if you haven’t tried one out…yet.).

As a strange sort of a close to this whole idea of social networking (for middle aged guys), I can see Twitter as different from most of the rest of these online tools, in that it can easily be used only to gather information, versus interacting with some designated friends (of any sort). As I understand middle aged guys, this might be an actual selling point for Twitter over such (much more interactive) tools as any of the long list of the already mentioned IM’s, VOIP clients, EBay, Facebook, MySpace, et.al.

 

Facebook…this is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. For many (especially the more young and female amongst us) this online giant has become a ubiquitous part of one’s daily life. For my ‘target audience’ (i.e. old duffers like me…) Facebook is seen as the face of everything they are not interested in. My point is that you need to know about something to be able to effectively dismiss it…and with regard to this topic, with this audience…ignorance abounds.

Facebook is neither a great social good, nor some den of evil (it has both though…). I suppose I should start with the obvious. Last week I got a chance to meet with some old work friends (a bunch of electrical engineers I worked with ten years ago). It was nice to see them, and as part of a number of conversations I had that night, the topic of Facebook came up…I polled the 12-15 men (all over 40 years old) , and the only users of Facebook did so at the behest of their wives (all three of them)… Delving further was obviously putting a damper on the festivities and beer drinking so I moved on to some other topics…

The fact is that there are a lot of trivial, meaningless, and vacuous things on Facebook (if you choose to deal with them, that is…). I have no intention of sugar coating what Facebook could represent to you, but there are things of value here too.

Here is where it starts to get a bit complicated. There are plenty of people and businesses which use Facebook as a place for free advertisement and marketing. Some of this is worthwhile (it’s free, after all), but there are plenty of ‘get rich quick’ types fouling the waters. An old friend of mine (in an email jus this morning) was telling me that she was about to seriously truncate her involvement with Facebook (et.al.) since she was being inundated with some neighbors using her as prey in their Multi-Level Marketing schemes…It appeared to be a complicated story…of which I have only a little knowledge…

The point is that with the internet at large there is a growing need to act like a circumspect adult, in that you need to be aware of your rights, your need for some personal security, and that there ARE wolves in the woods. The same goes for Facebook…no more, no less.

My point is that taking this into consideration, there are still some compelling reasons to look this online site/service over. I suppose it could be seen as a joke to saw that the ‘guys’ I was talking to last week were only on Facebook because of their wives compelling them to. While there are cases in which this might be, there are some reasonable justifications for a man to enter this world. The first reason is pretty simple: If you are married and have kids…

I’ve already stated that the internet (as with Facebook) you should be careful, the same goes (in spades) if you have kids spending time online (either they will, or they do…). There are less imperative reasons, such as developing a central place to interact with your buddies…emails can leave more obvious trails (e.g. regarding poker games, meeting the guys at a bar to watch a game, Super bowl parties etc.). And there are reasonable and decent people and businesses that use Facebook as a marketing tool.

The last time I looked (6 months ago?) Facebook had 500 million members. Not checking out Facebook at this point is about the same as disavowing TV as having no worth…in 1946.

 

With regard to the internet at large, this has to be one of the more obvious elephants in the room (i.e. that no one ever refers to…). Almost every fellow (middle aged guy) member of my age cohort has almost nothing to do with social networking. This isn’t to say that there are none…I see plenty of motivated guys using such things as Facebook pages as a means to market their ideas, business, hobby, etc. But they only represent that very tiny portion of the iceberg which sees the sky…

There are many faces to what we could call social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, all IM platforms, Skype, there are some inroads from SMS and MMS texting, even EBay has a functional social component…). Some of these sites have more involvement by my aforementioned peers (read: EBay, Craig’s List, et.al.), but I run into very few male acquaintances who are conversant with Facebook, let alone Twitter.

I find this curious (actually, if you read my blog often…I find almost everything curious…I’m just saying…). My take on this is similar to how I see men getting involved with some aspects of the great outdoors (e.g. hunting, fishing, ice fishing, etc.). The simple majority of guys I know who delve ‘into the woods’, usually do this to get away from the wife. Obviously I am not proselytizing this, but you can even see this in 50’s and 60’s TV sitcoms…

So, in a related manner, many middle aged men shy away from many social networking sites because they see them as being dominated by female sensibilities (once again, their view, not mine). There is a strange irony in place (if this thesis were to be true, even to a small degree) in that this situation seems to be diverging over time. The strangeness (for me) is that it is not based upon any sort of practicality, and that there are plenty of valid and worthwhile reasons for any of these guys to extend themselves into this new milieu.

OF course there are the boundary conditions…I know of a lot of guys who use these tools in a professional situation, but are reticent to use them in their private lives. I’ve been given all kinds of arguments stating: “these new forms of communications debase and trivialize the nature of what could take place.” “These new internet widgets are a flash in the pan, and I am not that interested in following fashions to that degree.” “Using these tools (mostly with regard to SMS and IM technology) reduces a conversation to a string of non sequiturs.” I could go on…

The fact of the matter is that some of these points are basically true, with the exception of the notion that these new forms of communications are a flash in the pan. The trick here is to look over and embrace the technology, to mold it to the needs you have and to toss away what doesn’t have value. This is a bit different from dismissing these new ideas out of hand (a common enough occurrence in my social set…).

To further this premise, I am going to try to present some of the potentials in using a few of these new tools. I intend to write in the language of middle aged guys (my native language), and as a result, at least some of you will have some more cogent reasons not to embrace this technology…

 

I can see in myself, and to a growing degree in our culture, that technology has allowed us to replace large portions of the ‘personal things’ which we use as a form of personal identification and even as adjuncts in how we define ourselves. I am talking about such things as the ability to reduce all documents, photos, books, movies, songs, and almost all forms of personal communications into digital formats, housed in technology which gets smaller every year.

I have all of these things reduced into my iPad, NetBook, a few USB drives, and my iPhone. With my ‘things of value’ inside these appliances, what else is really needed for my life? By this, I am sort of begging the question as to whether there is really a describable need to have so many tangible, physical things to define you…this includes such things as: all of the stuff we fill our living rooms with, our rec-rooms, and even much of what is in our bedrooms. Mind you , I am not advocating moving into the nearest park, I am only asking a question…what are some of the less obvious aspects of subsuming most (or all) of the things which are important (to us) into technology which would potentially fit into a paper lunch bag?

There are all kinds of things implicit in this perspective, such as: how much ‘stuff do we need? How much effort do we spend in storing and maintaining all of this ‘stuff’? How much of our lives can really be saved as digital artifacts? Maybe better stated would be how much further will we go?

With so much of our personal communications, business, finances, and entertainment dealt with in the cloud, the internet, or saved in digital formats, it seems that ‘where’ we are in the physical world is described by, and mostly limited by access to electricity and online access…

The vast majority of us are already doing most of our financial interactions (i.e. credit card purchases, banking in general, and even paying our taxes) online. Is there a plausible scenario where one could see the end of first class mail? Are having a phone number and an email address the future equivalent of a physical mailing address?

In the last several years I have seen (over and over) various perspectives about telecommuting, that is, to work, but not to be at work. Will there come a time where being at home isn’t really being at home?

In any case, I am not presenting some debatable thesis, I am merely thinking aloud…

 

This post is a book review of two books; one which I first read in 1977, and the other which I just finished. My reasons for putting these two books together will soon become quite obvious.

The first book was suggested to me from a Psychology Today magazine review in early 1977 (yeah, I know…a long time ago…). The book: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Princeton Psychologist Julian Jaynes was a revelation to me. Jayne’s quest was to try to describe how consciousness arose in humans. His premise, that consciousness was an emergent component of the hardware. His thesis was that we went through what could be called a ‘software’ upgrade near the end of the first millennia (BCE). Much of this book was going through etymologies and origins of the words homer used.

The interesting thing about this thesis was that since we have (reasonably accurate) text of the Iliad and Odyssey, we actually have some evidence of what he was propounding. As a consequence much of the book is consumed with discussion of and delving into word etymologies.

For what it’s worth, this book got me interested in Linguistics (the subtext through which Jaynes was making his hypothesis about psychology). There is another point which is worth considering here. While the arguments put forth in this book may be true, the fact is that there is no real way to prove it. The net result is an interesting journal through ancient literary works (the Iliad could be described as very close to being the load bearing pillar of western culture), a very strange sort of detective story of early Greek word etymologies and what is a spectacularly beautiful argument…irrespective of whether it is the truth or not…

For me, this book was an amazing intellectual flight of fancy, and when read as if it were only literature it is quite satisfying.

With this book deep in my memory, I just ran across a book which relates to some of the same intellectual territory. The linguist Guy Deutscher has a new book out: Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages which is mostly a broad discussion about how the idea of whether the language you speak colors and places limits upon the ideas with which you might come to. Part of this book is a journey into the dark underside of the scientific community (in this case 20^th century linguistics), as well as some amazing topics.

The first topic which caused me to recall the Jaynes’ book was at the beginning of ‘through the language glass’. This is the allusion to Gladstone’s opus and translation of Homer (yes, THAT Gladstone…back then Prime Ministers were also immensely gifted classical scholars…). To get to the story…Gladstone related that in his very literal translations of Homer, he found some curious discrepancies in how the author used color to illuminate and describe scenes in the Iliad. With dues respect to such time immemorial phrases as ‘rosy fingered dawn’ and ‘the wine dark sea’, the fact is that Homer never alluded to anything with the color blue. Not once in any of these first millennium BCE documents is there a use of the color blue, and as you dig deeper you can see some very, very strange uses of the names of colors used in quite incongruous way.

This gets stranger…a similar linguistic inventory of the Old Testament (portions from similar eras) shows very similar ‘odd’ uses (at least to us moderns) of color to describe things, ‘green gold’ for instance. In any case, books like this interest me a lot in that they put forth interesting ideas which might never be proven (yeah, I have read a lot about string theory too…), but which can light up one’s imagination…

 

Fifteen or twenty years ago, when I was still working in the electronics world I was presented with an interesting thought experiment by my mentor Cris Metzler. His question was “which books would you use to create a technical library for the electronics technicians (and some entry level electrical engineers)?”

I should preface this point with a small bit of back story. My mentor, Cris, who was a (at least in some aspects of the many roles he played at that company) sort of expert ‘hired gun’. He was almost always the last resort to those who were lost and incapable of solving any variety of electronics and troubleshooting problems. I was quite lucky that he took me under his wing (e.g. as a student into some of the more Zen-like aspects of analog electronics), as a matter of fact he is still a great friend…

In any case, he presented me with this poser about a technical library. At first I was considering just throwing in some of the textbooks I had accumulated from my previous technical education, but then I started to go further afield. Some of the answers I was coming to included some of the classic texts, such as Paul Horowitz’s the art of Electronics.

The next time I saw Cris I presented my results… He gave me a clue witch completely changed my view of the electronics world… He suggested that I add Arthur Conan Doyle’s the adventures of Sherlock Holmes! As I sat there thinking about this idea, it started to make more and more sense. A subtext to this techlab technical library was to provide the stimulus and motivation for beginners in the world of e4lectronics troubleshooting (RF analog electronics). This is a rather forbidding arena for beginners, and the idea of honing the rational skills and mental acumen one has is utterly important to start to see things in a manner which can allow you to fix things.

From the stand point of stimulus and motivation, Sherlock Holmes seemed to me to fit the bill far more than a pile of relatively arcane and complex books on RF theory.

Over the years as I reflect on this little (but quite important) experience I had, I have come to see that looking at things from the standpoint of skills and motivation is of at least as much value as merely looking at the pertinent facts which are the parts of a problem. This applies to electronics, programming, car repair, diagnostic medicine, and (gasp!) even in teaching.

As aspect of this realization is that it is incredibly valuable to amass as many mental tools as one can (and to metaphorically keep them sharp and well oiled).These analytical tools (including such big tools as inductive and deductive logic) are very powerful when used on the appropriate subjects. These tools work quite well in any arena, which is primarily governed by physical laws.

In other words the only real shortcomings I have found in developing this sort of mathematical rigor in my thinking comes when you try to use these ‘tools’ in areas which are outside of physical laws (e.g. the vagaries of human interaction, aesthetics, theology, metaphysics (in some cases), etc.).

In some ways this topic, that of the real value in developing mental acumen, rigor in how one thinks relates to my previous posts (about the use of calculators) in that much of this sort of mental discipline comes from a foundation in having real mastery of such things as associative, distributive, and commutative laws (i.e. much of arithmetic) and the basic s of algebra.

The level of technology used in our culture seems to be growing (on a nearly daily basis) and anyone without some of these tools will be relegated to world where they would become what could be called ‘digital peasants’. This is my reason or advocating some level of rigor in math and the sciences…

As a close, especially for those who have some interest in electronics (especially in designing and troubleshooting RF circuits), I have a link to Cris’s website, where he has a copy of his Laws of RF electronics

 

MY last post (just below) engendered a couple very good comments. Part of today’s post is (in a small way) a sort of thanks to these two writers in that they have helped me to coalesce my thoughts on the issue I hoped to get across. My original post devolved around the issue whether all uses of technology in our lives is always a good thing. A subtext of my post was a question about whether we really consider what we throw away when presented with shiny new technology.

In the particular case of the (in my estimation) the overuse of calculators in arithmetic classes in elementary and middle school. I have subbed in enough math classes to see that they create some vastly lowered expectation in what students think that they can achieve. I have been through more than a few (very respectful) debates with some of these student’s teachers, and find that I was only given ‘tactical’ answers as to the utility in the use of these tools.

No teacher (at least no teacher I ever talked to)ever longer term justifications for using these tools…it was mostly about diminishing classroom management problems, and possibly differentiating instruction for students with widely varying interests, motivations, and skill levels… Like I said, these are what I would deed tactical answers (short term, not to diminish what the teachers were trying to accomplish…).

I’ve spend more than a few years working in some technical industries. Having some semblance of math ability (if only in the guise of being a ration al thinker) was the only way to get ahead. The fact is, learning math is a discipline much like learning any other language. It takes discipline some rote memorization and a lot of repetition (none of which are than much fun for students or teachers). But it pays off. To diminish students chances in this manner (i.e. severely limiting the amount of actual repetition and the time spent in grinding through math exercises) is quite arguably not serving any students best interests (in the long term).

So, with this ‘thesis’ recapitulated, I can go back to trying to answer my some of my commenter’s points.

First off, my first commenter gave me a chance to see that there is a need for a bit more rigor in how I was trying to express myself. But the notion that the use of calculators is a prosthetic device is merely a definition of the use of the object, what I was wondering about is short and long term utility in the use of some of these prosthetic devices (namely: The use of calculators in elementary and middle school math classes). So, in that regard, I would agree with my first commenter that this is certainly an area filled with a lot of things worth discussing, but that it was only tangentially related to what I was trying (rather ineffectively, as it turned out) to describe (this is the case where the comment allowed me to see that I REALLY needed to clear up my points!).

My second commenter took a similar tack in describing such seemingly universally modern tools as Google searches as a similar case in which we are apparently losing something in the bargain of adopting new technologies. I understand the argument, but would hasten to add that the internet and Google as a search engine have created for us a tool which has such immense power that whatever it replaced was so different (‘old school’ library searches for finite amounts of salient information) that it is a completely different animal. In the past we had to go through (comparatively) great pains to gather whatever information we might have needed to create some ‘researched’ work product. The point was about information scarcity and how to hoard what little you had. Now the world in upside down, in that the modern rule is about developing increasingly sophisticated tools with which to winnow down the nearly infinite amounts of information we must wade through.

This is certainly another quite interesting idea and the reverberations of what this may signify in our world are going to take time to resolve.

These are some pretty big ideas. In comparison, I was (sadly enough) dealing with what can only be seen as a paltry thought, where I was wondering what the real utility was in allowing students to use calculators in math cases (usually from grades 2-8). Admittedly the calculator could be seen as a prosthetic device…just as a GPS unit or a wristwatch, or even the use of a search engine (if you stretch the definition just a bit). My question was more about the long term utility in merely learning concepts and mechanical tools (only in theory) without having the need to develop related authentic mastery of the skills…

To take this idea a bit further (sadly enough; reductio ad absurdum) what would you think if elementary schools allowed students access to computers such that they could use spellcheckers to get through spelling tests, and never had to ‘really’ learn the alphabet (it is merely rote memorization anyhow…).

The irony implied in my original thoughts (however poorly stated) is that we are using high technology tools to allow students to get by without being very well prepared to deal with the same technology.

OK, maybe this is a big idea…