Who?

  Driving back from Vermont (again) the other day, I was going through the little town of Hoosick, NY. While sitting at the traffic light, I happen to notice a small metal historic marker on the corner, the kind that you occasionally see.  From my vantage point, I was able to read "Chester A. Arthur". Below the name, was the word "President".  I thought to myself, "President of what?"  So, as I proceeded to drive, I said out loud "OK Google, who is Chester A. Arthur" (I think Siri is a more friendly entity then Google Now) She replied back "Chester Alan Arthur  was an American attorney and politician who served as the 21st President of the United States."

  President of the United States?!  I guess I must have been sleeping in class during those lectures.  I have no memory of him.  So I read that he served one term from 1881 to 1885.  He was Vice President and fell into the job because President James A. Garfield (I DID hear of him!) was assassinated. Further reading told me that Arthur did an ok job as president.  I looked at the list of all US presidents and I had a memory in History of all of them except good ol' Chester.
  So why was there a marker in Hoosick, NY when Chester Arthur was born in Fairfield, VT and buried in Albany, NY?  It seems that he once lived in Hoosick.  The town is probably most famous for being the burial place of Grandma Moses.

What Matters Most....

  It has become acutely aware to me that there has been a decline in my agility over the past few years.  It seems like it is occurring increasingly more in a geometric function rather than linear.
Of course I could keep it at bay more if I took better care of myself, but I am trying (however there is room for improvement!).
  I mention this because I was listening to a General Conference Address by Elder David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.  What he said gave me a different view on the whole Aging thing.  I quote:
  Several years ago I spent a Sunday afternoon with Elder Robert D. Hales in his home as he was recovering from a serious illness.  We discussed our families, our quorum responsibilities, and important experiences.
  At one point I asked Elder Hales, "You have been a successful husband, father, athlete, pilot, business executive and Church leader.  What lessons have you learned as you have grown older and been constrained by decreased physical capacity?"
  Elder Hales paused for a moment and responded, "When you cannot do what you have always done, then you only do what matters most."
  The simplicity of his answer was enlightening to say the least.  To me it is a simple guide to plan and prioritize both in matters spiritual and temporal.

Is Quantum Entanglement Real?

  Okay I am really going off on a tangent here.  Though I know very little about it, Quantum Mechanics is very fascinating.  I have talked about this before (What?! You don't remember?!*) but the one concept that completely blows me away is the Entanglement Theory.  There is a lot written about it but much of it is hard to digest and understand.  I did come across an article from the NY times that explains it more in lay terms.  It is written by David Kaiser who is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he teaches physics and the history of science:

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  "FIFTY years ago this month (now fifty-one), the Irish physicist John Stewart Bell submitted a short, quirky article to a fly-by-night journal titled Physics, Physique, Fizika. He had been too shy to ask his American hosts, whom he was visiting during a sabbatical, to cover the steep page charges at a mainstream journal, the Physical Review. Though the journal he selected folded a few years later, his paper became a blockbuster. Today it is among the most frequently cited physics articles of all time.
  Bell’s paper made important claims about quantum entanglement, one of those captivating features of quantum theory that depart strongly from our common sense. Entanglement concerns the behavior of tiny particles, such as electrons, that have interacted in the past and then moved apart. Tickle one particle here, by measuring one of its properties — its position, momentum or “spin” — and its partner should dance, instantaneously, no matter how far away the second particle has traveled.
  The key word is “instantaneously.” The entangled particles could be separated across the galaxy, and somehow, according to quantum theory, measurements on one particle should affect the behavior of the far-off twin faster than light could have traveled between them.
  Entanglement insults our intuitions about how the world could possibly work. Albert Einstein sneered that if the equations of quantum theory predicted such nonsense, so much the worse for quantum theory. “Spooky actions at a distance,” he huffed to a colleague in 1948.
  In his article, Bell demonstrated that quantum theory requires entanglement; the strange connectedness is an inescapable feature of the equations. But Bell’s proof didn’t show that nature behaved that way, only that physicists’ equations did. The question remained: Does quantum entanglement occur in the world?
  Starting in the early 1970s, a few intrepid physicists — in the face of critics who felt such “philosophical” research was fit only for crackpots — found that the answer appeared to be yes.
  John F. Clauser, then a young postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was the first. Using duct tape and spare parts, he fashioned a contraption to measure quantum entanglement. Together with a graduate student named Stuart Freedman, he fired thousands of pairs of little particles of light known as photons in opposite directions, from the middle of the device, toward each of its two ends. At each end was a detector that measured a property of the photon known as polarization.
  As Bell had shown, quantum theory predicted certain strange correlations between the measurements of polarization as you changed the angle between the detectors — correlations that could not be explained if the two photons behaved independently of each other. Dr. Clauser and Mr. Freedman found precisely these correlations.
  Other successful experiments followed. One, led by the French physicist Alain Aspect, tested the instantaneousness of entanglement. Another, led by the Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger, considered entanglement among three or more particles.
  Even with these great successes, work remains to be done. Every experimental test of entanglement has been subject to one or more loopholes, which hold out the possibility, however slim, that some alternative theory, distinct from quantum theory and more in line with Einstein’s intuitions, may still be salvageable. For example, one potential loophole — addressed by Dr. Aspect’s experiment — was that the measurement device itself was somehow transmitting information about one particle to the other particle, which would explain the coordination between them.
  The most stubborn remaining loophole is known as “setting independence.” Dr. Zeilinger and I, working with several colleagues — including the physicists Alan H. Guth, Andrew S. Friedman and Jason Gallicchio — aim to close this loophole, a project that several of us described in an article in Physical Review Letters.
  HERE’S the problem. In any test of entanglement, the researcher must select the settings on each of the detectors of the experimental apparatus (choosing to measure, for example, a particle’s spin along one direction or another). The setting-independence loophole suggests that, though the researcher appears to be free to select any setting for the detectors, it is possible that he is not completely free: Some unnoticed causal mechanism in the past may have fixed the detectors’ settings in advance, or nudged the likelihood that one setting would be chosen over another.
  Bizarre as it may sound, even a minuscule amount of such coordination of the detectors’ settings would enable certain alternative theories to mimic the famous predictions from quantum theory. In such a case, entanglement would be merely a chimera.
  How to close this loophole? Well, obviously, we aren’t going to try to prove that humans have free will. But we can try something else. In our proposed experiment, the detector setting that is selected (say, measuring a particle’s spin along this direction rather than that one) would be determined not by us — but by an observed property of some of the oldest light in the universe (say, whether light from distant quasars arrives at Earth at an even- or odd-numbered microsecond). These sources of light are so far away from us and from one another that they would not have been able to receive a single light signal from one another, or from the position of the Earth, before the moment, billions of years ago, when they emitted the light that we detect here on Earth today.
  That is, we would guarantee that any strange “nudging” or conspiracy among the detector settings — if it does exist — would have to have occurred all the way back at the Hot Big Bang itself, nearly 14 billion years ago.
  If, as we expect, the usual predictions from quantum theory are borne out in this experiment, we will have constrained various alternative theories as much as physically possible in our universe. If not, that would point toward a profoundly new physics.
  Either way, the experiment promises to be exciting — a fitting way, we hope, to mark Bell’s paper’s 50th anniversary."

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  Isn't that all just crazy?  Talk about thinking outside the box!  It tells me that with ALL that we know, there is SO MUCH that we don't know!
  Next time, I want to talk about, not 3 dimensions, but 10 and even 11 dimensions!


If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.  - Niels Bohr

Continue reading the main stor

My Life's Itinerary.....So Far - Part 15

  On July 22, 1992, the family piled into our two cars, one towing a U-Haul trailer, we left Grantsville, Utah and headed to Boise, Idaho.  It just so happened today was my daughter's 14th birthday and I thought it would be fun to surprise her with a little birthday party put on by a McDonald's during the trip.  I called ahead to arrange it and under the guise of  making a pit stop to eat, we went into said McDonald's.  I have to say my daughter WAS NOT IMPRESSED.  In fact she was mortified that I did this ghastly thing.  We laugh about it now, but I think she will never forget it.
  One of the owners of the company that I worked for, graciously let us use their home while we found a place to live.  They were away so it was a great idea.  It was my hope to make a favorable impression with the home office and the owners but my boys had dashed those hopes.  They were horsing around in the home we were using and managed to make a large hole (10" diameter) in the wall.  Naturally, I was furious.  Fortunately, the owner was not upset, at least didn't appear to be.  I offered to get it fixed but was told not to worry and that they would take care of it.  So we survived that crisis.
  In a few days, we found a house to rent.  An irrigation canal ran behind it.  The cute part was having ducks wandering around the neighborhood.  The not cute part was dealing with rodents.
  One advantage of having most of our belongings back in Vermont in our unsold home, was not having to move it when we came to Boise.  The disadvantage was having to purchase items that were duplicates of things we already owned but not available.
  So we got down to a routine.  Eventually our Vermont home did sell.  I flew out to close the deal and supervise the moving company.  The family was happy to get the rest of our belongings and things return to normal or as close to it as possible with five teenagers in the house.

Do You Hear Voices?

  Ok, this is completely spontaneous.  I have been sitting here at my desk and realized, again, something that I had realized yesterday. "What is that?" you say.  I realized that I am hearing voices. (Pregnant pause)  No, I am not going nuts. (Well, that can be debated at another time)
  The mind is a curious thing, not news for anyone.  It has a way of processing information that can have interesting results.  In this case, I hear voices.  Sort of like I am hearing a TV set on in another room or two people having a conversation somewhere in the house.  The difference is, the TV is not on and I am the only one here.

  The house is full of little noisemakers.  That may be the hum of my UPS under my desk, the motor inside the refrigerator, the fan over my head, the air conditioner, the fans in the computer, to name a few.  My conclusion is this; the blend of all these sounds tricks the mind (or at least MY mind) into thinking it is hearing voices.  According to the app in my phone,  the sound level is 42dB which equates to a 'quiet residential area'.  I think at that level, the brain can easily misconstrue the drone as voices in the background.
  That is my story and I am sticking to it!

And they're coming to take me away Ha Ha
They're coming to take me away ho ho he he ha ha
To the happy home with trees and flowers and chirping birds and basket weavers who sit and smile and twiddle their thumbs and toes
They're coming to take me away ha ha...

For Here Am I Sitting In A Tin Can.....

  The other day, I watched Gravity for the second time. Seeing Sandra Bullock isolated from everyone but at the same time able to see Earth go by her window makes me imagine myself as a 'land astronaut' while traveling in my car. I also see the world go by my window, but at a much smaller distance!  As I have mentioned before, work requires me to travel through a dozen states in my area.  As a result, I have a lot of 'alone' time while in the car.  When one is alone, their mind can wander.  Usually my blog entries get their start while I am driving and this one is no exception. While returning from a service call, I realized I am like a spaceship, isolated from everyone but still seeing everything around me.
  My 'land ship' has everything I need to accomplish my mission.  In the cargo bay, are all the components I need to perform repairs when I go EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity).  I am properly attired with the necessary clothing to protect me from the environment.  I have the necessary communication equipment to stay in contact with Ground Control (the office) and listen to Pandora.  There is only room for one other crew member, but that space is usually occupied by more cargo.  Once I leave the launch pad, the majority of the time is spent in transit to and from the destination.
  So once I get into my gold land ship, secure the hatch, engage the engine, and leave the port, I am on my way.  At this point, the World changes.  Instead of being in a constant environment of home, I am now looking out of my cockpit and watching the rest of the world, not as a blue sphere while 258 miles above it, traveling at 17,000 mph.  Instead I see everything by going through it at 65 mph (well, maybe 72).
  When orbiting around New York, and New England, it is usually places I have seen before and the familiar landmarks are like old friends I am seeing again.  However, there is always something I haven't seen before that I have previously missed.  Occasionally, my navigational equipment brings me to a place I haven't been before and that is always interesting.  I find myself studying the buildings, land features, the villages, shops, bridges, monuments, everything.  I wonder how long they have been there, why they are there, or why have they deteriorated or flourished.  I sometimes wish I could touchdown for a visit and learn more.
  Occasionally I am asked how I can travel so much.  I reply that it doesn't bother me; closer to the truth, I enjoy it.  Listening to great music, seeing an endless performance on Earth's stage. Interacting in my mind with me, myself, and I makes the time go by quickly.  Stopping to actually perform in my vocation is a small interruption between going to and coming from.
  Having been a "Mission Technical Specialist" for 40 years has afforded me a job that I have always enjoyed (in case you haven't noticed!).
  From this tale of fact and fiction, you may not know what my trade is if you haven't read previous blog entries.  I am a field engineer for Point of Sale systems, a fancy name for cash registers.  I love my job and it is going to be very hard to retire, but I think the aches and pains that accompany ageing will be a strong case for retirement.

Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature. - Albert Einstein

"Let Me Sleep On It....."

  I think my lovely wife is jealous because I can fall asleep almost as soon as my head hits the pillow.  I tell her that anyone with a clear conscience can do it.  Well that  might be true, but not from my personal knowledge.  But I can fall asleep quite quickly, anytime, anywhere.  Sometimes if I am doing a lot of driving, I might get drowsy, no problem.  I find a place to pull over, close my eyes and within a couple minutes I am asleep.  In about fifteen minutes, I wake up and good to go.
  I haven't always been  a quick sleeper, I think medical events brought it about.  In 2009, I had heart surgery for a valve repair because it was murmuring.  I could never make out what it was saying, but the doctors said it wasn't a good thing.  Long story, short, I went in with a heart murmur and came out with atrial fibrillation or afib for short.  The docs never talked about why or how I got it.  I guess it is a risk with heart surgery.  When you think about it, there is a lot of risk, considering my heart and lungs are stopped and my body depends on a machine for the duration of the surgery.
  Anyway, I am getting off track, what a surprise!  To keep my heart in proper rhythm, I am prescribed a couple pills.  One is Diltiazem, the other is Metoprolol.  One of the side effects of both these pills is tiredness.  Since I am on a steady diet of these drugs, I assume it has become a great sleep aid.  Don't worry, when I am awake, I am awake.  No worries about my becoming narcoleptic.  When it is time to sleep, no problem!

  Now that I am under the spell of these pills, so to speak, I can better relate to the lyrics of a Beatles song "I'm Only Sleeping".  In one verse it says:  Lying there and staring at the ceiling.  Waiting for a sleepy feeling...  That is how it is for me except I am not staring at the ceiling, I simply have my eyes closed and drift off to LaLa Land.

  Ok, I am going to go off track again.  Why?  Because I want to!  Dreams are a part of sleeping.  Some nights for me are more dream filled then others.  However, for me, the night of dreams often has a 'theme' to them.  Particular people or places or events may be the theme.  Sometimes they are pleasant and sometimes they are not.  If, while sleeping, I become aware of an unpleasant theme, I wake up, get up, go 'wash my face' then go back to bed again.  That theme has been broken for the rest of my sleep.

  More about dreams?  Well, in What Doesn't Kill You, Kelly Clarkson sings You know I dream in color, I do too.  Dreams and sleep are so fascinating.  It is easy to see why so much effort is devoted to researching and studying the subject.  They say that we only use a fraction of our brain.  I think our dreams use our untapped brain power for a playground.

  I haven't made a musical insert for a long time so here is one coming at you.  Just click here.

"I'm Only Sleeping" by The Beatles

When I wake up early in the morning
Lift my head, I'm still yawning
When I'm in the middle of a dream
Stay in bed, float up stream (Float up stream)

Please, don't wake me, no, don't shake me
Leave me where I am, I'm only sleeping

Everybody seems to think I'm lazy
I don't mind, I think they're crazzy
Running everywhere at such a speed
Till they find there's no need (There's no need)

Please, don't spoil my day, I'm miles away
And after all I'm only sleeping

Keeping an eye on the world going by my window
Taking my time

Lying there and staring at the ceiling
Waiting for a sleepy feeling...

Please, don't spoil my day, I'm miles away
And after all I'm only sleeping

Ooh yeah

Keeping an eye on the world going by my window
Taking my time

When I wake up early in the morning
Lift my head, I'm still yawning
When I'm in the middle of a dream
Stay in bed, float up stream (Float up stream)

Please, don't wake me, no, don't shake me
Leave me where I am, I'm only sleeping

My 10th Great Grandfather......

  Okay, a bit of history, albeit part of my personal history, but then, this blog is all about me, isn't it? :-)

Statue of  my 10th Great Grandfather in Salem, MA

  I am proud to say my Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather is somewhat famous.  Put another way; Roger Conant is my 10th Great-Grandfather or still another way; my Great-Grandfather's (on my Father's side) Mother's 5th Great-Grandfather (on her Father's side).
  Roger Conant was born in 1592 in England.  He came to America and founded Salem, Massachusetts (then called Naumkeag) in 1626 where he was also the first governor of the town.  No, he had nothing to do with the Salem Witch Trials which took place in 1692 because Roger Conant died in 1679.
  You can read more about him here.

The Human Condition.....

  Sometimes I find myself trying to avoid the news.  Almost always it is bad news and because it is on a global scale, it is often horrendously disturbing.  Call me an ostrich but I often choose to avoid it.  I am unable to do anything about 99.9% of the problems so I try to take a calm approach to current events.
  Technology has provided us with the ability to become aware of every event in the world instantaneously and, as in the case of war, we can now have live broadcasts.  One may think that these events are more frequent then in previous generations, but I think they have always been happening. The only difference is now we are so much more aware of everything going on.
  One of the most common news items is war. The Face of War has changed so much over the years.  I don't want to say it has evolved because that insinuates improvement.
  During the American Revolution, the British would wear bright red uniforms and march abreast into battle, easy for the Colonists to pick them off.  The musketmen were usually lined up in three ranks, bringing the maximum number of muskets to bear on the enemy. Firing rank-by-rank, the massed musketmen could fire nine volleys per minute.  
  As Mankind developed better ways to kill, battles became more elusive, even scientific, if you will. War tactics have been perfected over the years by strategists like Sun Tzu, and Carl von Clausewitz.
  With the start of the Vietnam War, a new term became part of our vocabulary, Guerrilla Warfare.  Guerrilla Warfare is a form of irregular warfare in which a small group of combatants such as armed civilians or irregulars use tactics such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, petty warfare, hit-and-run, and mobility to fight a larger and less-mobile traditional military.  
  Fast forward to today when the news reports are heavily entrenched with Terrorism.  Terrorism is commonly defined as violent acts (or the threat of violent acts) intended to create fear, perpetrated for a religious, political, or ideological goal, and which deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants.
  When war occurs, there is always ideology involved.  Either it is the cause of  the war or the justification of it.  Often times the attackers or defenders feel that their god is on their side.  What if both sides feel they are sanctioned by their deity?  Does that mean there are two gods involved or does it mean there is one god and that one side has got it wrong?
  No matter how tragic an event that takes place today, you can find an event that is equally tragic somewhere in the history of Mankind.  That being said, along with any civilization's god I feel that there is also a devil that may be an influencing factor over the minds of some warmakers.
  As I said, I am not a big fan of the news.  Call me whatever you like, that is the way it is.  I do believe, however, that I am very fortunate to live in a time and place where I am relatively free of the dangers of Man's inhumanity to Man.  (Is there a more politically correct way to say that?)

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. - Winston Churchill