Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Actual NSA impact on the Internet up to question today

Nothing puts libertarians and liberals on the same side as a government that actually spies on everybody, "big brother" style. Spooky--literally spooks.

There were supposed to be NSA hearings today; Glenn Greenwald was supposed to testify, but it's all canceled. Some just don't like getting spied on; others say they've got nothing to hide, so, so what; still others worry about being wrongfully tracked for bogus reasons.  And there are those who always use "handles", not names, online, and that brings us to why I use my pen name online...so...yeah, I'm not worried.  Not as Clara, anyway.  Real enough to be a real person but not real enough to warrant tracking. It's not like this name provides any secrecy for the person behind the pen, as such--it's a poorly kept secret, if it is, and it was actually more of a gag than anything else (one of these days I'll explain that)--still, online, it has its benefits in terms of maintaining privacy, at least.

Taking a step back, we can see that we have industry wanting people to feel secure enough to bank online.  Then we have the NSA which has special privileges to mine that data, and we're back to feeling insecure about doing business online.  Business vs government, yet again.  Something's eventually gotta give--this can't end well.

Believe it or not, this brings us to the nuances of copyright law as it pertains to the Internet, and I know you guys have noticed my header citing the Fair Use clause of that law (17USC107).  What needs to be mentioned is the legal standing of the Internet as a public environment which, like a public sidewalk or a public park, no individual can legally expect privacy, and which, for purposes of copyright, constitutes publication.  Anything you write and hit Send on is considered a publication and that's why you're also prohibited from copy/pasting entire articles written by the original author (copyright holder) without permission, even if you post proper attribution, and even with a link back. What you're doing, if you do that, is re-publishing without permission.

Don't expect freedom of speech, either, because all internet service providers are corporations and either you agree to their Terms of Service or you get no access. This brings us back to the NSA and any agreement by a corporation as part of their terms of being licensed to operate as a service provider.  Terms and conditions rule on the Internet, and yet most people don't read 'em when they click on the box that says they agree with 'em, and they're subject to change without notice.

Anybody with a server for Internet service has a copy of everything you've ever posted regardless of whether you think it's private or not.  Nothing is private on the Internet. Secure, maybe, but never private.  If you want private, go back to snail mail and landlines.

Oh--almost forgot to mention, regarding copyrights on the images I've posted, especially regarding any worries I may have about posting my artwork: Nothing I've posted is full sized, everything is of lower quality than the originals.  Other people address this situation by using watermarks, and that's a personal preference. It's one I do not choose to use.  Basically, I like sharing because I'm not selfish.

I can almost hear the old timers of the now-defunct Michael Moore board laughing their arses off because I used to make a major issue out of copyright ownership over words I posted--but the deal there was that people would quote what you said, rewrite what you wrote and call it a "correction", such that you would be attributed to words you didn't actually write.  It's another good reason to stick with social media instead of a board.

Classic Revisionist History problem on Yahoo Answers again

Who is Thomas Edison...?

I could answer this question but didn't, and the reason why not is clear when you read the other answers and all the thumbs down votes each got.  People who swear that Edison invented stuff he didn't will thumbs-down people who know that he didn't.

People who read biographies and complimentary books on this man can be expected to be misled; those of us who have read his actual patents will know better; been there, done that, and perennially get into trouble for having read the documents instead of the books.

I can still vote, though.  Everybody who claimed that Edison invented the phonograph got a thumbs down from me.  Actual patent documents show that Emile Berliner invented the phonograph.

A couple of days ago, a similar question arose: who invented the first radio?  I can answer that question depending on what a person considers to be "radio"...so I didn't answer that one either, although I could have.

Technically, the first radio invented was the experimental spark gap gizmo that induced a coincidental spark on another spark gap gizmo placed at a different location--but most of the time you'll find this event recorded as the discovery of inductance, despite the fact that it is essentially the first radiotelegraph before Morse came up with his code.

One could say that this experimental equipment didn't become radio until it was redesigned and then used for the purpose of wireless communication...or it could be said that radio didn't happen until the U.S. government recognized electromagnetic transmission officially as "radio" with the Radio Act of 1927, even though there were similar acts in place as early as 1910.  Those, however, were Wireless Communications acts, and radio wasn't really radio until the invention of the triode took place and people were thereby enabled to broadcast voice instead of dots and dashes.

Both of the answers posted to that question at this time are good answers, but the complete information consists of both of them put together.  There is no "best answer" here--just two equally good ones.

Revisionist history issues have generated an international incident when a banner emblazoned with "A people who forget history have no future" was unfurled at the Japan/South Korea games played for the East Asian Cup.  C'est la vie, toujours.
Kids in school may think that the subject of history is dry and impertinent, but it's at the root of even today's national identity, personal ethnic roots, and whether or not we regard other human beings as friendly or hostile.  History is about real human beings being really human, and revisionist history is always about current appearances so that it can be used to either demonize or glorify a nationality or ethnicity beyond what is actually warranted, for social gain, political gain, or both.  It is always important, always.

And kids, remember this: you will not have died yet before you, too, become history.  It's what being a senior citizen is all about.  It's what being a has-been is all about, and those of you who think the entertainment industry and/or sports industry is all there is to life would do well to recognize that people in those industries become history quicker than everybody else.

The older you get, the more you realize just how important history is, and I know I can see your future from where I stand: you will invariably attempt to pass on the history you know, and your own history,  to the next generation and the next generation of youth will, by and large, think you're boring as hell...and in their later years, wished they had listened because when you're buried, your story as primary source will, by and large, get lost and either get revised or forgotten. And never moreso than when your progeny are fighting over your property.



AUGUST 1 ADDENDUM: Another question on Yahoo Answers cropped up, and it's a question about the Armenian Massacre committed by the Ottoman Empire, still subject to current debate given its recognition as a condition for Turkey to join the EU. Neither side has got it right because they're both too close to one side or another.  It's a case where history's primary sources fail and it's best to consult a disinterested third party observer for a more objective retrospective analysis on what happened.

How do Turk denialists of the Armenian Genocide typically argue against the evidence for it?


Monday, July 29, 2013

Another old timer becomes history, plus breaking news postscript

Monitoring Times to cease publication

The 1920s saw the rise of radio; the 2000s see its decline. Oh, I know that Monitoring Times was a relative new kid on the block when it comes to publications covering radio, but it's the oldest old timer out there right now, if you don't count the venerable World Radio TV Handbook, and even that ole gray mare ain't what she used to be, either. That's why Passport to World Band Radio was launched by NASWA veteran and erstwhile Clandestine Corner editor and former IBA monitor, Larry Magne, a nice publication that had receiver review "white papers" that the WRTH didn't have.

Still, go back far enough and we saw the ANARC conventions, which died with the times but that Grove Enterprises, publisher of Monitoring Times, took over and which evolved into SWL Winterfest, sort of.

Popular Electronics used to have an extensive record of supporting radio to the point of issuing listener callsigns in an effort to mimick amateur radio callsigns issued by the FCC.  Good times...now all history.


 First a blog rumor, which cited a Politico article, and now Media Matters reports that Rush Limbaugh's production is to be dropped by Cumulus. Politico says that Hannity will be dropped as well.  Yay!

Friday, July 26, 2013

Cairo situation still fluid, worried about my friends there


A way to follow live what's going on in Egypt is claimed by The Guardian, but the article this link goes to still hasn't reported what I just heard via a Cairo friend, via Facebook: 15 people were killed in Tahrir Square by military security detail in civilian clothes.  I asked her which people died, pro-Morsi or anti-Morsi? and the response I got wasn't clear, and she did say she was pro-Morsi herself, so there's that grain of salt.

Given that the military has Morsi under arrest, I would guess that the charge made here is that the 15 killed were pro-Morsi, but it's just a guess at this time, and I've lost contact with my friend....wait, she's back, and explained that it was indeed 15 pro-Morsi people killed, and she is calling what the military did a coup.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

One of my new Libyan friends announced that the women of Benghazi took to the streets to demand change due to the rise in assassinations there, and nobody's happy about the assassinations that just took place in Tripoli. Looking at all these things going on this evening, I can see that the problem in Egypt (actually big things going on in Alexandria as well as Cairo) is because the anti-Morsi faction doesn't want the power grab that happened recently in Tripoli happens in Cairo.  I think I'll cross my toes, too.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, explained -- Happy 50th, Doctor!

 ...and there's a 2020 update down at the bottom...

NOTICE: This particular post has had so many updates put at the top, while the main topic entry got pretty much buried since 2013 due to the dispute between myself and the BBC over a snippet of content I utilized for the purpose of debunking previous scientific claims made by the BBC in one of its fictional serial shows.  The BBC has, thusfar, declined to pursue the dispute further at this time, but I don't anticipate that they've dropped the matter permanently. Nonetheless, this post has become fragmented and because it continues to draw hits even now in 2016, KNOW YE that it will be overhauled to an arrangement where the body of the discussion of the main topic will appear up at the top and the updates will be moved, in chronological order, to the bottom of the post, and will be continued to be updated at the bottom as each new scientific development pertinent to this topic crops up.




NOW NOTE: 
 What follows immediately is what began as the main body, context for which was my answers to a number of questions on Yahoo Answers inquiring into research methodology among certain people who got interested in what could be called "research globetrotting" in both the geographic sense and the temporal sense, so my answers described tips in terms of how to navigate, as time travel into the past.  I am still in the process of moving the Updates in proper chronological order, so please bear with me...

 =============================================

Yes, I did mention that I am a time traveler in a number of responses on Yahoo Answers. No, I am not a timelord. I have to admit that when I flummox the professional historian, I feel like one, though, to be quite honest--but I wouldn't call it gloating.  I'm all too happy to share--I'll show you how to fly my own time machine. The catch to the thing is grasping the concept as one of the sciences rather than as one of the social arts, although where perspective is considered, there's some art to it. Your inner Leonardo Da Vinci is required.

First, the basic foundation:


....well, it is the basic principle of perspective, but not necessarily "a timelord discovery" exactly. It has everything to do with being aware of what's a large overview of an historical event compared to what's the myopic view of a single person involved with said event.

What's past, what's present, what's future is all relative, both in time and in space.  On a given timeline, traveling the space between point A and point B (straight line presumed--line of travel isn't always straight) takes, well, time.  How much time? That's relative to what speed you're going.  I've often argued that the age of the Doctor is meaningless unless we know which fixed point in time he was born, and we don't, do we.  For instance, we can travel back to 1966 and observe the prediction of the future, but from 2013, it's the past--when The Doctor announces that he's 908 years old, we have to ask "compared to what point in time?", and "in Earth years, or Gallifreyan years?". Nobody knows and none of the writers have said. I'm sure you get the idea.

I don't refer to my own time machine as a TARDIS (much) although, functionally, that's exactly what it does. No blinky lights, no loud whines, but it does have a core and it does have a control system, and it does require navigation, which is why keeping one's bearings at all times is always important.

It's easy to get lost in the weeds of detail and getting things wrong because you've lost proper perspective and have no idea at what altitude you're flying (unless you're grounded, in which case you are in serious need of extraction from the weeds).  Fatal myopia occurs when you find yourself unable to back away from a person or event to see what environment, conditions, situations surround that person or event, regardless of altitude. You're stuck because you got too close, and in terms of time travel, you've committed a rear-end collision.


 How the core works is basically like a set of encyclopedias about world history.  Back away so that you can see the whole thing from volume 1 to the last volume.  You're essentially in orbit around the whole planet Earth at maximum planetary altitude. Humans are down there making history--all of them.  And you're looking at everything that has ever happened and ever will up until the date of the copyright.

Copyright date is important, even though the set pictured here has a copyright date in the 1930s.  Different books in different parts of history have different editors that are gatekeepers as to what gets included and what gets left out, so you'll want to consult a set whose copyright date corresponds to some period of enlightenment, because they'll leave nothing out that's known at the time.

Other eras have editors that cull information down to what they think is important at the time of their copyright date, and you don't want that.  Just because a book is newer, it's not necessarily better because of the editor, who is trying to sell his books to the audience of the time of the copyright date.  Today, an editor is usually trying to recycle old books under a new copyright to cut down on expenses.  These days, reference publishing has become a racket.

Now say you want to go some place on this planet.  Or you want to see the whole planet as it looks at a particular time.  That's what the index is for, and what that does is take you out of planetary orbit to a lower altitude.  Still, you really need to keep track of your bearings: points in time, points in space, and altitude.  Always remember that every time you change altitude, you also change perspective. The higher the altitude, the longer is your field of vision but you sacrifice detail.  The lower the altitude, the larger the detail becomes, including the weeds, but you narrow your field of vision and are at higher risk of losing your bearings. Never lose track of your altitude or you'll lose proper track of all other bearings, and finding yourself flying too low will get you invariably tangled in the weeds, disoriented.  In order to deal with details of an individual, you are going to have to land, disembark, and deal with the weeds.




So, then--let's say we pick a spot on the planet. Say, the Iberian Peninsula.  In the index you can pick earliest ancient history before it ever became Portugal/Spain, or you can pick either Portugal or Spain.  If you pick ancient, and land at some location in that period of time, then you'll be able to see Portugal and Spain as the future.  You know what's going to happen before it happens, because of where you landed. Hover, and you can see the peninsula without continental Europe, or you can just see a temporal era rather than a single point in time. Relative space and time.  Hover higher, and you can see all of Europe, parts of north Africa, or, temporally, an epoch if you like.

Let's say you want to examine a particular historic event; it would be a mistake to land smack on the event exactly where and when it happened.  What's better is to land (or hover) somewhen earlier, and you'll be able to see the run-up to said event, and seeing it as imminent future, and thus get a handle on why the event happened.  OR!

You can land/hover somewhen after the event to view all the consequences of that event, but be judicious about which somewhen you choose to land because you'll be at some point where the event is the past, the immediate consequences would be part of the past, but some of the consequences would be in the future, and so once again, keeping your bearings remains ultimately important in this case as well.

And always keep in mind that the lower you fly, the closer to a temporal point you get, your perspective changes to where things look larger than otherwise, etc. Always keep your bearings and your wits about you, if you're about to explore some particularly treacherous history terrain where disinformation abounds.  And avoid the weeds until you acquire the skill to sort them out.

It's true that time didn't end with 1930, so you're going to need to supplement your core with other material, but that's why it's just a core.  All it gives you is your basic navigation/GPS system, with which everything else you add will function as an actual time machine.

End of Lesson One.



LESSON TWO: What is time and why does it go wibbley wobbley timey wimey in spots?  Well, the basic answer to the last part of that question is that fractal characteristic mentioned in the update.  Okay--what is "fractal"? The Free Dictionary says THIS, while Wikipedia says THAT. Basically, it's a repeated geometric pattern, and in that regard I'll point out the old adage that it's important to learn history so that it doesn't get repeated.  It gets repeated, though, doesn't it.  Remember that, but also remember that history makes progress, too.  There's a behind you (past), and there's the in front of you (future), and thus time takes on a spatial character.

And you're already familiar with some bits of future: the phenomenon known as the "self-fulfilling prophecy" as well as predictable if-then/cause-effect futures; some highschool and college kids have become familiar with the mathematics of probability--Nate Silver got famous for his use of such mathematics.  Now here's where stuff gets wibbly wobbly...the theory of parallel universes now stand proven.  Now let's consider a branching fractal pattern...



The universe you currently occupy is the single stem at the base. You arrive at making the decision to go either right or left. When you make the decision, you enter the universe in which you are on record as having made the decision to take the branch you took, while the other branch is in a different universe.  Traveling into the past is easier than traveling into the future because it's easy to retrace your steps from where you remember you've been as the result of all your past decisions.  This means that you are not the you that has made different decisions.  What you don't know is which of your future selves is you because you haven't made those decisions yet with respect to the point in time in which you now stand.

The bits in the middle of the image, at the top, shows that paths do curve around, which gives the deal a circular property (more like a helix).

I don't need to see your finger stuck into a fan to know what will happen if you do that, so in that sense, it's possible to see a little bit into a possible future.  So remember this principle of time travel into the future: the bigger the jump you make from the time point you're currently standing in, the less likely you'll be able to return to the point you're currently standing in because your jump causes you to change universes over a wide range of decision branches, so rather than jumping you still need to navigate from point A to point B AND keep track of how you got there so that you can retrace your path back...and retracing this point in time you're standing in back to where you've already been is a matter of remembering where you've been (your own history).  And it's why that people who can't remember where they've been will invariably repeat the pattern.  It's a fractal repetition. (Note: taking steps and retracing steps involves a sequence of moves, while the whole point of time travel is dedicated to skipping steps of sequence--taking short-cuts, as it were)

Time: the phenomenon where events happen in sequence.  More than one event can happen at the same time (co-incidence) and the illusion of a "timeline" is a matter of tracing the path from one point in time to another point in time across a number of choices made out of a number of possible decisions that could have been made, each of which represent different universes where each of those decisions had indeed been made.  Your universe is composed of all the decisions you've made in an environment of the decisions made by everything and everybody around you that have co-incidentally made their own decisions along the path you've taken.

Okay, so the cosmic universe is too much for a human head to wrap around...so...let's consider a game of chess.  What makes a chess master is the ability to "see several moves ahead".  You could call it "looks into the future", ya?  The rules of the cosmic universe are immensely more complicated (with a lot more probabilities for things going in a gazillion-bazillion different directions of possibility) while a game of chess has, by comparison, just a few and you can if-then map out a future of how the game is going to go before it's played.  Truth be told, that's why I got bored with it, but that's a whole 'nother topic which pertains to why I find Othello preferable...anyhoo...

People who are chess masters are also time travelers, with a preference for traveling into the near-term future instead of the past.  Aha.  I'll bet you were able to wrap your head around THAT universe.  And a chess game is just as fractal as time in the cosmic universe--it's just that the cosmic universe has more moving parts with a whole lot more rules to play by.

The Internet hits I get on this blog entry have been mainly from the UK and I'll bet those are Doctor Who fans, which is why I'll add the following:  I have been delighted by the science behind the foundations of the Whoverse, past and present, and I would especially recognize the William Hartnell era for being the most, although NuWho does incorporate a few recent discoveries in that regard, like making both claims that "history can be rewritten" and "there are fixed points in time" where certain major events "always happen".  Looking at the fractal image I provided, you can see where the trunk separates could be described as a "fixed point in time" and along the route between one junction and another is where history can be rewritten with no affect on how the junctions turn out.  What Doctor Who doesn't mention is...in which universe?

 The Pandorica was used to "reboot the universe" but failed to explain how River's "timeline" traversed from rebooted universe to the pre-booted universe--or explain WHICH universe.  Ah, such is the difference between fiction and science.  Time isn't linear; however, with regard to a specific universe along a path of definite choices being made, a line can still be used to map the path between one divergence and another because the line represents a sequence of specific "fixed point" events.  Just be aware that the universe which these choices depict is just one among many, and this is the solid basis for how what happened on Apalapuchia is actually possible, alternate "time streams" and all.  The choice between the two Amys was a choice between two universes.  The time matrixes on Apalapuchia as a complete system can be thought of as a synthetic 5 dimensional chess game.  Dimension 5 is provided by the room of choices, where a quarantined person can choose from a variety of fixed points to travel through (Amy chose the garden fixed point).

End of Lesson Two.


LESSON THREE:

There are fractals made of lines, as the one cited above (so in that sense, it's linear), and there are fractals made of planes, like the famous one used in PBS's NOVA made of triangles, out of which came curves of a sort, too.  Those planes are the dimensions in space, where the fact of their repetition is the time element, and they're all relative to each other.  A human being (not all of them, surely) is capable mastering the finite cataloging all the renditions (a finite quantity) of a chess game.  That's what chess masters do.

From sci fi, we gather that a master at 3 dimensional chess is necessarily Vulcan, but here on Earth we have a number of human beings making that attempt in actual fact, because that's exactly what it takes to master it.  From that one may very well extrapolate that a piece of machinery that is capable of keeping unerring maps of which dimensions are associated with which nodes in time ("fixed points in time") is what's required to navigate the cosmic universe as we know it, only with every node we cross, "the universe as we know it" achieves a different definition.  We now arrive at why I call what historians do "research", and what I do is "navigation".  The very fact that what I navigate the past is also why I arrive at accurate answers to questions regarding it at a rather (apparently) quick clip...and "quick clip" is, of course, another matter of time.

In short, I do in fact navigate Time And Relative Dimensions In Space--TARDIS. :)

So can anyone else who has a mind to, actually, but it's not that much of anyone believes that, I'm sure.  More's the pity--as you can see, I give lessons.

End of Lesson Three


NOW NOTE FURTHER: What follows next is Lesson Four but cited within are links that have ceased to be good; reference is made to the science, the physics in terms of a particular lecture on String Theory. Those links/videos will appear as broken but I won't edit those out because of the particular screen shots I took to make further points, and again utilizing Doctor Who to convey certain concepts.



LESSON FOUR: The pocket universe

These are two different types of pocket universes.  When a string of fixed points in time are an accumulation of "bad" choices (unsustainable) you have a universe that is unsustainable for generating further fixed point progressions.  There are other types of pocket universes, and even miniature pocket universes such as would be generated by any given chess game (in chess, all pockets = GAME OVER).  That type of pocket universe would be inside of, rather than adjacent to, another universe, and is best represented mathematically as a subset universe.

The "explanation" that the Doctor gave in "Hide!" was lame and a half.  The theory behind the pocket universe has to do with expansion generated by progression, not by balloons fer cryin' out loud.  It's the progression that gives time the illusion of being linear, and produces the illusion that the spatial universe is expanding.  Time and space, along with their hybrid, dimension, are all relative to what time is perceived to have passed, as if time is a thing that passes.  It isn't.  It's an aspect of progression.

"Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones. But you still have to choose." --The Doctor

2014 October (much later than below) UPDATE: Recent hits on this posting as well as THIS posting prompts this update on both posts. The UPDATE to the other post clarifies the nature of time as a sequential progression a bit better, but it also involves a discussion of space and time which brings in more mathematics into consideration, so please refer to that post as well.  Thank  you.

Related: explanation of strings, knots and physics. Beware, heavily mathematical--
{looks like that link didn't transfer. It's gone anyway}


Did your eyes glaze over when you got to the part about how the Jones Polynomial determined whether or not a knot is able to be untangled? The simplest way to deal with any knot is the way that the Gordian Knot was dealt with, huh.  Just cut that bugger. Who the devil would even want to untangle a knot in the first place.  Well, when you're looking at the strings, as it were, of the simple map of time that I've put forth here, with each progression you can continue to progress as long as the elements of your progression remain possible, as is the case in a game of chess. You cannot if you get checked by elements that are not possible to progress further, and before you know it, you're stuck in a pocket universe.

String is a linear construct as is the temporal map, but the map branches.  The string has no branches and yet it can fold on itself and get tangled. In a thicket of branching progressions, so can time, and so does the Moebius Strip if you're considering the abstraction of infinity but as applied by physics. Time travel = taking shortcuts to bypass sequential events, and is more easily executed where wrap-backs occur.  A string cannot be a knot unless the string has loop-backs in it.  The Moebius concept of infinity requires a loop-back, as does the Kline Bottle.

The video gets more interesting about 14 minutes in, where we go from a nice linear curve to the zig-zags of quantum physics and space-time.



The values of various thetas in summation (sigma) gives one a calculated path forward in a progression. Theta Sigma. This is the translation in English (not Greek) of the name of the Doctor.

NOW NOTE FURTHER 
that this post has departed quite a way afield of the question on Yahoo about how to navigate history anywhere/anywhen on this planet, but do please keep in mind that the entire topic either way is navigation, a method that works in any library as well as it would work in any time traveling vessel.  The past branches off and oft times comes full circle (hence the expression in the first place). Time, being fractal, results in the same sort of pattern in the past, which is why books pertaining thereto tend to be, well, encyclopedic.

There really is no such thing as a time LINE, not even for historians despite the fact that so many of them believe in such a fiction.  And yet what makes string theory an issue, as well as the "bigger on the inside" physics, is in that both concepts are necessarily linear, and even the current depiction of "gravitational waves" is always on a single plane, illustrated with the infernally linear line.  This the goal of this entire missive is to completely get out of the linear "time line" {ahem} line of thinking. :)

Now to resume the blog...


UPDATE Oct. 4:
Via an article circulated on Google Plus, a Frax fractal app produced this--gorgeous!







Notice to the BBC: you do not have exclusive property rights to either time travel nor the relativity of space and time, nor to the name Clara.  I was a time-traveling Clara FIRST.  I know how to build and fly my own TARDIS, thank you very much, and I have for a long, long time.  The sciences are NOT exclusively YOUR proprietary property.

Further, I am the original Impossible Person Clara. Your Clara is a direct impersonation of me (see screenshots). Anything you do regarding any time traveling Clara, you do in honor of ME.  Kapice?  Americans can travel in time, too--If you're spoiling for another American revolution, I can guarantee you one.  If the concept of a time-traveling Impossible Person Clara got to the BBC via Tom Baker, then I am convinced beyond doubt that Clara Oswin Oswald's character is mine.  I was on his now-defunct Tom Baker.tv website as exactly such.
{The emoticon image above was obtained from Tom Baker's website while I was a registered member}







I'm placing this March 2015 UPDATE to this post up at the top, noting that a number of links on this page have become unavailable since its posting.  First, note on this page where I discuss how time is fractal, not linear, and then consider this new finding as to the mapping of over 8,000 galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood also resembles similar fractal branching, and consider, at the same time, that the travel of galaxies in this mapping effort involve distance traveled x TIME.  That's what the term "speed" means: distance traveled over a specific period of TIME, and that I've pointed out before that defining time in terms of speed of light is a recursive definition which is therefore invalid.  Enjoy.



The article
The link to the vid on YouTube

NOW NOTE FURTHER:
It's about at this point where I posted a YouTube video explaining how "bigger on the inside" physics wasn't any sort of science fiction invention created by the BBC with Doctor Who, and used a clip of the same to demonstrate how wrong it would be for the BBC to make any proprietary claims on the technology since the technology has been public domain on this planet for centuries. This particular blog post was a UK click magnet, according to the blog statistics back then, and en masse a lot of links I posted on this blog entry increasingly became unavailable, whereupon I found making a work-around necessary as well as reworking this page back into functioning again.  Via YouTube management, me & the Beeb went back and forth about complaints and rebuttals, but here it is, the year 2016, and my video remains standing.  I further assert that the BBC has NO claim (no one else either, for that matter) on technology that is demonstrably public domain, and maintain that assertion today.

So--this planet has had "bigger on the inside technology" for centuries when it sounds so exotically impossible on the Doctor Who show?  For what it's worth, it takes an Impossible Person like me to explain the exquisite simplicity of the matter with the disputed video in question as originally posted on YouTube:



...and you'll see this again as you continue with the original blog update entry below this commentary, albeit in Blogger-confined low quality.  It's really important to stress that it's because of the things I wrote about up to this point that one can begin to see that any library is a bigger-on-the-inside time machine, where the books are the user interface to a rather massive data core just as portrayed by the Doctor's TARDIS. All it takes to use a library TARDIS is navigation knowledge, for the library also encompasses the physics required by a TARDIS...most obviously for navigating the past. What's not as obvious is what techniques are required to navigate the future...but...those lessons are for advanced classes, although I do cover the basic principle of that further down in this blog entry. Very very very basic.

The ensuing greetings to Auntie Beeb were the direct result of what the blog statistics were showing as UK hits followed by links rendered inoperational...





April 2015 UPDATE: looks like UK entities yanked some more content and I'm in the process of working around those.  Stay tuned.

I am perfectly capable of generating my own clips, you know, and while you may choose to threaten Blogger with a lawsuit if they don't pull my blog, you DO know that I have the Fair Use clause protection, as all this is in the context of DISCUSSION of SCIENCE.  Whereas the scientific principle of time and relative dimensions in space are generic scientific principles which escape any attempt to make those proprietary in any form.  This is the nature of the argument I'll make to Blogger, and it's an argument that has succeeded in all the copyright challenges I've gotten via YouTube.  Your loss of any such lawsuit is guaranteed.

Go ahead and make my day.


To the scientific communities that have yanked content referred to--you are out of line in your pretense to being high lord gatekeepers of scientific discovery denying such discoveries to public discussion. God didn't die and leave YOU in charge of controlling the scientific universe.  By all means, you are also invited to make my day.  Seriously--you clowns have already collected big bucks for services rendered and nobody owns any universe.


This particular posting is a public discussion of science. References to Doctor Who are relevant in that classic Doctor Who was based on solid science regarding space's relative relations to time and relative time's relation to space, which goes to my oft-repeated point about how time defined in reference to the speed of light is recursive (therefore invalid), and associated assertions of science.  There exists no legal venue by which any production entity can claim ownership of the equation speed = how much time it takes to travel a distance---in other words, the classic equation distance = rate multiplied by time, which also (with considerations of mass/change-of-state/sublimation, acceleration/deceleration {basic calculus}, other physics of solids, physics of gases) happens to be the definition of time and relative dimensions in space,  a term which is just as generic science as speed is.

Doctor Who clips in this blog are primarily utilized as illustrations of science, and whereas there's greater science basis in Classic Who than there is in NuWho, more old clips than new will be found here under the protection of Fair Use copyright law. The only science NuWho was good for was to demonstrate the principles of geotemporal mapping.  Outside of that, NuWho is worthless.  Now, if you people are here to find trouble, I am all too eager to assist you in achieving your quarry.

But since you've yanked the Doctor's explanation of time and relative dimensions in space in terms of visual perspective, I have just outdone the Doctor on that score. And you can also see the defense I can make in terms of how time and relative dimensions in space are a scientific principle of physics that can NOT be claimed as proprietary by anybody...



...and here's me, doing a by far better job of explaining what is NOT a timelord discovery...



Thus we see that time is relative to the spatial dimensions of the object and we may therefore include time as another dimension, and all these dimensions are in fact relative to each other. It's clear, as well, that time and relative dimensions in space is a generic scientific descriptive that can't be copyrighted, defies patentability, and even trademarking.  Titles cannot be copyrighted; ideas cannot be copyrighted; ideas cannot be patented, either, nor can anything other than an invention or unique process, and that the invention we know as the book has been a public domain invention for centuries.  Not only that, but Yankee ingenuity improved on this invention--not British!--during World War II via its Victory Books campaign joined by the military after librarians launched it. The goal was to cram more bigger inside a book than was ordinarily the case, to accommodate inclusion in backpacks. (Also HERE)

Now, back to the physics, the science-- if you think you're raising a good point by pointing out that the interior of the book doesn't change even though one dimension doubles, it's countered by the halving of another dimension, you're forgetting something.  You're forgetting that each page has the same range of dimensions that the book does, and without changing the dimensions of the book, you can increase or decrease the dimensions contained by the book without changing the dimensions of the closed book by the following:

1. increasing the linear space the finger has to travel, in the same direction, from cover to cover, increases by adding thinner but more pages to the book.

2. decreasing the linear space the finger has to travel, in the same direction, from cover to cover, decreases by adding thicker but fewer pages.  The size of the book doesn't change but the dimensions contained thereby does.  It's analogous to the Doctor adding/removing rooms inside his machine--when the outside doesn't change its cover to cover dimensions, as it were, he can add or remove rooms but also has to consider the method by which the internal spatial dimensions lay against each other; how they fold together, so to speak, and thus affecting the inter-room navigation time--and it's all relative.

You would also be wise to consider that time travel navigation is the subject matter of my position as a time travel instructor, and not the science of time travel itself.  This is the wrong time for the development of the science of time travel, and the one thing I would have in common with your fictional doctor is that I won't provide spoilers, even when pressed to under oath.  As long as you continue to be greedy with science, you'll remain unready for the future.



Hello yet again, Auntie Beeb.  I regret to inform you that even under international copyright law, science cannot be copyrighted.  The best you can do is a patent, but that's difficult for you because patents are issued only for inventions or proprietary unique processes, or improvements on the same.

Show us your patents.

But patents filed in the 1960s are expired, Auntie, and are public domain...but that's not to say that the bigger-on-the-inside transdimensional engineered Earth device in the form of the book hasn't been public domain technology for centuries.  It has.

Oh, Auntie, my poor giddy Auntie--be a dear and research the term "derivative work" before you get your next pair of knickers in a knot.  You're welcome.






Major August 2015 science UPDATE:

Link to article

The science is in regarding that video I made challenging the BBC on transdimensional engineering and DANG if that doesn't look exactly like what I was talking about when I used the book analogy, further down in this post.  The curvature would be the book binding and the rest would be bringing two points closer together by manipulating the plane they're on; unfold the curvature and the distance between those two points increases; fold, and a shortcut can be established as there's less distance between those two points.  Exactly the way a book works, and humanity has had this basic technology for centuries.  Bingo!!  Auntie Beeb, take the hindmost--you don't own this.

Now here's where string theory comes in--notice that it requires fold-backs to work; a completely stretched out linear-form string gets you basically zero. I've said it before and I'll say it again--your idea of what zero is supposed to be is what's holding science back. You need to re-think your zero. Redefine what zero is.

No Klein bottle can exist without a loop-back either, nor can a Moebius strip.  Those work in theory as long as you exclude all dimensions except one, and that's a false presumption. I am now very confident that science can take it from there.  You're doing great already!

Quantum mechanics is, after all, mechanical, involving mechanisms. Delving into black holes as a mechanical system is very intriguing indeed.




....and it's late April 2016 and a remotely related item of science popped up on Google Plus, having to do with traveling a large space to a (relatively) neighboring star but using a craft of very very small mass, to utilize a light sail for propulsion. What I don't understand is what took  humanity so long to understand light as a form of energy that can do work when we've had the radiometer for as long as we did.  #DUH





July 2016 UPDATE: The planet's best, brightest cosmologists/physicists still get flummoxed by time. Well, as long as they insist on using the term "arrow of time" as they did in this article,  they inevitably will remain flummoxed. This infernally linear mode of thinking, coupled with their reliance on an infernally linear numbering system and the mathematics based thereon, it's going to remain the case. They seriously need to be liberated from their linear straitjackets. Seriously.




August 2016 UPDATE: Latest development that resembles my Physics 101 video in terms of a single dimension folded over like a book is the latest equation--ER = EPR. E = Einstein's theory, R = Rosen's theory, which goes on to describe the Einstein Rosen Bridge, which we also call wormholes. This article is a must-read for the few of us who take science more seriously than the BBC's Doctor, who writes it all off as "wibbly wobbly timey wimey."




Ides of April 2018 entry: The head wonk of timespace quantums has passed away, the man who would have thrown a party for time travelers if only they had shown up at the right time an place ( thus "proving" that no human being or English-literate extraterrestial has ever figured out time travel, as in EVER) passed away and we're waiting for HIM to show up at OUR party over at Widow Houdini's house. Yes, 19th century.

Whereas timespace is an affect of matter, Stephen Hawking isn't bound by the laws of physics when the material that made up the person of Stephen Hawking is no longer in the configuration of the remains of the person of Stephen Hawking. Having departed his material remains, I can say odds are pretty good that he's kicking his non-material self for having failed to prove the timespace co-ordinates for his party when he got around to advertising his invitation to time travelers. Stephen, have you at least calculated how many miles it is from 2215 to, say, 1980? Spacetime does involve distance in one of those dimensions it has, you know, and spacetime is multidimensional.  Well, at least you know NOW, don't you.

Now consider the following: archaeologists periodically unearth stuff which, at the time, had been lost knowledge and between the ancient times when the knowledge was common, became lost, then was discovered centuries later, time's events would have been completely different if the knowledge had been known during the time in between, as in, never had been lost. The point in time when I'm writing this is also the point in location where what we don't know is still stuff we can't know because we're here instead of being where we would be if we had but known all along. Stephen, the party you threw for time travelers was in a prohibited part of timespace.  What you tried to know, you weren't supposed to know. Yet.



October 2018 "Humans are so--linear." --The Doctor
Sequences of events can indeed be simultaneous, so that's no mystery. For every action there is equal and opposite reaction--that's basic gradeschool physics. And it wasn't prior to this "point in time" (time is pretty pointless, isn't it?) I hadn't seen the following article and what I write now is the effect due to reading it (being the cause).

Cause/Effect no effect on light says phys.org

Quantum weirdness indeed. Timey-wimey. But only with photons. I'm pleased to report that the other aspects of the universe continue in normal working order.


October 2018  Can't believe it's still time to update this very old post again, but Facebook just pulled an unbelievable fast one by Notifying me that somebody posted pics with me possibly in them. And you'll have a hard time believing who they think is possibly me. It's not Clara Oswald.















Yep--3 separate Notifications that I might be the 10th Doctor. Fancy that.
==============================================================

January 2020: With the run-up to the launch of the second season of the Jodi Whittacre era of Doctor Who, a marathon was run on BBC America which included the Tennant era episode involving Mme Pompadour, who likened her own life to being akin to chapters compressed in a book taking the slow path while The Doctor could jump around to any chapter he chose to.  Noteworthy also is the running of "the lost episode" which substituted animation for the bits where Tom Baker narrated for the missing pieces, and in which he performed the part of the script where Douglas Adams aptly observed that if you're a student of Einstein, Planck, et al, you've got a lot of unlearning to do.  How true; it's caused scientists even of the likes of Stephen Hawking to make the mistake of equating time with the device used to measure time. He should have known better because this mistake is quite elementary.

Time is a property of matter just like mass and gravity is, and it's why matter is capable of changing form. Any device composed of matter has its own properties of time that interfere with its use as a measurement thereof.  It takes a Douglas Adams to correctly observe that we've got a lot of unlearning to do in order to simply grasp the nature of time, and it's worthwhile repeating that Stephen Hawking himself proved that no person comprised of matter can travel in time outside of the properties thereof that matter possesses because persons are comprised of matter--not even a blue box that harnesses a star in perpetual state of decay can change that. Only if you're immaterial will time not matter. But humanity is on the cusp of figuring out anti-matter, though, isn't it. For that, they'll have to unlearn mathematics based on the decimal system.


January 19 2020 Tesla Edition  Seriously, BBC? Sure, there was industrial espionage among inventors, but that Edison circle included more than Tesla. It included Alex Bell and Emile Berliner and Westinghouse. You should have kept a keen eye on a lab assistant weasel named Watson. Tsk tsk. If anyone would have also been in alien employ, it would have been Watson.








Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Japanese elections impacted by WWII history

A lot of kids in school get bored silly with history classes, but fact remains that what happened 'way back when comes back to bite the here and now and, like it or don't, history remains important, and a current case in point is the Japanese election that happened just yesterday.  An excellent analysis was broadcast on NPR just this morning via the program "On Point".

Just like as happened with Turkey's conditional entry into the EU regarding the Armenian Massacre, the point was made about both China and Korea having sensitivities about pre-World War II domination by Japan; Nanking for Japan remains as much a sore point as Armenia does for Turkey, and there were more instances for Japan than just Nanking.

Prime Minister Abe's visit to honor the World War II war dead was viewed as an honor to those who were also war criminals, and such, and the argument was made that WWII was then, and this is now, under decades of a "pacifist constitution".  But allegations have already been made that members of Abe's party, being Japanese nationalists, are also history revisionists that lay a heavy coating of sugar on that particular bitter pill.

Well, it's not like the Chinese can claim victimhood at this point with their military patrols of the South China Sea, either, but this history with Japan is often cited as an excuse, too, so it's not like it can be relegated to those proverbial dustbins of history any better than the Armenian Massacre can.

Kids, you may think this is all dull ancient history that has nothing to do with you, but you can't avoid the fact that it affects the world you're eventually going to be running when us old dry boring fogies move on.


Monday, July 22, 2013

Chinese and other music exotica

It's been a long while since China had been jamming the radio stations of others by using raucous traditional music, but thanks to certain shortwave listeners, they've posted selections to YouTube, like this one...


...and this fancifully introduced one...

UPDATE: soundcloud.com has a good quality, full copy of the firedrake music from the satellite feed HERE

In my post immediately previous, I  mentioned "sea wind", aka sea breeze, which has a particular meaning in Asia and which also happens to be the name of a radio station originating in Japan but aimed toward North Korea.  Nice clear (ish) signal obtained by someone in Romania:


China has been attempting to dominate the shortwave radio bands for quite some time now, but it's also the radio band where one can find clandestine activity, such as the American military-sponsored Radio Solh (transmitter suspected to be in Britain, aimed at Afghanistan), which went off the air years ago, but whose music I still seek.  The only song on their playlist that I was able to find on YouTube was Temptation, by Arash.

...and I found it only because of the parts that were in English.  I tried looking for anyone's video log of the shortwave Radio Sohl to no avail, so I rummaged around my own archives and found an audio clip, starting from ID and playing through to its unceremonious abrupt cut-off (almost but not quite 15 minutes).

I turned it into a .WMV video using a pic of the infamous antenna of linguist Richard E. Wood, when he lived in Cape Girardeau MO and working for SEMO U.  A bunch of us radio folk went to his house when he first moved in and held an antenna raising party. The antenna didn't get raised that day--just the base was installed--as it began to rain and kept raining.  We went back to IL with a trunkload of bootlegged Coors (yeah--it was illegal to commercially take it anywhere on the east side of the Mississippi back then.  Good times)...



I made a point of recording the second song on that track because I discovered that every time I played that at breakfast, I could dispense with drinking coffee altogether.  I'm on the verge of offering a bounty for a good quality clean copy of that piece; it really gets my boogie up. AUGUST UPDATE: I have located a lengthier tape of Radio Sohl, recorded in 2008 with a different playlist.  Will process that and add that here. UPDATE 2: tape machine busted a belt, got a replacement and found that it caused a lot of distortion. I also found own archives of firedrake and other Sohl audio logs. Trying to process those at this time.

I wish I could find all the other songs I heard on Radio Sohl on YouTube--oh well--but in the process of finding the version of Temptation that I heard, I managed to find an older version of that where there was more English spoken, and I consider that one to be a gem as well...


Now if I could only find some Radio Tahiti on YouTube.  They've been off the air for decades and there was no better place to find the best music on shortwave, although, truth be told, Indonesia ran a close second.  I tried to find something from Radio Euzkadi (Basque separatists) via shortwave, but came up only with FM logs. I guess I'll just have to be happy with this collection of "glory days" interval signals (Radio Tahiti's IS is about 13 minutes in)...


I find it remarkable just how much TRT's IS has changed (Voice of Turkey), from what's on this video (toward the end, about 34 minutes in), then to a number of piano variations on one theme, and now, just one piano riff, same theme.  Not on this video: BBC's Oranges and Lemons; Radio RSA's bokmakierie IS.


AUGUST EDIT--Found some more Radio Sohl, and so I'll be appending those here, one at a time. The track immediately below has a rather lengthy anti-Taliban message after the first two tunes, but music resumes afterward.  People in the DXLD Yahoo Group have said these announcements, where they occur, are in both Dari and Urdu.


Sunday, July 21, 2013

China's crackdown on Falun Gong, again.

...but all I have to go on is a post by China Uncensored on Facebook.  Tried to find news online about this, and...well...nada (so far).

http://en.falundafa.org/
In the New York Times
http://www.faluninfo.net/

A shout out to my Chinese friends on Google Plus, who have been silent for quite some time since #chineseoccupy, and I think that, among the Chinese activists I have in my Circles, I am alarmed over the overwhelming silence from that nation in recent months.  No news is NOT good news.

A closer check of my Circles show a major part of my Chinese friends haven't posted anything recently, and I find this astonishing. I'm calling you out in particular, @周双立, @Shuo Zhang. @王玮玮 hasn't posted a thing since March of last year, and usually, when I post a G+ name on Blogger with a @ in front of it, Google will produce a dropdown. None was produced with these names, so something is bad wrong somewheres.

http://www.chinabubblewatch.org/

I checked the traffic to this post a few hours after I posted it and found that, for the first time, I've got more Internet traffic from China than I had from North America.  Xi Jinping, I see you.  And your guys, too.  I see you and your guys in the South China Sea. Two words for you: sea wind.

Friday, July 19, 2013

Old debates come back to haunt--talk about history!

Got up this AM hearing a strange thing on KOSU: Watermelon Slim was crowing about bringin' the blues to Oklahoma. Wut? He moved out of Oklahoma to Mississippi, last I heard.  And his website sez he done come n gone in June, anyhow.

Oh yeah, the debate history. My friends on Google Plus already know about my version of +Hypercrites, but there's another version of Hypercrites out there where Slim has been hanging his virtual hat ever since Debate Both Sides shut down, and that used to be Arianna Online before Arianna Huffington took off with the Huffington Post.  Yeah--we got a history, all of it political, and all of it debate, and all of that when he used to be an Okie.

Welcome back to Oklahoma, Slim.  Truce after all these years, maybe?

"I'm a King Bee" YouTube video
"Tomorrow Night" You Tube video

(Beats me why Blogger isn't imbedding YouTube videos anymore)

I already had some debate history come back to haunt me earlier this week on Wednesday when my favorite Norwegian dropped by. +Bill Coleman and I know him better as Gnosisquest on the old PBS board.  Actually, after joining that other Hypercrites, I'm pretty sure Bill's "met" Slim, too.  Anyway, me & Ras (Gnosisquest) connected at the coffee shop inside of Hastings, and we got a little past history discussion going, and when we got overheard by a young man, he joined in, and by golly if we didn't have a good ole fashioned debate going, just like the good ole days.

Yeah, Ras and me usually took the same side on things, while me & Slim didn't.  I lean liberal, while Ras is definitely liberal, and Slim--well, he's definitely liberal but he's got a libertarian streak and that's where the friction is. So there ya have the bottom line--given that debating was the whole point to begin with, it's no big deal. Slim happens to be a history buff himself (or used to be), as it happens. What the hey--debaters will debate because arguing is what they do. Now all I gotta do is figure out how the blazes to get to Rentiesville from Enid.  I got bets on routes 412 and 69.

Labor Day Update: well dang, I missed it.  I'm probably the only Hypercritter who hasn't seen a Slim performance in person.  Almost got to one when he did OKC's Passeo--"missed it by that much". Dang and a half. Well, if he ever does the Passeo again, I'm just gonna have to try harder.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Zimmerman v Martin is losing me some of my friends

I'm starting to get into arguments with people I otherwise get along with when the subject of Trayvon's death comes up.  Now, among the people I've known for years in shortwave radio circles, it doesn't surprise me among a measly few whose rightwing opinions I'm already familiar with, and we already don't get along from 'way back either.  Today's shortwave radio scene has been on the decline as a method of armchair traveling primarily because it's become more of a wingnut/conspiracy theory realm as major broadcasters of yesteryear pull out altogether leaving these idjits in place to spew to the world.

But I'm getting at odds with people I never expected to be like that, saying things like "oh so it's all whitey's fault now" and "the NAACP is all wrong".  Geez, this has been a year of major broadside past-time paradigm shift for me, none of it pleasant, but I'll be damned if I'm going to continue pretenses with the narrow-minded or the myopic no matter who they are and no matter where I find them.

The truth is that most whitefolk are incapable of putting themselves in the shoes of black folk, and although I took down my previous post as to why I think this way due to how personal it was, I think it's important to point out at the very least that when I visited black churches, I noticed that I was the only white person there in every case.  When I visited white churches, I noticed that there were a few blacks there.  And so I therefore realize I am also in the minority among whites as to what it's like being the odd duck out, and all the suspicions that go with that. I can handle being the only straight in a gay bar and the only white face in a black bar or black church, and the only woman on an all-male work crew in a power plant--but judging from my only-ness, I'm guessing I'm the only one in any given location who can handle it, too. The average person regardless of color never wants to stand out, and therefore, not being outstanding, are committed to being average right down to their common myths, preconceptions and prejudices.

I owned a house in a black neighborhood, so I know about redlining.  I got redlined because of where my house was located, not because of my own color (white).  I've not only visited black friends in "the projects" but lived there myself, figuring if my fellow human being could do it, so could I.  It's not easy, and it's no wonder there's no trust in the police force there.  After seeing what I've seen, I don't either. I know close up what the deal with inner city schools is, and I've always been in favor of national funding, independent of local property taxes as a result. I've spent a few years walking a mile in those shoes, and nobody, black or white, is qualified to pompously proclaim that I don't know what I know.

It saddens me to report that my fellow whitefolk, as a rule, are incapable of seeing a different reality and therefore denies it exists.  Redlining is illegal, and just because it doesn't happen to them, they think it doesn't exist, if they think about it at all, which I doubt.

I'd like to see a revival of an old book that made waves back in the Civil Rights era: "Black Like Me"--it should be required reading  especially today. Similarly, I'd like to see certain blackfolk who are smart enough to know better (I'm talking to you, Ilene) refrain from looking at all whitefolk as being in dire need of an education (most do, no doubt, but not all) and recognize individuals with differences among them, instead of treating them all uniformly.

Some whitefolk already "get it", even if they are a rare minority. It's one thing to be a conveyor of information and it's quite another to be a self-important self-appointed evangelist-gatekeeper, not only of information deemed worthy of conveying but also the information deemed necessary to conceal.  If some whitefolk didn't already "get it", Romney would have been president and whitefolk wouldn't be out on the streets protesting with their black fellow human beings the outcome of the Zimmerman trial.

We all need to sit down at the same table and walk a mile in each others' shoes.  Seriously.  There may be people out there who think that culture based on color is the bee's knees, but on this planet, there is only one earthling race, and it's the human race.  We seriously would do well to render stupid tribalism to the dustbins of history.