If you use the key words Youtube, Going Home, and Annie Haslam you will find an absolutely beautiful rendition with a slide show that will bring tears to your eyes. Very nice.
Yes Elizabeth.....That certainly is a beautiful rendition
I think the reason that this "Going Home" song is so powerful and meaningful for me is that my dear Helen went through the sad stages of wanting to go home as did so many others here.
I remember now, that I made a little song about it for youtube'
Two years ago I posted a link to a boy dancing in eastern europe somewhere in the basement pointing out that there were 10 million people who had watched him.
That song was by Parov Stelar who tends to do offbeat swing type music and he has done another piece with Fred and Ginger dancing - the only dancing pair there ever was for my money. This offtake has been viewed 17 million times.
The boy is still dancing in that basement and will be for years to come - only now 30 million people have watched. Everything everywhere is connected.
Parov Stelar - Booty Swing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco4z98nIQY
I saw your post that you're living large. Two thumbs up.
The problem with journeys is you arrive. Instead of looking out the window wistfully watching your life go by you have to get up, walk around, and do stuff. Like lug heavy suitcases because Guido doesn't. Or help the Russian woman with shoulders that would make a middle linebacker cry by pushing her, the suitcases, and the Lada so it might kick in and sputter us all to Minsk or wherever the destination is this time.
I was born in the wrong century. A hundred years earlier and picking the right womb, I could have been on the grand tour which almost everyone did back then. Hanging with Toulouse at the Moulin Rouge drinking Absinthe dancing the CanCan or skating in St Petersburg by the winter palace like Dr Zhivago before the revolution came. So many people journeyed around Europe as the thing to do to get a broader perspective that it had it's own name. Someone could say "he's on the tour" and everyone knew that meant he was schlepping around Europe preferably while someone else paid. Picking the right womb is everything in these things.
Let's say you popped out of mister and misses leather workers in Edinburgh which, it has to be said, is not a wise choice. Your grand tour will be riding the lame horse in the open cart to Whinchburg delivering leather pelts probably in the rain. Pick the Dutchess of York and the Duke of La-de-da and your travel plans take on a more foundational footing.
These thoughts cross your mind while you're pushing the Lada wondering whether Nanotchka sitting behind the wheel 'steering', weighs more or less than the lada or the suitcases. Or I imagine they would think such things since I don't travel. At least not any more. Well, that's not entirely true.
I do have an excellent travel agency that gets me special arrangements for every trip. They book me through Vicariously which saves no end of money. Whether I'm riding in the Tour De France with the guys looking around at the French countryside or I'm cliff diving off Monaco into a turquoise Mediterranean, I get about the same experience as one of the floating hotels that saves people the bother of actually travelling either. They eat better but I'm not stuck feeding with Mr and Mrs So Absolutely Boring You Want To Kill Yourself all week.
That's the best joke life has come up with for my money. Wherever you are and whatever you're doing, your travelling companion is always the same person and that can range from hilarious to downright torture to watch. In my case there's a fairly large and motley crew in here and no thought pops out onto the field without being kicked around by everybody. On the other hand nobody hogs the floor without getting shouted down or more likely have an ACME bomb go off making the 'speaker's' eyes open wide in black face.
One of the gang's great ideas was to do a movie narrated by cartoon characters explaining Einstein's theory of relativity in simple terms. It could work except for the obvious shortcoming that I don't understand anything Einstein said. That's the point I was going to make though. I'm not interested in arriving. I'm not even interested in going. I'm already on the only journey that is ultimately going to matter to me and there I'm a time traveller through space or a space traveller through time - take your pick because that's the real relationship I'm in.
The places I actually have travelled to are all littered with the edifices of desperate people. No palace grand enough, no monastery holy enough, no empire big enough, no hoard large enough, no vengence sufficient, and all of it achieved the same end. Piles of stones around and some baubles that have survived for which desperate people can't pay enough now to get enough of them. Self awareness comes with a price. Self awareness is the architect of history. Testosterone is it's brush. Fear is it's reason. Momentary changes in the landscape is it's reward. Dust is it's future.
Dust is my future too. It's what I was before. I don't know why I should be afraid of that. I hate it but I don't have to do anything to achieve that. It's a universal truth of phyics and whatever else is true whatever we believe, whoever or whatever is running the place - they run it using one integrated set of physics across the entire universe. Ergo every lifeform everywhere in the universe is facing the same physics I am. Entropy.
The benevolence of this system by which I am communicating with you now by making you have your own thoughts about what I'm saying by stringing little letters together that you assign all the meaning to which is almost certainly different from how I see - is that the rules are the same for everyone everywhere. Personal experience can and does vary wildly though. That's probably true elsewhere too. Differentiation and minor variation on theme are powerful concepts anywhere in finding a foothold that works better. Polar bears as I've said are black bears that kept going north. Comparing genetics proves that. White, thick fur and greater fat thickness are minor variations that worked there over time in that space back then.
It's not easy getting old, don't get me wrong. It's just not a reason to panic. In all likelihood 2087 is going to be just like 1826 was. Nothing; but, no worries either. Lots of people worry about that. I think that's funny but few share that joke. Why would I worry about not having worries anymore?
So, the thing is when I get to my destination I don't actually have any luggage. I just arrive. All the arrangements are made and all I have to do is show up - and I don't have to worry about being on time either. I won't have any feelings about that either. My feelings are in my body and one thing is very clear. When I die, I'm not in my body anymore and ipso facto, I'm not having any feelings about it.
Someone once asked me if I didn't think it mattered what happened in the middle east for example. I don't think it matters what happens in this region of space or even the entire galaxy. The point of making the place so mindbogglingly big (if it was designed) would be to ensure that local things happening like supernovas and colliding galaxies don't wipe out the entire purpose (if there is a purpose). If there isn't a purpose it's still this big and so either way the local populations which are mathematically certain elsewhere are unlikely to all be wiped out. It's likely as well that many lifeforms that make it to tools and interfering with the naturally balanced order wipe themselves out by making changes too fast and too poorly understood that get out of control.
The most compelling argument that there are advanced civilizations out there, some wag said, is that they haven't tried to contact us. That would make them more intelligent than us. That is a comforting, if contrived, thought.
I was taught to learn and think in school. I learned that I was on my own in university. I didn't really start getting an education until my mid twenties when I realized that what I was trying to find my way in was more a free for all zoo than a serious place. Few people cared much that their reasons did or didn't hold up under scrutiny. Fewer people still had much in the way of reasons to hold up under scrutiny. Few reasons held up under close scrutiny in any regard before falling into camps of subjectivity.
The viewer creates the reality and reinforces it - or changes it and that either by choice or by personality or by memory. Eye witness accounts are the field where close scrutiny verifies that almost everybody sees the same events differently and that almost all memories of events change over time.
None of that matters anymore than this region of space. It's good that self aware creatures have such a personal experience in life. It lets us love as well as hate. It lets us give as well as take. It lets us care beyond ourselves as well as fear beyond ourselves. It makes life intensely personal and, knowing I'm here, I would have it no other way. Whether that's by design I can't say.
Kill for God and country they cry but I will have none of it. I offered proficiency and that is all. The meaning the populace is occupied with is the same twaddle my readings of every civilization that ever existed shared in idiom if not in form. THIS is important. Learning that we're always the same in every era for thousands of years because by being human we demonstrate human traits - isn't important.
Human isn't important either any more than the polar bear. We happen to dominate the planet at the moment. We shot up like a shooting star and as we all should know - humans can only think in terms of the previous high water mark. Always up. Always more. Never down. Never less. Not particularly thought out.
While this rock went around the sun 65 times so far, I have lived many lives. I have been many people and have seen many things. My head can play different kinds of music. I can see dozens of movies and hundreds of scenes. I remember parts of hundreds of books. By the same token as some get large breasts (I didn't) or have large johnson's (I don't) or can play a musical instrument (I can't), I was given a good enough mind to learn and a sound enough spirit to always know I am in HIS house (that will do) and I am just a small renter with some free time now.
I need only go to one question to know. Form is not important in this. I am at the end of my life and the question is asked - what did I think of it? Thumbs up or thumbs down? The answer is two thumbs up. Fantastic experiences. Everything else is commentary.
When reading your stories I'm thinking that your brain is traveling at breakneck speed. I can't imagine how you do it. I like the way you embed little truths into your writings. Such as.....
Kill for God and country they cry but I will have none of it.
We've come a ways from those foxholes. I will take you to some places if you are so inclined.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXjUqLMgxM
This is a one hour show that goes through how a group of scientists worked together to break down what a rusted lump found in a Roman shipwreck actually was.
Life is much bigger than our tiny concerns just as our tiny concerns are our entire universe (you don't think about what you're not aware of).
I said I would take you a few places and today I was wondering why there are no subduction zones in the Atlantic Ocean. The Pacific Ocean has the ring of fire where the ocean floor folds in under the continental plate. The much younger Atlantic doesn't. Why? So I found out my 1980's understanding of geology is out of date. There are three minor zones forming. Ocean floor is relatively light when it first forms and progressively gets denser over many millions of years. The Pacific is huge and the ocean floor has enough time to get quite dense and literally sink under the continental plates.
The Atlantic Ocean is much more recent. We can date all that but you can tell comparing the south american and african coastlines. They fit like a glove because plate drifting hasn't had time to jumble up those pieces. There's just the mid-atlantic ridge all the way up and down exactly in the middle where the atlantic ocean floor is exactly as old on one side as it is the same distance on the other. The oldest part of the atlantic ocean is right beside Virginia Beach and Morocco. The youngest part is right at the mid atlantic ridge. Iceland is the only land that sits on that ridge. In fact you can walk in iceland with one foot on land going west and one foot on land going east.
That's how we confirmed polar magnetic shifts. Every 300,000 years the molten lava solidified with a different 'north pole'. It turns out that's fairly regular and has something to do with the molten iron core. If the compass had been thought of during one of the shift periods - it wouldn't have worked because the iron filings (from making weapons and such) wouldn't have behaved strangely predictably around a magnet which is how compasses were invented in the first place.
That made me notice a PBS documentary on Mount St Helens. Not focused so much on the eruption that was probably the most recorded in history - but in the scientific work being done afterwards - and the incredible things they're learning about how volcanoes really behave and how resilient life is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlbnLnHSRzE
edit - btw, we will never know but I'm betting that ocean floor needs a certain time (read size) to have the outer edges (coast lines) become dense enough to subduct under the plates. I'm betting way, way down the road the appalachian mountains which are so old they're almost mounds - will become active again once the atlantic starts sinking underneath. The water moisture in the ocean floor is what causes volcanoes. I wouldn't sell the Virginia Beach property though.
Wolf .....I enjoyed watching both of those videos that you found. You certainly have a great sense of what's interesting in this world and how to find out about it. .....I particularly marveled over the story of the Greeks and their construction of the very first computer in 200-bc. using such an amazing gear driven machine with precise accuracy. .....I remember once when I was working on converting a machine to micro-processor control, and it required a gear with ten teeth on it. The machinist was having a fit, saying "Why not 8 or 12 instead of ten?"
Some history of round numbers (like 10 teeth in your example)
Round numbers have always fascinated human beings. The rounder it is the more important it must be. I'll try to tell the millennium story differently. Let's say you had a precocious child you were baby sitting and to keep them quiet you offer them $1 if they count to 100.
They count to 99 and put their hand out for their dollar. You explain to them that in order to finish they have to include the last number. You have to include the number 100 in order to say you finished counting the actual amount.
Now lets say it's $10 and you asked the child to count to 2000. They agree and after a while they get to 1999 and put out their hand for the ten dollars.
That's what the planet did. It got to 1999 and then this HUGE ROUND, REALLY ROUND number was ahead and everybody had a brain cramp.
On December 31, 2000 when the one thousand years in a millennium were actually done, there was no one around. The new thousand begins with a 1 as in 2001 and ends in a zero as in 3000.
I hope that in 3000 when they celebrate the end of this millennium, they will get it right and do so on December 31, 3000 - and not on December 31, 2999.
There will still be coins around from this fiasco then just as there are tens of thousands of Roman coins and thousands of Greek coins around which we saw on that Greek astrolab thing.
Ask people what millenium we're in and many will get it wrong (don't do that because there's no point making people feel stupid). They will say we are in the second millenium because of course it's only 2016. Young children don't get fooled by that as easily. They haven't spent their adult life yet being the underassistant west coast promotion man and may still have an open mind. We're in the third millenium After Christ which in latin of course isn't Anno Domini. That means the 'year of the lord'.
The problem with this is that the Jewish people don't use that dating because, of course, Christ is part of Christian thinking and does not exist in Judaism. Israel speaks Christian dating because it's convenient when speaking to Christians. This is even more frustrating for Moslems who also refer to the Jewish bible as a book of great learning but did exactly what the Christians did and began their own calendar based on their own history which is what everybody does including the Jewish people.
It was the Moslems who taught the Christians the use of the mathematical zero. They did that when they conquered northern Africa and then came up across Gibralter and conquered much of Spain. It was during that time that the Moslems translated their books into Latin for the edification of their conquered province.
Zero was the realization that when you have two apples and give someone two apples then you have zero apples and that concept needs a placeholder - a space. That was somewhere around 800 AD I think. Up until then Christianity had no name for the year Jesus Christ was actually born in. That year of course is the year zero because AD only comes into effect the year AFTER he was born and BC only comes into effect the year BEFORE he was born. As the Moslems pointed out, there was a year in which he was actually born and you have to count that year in your thinking.
It doesn't help that both calendars the Christians used were Roman and Roman based (Julian and then Gegorian) or that the days of the week are Viking (Thor's day, Woden's day, Frei day, Sun day, Moon day), or that the most reliable 'calendar' was the moon and it's regular phases. As you saw in that documentary, none of those work together harmoniously.
It gets further complicated when you combine different base counting systems. The invention of the zero allowed the Moslems to create the base 10 system the world now uses. The world also used base 6 counting systems which our clocks and our calendars still work with. There is no 10 in clocks or calendars because the Moslems hadn't conquered Spain before those things became entrenched and base 6 works better because 4 times base equals one day (6 x 4 = 24). So human beings use both now still.
Then in 1938, along comes George Boole who invented a Boolean Math which is essentially base two in it's pure form. There are only two numbers. One and zero. You can easily learn how to express any number as a set of 1's and 0's. That changed everything.
It changed everything because saying something is either a one or a zero is exactly the same function as saying something is on or off. That makes every last data point a switch which is either on (1) or off (0). On and off can be yes and no or right and wrong or any other dual concept and the power of that is you can apply logic directly to mathematical values.
Instead of just counting values, you are creating meaning without limit by combining ideas even though it's just math you're actually doing.
The logic comes into it when you use connectors like AND, NOT, IF, and OR for example. Now you're not just adding and multiplying or square rooting - you're into virtually unlimited functions that can apply to almost anything. It's because of Boole that the first computer was able to do something useful and it's base 2 counting which then married seemlessly with logic, that computers and what they do became possible.
IF George comes to this site (1 or 0) AND George logs in (1 or 0) AND George gives the right password (1 or 0) THEN give George the right to post (1 or 0). IF George tries to post AND it's not timed out AND George is signed in THEN process the post. And the math part is that each time it looks for a one or a zero. One means yes. Zero means no. In this example you need to have all the conditions met to go ahead or you get an error message (IF zero then NOT post AND display this error message).
On the other hand, there's a tribe in South America that gets by fine with just three numbers. They use the numbers one, two, and many. All things can be covered with that in their world. When the modern apes told them that was out of date - the primitive answered that he was here now and that was current so he wasn't out of date. True story.
All shares of modern stocks suffer from the same round number theorem as the millennium. Whatever the facts, coming up against a $100 stock price causes people to reassess because it's VERY ROUND. Have a great day.
To Wolf and his many friends on this site.........
I've been thinking about commenting on your last posts, about numbers, ever since you wrote them. I'm always so impressed with your knowledge of literally everything.
The son of one of my nephews is a Math and Physics professor at Stanford University and I emailed him your posts. In his reply, he called them a Great Ramble on the History of Numbers and was curious as to your profession. I told him I thought you were an artist..... He was amazed.
I took the liberty of putting some of your posts on my little website so anybody could easily find them. I hope it's OK with you. This is a direct link to them.. ................................... http://www.georgestreit.net/unp_wolf_krause
I'll expand on it a little bit: In computer science education there's a notion that's gathered steam over the past several years, called "computational thinking." Not everyone agrees on what that means (in the same way not everyone agrees on what "mathematical thinking" or "musical thinking" might be), but one take is that there are patterns in the ways we can use computers to accomplish tasks efficiently, and we can see some of them in everyday life. If we're aware of those patterns, then we might find it easier to understand how computers work, and we can sometimes think of better ways to do things in the real world.
I'll give one example from the world of computers and another from the "real" world, sort of. Imagine a thick phone book, the kind we don't see as often these days because the information is kept online. If you're looking for a particular person's phone number, you don't start at the beginning and work your way through the As, then the Bs, an so forth. Instead you might open the phone book somewhere in the middle, automatically think, "No, the Ms is too far into the alphabet," then split the difference in the first half of the phone book ("No, the Fs are not far enough,") and eventually find the name you're looking for.
Computer scientists call this binary search, and it's the most efficient way of finding an item in a list of ordered items (under some assumptions that I won't go into). It's binary in a true/false sense. You're making two decisions at each step: "Is this my item?" "No? then is what I see greater than or less than the item I'm looking for?" The nice thing about treating a task like this in abstract terms is that we can then analyze it mathematically and predict how long it will take without actually having to try it out. Ten billion items? I can tell you about how many steps you'll need in the worst case (log base 2 of ten billion).
Here's a second example (from memory, so I may get some of the details wrong). Back in the middle of the 20th century, telephone systems worked in a way we older folks are all familiar with: you picked up the receiver, waited while you listened for a dial tone, and then started dialing. During that waiting time, the system is trying to connect your phone to a local switch that will handle your call. If there are a lot of people trying to call at the same time, your call gets put in a queue. Here's the question: How should the queue be ordered? (This is a very typical kind of question in the design of computer systems today.)
The natural, fair answer is "first come, first served." And that works. But when the telephone system got very busy, the waiting times would get long, and callers would hang up (or jiggle the little button) and try again. The result was that by the time the system got to your call in the queue, it would be just a placeholder that didn't need to be handled any more. It turned out to be more efficient to order the queue "last in, first out," the reverse of what we'd think was fair, but because of people's natural behavior in using the system, it turned out to be the most efficient way to design it.
Hi George, what an amazing thing to come to your link and see myself. I've never experienced that before. Thank you. I started reading and came to the line "I just can't do this anymore" and I broke down hard. That will always remain one of the worst moments of my life. It's not guilt or regret or any other simplistic thing. It's the instance the poignancy of the tragedy overtook me where all moments before were me fighting to keep things in some semblance of what they had been and all moments after were the new reality.
Thank you also for sharing with me that a Stanford professor versed in the topics found my little romp to be sound. I'm assuming 'a great ramble' is being used qualitatively there. We have to remember the topic which is taking you somewhere in a post - and not the construction of meaningful commentary. You're welcome to use my words in any way that suits you. They're all said to you.
My last position was as a director of governance in a large corporation and before that I was the CIO of one of their subsidiaries. One of the banks in the carribean still uses the system I designed fifteen years ago untouched. I've had three careers starting in finance with the first, then in sales and marketing with a major drug company, and finally in project management and systems. I worked a total of 28.5 years under the umbrella of those three companies and the very second I was secure, I retired at the age of 53. I just wanted the money. I'm 65 and I'm in my 13th year of independence. That is the only achievement I care about.
What other people do and think is their business. At fifteen I realized that the deity I was raised to believe in was insufficient and cluttered with human needs. I modified my own religion of which I am still the only member, and that design has also remained untouched.
It was the same with education. I realized after I graduated that if I wanted a real education, I was going to have to start reading source material. It took me over ten years to go through the list I made. If you're looking for different - I seem to be in that category.
When I look at the grand sweep of life, it's clear that things do not matter one wit. They all are the flotsam and jetsam of space rubble. It is only time that matters. It is only in time that meaning exists and in order to have meaning all you need is a single viewer to create it and all you need to turn that meaning into rubble is a bit more time. Time gives space coherence - not the other way around.
Most all mammals live in the same intense, first person and direct experience we do. They all have personalities and personal reactions to experience in such a similar way to ourselves that differentiation on that point is minimal. Being alive and in the moment isn't determined by self awareness so much as awareness - and both of those have ranges. Humans of course assume human awareness is the perfect pitch awareness - which is a redundancy that seeps in when self awareness meets the deep needs and fears we all feel.
You said you didn't know who I was. Now you do. I'm nobody and I don't matter any more than anything in 28493 BC mattered or in 6819 AD will matter. I'm completely free to be me in the moment. It was abundantly obvious to me as a teenager that life on this planet was the last thing from any charitable form of serious in any meaningful regard whatsoever. Every last aspect outside mathematics and physics to name two, is consistently and obviously self serving.
This may sound like criticism or scolding; but, it's the opposite. Life is open system. Any input can and might happen. The plethora of deities don't all affect your life - just the one you accept - which is strange when you stop and think about that. Except when you do stop and think about that - it isn't strange at all. It's all in what you believe, and believe it or not, the pen writing that is in your hand.
"Who are you?" the mad hatter asked at the busy luncheon table. "I am free." I answered and turned him into a cheap plastic garden gnome. Because I can. Come back a thousand years from now and ask me what happened to the mad hatter. He'll still be a cheap plastic garden gnome and it still won't matter.
To Wolf and his many friends on this site.........
Wolf........Thank you for finally opening up about yourself. You should be very proud of what you have achieved in proportion to how hard you worked for it. From your paintings on "Wolf Von Munchcake". I knew you were an artist, but I'm not surprised that it was only a hobby. Several of my friends were also curious as to your profession, so of course I had to add your explanation to the site.
Robert (RSA)........I see that Wolf is not the only scientific intellectual around here. Thank you for your contribution. I love to read this high-teck stuff. It gives my little brain something to play with.
I'm happy that we have the opportunity on this site to engage in these far out discussions. It gives us something to divert our brains from our stressful caregiving experiences.
Forget what time it is. Forget about what's going on right now.
Try and understand that every recorded moment is there all the time just as every memory is stored all the time and that not accessing isn't the same as not there.
I have you pegged at 94. If that's right then you were born in 1922. That means that you were about 18 in 1940. That's the year this came out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdJSBtuS0oc
So what was happening to George in 1940? I know one thing. There's a tome of data in there about that year. There were 8766 hours in that year and that's a lot of hours in which to be 18.
Where did you live? What was it like living there? Go back there and dwell in that age or that year or that place and find a few things to tell. Were you working yet? Were you in the armed forces? What happened in that year?
This did:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKh6XxYbbIc
And this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l6vqPUM_FE
And this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvSKYDaorLk
In the mood yet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQgXPTekOU
.....
Start writing. If you need anything just whistle. You know how to whistle don't you? Just put your lips together and blow.
Anyone else around in 1940 is equally invited to play this game.
If y'all don't mind, I'll jump in here before Georgie wakes up and toss in a few recollections that bracket the year 1940. Actually, it's some class history stuff I had written for a for a high school class reunion about twenty years ago.
FIFTH GRADE - 1938/1939 Teacher: Miss Katherine Williams Subjects: Reading, English, Arithmetic, Geography, History, Spelling, Writing, and Health. Recollections: Miss Williams seemed determined to paddle everyone in the class, as several of the classmates will testify. Once during recess the girls invited the boys to play Red Rover, Red Rover with them, and it seemed a thrilling idea to go crashing into a line of girls, but the truth is that they didn't have very much to crash into except for Dixie Moore. Meanwhile: World War II began as Britain declared war on Germany after Hitler overran Czechoslovakia and Poland, but that seemed far away. The World's Fair opened in New York and an M.I.T. student swallowed thirty-two goldfish. Rookie Joe DiMaggio led the American League in batting and the first nylon stockings were sold in Wilmington, Delaware. John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" was a best seller and "Gone With the Wind" opened in big theaters. "Moonlight Serenade" became a big hit for Glenn Miller.
SIXTH GRADE - 1939/1940 Teacher: Miss Katherine Williams Subjects: Same as fifth grade, plus Agriculture Recollections: The class was split by some unknown formula and combined with students from the class just below ours. Miss Williams' class stayed on the Elementary side. Meanwhile: Hitler pushed the British into the sea at Dunkirk, overran France, and began bombing Britain in preparation for an invasion. Congress passed the Selective Service Act, and the 40-hour workweek went into effect. Gearshift levers started appearing on the steering columns of popular automobiles. Glenn Miller was the most popular big band leader, and wee Bonnie Baker recorded "Oh Johnnie, Oh Johnnie, How You Can Love".
SEVENTH GRADE - 1940/1941 Teacher: Mr. Thomas V. Banks Subjects: English, Arithmetic, Spelling, Mississippi History, Science, Citizenship, and Health Recollections: Prof. Banks was seemingly a very accomplished man, speaking French and playing the violin, and he entertained us all -- and inspired some -- with stories of his travels and experiences. He made a Gatling gun motion and sound to line us up for marching back into class after recess. Billy Majure got sick in class once from having to swallow tobacco juice because Prof. Banks stood behind him at third base all through recess so he couldn't spit. Mr. Shoemaker organized a tonette band to start teaching us the rudiments of reading music, presumably to prepare us for the real band later on. The output of the tonette band never was very musical -- mostly just screeching. In the spring, just before school was out, we had a class picnic at Bingham's pasture. Meanwhile: FDR campaigned for his third term, the Office of Price Administration was established to prevent profiteering on goods in short supply, and tires were rationed. Vocal groups like the Pied Pipers and Modernaires started singing with the big bands. Big hits were "Dolores" by Tommy Dorsey and "Chattanooga Choo Choo" by Glenn Miller. (Polly Lawson taught lots of us to dance to those tunes on Paul McMullan's porch a year or two later.) Ernest Tubb recorded "Walking the Floor Over You".
EIGHTH GRADE - 1941/1942 Teacher: Miss Katherine Williams Subjects: English, Arithmetic, History, Spelling, Writing, and Manual Training (for the boys -- probably Home Economics for the girls) Recollections: Jo Cork recalled that Joe Henry Steinwinder got in trouble for popping Doris Alford's bra strap while in line at the pencil sharpener. Those of us who had progressed from the tonette band to the real band were disappointed when Mr. Sparks, the band director, was drafted, but Carolyn Smith carried on as student director. In Manual Training the boys made wooden models of German airplanes to be sent off to England to help aircraft spotters recognize and identify enemy warplanes. Meanwhile: The U.S. entered the war after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Corregidor fell and Germany and Japan seemed to be dominating the war, even though General Jimmy Doolittle led a token raid on Tokyo and we won a few naval battles like Coral Sea and Guadalcanal. The WAACS, WAVES, WASPS, and SPARS were established, and Rosie the Riveter entered the workplace -- which proved to be a watershed event in American culture. Sugar, coffee, and gasoline were rationed. "Moonlight Coctail" and "Serenade in Blue" were big Glenn Miller hits.
To Wolf .......... You are really great at challenging my little brain and giving me something to do and think about. I know that at 18, the year 1940 was a busy year for me and I should have fun reminiscing that great time of my life, but as you know, I'm a very slow thinker and even slower at typing, however I'm sure that I can come up with something.
Gourdchipper .........I enjoyed your contribution. I can relate so well to your stories and the fun you had. I hope others on this site, especially the gals will chime in here.
I don't mean to hog the forum, but while everyone else seems to be otherwise occupied this Memorial Day weekend I'll just go ahead and get this out of my system before going out to finish mowing my five acres. (Incidentally, while mowing I usually sing aloud the hymns that former DW Frances so loved harmonizing with.)
A couple of years ago I self published a family memoir that included recollections from my pre-teen and teen years bracketing 1940. I’ll paste in snippets from that memoir (which, incidentally, is available from Amazon.com if anyone is interested – AS I RECALL – AN AMIS FAMILY SCRAPBOOK OF MEMORIES).
“When I was about twelve Daddy bought me a very old hammer action, double barrel, 410 gauge shotgun from Pete Roach's brother-in- law. We had to get Pete to braze one of the hammers that was broken, and we had to improvise a firing pin out of a small nail, but I was really excited about having a shotgun. Daddy and I finished filing down the nail to make the firing pin after dark and he and Paul and I went outside to test the gun. I fired it straight up in the air so I wouldn't hit anything, and it almost drove me into the ground. Boy, did that little gun kick, then and always! That firing pin never worked too reliably, even though we kept filing on it off and on for months. Sometimes it would puncture the "cap" in the shotgun shell and powder would sting your face, and other times it wouldn't fire at all. Paul still has that little gun, I think, and Daddy's 16 gauge too.
I guess Daddy figured that if we were old enough to be shooting a shotgun, then we were also old enough to be told the "facts of life". One night after supper he took Paul and me out in the back yard, between the garage and the hen house, and laid it all out for us in terms of our cow, Sookie, and other farm animals. We didn't admit to him that we had already heard all about it, only about people and not animals, from a very sophisticated thirteen year old named Harold Streibeck. Or at least we thought he was sophisticated because he had lived in Vicksburg and lots of other places, not just Newton, and he smoked a pipe while giving us his version of the "facts" while the three of us sat on the roof of the hen house, hidden by overhanging chinaberry branches. Daddy's version confirmed, but added very little to, Harold's version.
I guess along about this time I had designs on a pretty, gangly girl named Jo Cork that my classmates had paired me with way back in first or second grade. If you even spoke to a girl once, your classmates would take up a chant of "Sonny and Jo, Sonny and Jo". I guess we accepted their verdict because we used to pass notes in class and I think we sat together once at a class picnic at Bingham's pasture, and I think I even gave her a sort of sideswipe kiss on the cheek once on a school bus trip somewhere. That fired me up so much that I bought her a rectangular, silver compact at McMullan's Drugstore, intending to give it to her for Valentine's or for her birthday or something, but I could never get up the nerve to give it to her or find the right moment, so it stayed hidden in my desk for years --- still gift-wrapped in pink tissue paper. I have no idea what finally became of it.
My Uncle Bill Hardin and his new wife, Marijean, were staying with us for a few days when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. I can remember all of us sitting in the front living room, listening to the news reports and to President Roosevelt on the old RCA radio. Up to that point the war in Europe had seemed far away, but now, suddenly, it was close to home --- realizing that Uncle Bill and Uncle Paul would probably have to go to war. Big changes in our lives were in the offing.”
Wolf, re. your comment, "Personally I would like to hear from Mary75." I'm flattered, but can't really oblige. I have to limit my time on the computer: pain and halfway through my next novel. I did cover that time period in "Dreaming of Horses." (It's roughly in the section from the sale of the house in Calgary to the family's move to British Columbia.) The other thing of significance that happened in 1940 when I was 10 was that I realized I was old enough to size-up and make my own decisions about people and situations.
1 really enjoy the opportunity to read and find out a little bit about my friends here.
OK.......Here's my 1940 story.
It was summer time and I had just finished High School and I was having fun playing around with my favorite hobby which was experimenting with electricity, But I had one problem. My folks were continually after me to get a job and go to work.
Lucky for me........I found an easy way out....... On July 15,1940, I enlisted in the Army. Not only did I escape going to work, but I became an instant hero. They dressed me up in a fancy uniform to strut around in, and my folks were actually proud of me. And for an extra bonus, I even got my picture in the local newspaper.
Since I knew something about electricity, they put me in a new signal corps battalion that was just being formed, destined to be sent to Alaska to construct and maintain telephone lines. They taught us how to dig fox hole and shoot guns and how to set and climb poles, string wire and cable and use all the army communications equipment.
And that's exactly what we did in Alaska around Anchorage and later in the Aleutians after the war started with Japan. Since I was almost the only one in the whole outfit of 200 men that knew something about electricity, they put me in charge of the tech section, with a really good rating and pay.......... Lucky Me....I enjoyed being a hero in the army....
I spent five and a half years in the army, Most of it in the Aleutians. Discharged at 23 years old and married my dear Helen Aug.18,1945.
............This pretty well covers what I did in 1940 and the five following years. ............Now I'd like to read some other 1940 stories.
Did you have a gun? I thought the Japanese attacked the Aleutians. Never mind that. What was there for entertainment? Did you ever hear Tokyo Rose? Is that where you learned the diet you talked about?
I don't have any 1940 stories. My dad was 12. I doubt he'd reached puberty let alone had a gleam in his eye that one day he would have a huge disappointment - I mean a son (just a joke). Hey, it's not my memorial day.
...
Mary, no problem. I have your new one on my night table. I'll go back to Dreaming Of Horses and re-read that part with new eyes.
I can't imagine why you would be interested in these details. I'm sure you know all about the Aleutian chain and what happened there in the 1940's. I hate to clutter up this site with my boring stuff. So if you just want something about me to read, let me give you a related story that may be more interesting.
He wasn't our company commander. I think he was our company administrative officer. He was quite different than our other three commissioned officers in that he always seemed to be alone, quiet and aloof and never associated with any of us. I don't think I ever exchanged more than a few words with him over the years. So why am I telling you about him?.........I'll have to give you this little story.
Electricity was always my hobby and when I enlisted in the army at 18 years old, they put me into a signal corp. company that was being formed and destined to serve in Alaska. I was almost the only one in our newly formed Signal Corp. company of 150 men that really understood electricity so they put me in charge of the technical section where in about one year I attained the rank of Tech Sargent with three times the pay of a buck private. I was really proud of my stripes and happy for the extra money.
In July 1943, our company was on the little island of Amchitka in the Aleutian chain trying to build telephone communications across 40 miles of mountain peaks and frankly not doing too well. We had been there for a year and the conditions were so harsh that it was about all we could do to survive. We were only 18 miles from the Japanese held islands of Kiska and Attu, and constantly on the alert.
It was there that I developed a bad case of osteomyelitis in my lower right femur. At the infirmary on the other end of the island, the doctors operated on it and drilled some holes in the bone so it could drain and I was airlifted step by step back to Barnes General Hospital in Vancouver, Wa. where I was treated with a brand new drug called Penicillin and more operations. I was in pretty bad shape and sometimes delirious from the infection, but after two and a half months in a hospital bed I was starting to feel pretty good. And I was looking forward to my mom and dad coming to visit me from our home in Pomona, Calif.
I hadn't received a pay check for about three months so when it finally caught up with me I was surprised to find that the amount was only a third of what it should have been. In army hospitals if you have any problems, it's customary to get help from the ward chaplain so I asked for him and when he came by I explained my problem to him. That is when I found out that I was no longer a Tech. Sargent.... I was a buck private.....Wow....What a shock.
The chaplain showed me the demotion order. The reason was called.... Returning from a combat zone for reasons not in line of duty. He said that there were numerous demoted returnees at Barnes General whom be had tried to help but there was nothing he could do about it...... I felt so bad.......I was Private Streit again...... I didn't care about the money, but how could I face my mom and dad .......Poor George.......... My self-esteem was shattered.
I was not religious but I must have put out a little prayer because two days later, the chaplain came to me all smiling and happy and told me that a war dept. order had reinstated my rank retroactively. He said he could hardly believe it because it had never happened before, in spite of all the efforts he and others had made. I later found out that it never happened again. My reinstatement was the one and only. .........Did I have some guardian angel looking out after me?.......Why lucky me..... and no one else? The answer to that puzzling question finally came to me in a round-about way.
Six months later, I was stationed at camp Pinedale, Fresno, Ca. which served as an army relocation center and to my surprise, I met an old friend, Sargent McCallum, who served as First Sgt, of our company. He told me that everyone felt bad when I fell ill and they took me away, but when the demotion order came through, they just could hardly believe how the army would treat one of their own. He then told me about Capt. Hooks... (I started this story with Capt. Hooks)..... Capt. Hooks was particularly upset over the demotion order and made up his mind to do something about it. He sent a letter up through the chain of command in protest, and when he received no action from the letter. he wrote another, and sent it directly to the office of the Adjutant General which resulted in the reinstatement.
I've often thought about why Capt. Hooks would go to he trouble to do this for one guy that he hardly even knew, and a guy whom he or the company would never see again.......What was his motivation?......Why would he care about me?
I think the answer to this question confirms my long time belief that the purpose of life is to seek happiness and the way we do it is to make others happy.
I've always wished there was some way I could thank him. Not only for what he did for me, but for the wonderful humanitarian lesson he taught me.
Hi, Wolf--if it's not three girls on a swing, I can't guess. But I would like to see that painting some time.
I don't have any memories about myself to share on Memorial Day, but I'll mention that when my wife and I were living in the retirement home, we often had dinner with Ray and Walter, both of whom were in the service during WWII. Walter died a few years ago, and I lost touch with Ray when he moved into a skilled nursing facility some distance north, closer to where his son lives.
In the retirement home there's still a picture of Walter hanging on the wall in the dining room, along with a dozen other pictures of men and women in uniform. He's wearing a sailor's suit in his photo, and he's 18 years old. You could still see the young man, 70 years later, when Walter smiled.
Our dinner conversations were about nothing special, but I loved them anyway. Walter told us about the Japanese sending balloons over the coast of Alaska, to set forest fires; Ray told us stories about what he'd done with the WPA, back in the day, including rolling out high school baseball fields in Pennsylvania. They were mostly personal histories that we heard, the most important kind.
Robert, that's the one. I paint on it most days. It really did start with the ambitions in life thread.
I have a flickr account where I put a hodge-podge of stuff. Some of my paintings are there. If you're interested you're welcome to have a look through. If the link doesn't work try typing in 'wolf von munchcake'. There's only one of those. No need to reply.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/wolfkrause/
The person in the black and white photo near the bottom is Dianne at her best. That's her just above in a yellow top and sunglasses when she had AD but was still able to walk around comfortably. Some of the pictures are of people here. There is also one view out of the window I live in front of. The bear picture is Coco's husband and the person fishing is also Coco. There is Jang, and Ol Don, and Mary, and Bama, and a few others including Carol Simpson. Think of it as poking around in my attic. I'm locked out at the moment because I can't remember my secret question. Where did you grow up? I'm liable to have answered almost anything.
I learned I got Frei wrong on days of the week. Friday is named after some Norse guy's wife and isn't spelled Frei.
I'm in the months. I knew July and August were Julius and Augustus Caesar, the famous salad brothers.
What I never knew was that the ancient Roman calendar had ten months. March used to be the first month. And right away the "ember"s make sense..
March - arguable why it's called that but was the first Roman month April - also arguable but root means 'second' in Latin May - named after Maia a god of growth June - named after Juno, god of marriage July - originally Quintilis for fifth (as in fifth of ten months) then Julius August - originally Sextillia which means sixth, then Augustus September - comes from Latin for seventh October - comes from Latin for eighth November - comes from Latin for ninth December - comes from Latin for tenth
January - added later named after Janus, god of beginnings February - a period of celebration before the year began became a short month on it's own
Those last two months were added on to the beginning by someone in the 7th century BC. So basically the Romans were just as screwed up as anybody else.
....
It's all words and you can make up whatever you want - as long as it totals 365.25 days in a year. That's how long it takes the Earth to journey around the Sun and that's what a year is. If you get 365.25 wrong, your calendar will start to drift. That's what happened where the time to reap and sow the harvests went way out of whack.
We don't break up a partial day. We go 4 times .25 and add that one day on every 4 years and we stuck it at the end of the short month that used to be a festival before it got called a month of it's own.
The next step we take today to keep it in rhythm of the exact time it takes to get around the sun, is that we don't count century leap years UNLESS they are divisible by 400. So 1900 was not a leap year even though it's divisible by 4 because it can't be divided by 400. The year 2000 WAS a leap year because it can both be divided by 4 and by 400. The year 2100 won't be a leap year either so plan for that.
With those steps you can run ten thousand years and not get out of whack by a single full day.
George, you recounted some memories of your military service so I'll reciprocate. Seventy years ago today I joined the US Navy:
"You’d think I would have fond memories of a big sendoff as I went off to the Navy, telling everyone goodbye and all, but the truth is that I have absolutely no memory of it. What I do remember is maybe eight or ten of us new recruits assembling at the recruiting office in Jackson on June 6th, being sworn in, and then being put on a train bound for Chicago, under the care of an older recruit who had previously been in the Army or something and who had been given a large manila envelope containing our “orders” and meal tickets so the railroad or restaurants or whoever would feed us. I don’t remember how long the trip to Chicago took or how our leader got us from Chicago on up to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, but he did. About the only thing I remember about my first day in the Navy was falling and skinning my knee as several of us sprinted across the crushed gravel parade ground (referred to as the grinder), trying to get an early place in line at the chow hall for supper. The next day they gave us all GI haircuts, had us pack our civvies in boxes to be shipped back home, and handed each of us a mattress cover (old salts referred to them as fart sacks) and started filling it with ill-fitting uniforms that we weren’t allowed to put on until they were through poking and prodding and examining us, and giving us shots in both arms. Walking around “nekkid” for a whole day, plus the buzz cut haircuts, really did a number on any sense of privacy or self-esteem you might have had at the start of the day.
We spent a hard six weeks learning to salute just about anything that moved, to march in formation and do a “manual of arms” with old Springfield rifles, to take care of our uniforms and bunks to pass frequent inspections, and to sing marching songs like “I’ve got a gal from New Orleans, she loves sailors, not Marines, Oh My Aching Back!” (There were also smuttier versions of our marching songs that I won’t repeat here.) One other big thing we learned was to smoke cigarettes. After marching for maybe an hour we’d be given a “smoking break”, and at various other times during the day an announcement would be piped over the public address system that “the smoking lamp is lit” in the barracks or in whatever building we were in. So naturally we learned to smoke. After two weeks in boots they issued us our first payday – referred to as our “flying five” – and we were allowed to spend it at the Base Exchange. My first purchases were cigarettes and a plastic cigarette case with a built-in lighter, because being able to offer someone a smoke was a good way to break the ice with the horde of strangers around you. Incidentally, the lighter fluid odor leaked into the cigarette compartment, so all through boot camp my cigarettes smelled like lighter fluid. But I smoked them anyhow. We weren’t allowed off base during boots, but on the train back into Chicago after graduation an enterprising guy was doing a good business selling narrow “tailor made” uniform neckerchiefs, which we were all anxious to buy to prove that we were now “old salts”. Our rank during boot camp had been ‘Apprentice Seaman”, which changed to “Seaman Deuce” after graduation.
I rode the train back home to Mississippi on a two-week leave that we all got after boots, and then headed back up to Great Lakes, where I’d spend the next six months in “Primary school”, learning the fundamentals of electronics and actually building a super heterodyne radio. I think our rank was automatically increased to “Seaman First Class” as we entered school. We got liberty nearly every weekend, so we’d go into Chicago or sometimes Milwaukee where there was lots to do – we could catch the North Shore Line from Great Lakes to either place. Riding the express elevator up to the top of a skyscraper like the Tribune Tower was a thrill for a country boy, and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago was fascinating, but a less elevating activity was going to Grant Park on the shore of Lake Michigan, where you might luck into picking up a girl for a date. Milwaukee was a different liberty experience than Chicago, and I mostly remember going to a burlesque house there, where the “Statuesque Miss Hillary Dawn” shed most of her clothes for the audience. I guess I was at Great Lakes from early June 1946 until January 1947, so I got to experience some really hot weather during boots and some snow and stuff before finishing Primary. One pleasant memory is of a Sunday when a girl I was dating (I had met her at the ice-skating rink) came out to visit me on base, and we sat in the Hospitality House and drank cocoa by a roaring fire in a big fireplace and watched out a picture window as huge snowflakes fall to the ground."
"Secondary school turned out to be situated on Treasure Island, which had been dredged up in San Francisco Bay for the 1939 World’s Fair, and our classes were held in buildings left over from the fair. From there we had great views of downtown San Francisco, Alcatraz, and the Golden Gate Bridge to the west, and Oakland and Berkeley to the east (when it wasn’t too foggy, which it was a good bit of the time). In Secondary we finally began to be trained to work on real Navy shipboard equipment like radars and sonars and radio transmitters and receivers. San Francisco was a good liberty port as far as sightseeing was concerned – cable cars, Golden Gate Park, Chinatown, Coit Tower, etc. – whereas Oakland had more ”lower” forms of entertainment to offer – I can remember going to a taxi dance joint there once or twice where you’d buy a bunch of tickets when you went in and then use them to pay for dances with “hostesses”. I did well enough in class there in Secondary to be one of only a handful from my class who graduated with a rating of ETM-2c – that would be equivalent to maybe a staff sergeant in the army – while most were made only ETM-3cs.
After Secondary school I was assigned to the USS Ozburn, DD-846, which was to be my home for the remaining eight months of my Navy career. It really doesn’t seem fair, the Navy sending me to ETM school for a whole year and then getting less than a year’s worth of work out of me, but they were glad to see me -- the ship had just returned from a several month tour to Japan and there hadn’t been an electronic technician aboard for probably a year. We never really went anywhere except for steaming up and down the west coast, but the rule was that you got sea pay if the ship got more than 40 miles offshore or something like that. One Navy Day we had steamed up to Aberdeen, Washington, and tied up at a dock so the locals could come aboard and be shown around. But tying up to that dock proved to be quite a challenge for the Captain because of a combination of wind and a strong current running, so he turned the job over to the Exec, who supposedly had more sea experience. He made several passes at it before finally deciding to go for it – and succeeded in tearing up about a hundred feet of wooden dock. But no damage to the ship. That must have been like March of 1948, because we were scheduled to go into dry-dock in Bremerton, Washington, in early April for extensive modifications and upgrades. My enlistment wouldn’t actually have been up until June, but the Navy evidently ran out of money that year and ended up discharging a bunch of us two months early. Our Communications Officers tried to talk me into re-enlisting for another four years, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. All this business about being discharged early had come up suddenly, and when I left the ship I was still owed several hundred dollars by a few guys that I had helped out with loans. I left an older carpenters mate friend named Coble in charge of collecting my debts, but then later didn’t bother going back to collect from him after learning he’d evidently had a big night on the town ON MY MONEY! I remember once in San Francisco I had made liberty with Coble and he steered me to a favorite bar on Eddy Street with the promise of a floorshow. We bought watered down drinks for “B” girls all evening, with the bartender announcing every half hour or so, “The floor show goes on in ten minutes!” He was still saying that when the place closed at one a.m. – there was no floorshow!
Before closing out on my Navy career, I just have to comment on how surprised I am at how clearly I recall details of those days – much more clearly that I do of my high school days and even later college days. I wouldn’t take anything for the experience of being in the Navy – it was a fun experience and doubtless helped shape
This morning, long before most of us were up, the sun rose above the heel stone at Stonehenge in Britain like a Swiss watch figured out by some bright lads thousands of years ago. The Sun of course hasn't moved at all. We do all the moving.
The summer solstice is not the longest day of the year. All days are the same length. The Australians and New Zealanders and Argentinians don't get any air time because 90% of people live above the equator in the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere this is the shortest day of the year.
What they all mean is how much sun they get, which bores people living near the equator because they live in a different rhythm. They have the sun overhead and then it angles a little in both directions. In some ways, they have two 'winters' each year when the sun reaches the tropic of cancer and then of capricorn. It's overhead, it angles that way, it's overhead, it angles this way, it's overhead. If you're in Ontario, not so much.
All this can vividly be shown with an orange and a light bulb. Stick a pin in the orange roughly at your latitude and tilt the orange 23.5 degrees and understand that tilt doesn't change (it does very slowly over time but that's a different timescale) and so as the orange orbits around the room around the light bulb (the sun), it's angle SEEMS to change at the point that pin is stuck in the orange.
The right rate of spinning around the orange is so that once around the room exactly, the orange gets spun exactly 365.25 times which is of course one year. Stick that pin in Maine somewhere and watch how the 23.5 degree angle means quite angled sunlight (winter) and pronounced 'summers'. Stick that pin in the equator and the angle wobbles but it's mostly roughly overhead.
So, on this summer solstice day for people farther up in the northern hemisphere there is the most light available because of your angle on this rock while the sun, being a star, doesn't budge one bit in relation to everything spinning around it. Instead the sun actually is moving but it's moving in relation to the other stars in the galaxy and takes all the rocks spinning around with it.
The earth does not orbit the sun in a roughly circular orbit. It corkscrews through galactic space where the sun just moves through galactic space. How the rocks like Jupiter spin around does make the sun slightly wobble. Anybody looking at us with our own recently discovered instruments would know this star has planets.
Now Wolf..........You've overloaded my little brain again. I've read it twice and it's barely sinking in. Maybe if I go through it a few more times I can use it to impress some of my friends with my knowledge of our solar system. ...................Thank you
It's odd as I keep saying what actually happened in history and why things are the way they are. I don't pretend to understand more than a small part of it but that experience is always the same. It's fascinating.
Take Robin Hood and King John and Sherwood forest. Robin Hood was a character invented by Sir Walter Scott, but King John really did rule Sherwood Forest. Owning that forest was a major money maker for King John. He needed that because he inherited 2/3 of France along with England as his kingdom, but he soon lost Normandy and had to raise a vast sum to get an army big enough to take Normandy back.
His barons were so outraged by his actions that they banded together and for the first time in history - they demanded that there be a set of rules that limit the king's power and give ultimate power to the rules they wrote and presented that demand to him on the fields of Runnymede.
He agreed to it and signed it and that Magna Carta document is the seed in western society of the concept of parliament/house of congress. And in that Magna Carta it specifically says that the Sheriff of Nottingham must be stripped of his titles and lands.
Tony Robinson, the narrator of Time Team, has also done a series called Walking Through History and in this episode he's walking through the story of King John. It's a great series because you go along on the walk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVut-hFO2wc
One of the things I love about being alive at this time is that I can snap my fingers and here I am walking through England, then I can read the Magna Carta or look at a copy of the original. I hope you enjoy the walk. He does a series of them.
Thanks for sending me this. It's certainly an interesting documentary. Such beautiful scenery and architecture. I remember learning about the Magna Carta in grade school but had forgotten all about it. I don't think I've ever heard it mentioned since then and as you mentioned, it's actually the basis of all are modern governments.
Now I'm going to watch some of those other Walking Through History documentaries.
I have a friend who is an artist and creates great portraits of famous women throughout history. I sent her this little story of one of my favorites.
Who Was Emilie du Chatelet ? During my research into the fascinating work of Albert Einstein, I came across this name several times, So naturally had to find out who this lady was and why Einstein thought so much of her. I am amazed that I had never heard of her before/ I want to tell you a little about her.
Emilie was born into a high class French family in the early 1700's. One evening when she was ten years old she was reading a book in the same room where her dad was entertaining a group of scientist friends who were discussing a somewhat complicated formula for solving a deep mathematical equation. To the amazement of the group of scientists she interrupted their conversation with the exact numerical answer to the equation. Upon confirming that she was absolutely correct, the scientists informed her dad of her great natural mathematical ability and urged him to send her to study at the highest French Academy of Sciences where she excelled in astronomy. mathematics, and physics . A truly brilliant mind. When she was twelve years old she was fluent in Latin, Italian, Greek, and German. She associated and corresponded with all the great scientists of the world and loved the challenge of learning from them.
Emilie was the first to question Isaac Newton's famous law of motion. A Dutchman was testing Newton's theory of motion by dropping a brass ball into soft clay and found that if the ball was dropped from twice the height, it would penetrate the clay four times as far,...... not twice as far. (as per Newton's formula, E=MV ) So Emilie conducted her own experiments and concluded that the correct formula would be E= MV2. ( energy equals mass times speed, squared ) Einstein agreed with her. This is just one of many contributions she made to our scientific knowledge.
Her marriage at nineteen to a much older nobleman was prearranged, as was the custom at that time and because her husband spent most of his time as a diplomat in foreign countries, she had several boyfriends including the well-known physicist Voltaire. All this with the approval of her tolerant husband. It was like one big family.
Emilie and her husband had three children. She died at the age of forty-two while giving birth to another child, as a result of an affair with the poet, Saint-Lambert.
Now .....I'm thinking, Why have I never heard of this brilliant lady scientist? Maybe it's because she was a woman and not a man. The great forefathers of our great nation would say she was a myth and did not exist because they believed that women are mentally inferior to men and should never be allowed to vote.
George, I'd never heard of Emile du Chatelet. I looked her up further and your point is well taken because Emile clearly was exceptional and deserved far more attention than she has gotten so far. Madame Curie faced the same thing just century or so ago.
One supposes such ideas about women are likely to surface in November just as they did about people of African descent. That clearly inferior chap was the editor of The Harvard Review (and also president). It's 'reasons' like prejudice that cause lines like this to be written:
"You can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.” (George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 1876)
She was a very good writer but even she couldn't unshackle that she didn't have "a man's force of genius", she had force of genius full stop.
Ok. So here's the thing. You drive your Ferrari around with your friend where everything you see is a passionate experience partly because both of you are over the top pretty much all the time. It would be best to watch thinking of yourself as Italian.
When i got to the ferryman I asked him what I should bring. "It's not that kind of journey" he said, "You needn't pack a thing." I asked him then why he had a boat, if what he said was true. "Because." he said, "Whether there is or not is entirely up to you."
Oh no, an existential troll, pandering his self serving refrain I wondered what the chances were anything he said might be sane When in a blink, or less I think, we were suddenly standing in a train "The metaphor doesn't matter." he said, "The journey is always the same."
"There is no ride and there is no charge but you do keep all the change." "You could do it in a shoe, you could do it in blue, you could do it quite deranged." With calm dark eyes, he looked at me wondering perhaps if I was fussed. So I kicked his boat, scrunching my toe, and cried out, "I refute this thus!"
He smiled at me hopping in pain apparently gathering his thought And explained you see, that what was real to me was, apparently, not. Instead, he said, the world I was in was actually, quite largely, invented. The stuff that was me and way that I see determined how it was presented.
I laughed in his face and pointed out that he had everything backwards The things happened first and the things that I felt, clearly, came after But he didn't agree and said to me I had chosen from the beginning That it wasn't a question of what game I was in; but, only of what inning.
I pondered this and thought awhile as my toe went into thrombosis "What?" I asked, "Make's you come up with such a very odd prognosis?" I charged him to produce his evidence of when my fate was determined. "On the date of your marriage." he answered, "And the date of the diagnosis."
I had come to the ferryman just to see what I should bring It's not that kind of journey he said and I didn't need a thing So I changed my mind and decided then to just go home But not before I turned him in to a lovely garden gnome
We talked about how the earth and the sun move and how 90% of the population is above the equator. Right now there's a perfect example of what I mean. The Olympic Summer Games are being held in Brazil in the winter which is why it's dark at 5:30 down there. The southern hemisphere angles away from the sun where we are right now in our orbit around the sun. I hope you're doing well and are watching some of these Olympic games.
Not many people on North America wondered why all the volcanoes are on the west coast and none of them are on the east coast. Plate tectonics only became accepted in the 1950's where yours truly got into trouble for cutting up an atlas in that same decade to prove that South America and Africa fit like a glove. They knew the Appalachians are extremely old mountains and that the Rockies are new, and also that both have sea shells in their rocks even at the top. The stuff all moving around wasn't seen as reality though until it was.
There come times when human thought is for some reason ready to conceive an idea and then move to that idea as reality. The theory of gravity and the theory of species evolution are two examples but they don't have to be in the realm of science - the equality of marriage for all is an example of something the United States majority is moving into the realm of reality as we speak which is a good change for some.
The experience of realization has been going on for a long time. The Greeks stand out as a civilization that had so many realizations that much of what they learned over 2,000 years ago is still taught today. What's common through history is that discoveries are made when science is valued and some freedom of expressed thought exists. Darwin sat on his Origin Of Species for many years because he knew it was a firestorm and only published when Wallace showed up with an almost identical theory he came up with and was asking Darwin to proof read his.
We are living in a time when multiple such reality changing discoveries are being made. Three dimensional printing, the proof of the Higgs Boson particle, and the end of history are just a few examples of reality changing events occurring as we speak. History is written by the victorious anyway and is always self serving. As I've said, we were not taught history - we were taught what white guys did. If Christopher Columbus set out today it would be captured on countless cameras and videos from where he left, on the boat, and where he arrived.
There's a discovery just made that is going to provide the impetus to move what some of us have known for a long time which is that planets are everywhere. That should have been obvious all along, but with what they're calling Proxima B, it's now going to move into the general human consciousness.
The reason is because Centauri is by far the closest star to us at 4.3 light years away and it's a triple star which was outside the ken of science as a place a stable planet might exist where the idea of planets around any other star was still as much theory as it was obvious. Not only is there a stable planet around Proxima Centauri, it's earth size and in the 'goldilocks' zone which means water can exist in liquid state on it.
And even though this planet is in an orbit 11 days long (1 year = 11 days), and the type of star it has tends to spew out big radiation bursts occasionally, the first science fiction movie is likely being screenwritten as I type and nothing will prevent this planet from firmly entrenching into our reality.
A number of things are going to happen now. Remember that the Chinese are looking for world stage events to dominate. Their space program and agenda are already very impressive and here's a chance to leapfrog. That's important for a single reason. It will kickstart the Americans again who absolutely will respond.
The specifics are space telescopes (probably three Hubble types in synchronous orbit thus making the entire distance between them act as a single telescope), a massive rush to study Alpha Centauri which has a G2 star (a yellow sun like ours) to try and find a small rocky planet in it. That's a binary star though which together with Proxima Centauri makes up that three star system. Binary stars (two stars bound together by their mutual gravity) are likely to have real effects on the establishment of stable orbits for planets. We don't know and will be finding out in the next number of years.
The specifics of what will happen now include the sending of probes. The first probe sent won't get there first. It will be passed by a number of others sent later but which travel faster. We don't have anything right now that can work but that is on dozens of whiteboards also as we speak.
Also as we speak these findings are under serious peer review. Every group that has the tools is going to check to see if they can verify it and that information will be coming out in the coming weeks and months.
We've proven the existence of well over a hundred planets so far mostly by studying their wobble. The sun has a pronounced wobble in it's path through space which is provided by the net aggregate of Jupiter, and Saturn, and the rest depending on where they are in their own orbits. Which isn't quite right because the stars aren't actually moving in any meaningful time frame.
The only reason we think the stars move is because we are on a spinning and tilted rock. Get a satellite up in a stationary orbit, not around us, but around the sun so that a year from now the earth will come back around to that satellite because it is in the same place relative to the sun. Think of it like this. That satellite is following along with the sun through space and everything else is orbiting both of them where once a year the earth comes around just like it's supposed to.
At any rate, the telescope on that satellite knows that nothing is moving except the planets where even the sun would always be in exactly the same place relative to it. None of the stars or constellations or nebulae would be moving either. They don't which you learn the second you get off the spinning, tilted rock. The stars NOT moving except over very long periods of time. It's the rocks spinning around them that create the apparent wobble.
We got the two Voyagers to leave the Sun's gravity by using a lot of gravity assists. Flipping around a planet accelerates you. That has a limit. Flipping around the Sun doesn't give you a gravity assist because going around the thing you're trying to leave gives no net change.
The simplistic way to understand what your facing is by putting a bowling ball on a trampoline and understanding that in a simple way the sun's gravity affects space like the bowling ball affects the trampoline. Think of it as a gravity well. That's why I said we should use nuclear energy and launch our waste into the sun. Close only counts in horseshoes and grenades they say, but, it's hard to miss that bowling ball with a tennis ball and if you do it's going to suck it in anyways. The sun is already a continuous nuclear explosion so our grains of spent plutonium will be vaporized into electrons and plasma and other lovely physics.
I've said before that if there is a god then he has a sense of humor and here's another example. We find a rocky planet in a zone that can keep water liquid with a gravity estimated at just 1.14 times earth (you feel 14% heavier walking on it than on earth). Look what's over here in our own backyard practically! Why it's almost exactly what we're looking for against incredible odds. How odd. Or it would be if the universe wasn't littered with them.
There's a lot more to why I'm making such a fuss about this. Proxima Centaur is literally the closet star to us. Even Alpha Centauri is another point one light year away. If you look at a proximity star map which is a three dimensional representation of the nearest stars to us whether they're 'above' us or 'below' us or over there, you can see there are some twenty five stars within 12 years of us. Draw the sun in the center of a 12 light year balloon and there are 25 stars in it in various locations around us.
The reason that this is going to explode planet hunting is because the star the new earth like planet is in, is a red dwarf and that blows the lid off of our ideas about what kinds of stars can have earth like planets around them where the answer is almost all of them.
Don't forget that both Venus and Mars fall into the earth like category. Both could hold water and both are in the right 'temperate' zone, but there are many factors that determine what we mean.
You also should understand that while we've been finding Jupiter type monsters, it's much harder to find the little rocky planets because their gravitational effects are microscopic.
There are so many things I don't know. I can tell you one new thing with absolute certainty. Proxima Centauri has just begun to change human mainstream reality and we are going there now that we know it's there. That's what we do.
An earth sized, earth gravity, water bearable planet right next door just out of our reach but solvable. God's universe is calling on the direct line to our cortex which is exactly the same thing as turning on a light bulb in the woods. We are coming because that is the deepest drive we know now that we know, and will soon prove to ourselves, it is there.
If you're still here my friend, know that this is the most hopeful news you could imagine. We have already discussed base nature using Chaucer and by our nature it's not good that humans have insufficient things to reach for. Humans will turn inwards because they will turn somewhere by their base nature. We are explorers and expanders by that base nature.
As that ability ends on earth by our exhaustion of it, then we must have new places that draw us or we absolutely will turn inwards and thereby decay. And when we find this planet so close to earth like around a star that we wouldn't have predicted could hold one, then we know that almost all the stars have that potential because it's true that if a red dwarf can have one then most stars can. We're only a few years away from finding the next one close to us. If we can find one 4.2 light years away then we can find one 11.7 light years away and that's the 25th closest star to our sun.
We are certainly going to figure out how to send probes and that's going to take a few years where by then we're likely to have half a dozen nearby targets. I would guess the next rocky planet nearby to be discovered is less than two years away.
It doesn't matter how hard it is to get to. Once we know it's there we'll figure it out. I said once long ago here that there are two main lines of research both of which seem unstoppable. The development of robots and of bio-engineering. One of those two would be the solution for going out there. Human beings would have a very hard time in that space and those distances.
In fact the whole concept of anyone going is science fiction. But we don't need to go. We won't even be flying our airplanes twenty years from now. The adventurers can go to Mars and to Europa and they can watch from there perhaps 100 years from now as the first probe closes in on Earth Two in Proxima Centauri sending it's pictures and data back to earth. Which will take 4.2 years to get there.
This is all going to happen and I lived long enough to see this. I would never have guessed back in the 1970's when human beings seeing that the only star they knew had rocks around it wondered if any other stars had rocks around them. Duh.
Now you can watch how this obscure little event enters your life over the next few years because it will. And I have news too. I'm free of this and am back in my own self. What a thing. And poor Dianne and Helen. But it's an amazing universe and our stories are still unfolding. Watch the idea of other earths nearby enter our lives over the next few years and long before you reach the century mark ahead of you.
Belief in something greater than ourselves should have room to include the discoveries and exploding knowledge of which Wolf speaks. The universe, made up of millions of billions of stars, and subatomic particles so elusive that we need to build giant accelerators to prove their existence - these are all part of our world at the ends (that we are aware of) and are mostly unseen, unknown, and so ignored by many.
I like your enthusiasm for the breathless exploration of space, Wolf. I don't share your belief that the majority of mankind really wants to know what is "out" there. Oh, sure, there are astrophysicists and quantum physicists who care deeply and people like you who relish learning. Fortunately, our society has funded this learning at this time. With it, though, comes a backlash from people who want a simple explanation and do not want their system messed with, least they have to re-evaluate what they already know, and, horrors, modify what they think they know.
I think there will be a pushback; perhaps another Dark Ages. Imaginative minds thrive on discoveries. Complacent minds will fight to not have to think very hard. One only need read of a thousand years of history at any time to see that the course of things is that civilization will get in the way of itself and learning will come to a screeching halt by beheadings, killings, and excommunications from any established belief system either from within or without. And that will be the end of another civilization. It is cyclical. We are our own worst enemy. Or as Pogo said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
But keep writing, Wolf, because I also believe that "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." If AD has taught me anything, it is to never think that I understand this life, this world, this universe: but just to keep my eyes wide open and hang on tight. The ride is especially treacherous and bumpy right now but there might be something wonderful revealed tomorrow that I did not know.