Tag: Time

Pioneer deceleration problem, My take. #space #time

In 1992, we launched Pioneer 10, which is leaving the solar system. As it reaches further away from the sun, it has begun to decelerate.

Scientists believe to have discovered the solution. They are proposing that particles leaving the spacecraft as heat are pushing against the forward momentum of the craft slowing it.

“I beg to differ.”

Using the good old formula F=MA, that simply does not seem to add up.

I read about this anomaly years ago and have noodled the issue for, well years.

Time is not a constant.

We here on earth think of time as purely a linear progression that we measure with clocks, watches, and calendars.

For years we have all seen the model of the solar system on a green grid with the sun, planets and other bodies all warping the fabric of space as they “fall” in their respective orbits.

Picture the solar system not on a horizontal plane but inside a bubble. Maybe it is an oblong bubble and not a perfect sphere but a bubble never the less.

Now picture the other things inside that solar system in their respective bubbles, each creating a bubble that is respective of its mass.

That bubble is warped space. Its intensity of warpage is directly proportional to the amount of gravity.

When we see these huge storms on the sun that go on for days, or the Magellanic Clouds that seem to be frozen in time, this is our first clue that time is not a constant.

If we could build a craft that could tolerate the heat of the sun and orbit it much closer to the sun, I also suspect that the storms on the sun would happen at an accelerated rate. That craft would be in a different “local time.”

1dbd_flux_capacitor_car_charger — Pick this handy little gadget up at Think Geek!

Much like traveling through the country we pass time zones and date zones. If you hopped in your faster than lightspeed spaceship with your version of the flux capacitor and left to see the Horsehead Nebula, when you got there, it would not be there.

Leaving your “local time” heading outside of the solar system would put you into another time zone. Instead of being based on some ancient 60 seconds to the minute, the next “bubble might be 75 seconds to the minute.”

Traveling between the Bubbles in that area of empty space, where gravity does not play a role might very well find you traversing the distance in “no time,” as there is nothing there to create the bubble!

Pioneer 10 and 11 are slowing because they are reaching the end of this bubble and entering into another local time. Once outside the bubble of the Milky Way, I suspect it will speed up significantly.

Where the demarcation point of that bubble is, is truly a mystery.

This postulation can be proved or disproved with a simple test.

As the spacecraft get further away, does the bit rate of the telemetry change at all, even in the slightest?

The bit rate should not change with distance, only time!

I am a science fiction writer. I don’t pretend to understand the books of math that these scientists do. Because I don’t constrain my thought process to what I can find a formula for, I can think outside the box.

The postulations no matter how preposterous they may seem to the scientific community, I claim them as mine and hold that copyright.

They may very well find themselves in one of my next novels which is possibly the only place that they belong.

-Best

Open letter to #NASA

Open letter to NASA

TIME

I am just about certain that someone has thought about this but, just in case.

I often wonder about the voyager and Pioneer anomaly and can’t help but think that gravity and space-time are coming into play. Are they really slowing down or do we just perceive them as slowing down as their “clocks,” which I am guessing you are using for a measurement, are running differently. Have they sped up as they leave the gravitational pull of the sun?

Does the data stream that comes from them arrive at the same speed, or would we just perceive it to be at the same speed as it is now in our space-time?

Does gravity effect RF?

What has the signal strength been as they traversed to their current points, assuming that the transmitter is still a constant wattage? Has it stayed at a constant or has it degraded with distance?

If the latter, since space is a perfect vacuum, what accounts for the degradation, Space- dust?

In 2015, when you launch Solar Probe Plus, as it gets closer to the sun it would be interesting to note any time anomalies.

Since gravity and time are related, it would be interesting to note what those differences are, closer to the sun.

Do solar storms really last for days, or do they appear to because the sun is literally in a different time zone?

-Best

Time & #2014

Time & 2014

As we near the end of another year I thought it prudent to talk about time.

We humans take time for granted, “there is always tomorrow,” “I can’t wait for Friday,” Why is this day going so slow?” Sound familiar?

When we are working for someone we are “selling our time.” One man said once that “we are all whores,” “We will do most anything for money!”

That statement was not lost on me and he was right! While the traditional whore sells her time and body we sell our talents and time. There is little difference except her talents are not acceptable in polite society; while ours might be.

Simply stated, we have no idea when the bell will toll. We have no idea when we will draw our last breath or have that final heart beat. Will we live to the ripe old age of 100 plus or will we kick off today?

Some of us take this to the extreme and create a bucket list. Before we kick the proverbial bucket we want to accomplish X, Y and Z and probably many more letters than there are in the alphabet.

So, as we prepare for 2015 what should we be thinking about? What should we do?

Sadly I have known way too many folks that never did things that they wanted to do. Simple things like go to Alaska or Hawaii. These folks had the means, they just did not set aside the time.

Time management is something that should be taught in school as I truly think that is a key element to success. If you set aside 8 hours of every day for sleep, that leaves you 16 for other things. 40 hours of every week should be for work that leaves you 40 for other things. Realistically we can take 10 of those 40 for commuting leaving 30 for eating, playing or other things. That of course does not include the 32 hours on the weekends.

For arguments sake, let’s say we will live until the age of 80, give or take.

Taking care of your body and mind should be a priority. Getting to 80 would only be good if you can still do things at 80. Many folks still live a productive active life at that age and instead of shunning the idea you should embrace it and plan for it.

Life is about change, and adapting to that change. As we age we find that there are things that we can no longer do or do easily.

After my head on collision with the drunk, my life took a turn that was unexpected. There are things that I can no longer do as the pain regulates that activity. Should I relegate myself to that fact and just stop trying, or should I look for other things that I can still do?

Successful people don’t give up. They keep trying. They look for other ways to re-invent themselves. Wounded Warriors are people that I look up to. While I live in constant pain, I still have my extremities and even though it hurts, I can still use them. Many of them do not have them any longer and yet, they find new ways to “live life!”

The death of Robyn Williams took me by surprise. That has been a very sad event in 2014. I wish I had known him because maybe, just maybe I could have made a difference. That to me is one great way to “spend” ones time and that is in the service of others. I am not suggesting that you make a career out of it but, I always feel better when I am helping someone else. Robyn was a life worth investing in. He made countless people laugh and have better days through his talents. His death made many cry and I suspect; still does.

The longer you live the more “death” you will experience and it is important that you deal with it in such a way that it does not bring you down. None of us are getting out of this alive and that brings me back to time management.

One of the other “celebrities” that meant a lot to me was Steve Irwin. Please don’t get me wrong, there are tons of people who have meant something to me that I have genuine pain for their loss, Bing Crosby, John Wayne, Bob Ross, Ronald Reagan, and Carl Sagan to name a scant few. The list could go on all day so let me get back to Steve Irwin.

Why Steve? Steve made me laugh. Steve captured my interests and in doing so made me see his love of life and all of the world’s creatures in a new light. Before Steve, the only good snake was a dead snake, the same held true for spiders! Now I have been known to take a spider out of the house and put it back outside. I actually chased a coral snake down and took its picture! I can guarantee before Steve, that is not something that I would have done! While chasing the snake I remember thinking in his voice, “I hope its not grumpy!”

Although his zeal for life often put him over the top of the bell curve of “living on the edge,” He lived his life more in his 42 years then most of us will in those 80 years that we may have. Steve brought the camera in and shared many moments of his life “some rather intement” involving he and Terry’s first child being born. I was amazed that he lived past that day! That show, had me put a visit to down under, on my bucket list.

Living in the moment

There was a star trek movie where Picard was taught to “live in the moment.” What were the writers getting at? I thought about that for sometime and finally concluded that we fail to take time to smell the roses. We see them in passing but seldom stop and go over to them and “smell them.”

We go through our lives one Starbucks at a time, punctuated by meetings, phone calls and long commutes to and from the office where we once again survive hectic schedules of soccer, ballet, ball practice, dentist visits, and maybe a trip to grandmother’s house for the holidays.

We live our lives on screens. We exchanged the TV for the computer, and now we have tablets that can be utilized during the commercials for things that you simply must have as you disserve them! We stalk our friends and family through Facebook or other social media and we get our news from snippets doled out in 140 characters or less.

We allow the masses to let us know what is important by what is trending, often times to discover it has something to do with someone’s butt!

Porch Time

When I visit family in other parts of the country I look forward to the visits where the internet does not work and the cell phone gets crappy signals. I have been known to get some coffee and watch the sunrise on their porch and I have also been known to sit on the porch with a good book if no one was around or, engage in “social intercourse” with those that made the time to do so.

Those are moments where I either invested in myself or in others through a just about lost art of “talking.” Carrying on a conversation without LOL or OMG and in more than 140 characters!

Goals

Set yourself some short term goals and long term goals whether it be financial or life goals and track your progress.

Much like project managers track the progress of a project through milestones, task and such, you too should manage your life in such a way that by the time you retire you have the funding to do so, and you have a plan for what you will do during that time of your life. Both are equally important!

Some will tell you that life just happens but, those are folks analogous to ships at sea, without a rudder!
You must have a rudder if you don’t want to capsize or end up on the rocks!

Manage your money and manage your time!

If you are called home before you get to retirement, than God has something more important for you to do.

While you are working, try to enjoy what you are doing. A third of your life you spend working, you should do your best to find something to do that you are passionate about.

A third of your life you spend sleeping, get a comfortable bed as this is an investment in you.

The commute is just what it is and your options may be different. Car pools allow you the opportunity to visit with others. Public transportation would allow you to nap or read and then there are books on tape.. I have been known to use it as “me time” and sing while other drivers looked on, thinking that I had lost it!

Make the most out of the time that you have here and spend your time wisely!

As Marvin Zindler used to say, Good Golf, Good tennis or whatever makes you happy!

Time and Puzzles

Time and Puzzles

I wish I understood all that I know about time.

Like the mysteries of the Quark, I would really like to understand that too.

What I do know about time is that we never seem to have enough of it. When things slow down I like to ponder what I know about “things.” One of those things is time.

As a creator of a science fiction book I had to do some messing with time. Not unlike the “flux capacitor” I had to “invent” a device that would move my beleaguered crew through time and space. This required a lot of research because I really don’t want to be laughed at.. Well I guess if they must laugh I would hope it is with the same jocularity that we laughed at the garbage consuming flux capacitor.

Having said that and on a little more serious note I was wondering. Things like this keep me up at night as I “wonder” a lot. Ever notice how the storms on the sun seem to last forever?

I am thinking that they only seem to last forever as the sun has its own version of time which is a lot slower than ours due to its mass and gravity.

Knowing “something” about Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity it just seems to make sense.

How to prove this is another story. Here is another question. Does the time that mercury experiences correlate with ours? Another words, if we were to land on mercury and call home via radio, other than the 8 minutes that it would take to get the signal to earth would their atomic clock read the same as the one on earth?

If there is a difference in time from the light source from the sun to us would this change our perception of the speed of light? How about the age of the sun?

How about in reverse? Are the clocks on Voyager or some satellite that is far out in our solar system the same as the clocks here on earth? Do they have them?

Things like this really do keep me up at night. What say you folks that understand the complicated math that surely accompanies this “stuff?”

-Best to you and those that you care about!

The case of the password vs insanity.

We have all heard that the definition of insanity is: doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. This was not lost on me when recently my password on my home PC was no longer accepted.

Imagine logging in to your own PC, that no one else touches, and the password no longer works.

I cannot tell you how many times that I tried the password that I know that it is supposed to be, and then doubting my sanity, trying every other password that it might be “just in case I changed it” without remembering I did.

The only reason there was a smidgeon of a doubt is that recently Yahoo forced me to change my password. They would accept nothing less than a strong password which by the way is so strong that I have trouble typing it while looking at it, and there is not a chance of remembering it.

No longer are the days of the family pet or address or birthday acceptable as passwords. Imagine having to type a password like this T4^s#hg^9? every time you logged on to your computer!

While the home PC’s password was not quite this strong, there is more than room for error. This led to a rather frustrating afternoon as one might guess.

The trouble shooting process was difficult as Windows allows little room for error and certainly not much for diagnostics. My first guess was the keyboard had to be messing up in some way so I changed the batteries. When that did not bear fruit I hooked up a hard wired keyboard to the USB port and still nothing. “Incorrect login name or password.”

Google produced nothing relevant other than an ad for some company that sells some software to recover your password. Microsoft was no help. If I were in a decision making role at Microsoft I would make some sort of option on the login screen that would allow for one to make certain that their keyboard is typing the correct letter and that the caps is on or off. Wireless keyboards don’t have any LED on them to tell you about “num lock” or shift lock and , the screen was not giving me any hint of this either although it normally would.

Windows 7 offers a way to reset the password, but you have to plan for it first and oh yes, it requires the “A drive, a floppy.” This too needs to be re-thought as few computers today have a floppy drive.

Somewhere in the process of trying to boot into safe mode I get an error that says “keyboard failure.”

At this point I try the wired keyboard into several different USB ports with the same results. I then installed a usb card thinking that maybe that would work, nope same results.

I could do things in Bios but not in Windows. The thing that would have helped is a way to check the keyboard, in Bios. My guess is that Bios is not as picky about what it sees from the keyboard and since you are only using limited keyboard functions, curser movements, enter and tab, one would not have guessed that the USB was having issues.

I just happen to own another machine of identical configuration, so a swap of the hardrive to the other machine rendered a machine that worked with my password that worked all along.

I can only conclude that there is an issue with the USB controller on the motherboard.

I am considering clearing out the Bios on the old board and trying a re-install of the software just to see if that fixes it. There may also be some sort of update from Dell for that Bios.

For you hardware junkies out there, this is probably standard fare. While I could have purchased a new machine for the $$ wasted in time to diagnose this, I have a new found empathy towards those who just use the machine and have no clue how it works.

Can you imagine Joe Q User out there that really looks for the “any key” having an issue like this?

If I was frustrated (and I have been at this when DOS 1 was new,) I cannot even fathom what something like this would be like for others who have less experience than I.

I hope that this helps someone somewhere possibly saving some time and frustration as this type of bugaboo should not happen.

Best to you and those that you care about!

Time

Some measure time by the ticking of a clock, others by the days of the week and still others by the years that pass.

One of my favorite songs has a line in it about “being in the autumn of my life.” That sounds almost forlorn in retrospect.

The truth (you know how I like truth) of the matter is that most of us measure time by the weekends. We relish the hour when Friday afternoon rolls around and we can take some “time” to go out, sleep in, golf or what have you.

I used to watch people walking into the office on Monday morning and then watch them leave as the evening skies turn a pale shade of azure with crimson overtones flashing across the skies, dancing across the few clouds that sailed by.

In the morning people are full of life. There is just about a glow to most of them. Around twilight, the glow has turned to hollow, shadowed facial structures. The enthusiasm that they greeted the day with has long since departed, leaving them bereft of cheerfulness. They are in fact vapid, of that essence of “life!”

Looking upwards towards the kaleidoscope display of nature’s own brand of art, is not even a passing thought. We have lost our way in the maze of time clocks, political correctness, rules and social mores. We have forgotten how to be “us.”

Making our way with the throngs of other drones either by bus train or car we head to that last bastion of relief, our homes. Summoning the last bit of energy in reserve, they “we” plod through our charted course until we finally can collapse into our beds, maybe even inviting death’s “sting” as we contemplate the day today, and start thinking about tomorrow. Would that “sting” really be so bad?

The weekends are fraught with their own unique brand of dull drum, as we now must take care of the things that did not get taken care of during the week. This thing called life happens on those days of the week that end in “Y,” and many of us may wonder “why” we chose the path that we did.

Time can be measured in heart beats. I truly believe that time is relative in that manner as the creatures with the fastest heart beat seem to live the shortest amounts of time, conversely those with the slowest, seem to live much longer.

We sell our selves every day, one heart beat at a time. Every heart beat that you spend, is one less heart beat that you have left. Since we do seem to measure time with our hearts may I humbly suggest that you fill your life with love and laughter? Life is too short to be angry.

I overheard a man today complaining about his employer at great lengths, regarding their intelligence, their breeding and so forth; and I could not help but notice that he was working for them. His brand of “living” was to sew seeds of his discontent to fellow workers and stew in his lot in life. We could talk about negative and positive energy but that is a topic for another day. Do you know that when you are upset or angry, cortisol is released; the stress hormone. Does it really pay to be “angry,” Only if you want to shorten your life, and the lives of those people around you!

Time is what we make of it, and we are all the stewards of that time. Tomorrow will take care of itself, live for right now, in the moment. Enjoy what you do even at your work for there are no do-over’s, this is it!

You can do that with what I call PMA, the diametric opposite of PMS, to borrow that awkward condition in some women’s lives, as an example.

Positive Mental Attitude

It takes practice but after 45 days of doing it, you will be a different person. I have been practicing it for years and I do not look like those that I described earlier. As the matter of fact I appear quite young for my age. I guess I will have to write about that one day soon. In short, don’t get caught in others negative attitudes and don’t ever project one. Life is too short to hate, to be angry, to live in a constant state of turmoil.

Allow me to share one brief story of how I discovered PMA.

I had a job that involved going out to customers’ locations, carrying a 40 pound box of tools, parts and so forth to repair what needed to be repaired. While I really liked what I did, and I enjoyed dealing with people, I really loathed the fact that parking was a hassle; it was in the south so high humidity and pop-up rain showers were normal on top of being in a large city.

One day I parked blocks from where I needed to go, as it was raining so all of the “close up” parking was taken. The rain in this case was caused by a tropical storm sitting on top of the city, in short rain was moving horizontally as well as vertically. Wearing dress clothes(very wet ones), carrying that tool bag, slogging through running water, I finally made it into the building. Another older gentleman was behind me, so I held the door for him. As we climbed into the elevator I began grumbling about the weather, the day etc. As I was trying to engage this man in conversation as “I do that” his demeanor was very much different from mine. He seemed content if not jovial. He took off his hat and allowed the water to run onto the floor and patiently listened to me while I droned on about the rain.

Before he left he passed this on to me and I have never forgotten it. “Son, anytime you wake up sucking air, it is a good day!” We were at a hospital for cancer treatment, and I can only assume that he was a patient. I had discovered PMA!

Those words rattled around my head for that day, the next and so on. Every time I am having a tough time, those words re-play themselves they in fact, resonate with my soul; I usually strike a grin and silently thank that man for sharing that one bit of advice. Rarely do I have “bad days” any longer. It put things into perspective for me and it is my prayer that this may help someone else who is having a “bad day.”

Take a moment to smell the roses, watch the clouds, and my personal favorite is to watch the ocean. I can sit there for hours just watching the waves and listening to the seagulls and other birds going about their day. That is time well spent..

-Best to you and those that you care about!