Wiccan Invocations
I heard in the paper that Chesterfield County, Virginia rejected a Wiccan priestess' request to perform invocations for them. This shows that Chesterfield County's officials don't bother to find out what Wicca stands for or what Wiccans believe. They have this old image of witches on brooms. The county attorney, says, "Wicca is neo-pagan and invokes polytheistic, pre-Christian deities" and for that reason he rejected the Wiccan's request. He should not reject Wicca for what it is but should consider what Wicca does and what Wiccans do. Further, what if I object to a non-pagan, monotheistic Christian deity? I would find an invocation to such a deity offensive to me.
I think Chesterfield County should either reconsider its decision and allow the Wiccan to give invocations in Chesterfield County, or do away with invocations altogether. It is hard to do an invocation without breaking the principle of separation of church and state stated in the First Amendment.
Further, I feel that the Richmond Times-Dispatch this time has disgraced itself with its report of the incident. "Chesterfield gives witch the broom." That shows that the people on the staff of this newspaper have brooms in their brains. They are imprisoned by the witch stereotype. They should have simply said "Chesterfield rejects Wiccan's invocation request".
Sputnik
2002 October 5 was the 45th anniversary of the launching by the Soviet Union of Sputnik I. I was 11 years old when this occurred. I was in the living room of my parents' house, and they were watching TV. All of a sudden a special alert came on the black-and-white TV. The "Russians" had launched an Earth-orbiting satellite in orbit called Sputnik I and it was giving off a beeping sound: beep, beep, beep... The first thing I said was "shoot it down", for we were all trained to hate the Soviets and their Communist form of government. But my father said that they won't do that because the satellite will do good for everyone.
But it was a shock to people. Headlines persisted for some time after the launch of Sputnik. People became afraid that they may develop continental missiles capable of sending nuclear warheads to the United States. In some ways this event resembles Planeattack, the terrorist attacks of 2001 September 11, in that both events were jolting reminders that our country was no longer secure within its borders. Interest everywhere in mathematics, science, and engineering skyrocketed. This increased interest in the sciences and space led to the US space programs and Kennedy's moon challenge, which was successfully met in 1969.
And Sputnik ushered in humanity into the Space Age, into a world where we casually use satellites for such things as locating your place (GPS), cellular telephones, and cable television broadcasts. It was our first step into space.
Virginia Association of Astronomy Societies
I attended this conference in Ashland, Virginia today and heard several good talks, including one wherein the presenter showed how a picture in a darkened room can show up rather easily in today's CCD equipment. It was followed by a picnic and skywatch near Ashland in which I located several interesting objects in my telescope. I regard this is a summertime conference, since the temperatures were in the upper 80s. It may be the last day of summer. Highs in the low 70s are called for next week.
A Journey through Blogrealm
Blogtrek
Blogtrek
2002/10/05
2002/10/03
Billions and billions!
One of the foremost media people and scientists in our lifetime has been Carl Sagan, who brought the universe and its wonders to TV audiences everywhere. One of his hallmarks was the phrase "Billions and Billions", resulting from the way he said "billions". He said it with an increased emphasis on the "b". There was a good reason why he did it, and that was illustrated by an incident on the stock market on 2002 October 2, Thursday.
On that day the averages ambled about the zero line all day, then suddenly tumbled at the end of the day for a loss. Maybe there were economic factors involved, but something else happened that could have caused much of that drop. Bear Stearns, Inc input an order to sell four million shares of stock. Now some misunderstanding of human voices, perhaps over the telephone must have occurred. It was not a computer error. Somehow it got entered in as four billion shares of stock. That is an enormous number, and that would influence the averages. Someone caught it and halted all but $622 million of the sale.
It is clear now why Sagan said "billions". He wanted to distinguish "billion" from "million". The two sound alike but are vastly different in size. A billion is 1,000,000,000 (in America, that is). A million is 1,000,000, or a thousand times less. They sound alike; in fact, "m" and "b" are relatives of each other, along with "p". All are made by parting the lips. So I can understand how "million" sounded like "billion". This means of course that the error was one involving the human voice.
We should learn the names of large numbers and know how big they are. Here is a table:
There are names beyond these, such as quintillion, sextillion and so forth, and one can go to a web page of large numbers to see them all. But, as I show below, these are rarely used. Learn these numbers and these names, and say them properly. Also take into consideration the country you are in - in Great Britain and some other places, a billion is 1,000,000,000,000. This will help avoid errors that result from mistaking a million from a billion.
The Quadrillion Principle
This principle asserts that quantities that we use in everyday life and usage cannot exceed a quadrillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000. This explains why "trillion" is frequently used in our society, but "quadrillion" is much rarer, and "quintillion" and higher numbers are almost never heard of. The reason is this. The gross world product is somewhere near $10 trillion. The smallest unit that we work with is a penny. $10 trillion are a quadrillion pennies. This is the maximum amount we can conceive in terms of the minimum. It follows that all other quantities in our life must fall between these and be less than a quadrillion. For example, the number of rabbits in the world must be less than a quadrillion. For a rabbit is worth greater than a penny, maybe $10 or $100 or so; certainly it takes more than this to feed it. Further, the total worth of all the rabbits in the world must be less than the GWP. For otherwise, we would catch and buy up all the rabbits to increase the worth of everything. Therefore the total number of rabbits is less than their total worth, which in turn is less than the GWP which is a quadrillion pennies. So the number of rabbits is less than a quadrillion.
One of the foremost media people and scientists in our lifetime has been Carl Sagan, who brought the universe and its wonders to TV audiences everywhere. One of his hallmarks was the phrase "Billions and Billions", resulting from the way he said "billions". He said it with an increased emphasis on the "b". There was a good reason why he did it, and that was illustrated by an incident on the stock market on 2002 October 2, Thursday.
On that day the averages ambled about the zero line all day, then suddenly tumbled at the end of the day for a loss. Maybe there were economic factors involved, but something else happened that could have caused much of that drop. Bear Stearns, Inc input an order to sell four million shares of stock. Now some misunderstanding of human voices, perhaps over the telephone must have occurred. It was not a computer error. Somehow it got entered in as four billion shares of stock. That is an enormous number, and that would influence the averages. Someone caught it and halted all but $622 million of the sale.
It is clear now why Sagan said "billions". He wanted to distinguish "billion" from "million". The two sound alike but are vastly different in size. A billion is 1,000,000,000 (in America, that is). A million is 1,000,000, or a thousand times less. They sound alike; in fact, "m" and "b" are relatives of each other, along with "p". All are made by parting the lips. So I can understand how "million" sounded like "billion". This means of course that the error was one involving the human voice.
We should learn the names of large numbers and know how big they are. Here is a table:
| thousand | 1,000 |
| million | 1,000,000 |
| billion | 1,000,000,000 |
| trillion | 1,000,000,000,000 |
| quadrillion | 1,000,000,000,000,000 |
There are names beyond these, such as quintillion, sextillion and so forth, and one can go to a web page of large numbers to see them all. But, as I show below, these are rarely used. Learn these numbers and these names, and say them properly. Also take into consideration the country you are in - in Great Britain and some other places, a billion is 1,000,000,000,000. This will help avoid errors that result from mistaking a million from a billion.
The Quadrillion Principle
This principle asserts that quantities that we use in everyday life and usage cannot exceed a quadrillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000. This explains why "trillion" is frequently used in our society, but "quadrillion" is much rarer, and "quintillion" and higher numbers are almost never heard of. The reason is this. The gross world product is somewhere near $10 trillion. The smallest unit that we work with is a penny. $10 trillion are a quadrillion pennies. This is the maximum amount we can conceive in terms of the minimum. It follows that all other quantities in our life must fall between these and be less than a quadrillion. For example, the number of rabbits in the world must be less than a quadrillion. For a rabbit is worth greater than a penny, maybe $10 or $100 or so; certainly it takes more than this to feed it. Further, the total worth of all the rabbits in the world must be less than the GWP. For otherwise, we would catch and buy up all the rabbits to increase the worth of everything. Therefore the total number of rabbits is less than their total worth, which in turn is less than the GWP which is a quadrillion pennies. So the number of rabbits is less than a quadrillion.
2002/09/30
Rochester Red Wings and Minnesota Twins
Google, already by far the most useful search engine, in my opinion doubled its usefulness recently by including a News search engine in its repertoire. This search engine searches for the latest news on a search term. This will revolutionize news on the Web. So far the networks and newspapers have been putting up the same old stilted stuff all the time, and they duplicate each other. Google will change all that. Now you can search for whatever you want. If you want the latest on Venus Williams, type that in and you will get stories on her that the big ones aren't reporting. If you want the very latest of stories, Google will not accept a complete blank or even the word "the" but if you try a moderately common word such as "time", it will come up with stories that have occurred only minutes ago. Talk about breaking news! Google breaks them before all but one of the news breakers do. Too bad we don't have Google on the TV set. That will come next.
But I would like to comment on one piece of news that Google News helped me find. I wanted to find out about the Rochester Red Wings and five other professional baseball teams and see how they paired up; the Red Wings had declared free agency so they could look for a new club. I recommended in an earlier blog that Rochester pair up with the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Nashville Sounds go with the Atlanta Braves, and the Richmond team (the Breeze?) associate with the Orioles. That would have sharply cut travel costs.
Instead, travel costs increased. A Google news story said the Rochester Red Wings paired up with the Minnesota Twins. That took me by surprise. The Twins? They are far away and the Twins were threatened with extinction a while ago. The Twins had the Edmonton Trappers as their farm club, so I wanted to find out what happened to them. A search on "minnesota edmonton" told me that Edmonton switched to the Montreal Expos. Another surprise. So I went to "expos lynx" and found that Montreal's farm team, the Lynx, mated with the Orioles. So instead of Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta three-cycling AAA farm teams, Baltimore, Minnesota, and Montreal did instead. And it increased travel costs. The total "by crow" mileages among the original pairs was 1,460 miles; next year for these teams it will be 3,050 miles. This year two of the distances (Baltimore-Rochester, Ottawa-Montreal) were drivable, but next year they all will have to go by plane, except maybe Baltimore-Ottawa. So why didn't they go according to saving driving costs? There were other considerations.
First of all the Rochester Red Wings had five losing seasons in a row, and that is rare for that franchise. The Red Wings owners and fans felt that the Orioles were not serving their needs well, so they ditched them. The Hometown Annapolis web site said it best, I felt: "Talk about embarrassment: Have you ever heard of a minor-league team ditching a major-league team? It always happens the other way around! But not to Peter Angelos' hapless Orioles. And you know what? Next year's team could be worse than this year's -- because there is no talent in sight."
Secondly, the Wings fans wanted Pittsburgh for their parent club. According to the Democrat and Chronicle", 56 percent of the fans wanted Pittsburgh, 25 percent Baltimore, 12 percent Minnesota and the rest others. But the Pirates snubbed them. They continued with the Nashville Sounds for another two years, even though by switching to Rochester, they could have set off a chain reaction that would have saved big travel bucks. After that, the Red Wings and Twins were an obvious match and that's the way it came out.
So personal and emotional feelings about these teams seems to have trumped travel economy in the pairings between major league and Triple-A minor league for 2003. That is too bad in a way because it means increased consumption of petroleum, a commodity that will get scarce in the years ahead. Another thing this says is that even long-standing relationships can come to an end eventually. The Baltimore-Rochester match lasted 42 years, the longest among any of the pairs of teams in baseball. I still remember the headlines in the Rochester newspapers when I was 14 years old. Red Wings break with Cardinals, sign with Orioles. The Red Wings ditched the Cardinals because the Cardinals saw fit to snatch 4 star Red Wings in the height of playoff and pennant contention to play on the Cardinals instead, angering the fans.
I also heard tonight that the new name of the new Triple-A ball club in Albuquerque, New Mexico will be the Isotopes. This came from a cartoon show, the Simpsons, about a team called the Springfield Isotopes that moved to Albuquerque. A survey revealed that the older the fan, the more he dislikes the name "Isotopes". I think it is cute and original, and far better than "Dukes". It's a good choice, that is, unless it reminds people of stores of radioactive material in the area.
Spaceship Earth
One may object to my proposal the other day of a higher gasoline tax. The less and fewer taxes we have the freer we are. Indeed, if the resources for the way you want to live are readily available, maybe little or no government is the best. However, resources are not readily available. In fact, we may run out of cheap oil in a few years. It is like being on a spaceship, say, going to Mars. There resources are scarce indeed and the inhabitants need to live according to strict rules, otherwise, the spaceship will fail and they all will die. But isn't Earth then just another spaceship? Instead of being 80 feet wide, it is simply much larger, 8,000 miles wide. But it still is a spaceship. It has finite resources. So we may need to live according to some rules to ensure that our only spaceship that we know of survives. This means use solar energy, recycle, drive hydrogen cars or ride a bike, and so forth. Cut back on petroleum usage (which is why the tax). And above all don't squander our resources on anti-human events such as wars.
Torricelli
I heard on the news that Torricelli, incumbent in New Jersey, is quitting the race to continue as Representative from that state. The media are saying that could turn things over to the Republicans. I don't think so. The prime determiner of election results is the economy. A good economy favors incumbents; a bad one favors challengers. The economy was sour in 1980, and incumbent Carter was defeated in a landslide. The economy was sour in 1992, and Bush I, having won a highly popular war with a 90% approval rating, was defeated by someone who had been known to have had extramarital affairs (only four years after the Gary Hart incident!). The economy was taking off with the dot-com boom in 1996, and sure enough, Clinton was re-elected despite scandal clouds growing around him. The economy determines everything, it seems. Right now the economy is really bad; the stock market keeps wanting to go down, down, down. And if this is the case from now to November, GOP control of the House and Senate will go down, down, down. If Torricelli's opponent wins, there will be an upset elsewhere that will give control of the Senate to the Democrats. The media harp on the prospect of the Great Oil War of 2003 making Bush popular, but in my opinion, the prospect of this war coming is one of the main reasons why the stock market is so sullen right now. If the economy continues as bad as it is now, Democrats will take both houses in November.
Google, already by far the most useful search engine, in my opinion doubled its usefulness recently by including a News search engine in its repertoire. This search engine searches for the latest news on a search term. This will revolutionize news on the Web. So far the networks and newspapers have been putting up the same old stilted stuff all the time, and they duplicate each other. Google will change all that. Now you can search for whatever you want. If you want the latest on Venus Williams, type that in and you will get stories on her that the big ones aren't reporting. If you want the very latest of stories, Google will not accept a complete blank or even the word "the" but if you try a moderately common word such as "time", it will come up with stories that have occurred only minutes ago. Talk about breaking news! Google breaks them before all but one of the news breakers do. Too bad we don't have Google on the TV set. That will come next.
But I would like to comment on one piece of news that Google News helped me find. I wanted to find out about the Rochester Red Wings and five other professional baseball teams and see how they paired up; the Red Wings had declared free agency so they could look for a new club. I recommended in an earlier blog that Rochester pair up with the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Nashville Sounds go with the Atlanta Braves, and the Richmond team (the Breeze?) associate with the Orioles. That would have sharply cut travel costs.
Instead, travel costs increased. A Google news story said the Rochester Red Wings paired up with the Minnesota Twins. That took me by surprise. The Twins? They are far away and the Twins were threatened with extinction a while ago. The Twins had the Edmonton Trappers as their farm club, so I wanted to find out what happened to them. A search on "minnesota edmonton" told me that Edmonton switched to the Montreal Expos. Another surprise. So I went to "expos lynx" and found that Montreal's farm team, the Lynx, mated with the Orioles. So instead of Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta three-cycling AAA farm teams, Baltimore, Minnesota, and Montreal did instead. And it increased travel costs. The total "by crow" mileages among the original pairs was 1,460 miles; next year for these teams it will be 3,050 miles. This year two of the distances (Baltimore-Rochester, Ottawa-Montreal) were drivable, but next year they all will have to go by plane, except maybe Baltimore-Ottawa. So why didn't they go according to saving driving costs? There were other considerations.
First of all the Rochester Red Wings had five losing seasons in a row, and that is rare for that franchise. The Red Wings owners and fans felt that the Orioles were not serving their needs well, so they ditched them. The Hometown Annapolis web site said it best, I felt: "Talk about embarrassment: Have you ever heard of a minor-league team ditching a major-league team? It always happens the other way around! But not to Peter Angelos' hapless Orioles. And you know what? Next year's team could be worse than this year's -- because there is no talent in sight."
Secondly, the Wings fans wanted Pittsburgh for their parent club. According to the Democrat and Chronicle", 56 percent of the fans wanted Pittsburgh, 25 percent Baltimore, 12 percent Minnesota and the rest others. But the Pirates snubbed them. They continued with the Nashville Sounds for another two years, even though by switching to Rochester, they could have set off a chain reaction that would have saved big travel bucks. After that, the Red Wings and Twins were an obvious match and that's the way it came out.
So personal and emotional feelings about these teams seems to have trumped travel economy in the pairings between major league and Triple-A minor league for 2003. That is too bad in a way because it means increased consumption of petroleum, a commodity that will get scarce in the years ahead. Another thing this says is that even long-standing relationships can come to an end eventually. The Baltimore-Rochester match lasted 42 years, the longest among any of the pairs of teams in baseball. I still remember the headlines in the Rochester newspapers when I was 14 years old. Red Wings break with Cardinals, sign with Orioles. The Red Wings ditched the Cardinals because the Cardinals saw fit to snatch 4 star Red Wings in the height of playoff and pennant contention to play on the Cardinals instead, angering the fans.
I also heard tonight that the new name of the new Triple-A ball club in Albuquerque, New Mexico will be the Isotopes. This came from a cartoon show, the Simpsons, about a team called the Springfield Isotopes that moved to Albuquerque. A survey revealed that the older the fan, the more he dislikes the name "Isotopes". I think it is cute and original, and far better than "Dukes". It's a good choice, that is, unless it reminds people of stores of radioactive material in the area.
Spaceship Earth
One may object to my proposal the other day of a higher gasoline tax. The less and fewer taxes we have the freer we are. Indeed, if the resources for the way you want to live are readily available, maybe little or no government is the best. However, resources are not readily available. In fact, we may run out of cheap oil in a few years. It is like being on a spaceship, say, going to Mars. There resources are scarce indeed and the inhabitants need to live according to strict rules, otherwise, the spaceship will fail and they all will die. But isn't Earth then just another spaceship? Instead of being 80 feet wide, it is simply much larger, 8,000 miles wide. But it still is a spaceship. It has finite resources. So we may need to live according to some rules to ensure that our only spaceship that we know of survives. This means use solar energy, recycle, drive hydrogen cars or ride a bike, and so forth. Cut back on petroleum usage (which is why the tax). And above all don't squander our resources on anti-human events such as wars.
Torricelli
I heard on the news that Torricelli, incumbent in New Jersey, is quitting the race to continue as Representative from that state. The media are saying that could turn things over to the Republicans. I don't think so. The prime determiner of election results is the economy. A good economy favors incumbents; a bad one favors challengers. The economy was sour in 1980, and incumbent Carter was defeated in a landslide. The economy was sour in 1992, and Bush I, having won a highly popular war with a 90% approval rating, was defeated by someone who had been known to have had extramarital affairs (only four years after the Gary Hart incident!). The economy was taking off with the dot-com boom in 1996, and sure enough, Clinton was re-elected despite scandal clouds growing around him. The economy determines everything, it seems. Right now the economy is really bad; the stock market keeps wanting to go down, down, down. And if this is the case from now to November, GOP control of the House and Senate will go down, down, down. If Torricelli's opponent wins, there will be an upset elsewhere that will give control of the Senate to the Democrats. The media harp on the prospect of the Great Oil War of 2003 making Bush popular, but in my opinion, the prospect of this war coming is one of the main reasons why the stock market is so sullen right now. If the economy continues as bad as it is now, Democrats will take both houses in November.
2002/09/29
Outer Banks
We signed up to go to a vacation on the Outer Banks in two weeks. I am looking forward to it, to walks on the beach, spotting all sorts of unusual birds, and looking out at a dark sky at night. There seems to be something mysterious about a piece of land that is so far away from everywhere else.
Three Pocket Speeches
I now have three pocket speeches. A pocket speech is a speech that you can give right away at occasions, usually Toastmaster meetings. Usually I have trouble coming up with just one. So how did I come up with three? The first one was about this very activity, blogging. It is an introduction to blogging and what it has meant for me. The second one is my response to Governor Warner's drastic budget cuts; I argue he should raise the gasoline tax instead. My third one is the introductory speech to the Virginia Association of Astronomy Societies convention this coming weekend. I will give a practice speech of this to the Richmond Three-Letter Toastmaster meeting this Wednesday. I think this blogging helps me get topics for pocket speeches. If so I can expect to have even more pocket speeches in the future.
We signed up to go to a vacation on the Outer Banks in two weeks. I am looking forward to it, to walks on the beach, spotting all sorts of unusual birds, and looking out at a dark sky at night. There seems to be something mysterious about a piece of land that is so far away from everywhere else.
Three Pocket Speeches
I now have three pocket speeches. A pocket speech is a speech that you can give right away at occasions, usually Toastmaster meetings. Usually I have trouble coming up with just one. So how did I come up with three? The first one was about this very activity, blogging. It is an introduction to blogging and what it has meant for me. The second one is my response to Governor Warner's drastic budget cuts; I argue he should raise the gasoline tax instead. My third one is the introductory speech to the Virginia Association of Astronomy Societies convention this coming weekend. I will give a practice speech of this to the Richmond Three-Letter Toastmaster meeting this Wednesday. I think this blogging helps me get topics for pocket speeches. If so I can expect to have even more pocket speeches in the future.
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