Religion in Computers

Today I found on the Internet an article about this device, a "3dfx Voodoo 1 4mb PCI w/o Cable 3D Accelerator" It is a graphics accelerator card. But note that the brand name has the name of a religion in it. Why did they do that? We don't have Christian hard drives, Islamic monitors, Buddhist RAM or Wiccan mice. So why do we have Voodoo Accelerators? Voodoo is the name of a valid religion, one of the original religions in western Africa. There is a lot of hype in our culture about Voodoo, and maybe that is what got this card manufacturer to call its accelerators Voodoo. But if they would not call a hard drive Episcopalian or a CD-ROM drive Unitarian, then they should not call a graphics accelerator Voodoo. 3dfx should find another name.

OO Programming Language Developers need to learn English

One of the principles of English is that proper nouns and adjectives are capitalized. For example, "car" is not capitalized for it is a common noun. It describes a car in general. However, "Toyota #137245" is capitalized because this is a specific instance of a car. It is a proper noun. The word "person" is not capitalized because it is a general word for any person. The words "George Walker Bush" are capitalized because they describe a specific person.

Object Oriented programming language developers have come up with a similar concept, namely that of a class. A class is a type of structure that is defined and generic, representing any old thing in the class. An instance of a class is a specific example of the class. An example of a class would be "cat". It would have attributes such as weight, breed, and the pitch of its meow. A specific instance of this class might be Boots. His attributes would then be 15 lb, tuxedo kitty, and high-pitched. I suppose you recognize this as exactly the same concept as that of common noun and proper noun in English.

Well if so, then why do OO programmers do it the other way around? In English we would say:

My cat is named Boots.

But in an OO language such as C# or Java, we would say:

Cat boots = new Cat;

That's just the reverse of how English does it! All of the books I have seen capitalize classes and lowercase instances. Why? Why can't we be consistent and why can't we notice OO programming in our everyday language when it exists? When I program, I am going to write

cat Boots = new cat;

and that will be that.

Oil Shortage Jokes

Today I hit upon an interesting picture on the Oil Crisis site. It shows the next two models of SUVs. The first is one that comes with its own portable drilling rig. The other is the DonCar. You need to click on that to see what a DonCar is. I also like the couple coming into a back to ask for a loan to fill the SUV's gas tank. What other Oil Shortage jokes can we come up with?

The Oil Shortage Traffic Light. A policeman at the center of an intersection yelling "Red!!", "Green!!", "Yellow!!".

The Oil Shortage Traffic Cop Uniform Fashion. A suit that is one-third bright phosphorescent red, one-third phosphorescent yellow, and one-third phosphorescent green. Four such police officers form a square and turn at appropriate times to show the appropriate color to the bicycles, pedestrians, and buggies that want to cross.

The Oil Shortage One-Person Airliner. A long-necked swan. You just hop on him, tell him "fly", and you're on your way!

The Oil Shortage Gasoline Price Sign. Each day the price goes up by zero. That's right, zero. They just add a zero onto the end of the price. Today's it's $3, tomorrow it's $30, the next day, $300 and so forth.

I suppose you can come up with other possibilities. We all like to laugh at ourselves at times, and we need some levity while considering the impact of the future shortage of petroleum which we know will come sooner or later, maybe around 2011 or so.

Abstract Wars

I read that the official national military strategy of the US includes the principle, "The enemy is terrorism." Whaaa??? How can our enemy be an abstract concept? There are no guns, no grenades, no rocket launchers, no artillery shells, and certainly no weapons of mass destruction that are effective against an abstract concept, for such does not exist as material objects in our world. It's like holding a non-abelian group up at gunpoint. Or holding the number 666 up at gunpoint.

Let's stop warring against terrorism and see if we can control these violent acts by (3) defending ourselves against terrorist acts, (2) getting rid of terrorists, and especially (1) ensuring by our behavior and cooperation with other nations and people that there are no terrorists in the world to begin with.

A song a day

I came up with a new idea for journaling today. Call it songaling. This is that of composing a song each day. It is only about 16-32 measures long or so. The idea is that I would meditate briefly to get the songs that keep playing in my mind all the time and would influence what I would play out of my mind. Then I would play whatever comes up. Some interesting things have come up. After eight days, I have three rather pensive pieces, a Latin dance, a majestic composition sounding like a graduation song or a national anthem, a really weird piece, a blues number, and a 5/4 jig. The Latin number was inspired by my seeing a news segment on people who visit Cuba. Perhaps I could call it "What's so bad about Cuba?" or "¿Cuál es tan malo sobre Cuba?" I have put the anthem-like song on line because it is so inspiring; it is my Song of 2003 November 26. Click on the name to play it.

I don't know how long I can keep this up, but it provides a wide repertoire of my own music, some of which can serve as preludes at my church for instance, and if I continue it over a year, I will have written 366 compositions.

My Choice after the Debates

Well, it looks like the Democrats are at it again. They debated each other in Iowa over the weekend, with Lieberman absent, and Kerry and Edwards in Washington, ready to vote anytime on the Medicare bill. I watched the replay of the debates to determine which I like best. There were some good moments.

Ramsey Clark named incident after incident where George Dubya Bush turned off people both in this country and out and concluded that "He has not learned how to get along with others."

Dennis Kucinich emphasized that if it was illegal to go in there in the first place then it is illegal to stay there, and he pulled up a Washington Times (a Republican-leaning newspaper!) and showed four whole pages of pictures of servicemen that have lost their lives in Iraq.

Howard Dean said it was time to slow the tempo of the debates after Kerry kept hammering him on the Medicare theme and how Dean pushed through cuts in the Vermont legislature when he was governor.

Carol Moseley Brown said it was time to take the "Men Only" sign off the White House Door.

So which ones do I like now? Keep in mind that I would prefer even last place on this list to Bush and that if it came to a last-place to Bush contest for the Presidency, I would vote for last place easily. With that in mind, here is my preference:

1. Dick Gephardt. He is one of the older candidates, and it shows. He shows the best experience of any of the candidates. He has been through it all and apparently knows how to use that knowledge to help improve the lot of us all.

2. Tom Kucinich. He looks like one of these scrappy young candidates, but I like what he has to say. He voted against the war in Iraq, even while other Democrats were voting for it, and he expresses a world view rather than a parochial American view.

3. Howard Dean. I have seen some flaws in him, but he may be the best chance to defeat Bush next November. He was my choice earlier, and clearly expresses a choice separate from the President.

4. Joe Lieberman. He, like Gephardt, shows a lot of experience with the government. However, his being Jewish may be a liability. He will need to be careful not to show any favoritism for Israel and to show to Arabs that he is on their side as well as the side of Israel - a hard act to pull off. From what I have seen, he will be able to do this.

5. Al Sharpton. This candidate gets points for being more expressive with his beliefs, more so than with the other candidates. He expresses the same points as the others, which I mostly agree with, but he does it more forcefully. I think if he gets elected he will get things done but may have to tone down some of his passion.

6. Ramsey Clark. He expressed a belief in God in these talks, making me think he may not support such issues as taking "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance before allowing it in the schools. His initial waffling on the Iraq war concerns me a little. His background is that of a military general, which may not go well as the chief executive of a civilian government. He may have some charisma but not enough to topple the challenger-charisma Lichtman key.

7. Tom Edwards. He does not seem to offer anything unique that the other candidates don't have, and so as President he may be more cautious than some and let his Cabinet and Congress have more of a say than they would with a stronger President. He is said to have charisma, but in my opinion not enough to topple the challenger-charisma key.

8. John Kerry. I didn't care for his pressing Dean on the Medicare issues, and his initial support for attacking Iraq concerns me.

9. Carol Moseley Braun. She alone of the candidates would keep the soldiers in Iraq simply because we have them there. Al Sharpton offered a contrasting viewpoint.

And so there it is. I hope that Dean or Gephardt gets it, and that whoever it is will defeat Bush next November.

The Greatest Decision

I heard documentaries and other stories about President John F. Kennedy's life and his assassination. What struck me about it was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Looking back at what Kennedy did, I conclude that he made one of the best decisions ever made by a US President. Further, in so doing, he turned back demands on him that could have likely meant my early death at age 17 - and maybe yours, through a nuclear holocaust.

The problem started when Nikita Khrushchev wanted to counteract the presence of missiles in Turkey and Europe that were pointed at his country, the Soviet Union. He made the impetuous decision to put missiles in Cuba with the intent of rectifying that balance, knowing full well that the US would react strongly to such an incursion. It turned out to be his biggest blunder. But he went ahead with it, and started building missiles in Cuba.

This was soon discovered by US spy planes - satellites were up but not the type that could take aerial photographs of Cuba. The Joint Chiefs of Staff reported this to Kennedy and said that there was only one way to handle this - invade Cuba and overthrow Castro. Kennedy did not want to do this. He felt that this could cause the Soviet Union to retaliate with nuclear missiles. In fact, there already were missiles in Cuba that could have hit US targets. He did not want to do something which might cause the world to explode in thermonuclear holocaust.

But he did not want to back down. To allow Soviet missiles in Cuba would have seriously damaged our security. So he wanted to stand up to the Soviets but not cause a nuclear showdown. An invasion was not the way. Neither was doing nothing. He found a way of standing up to the Soviets that had the best chance of dealing with the situation. He ordered a blockade of Cuba. This did two things: it told the Soviets to stop building missiles in Cuba or else; and because it took time for Soviet ships with equipment to get to Cuba, and this is what made the decision so great, it gave Khrushchev plenty of time to think about what he was doing. Just as the ships got to the brink of the blockade, sure enough, Khrushchev backed down, allowing a treaty to be formulated and signed. I feel it was one of the most brilliant decisions ever made by our Chief Executive. Another fine point of this decision is that Kennedy rejected the advice of his military. In his previous endeavor with the military, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the brand new President listened to the Joint Chiefs and created a big fiasco.

The decision also humiliated Khrushchev and exposed to the world his mistake. He paid for it a year later when the Kremlin threw him out as Party Boss. The decision by Kennedy was a courageous one to make. There still could have been a nuclear holocaust. But by doing what he did, he took the best chance of preserving the existence of our civilization, and it still exists in part because of him. Hope that we have more leaders and decisions like his in the future.

Combating Spam is an International Problem

I heard recently that the house had passed an anti-spam bill. In particular, CNN said on its web page that "The House voted overwhelmingly Saturday for a bill to outlaw most Internet spam and create a "do not spam" registry for those who do not wish to receive unsolicited junk e-mail." This may seem like a good idea. Spam resembles telemarketing calls in that both come uninvited, frequently involve scams and fraud, and usually try to sell us something. A while ago a Do Not Call list was established. This is a listing of people who said that they do not want to be called by telemarketers. There are now 50 million or so people on this list. This means that if a telemarketer calls someone from the list he can be penalized for it. To me this seems like a good idea. If you sign up and someone calls you, just report it to the authorities.

So why not a Do Not Spam list? The intention is the same. A spammer must avoid email addresses in such a list when they send out their multimillion-recipient emails. But there are problems with this. There are many ways in which a spammer can avoid detection, more so than with telemarketers. He can misspell words, use gibberish in his message, use false return addresses, and hop from one email address and IP address to another to avoid detection. The telemarketer has a few such methods available, chiefly the "unavailable" appearing on a caller ID, but not as many as the spammer. The telemarketer is forced to speak personally over the phone to his targets, but the spammer does not need to contact anyone at all. In 5 seconds, if he is lucky, a telemarketer can call one person. In the same length of time, a spammer can spam tens of millions of people, simply by clicking a mouse. So a do not spam list is not as effective.

Further, the US Congress is the wrong place to start fighting spam. No US law, no presidential order or edict, absolutely no court subpoena, summons or warrants can do anything about foreigners spamming from overseas. Many spams I get are from domains .fr, .it, .tw, .pc, and so forth, meaning France, Italy, Taiwan, China, and so forth. No US law can do anything about people from these places for the US has no jurisdiction there. For spam to be truly controlled, it needs to be treated as an international problem. It needs to be brought up before the United Nations, and the UN should take steps to help its member countries fight spam worldwide, so that a spammer in Taiwan can be caught and tried for spamming the United States. Unless this problem is internationalized, it will never be solved.

The Kennedy Assassination

Today is the 40th anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy on 1963 November 22. Where was I when the shooting happened? I was a 17 year old high school senior. It was Friday and I went through my usual sequence of classes including Advanced Placement Calculus at a school in upstate New York. At the end of that Friday, classes were rearranged to accommodate an assembly to honor and cheer the school's athletic heroes. One by one they came with cheers for everybody: the track and field team, the basketball team, and the football team. At about 14:10 EST, suddenly we were all called to either give the Pledge of Allegiance or sing "America, Tis of Thee". After that the assembly ended and we went to our homerooms. I thought it was rather strange. It was too early. Otherwise it was normal. The homeroom teacher went through some administrative things, and then dismissed us. We all went out to the bus, walking on the pavement outside. Then I heard what had happened. Students were talking to each other about what had happened to President Kennedy. I got onto my bus and sat near the front. The bus driver said that there was a bullet in his brain. I did not know what that meant, except that it seemed serious. She was listening on the radio. The people in the back were talking about Senator Goldwater; apparently about his chances for getting elected after this.

The bus drove by a nearby Catholic school and I saw the flag there at half mast. I wanted to know if it was true. It stopped on my street and I walked out with a neighbor girl. She said that was an awful thing to do to him. I got into the house, which was empty. My parents were both working. I turned on the TV and saw it. There was a picture of President Kennedy on the screen, and below it, it read "1917-1963". So it was true. I wanted to know how my parents would react. My brother kept making my life miserable with music from a rock station, but now the station was playing church organ music, saying that after this event it would not want to play its usual popular music. When she got home, she said ti was awful what happened to him but it was what one would expect from appealing to the crowds like that. There was a Senior Night dance scheduled for that night. I could not get a date but was intending to go single. I called someone and found out it was cancelled.

Most of the time I was home that weekend and Monday, watching the TV for new developments. I turned on the radio on Sunday and got the announcement that Oswald had been shot. The headline the next day read "Pro-Castro Gunman Held in Assassination of Kennedy", and two days later, "Millions watch: Revenge Bullet Kills Oswald".

It did not seem to affect my life that much, but it did help set up the Johnson-Goldwater presidential election of 1964. In that election, Johnson won every state except a strip of five states in the Deep South and Arizona. But suppose Kennedy had lived? From what I have heard, some of the sexual experiences of him may have come to light, along with his association with the Mafia. This may have led to his impeachment and possible removal from office or resignation. If it did not lead to that, there is a possibility that another Democrat, maybe Johnson, would have challenged him for the nomination. If this challenge had been successful, the Democrats would have lost three Lichtman keys: challenge to nomination, incumbency, and scandal. They had already lost four. The loss of seven keys would have meant a Goldwater victory, and the history of our nation would have been substantially different.

The Kennedy Assassination, along with the Moon Landing, Planeattack, the start of the two Iraq wars, and the Cuban Missile Crisis were events that I, and most other people, will always remember.

Gay Marriage and Massachusetts

I heard on the news this week that the banning of marriage between individuals of the same sex in Massachusetts has been declared unconstitutional. People opposed to gay marriage say that a marriage is between a man and a woman. Maybe it is. Biologically, it works best with a man and a woman, since they can produce the children to constitute a family, and the purpose of marriage in my opinion, is not companionship; it is not financial, and it is not even sex. The purpose of a marriage is to raise a family. This implies that the partners need not keep sexually exclusive to their spouses, provided the couple agrees to a policy of this kind. That's right, I think a sexually free marriage can work. It would be the ideal marriage for gay people. A gay man can marry a lesbian and agree that their sex life would be separate from their marriage except for a few times necessary to create the family. A lesbian marriage would have to have sex with others (or use expensive in vitro fertilization) to create a family, and there is always the possibility that their male partners would want at least partial custody of the children. A gay male couple can't even create a child on their own but have to seek adoption.

However, the court is right in saying that banning gay marriage denies the benefits of marriage to a gay person solely because of his or her sexual preference. Some sort of union needs to be recognized such that the couple does have the benefits of marriage. Further, I would not like an amendment added to the Constitution stating that a marriage is between a man and a woman. To me that is the government entering into something that should be personal among the partners in a relationship.

Close Encounters on the Highway

Lately I have been noticing more and more strange arrangements of lights on cars on the highway. For most of my life, cars had two headlights on their front, plus maybe orange parking lights, and two taillights. In the 1970's, I watched the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which extraterrestrials make a roundabout arrival to our planet. In one scene in the movie, someone driving on the road gets a tailgater, a car following too closely. There is nothing much you can do about this. You can keep your distance from the car following but you can't make the other guy behind you keep his distance. So the guy stops at a stop sign and motions for him to go around. The lights behind the vehicle then move to the right as the car goes around our hero's car. The same thing happens again; he gets another tailgater. Once again he stops at a stop sign and motions for him to go around. Instead, the lights go up! This is no ordinary car. It's an extraterrestrial visitor. Other car-like vehicles also appear, and some of these look weird with unusual patterns of lights.

And so do some of the cars I see on the highway today. The most common weird pattern seems to be four white headlights on front. That is not the usual pattern. There should be only two headlights. I suppose the extra two headlights, near the ground, are to cut through the fog, but they also make the vehicle look like something out of the movie. So I call them "close encounters". I have included this word on my nonword page. I also find them annoying, as close encounters are almost always too bright for my eyes. So I flick my brights at them to signal to them to turn off their close encounters lights. They may think their brights are on, but that is the only way I can signal them. So if you see someone flicking their brights at you, check to see if you have your brights on, but also check to see if you have close encounters lights on, and turn them off, for I don't want to think that you are from some galaxy far, far away.

An extended system of units

Scientists have for a long time dealt with large numbers, in the millions, billions and so forth. It was unwieldy to say 3.6 billion electron volts or a trillionth of a meter, so scientists long ago invented the International System of Units. By this system, one could express higher numbers. For example, a hertz is a cycle per second, used to measure electromagnetic frequencies. So then a thousand hertz is a kilohertz, or KHz for short. A million is a megahertz, and a billion is a gigahertz, where "giga-" means gigantic. A trillion is "tera-" from terato- meaning monster. Similarly, a nanosecond is a billionth of a second, and a picometer is a trillionth of a meter. This proved to be inadequate, so two more units, femto- (a quadrillionth) and atto- (a quintillionth-) were added (I am using the American interpretation of "billion" and so forth). Shortly after that came their reciprocals, peta- meaning a quadrillion, and exa-, meaning a quintillion. Even this became inadequate, as some scientists started to use the units milliattovolts. This is not legitimate as one is not supposed to use more than one of these suffixes at a time. So more units were added: zetta- for a sextillion, and yotta- for a septillion, or 10^24. Similarly came zepto- meaning sextillionth, and yocto- meaning septillionth.

Even this is inadequate. For example the Sun puts out 380 yottawatts, so that Sirius, being 23 times brighter than the Sun, puts out 8,740 yottawatts. This is not legitimate, as it uses numbers above a thousand. When such a number is encountered you need to divide by a thousand and use the next higher unit. But there isn't any in this case. That is why I devised a system of units to go well beyond these, in fact, all the way to a vigintillion, 10^63. After yotta- comes xona-, so that Sirius puts out 8.74 xonawatts. Then weka-, vunda-, and so forth. I followed the pattern of backward sequence of letters of the alphabet followed by a rendition of the Latin for the number. Similarly I came up with xonto-, meaning an octillionth, and so forth.

I posted them on my unit system site and said that these were my suggestions for units. It was not official, of course, and I hear no attempt to make them official. A committee of scientists, not just one eager blogger, needs to extend the system. If they took my units as a model, undoubtedly there would be some changes. For example, my vunda-, meaning 10^33 and connoting eleven, means 38 in Bantu or Swahili, so this could be confusing. Robert Munafo quotes my system, but says that he thinks the unit beyond yotta- is more likely to be novetta- instead of xona- as novett or something like that is Italian for nine. So remember if you use these extended prefixes that they are not official.

Nevertheless, I am glad to see that these names are starting to take hold. I did a Google™ search for "xona weka" and got 78 references! The main one seems to be Plexos, and apparently people are picking it up from either my site or Plexos'. Maybe they will form part of an official system soon so we can measure the Earth in grams (6 xonagrams). So go ahead and use them, but be sure to acknowledge that I developed these names first.

Board Can't Have Sectarian Prayers

Today was a big day today! Two important decisions that will improve the worth of livin gin this country happened. The more important of them was the decision by US District Court judge Dennis Dohnal that the refusal of the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors to allow Wiccan Cyndi Simpson to give an invocation to the Board earlier this year violated the principle of separation of church and state and was discriminatory as well. Specifically, he said that "prohibition against utilizing prayer to proselytize or advance any particular religion by sanctioning a preference for a particular set of beliefs. She was presumptively excluded because of a stated governmental preference for a different set of religious beliefs and viewpoint, albeit the beliefs of a large segment--if not the majority--of the population".

This means either the Board must eliminate prayer or invocations altogether, or it must allow anyone to give the prayer or invocation. This was the correct decision, in my opinion. The Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors is a public institution. It is answerable to the people. It is not a private club (despite what one newly elected Board member says) for the supervisors by themselves. Therefore, invocations to this Board are public acts, and therefore the Constitution prevails.

I now only hope that the Board adheres to this decision and not try to challenge it in the courts.

Heart of Virginia Council Changes Names

The other good decision of today was the decision of the Robert E. Lee Council of the Boy Scouts of America, which serves central Virginia, to change its name to the Heart of Virginia Council. The council has had the name of Robert E. Lee for over fifty years. Many think of him as a valiant soldier. But first things first. He did choose to abandon allegiance to the nation that forged the path to democracy and freedom for its citizens in favor of one that enslaved a huge percentage of them. He was a brilliant general, so his siding with the Confederates ensured a bloody, violent war and guaranteed that he would be responsible for more American deaths than any other person in our nation's history, even Hitler and Tojo. Further, he is a symbol of racism to a good part of our population. Therefore, his removal from the name of the council was a good decision. General Lee's name belongs in history books and in museums, and certainly not in the name of a widespread organization for boys.

I therefore commend the Council on its decision. Now they need to go further. They need to defy the national Boy Scouts of America organization and declare a policy of non-discrimination against gays, atheists, and agnostics, as the Girl Scouts have.

Girl Scouts not all that good?

Unfortunately, the Girl Scouts do have their problems. A troop of them in Fairbanks learned how to kill and skin beavers and to prepare their meat for cooking. This is a practice that should have gone out long ago. We no longer need to kill animals to make a living. Beavers have as much right to life as we do. Animal killing and skinning is something we should abandon in favor of farming and other vocations. This may be the only life that people in Fairbanks know, but times are changing there as anywhere else. Fortunately, the national organization does not support this troop's activities.

Grocery Stores

One of the first things I had experience with when I was young was grocery stores. My mother would take me to the local Wegmans in Rochester, New York when she went shopping. I was most interested in the cereal. Later on, the big company in town, Kodak, bought the land the Wegmans was on, but it opened elsewhere, including one store that looked really futuristic for its time in 1960, with conveyers that took your groceries to the outside. Since then Wegmans has continued to expand, now offering stores where you can do all your grocery and department store shopping in the same place, somewhat suggesting Wal-Mart but much better.

I eventually moved to Richmond, Virginia. In Richmond, the top store is Ukrop's. Since I have been here, Ukrop's has meant short lines becausae there was always enough help available, good quality but expensive food, and large stores with a restaurant facility. The one thing I find objectionable about Ukrop's is their closing on Sunday. The large Ukrop's stores remind me of Wegmans. I hear that both stores rate highly among grocery stores throughout the nation. They have a lot in common: large stores offering more than groceries, a CEO whose name is the same as the store (Joseph Ukrop at Ukrop's and Robert Wegman at Wegmans), so is a family business, and a regional extent.

As of late Wegmans has been expanding southward, into Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Now for the first time they will open a store in Virginia, early next year near Dulles Airport. Do they plan to expand into the rest of Virginia? I notice that Wegmans is about five times as big as Ukrop's and offers the same excellent environment. It would seem to me that if they want to expand into the rest of Virginia, a good first step would be for Wegmans to buy out Ukrop's. That would put Wegmans stores all over the place near Richmond, and from there they can expand to western Virginia and the Tidewater area. They would not have to construct a lot of new stores. Further, it would mean I can get the good deli and bakery items, the restaurant, and the good service I get now with Ukrop's from Wegmans, and further, it would be open on Sunday. I say go for it, Wegmans.

Lunar Eclipse

Yesterday I observed one of nature's more interesting phenomena - a lunar eclipse. I was attending a meeting in Baltimore on 2003 November 9, and left a little early to be back to Richmond by 1800 (6 o'clock) to set up my equipment for the eclipse. I got back at 1740 and ate dinner at a nearby McDonald's. Then I went over to the Science Museum, where a public skywatch was taking place. I got out my eight-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and aligned it with the stars. I then pointed it at the moon. What followed was an interesting night.

The Moon first entered the Earth's shadow at 1833.Gradually the moon lost more and more of its lit surface, and an eerie red took its place. An eclipsed moon shows up red, because it is reflecting all of Earth's lovely red sunsets, sunrises, and suntouches around the world. If you were on the Moon, you would see a total eclipse of the Sun by the Earth. The dark or night side of the Earth would show, and it would be surrounded by a red circle or ring where the sunrises and sunsets are. It would look like a ring of fire in the sky, and that ring would be shining its red on the Moon, making the lunar landscape red. We see this redness from the Earth when we look at a total lunar eclipse.

I took several pictures of the Moon by placing a digital camera right up to the eyepiece until the image shows on the digital display of what the camera sees. I then snap the shutter and this results in a picture. It is a fairly easy technique, and it produces good pictures. One visitor even wanted me to take pictures with her digital camera. I took it and she had a pictorial souvenir of the eclipse.

Later in the evening, the moon came out of the shadow of the eclipse. It was not a long eclipse. The Moon just barely came entirely inside one side of the Earth's umbra, or what might be termed the Great Shadow of Night (we were in it, too). There was one bright side to the disk of the moon, making it look as though it were not fully eclipsed. After the Moon started coming out of the eclipse, people wanted to see other things. It was a beautiful night, with only Richmond light pollution holding us back from seeing all the wonders of the heavens. I pointed the telescope at Mars. It was still a good object to observe, but it is not as easy to pick out markings on the planet now. Someone wanted to see Saturn. This is always a prizewinner at public skywatches, because of its unique appearance. So I told the telescope to point to Saturn. It went completely level, then rotated and pointed at some lights in a walkway near the Museum. It was too low to see. A little later, I saw it but when I tried to point the telescope at it, a light pole was in the way. It moved away from the light pole, and then I got the telescope on Saturn. Then I showed people Saturn with its rings through the telescope. They expressed great wonder at the planet, and some even said it didn't look real. But it was real. It was Saturn in the telescope, with its rings.

Given a clear dark sky, any skywatch held when Saturn and the Moon are both up will be a success.

The Election

I came into the voting booth about 2003 November 4 0620 in the morning. The big race that was talked about all over the place was the Bermuda District Supervisor race. So that was the one I was concerned about. I thought there would be other races, but no one ever talked about any of them. No TV show, no newspaper, no signs littering the landscape said anything about any other race. So when I walked into the booth I was surprised to be confronted with about 10 different elections! There were unopposed races for state assemblyman and senator. I was opposed to both unopposed candidates so I took the action that was suggested by someone at the Toastmasters convention I want to last weekend. The winner of the Humorous contest spoke with a title of "Vote for Me", where he said what he would do if he were running for Governor of Virginia. That someone suggested the idea of writing him in. The election PTB (powers that be) will be befuddled by this one person getting votes in several counties and cities. So I did it. I wrote him in on my ballot.

But there were other races. There was county treasurer, school board, county sheriff, and a couple of others. I did not know anything about these people, and some of these were contested. I just skipped them. I had wanted to know about these before the election. The hypermedia centered in this one race in Bermuda and perhaps a few others and completely ignored the others. I think they did the people of Chesterfield County, Virginia a disservice. It used to be that the local newspaper (Richmond Times-Dispatch) would list all these ballots, but I saw absolutely no sign of this in the past Sunday paper. Now maybe they squirreled it away under some ads, but I could not find it. I think from now on the hypermedia should quit harping about contested races and tell us about all the candidates who are running. The first duty of a citizen is to be in the know about who is running the government or who is running for running the government, and the media made it hard for the citizen to fulfill this duty.

Longhorn: What I would like to see

The history of computers over the past decade or so has been a history of version after version of Microsoft Windows coming out. There was Chicago (Windows 95), and then Memphis (Windows 98?) and Cairo (Windows 2000) and Windows ME. Then Whistler (Windows XP). Each one came with its own set of conniptions. Some things became better. Others became worse. Many items have shifted from place to place, from the Control Panel to Explorer to the Desktop Menu in a dizzying circle. People can't find things because they have been shifted around so much.

In particular for Windows XP, I find that the Find utility has been dumbed down and is no longer as valuable. I had to download Effective File Search to get an adequate search replacement for Windows Find, which I find sometimes does not find when it should. Windows insists on throwing up these dumb huge icons in its Explorer windows, which means I can't see the items on the list but must shift through visually through a forest of symbols. You have to explicitly set for each Explorer window whether to bigicon the files or to list them in a detailed list. In one version I have seen, deleting a tray icon deleted a desktop icon and vice versa. That I don't like. It means I either have to give up my desktop's usefulness, or I have to give up the taskbar.

So what would I like to see in a new version of Windows? I want to see DOS maintained and all DOS programs runnable. I want a Find and an Explorer similar to previous versions, not to XP. I want the Classic interface to return as the default. Luna means you can't find what you are looking for. I want the default for Explorer to be to include the file extension. That is an important part of the file name. MyData.txt is different from MyData.doc is different from MyData.csv is different from MyData.xls. I don't want all four of them to appear in a list entitled "Mydata". That is mass confusion. Most of all I want it to support all types of programs including standard Java. I don't want .NET and only .NET, which is where Microsoft seems to be headed.

But I don't know if I will get these items. Most likely I will get an operating system that will discombobulate much of what I have, and will cost me more frustration and time than having to put up with the signs of aging of an older interface would.

Chesterfield County elections

An important election is that of Bermuda District, Chesterfield County, Virginia, USA, supervisor. This supervisor is one of a board of five supervisors, one for each of the districts in Chesterfield County. There are three candidates: an incumbent independent Jack McHale, a Democrat Ree Hart, and a Republican Dickie King. So which of these am I going to vote for?

National affiliation. That an Independent is the incumbent is a wonder to behold. That is in Jack McHale's favor. He's been at the job for 12 years! I tend to favor Democrats over Republicans but I take each case separately. Nevertheless this would have me favoring Ree Hart over Dickie King.

Developers. This is a serious issue. The developers come in here, plow down our trees, removing our landscape's beauty and destroying the habitat for a number of species, build houses and sell them via realtors to people who clog the highways with children who crowd the schools. The politicians talk about school problems. They talk about highway needs. No. That's not the main point. Both of these problems will be resolved if the developers are kept in check. Which candidate is best for doing that? Well, since I have seen all sorts of development here, that disfavors McHale, the incumbent.

Schools. Jack McHale has voted to decrease property taxes, and this supposedly hurts the schools. Only if the politicians let it. They can decrease property taxes and increase them somewhere else or cut back on other budget items. Further, the main problem is not taxes or schools but developers.

Roads. There are several needs for roads in the county, and traffic jams are on the increase. Limiting development is the best way to deal with road problems.

But the biggest issue for me is the refusal by the board to allow Cyndi Simpson, a Wiccan, to give invocations to the Board of Directors, while allowing Christian and Muslim religious leaders to give invocations. I want to vote for a candidate that will allow her to give invocations. Apparently Jack McHale has not been with the rest of the board on this. When I asked Ree Hart about it, she was wishy-washy about it and said she was Christian. So I am not certain about her. Dickie King appanretly thinks the Board is a private club for whom the invocations serve only it, not the rest of the community. Mr. King, the Board is a public institution. There is no privacy on the board. If you let a Christian give an invocation, you must let Ms. Simpson give one too. As far as I am concerned, Dickie King is out.

That leaves Jack McHale and Ree Hart. I feel that Dickie King's stand on the invocation issue is so extreme that the first priority is to defeat him. That means choosing which of Ree and Jack is most likely to win. From what I hear, Ree is. So I may vote for her. But in truth, this is a difficult decision to make between these two. I am sure either is capable of serving us well.