Dick Chaney is at it Again

Who would have guessed Dick Chaney would be so public in saying that water-boarding was a really good idea for prisoners, and waterboarding has saved thousands of lives. You would never have, for instance, seen Spiro Agnew commenting on the Carter Administration would you? Chaney is only a walking billboard reminder of everything the Democrats don't like about the Republicans. When Chaney says that he'd trust Rush Limbaugh over Collin Powell to lead the party it only goes to show where the heart and soul of the Republican party is centered. As to the matter of our Afghanistan policy and "diminished security" the thing is I am not the least bit worried about this as I so boldly indicated in my last blog. Thom Hartman remarked hypothetically, "What if Mexico didn't like the "drug terrorism" of our drug lords and how we have ravaged the country and so flew an unmaned drone plant into Phoenix to get a few drug houses and killed about ten or twenty thousand people? We wouldn't like that very much, would we?

PERFECT LOVE CASTETH OUT ALL FEAR

We have to learn to trust ourselves. They have run experiments on Apes to prove what we knew all along anyhow - that egalitarianism and equality are good things. The lab people tried to create inequality among the Ape population under their control and reward a few lucky Apes all of the time. Mistrust grew among the rest of the ape society as well as neurotic behavior as well as changes in the central nervous system, and even changes in their brains. Today we learned in class how stress increases cortesol, which in addition to making you gain weight also damages the kidneys and the liver and puts overall stress on the body and ages the body. Societies that preach and practice equality are in the long run, happier societies. One thing we need to do is to learn to trust our government again, as a good thing and not a bad thing. Hopefully, having Obama at the top is leading the way in this goal. People say that Democrats want "socialized medicine" when in reality "single payer insurance" really isn't "Socialism" in the sense of the government paying either the doctors or owning the hospitals. These will still remain in private hands. We just want the government to run the insurance part of it; that's all. The government is the insurance company, because we know insurance companies can't be trusted. Once we get them out of the way, the whole rest of the health care system will run much more equitably.

ROMULAN IDENTITY CRISIS

They say that indeed this is the REAL "StarTrek - Next Generation" movie. It is truely the "Next Generation" of StarTrek movies with a whole new cast and a whole new constituancy, and a whole new set of plot lines, from what I've heard, to set up sequel movies down the line. You saw very little of StarTrek in the "Next Generation" series. You still had Romulans and Klingons and Scottie made an appearence in one episode, and Serek, Spock's father, made an appearence in another. I think the Romulans as I describe them in my writings would really love it is someone went back into the past that would change the future they are having now, like say back a few hundred years. There is still a group of Romulans who when they speak of earth use dates from the Julian Callendar, which is 13 days off. What I learned is that they use semaphore backwards from us, sort of. But they learn it the same way I learned it- - backwards, but Stewart Sutcliffe says that's the way they often use it. Because someone is leading a parade and looking forward and giving flag signals, or else they are riding in tanks, or sometimes if a guy from the rear gives signals, they've viewing them in a mirror and see it backwards. What got strange is that the Sirians- - they do it correctly, like we on earth do. But they said they learned it backwards because they thought that was what would make the Romulans more confortable. When Romulans look at a map they look with east at the bottom and west at the top. And when they do nautical or Radar sweeps they start from the west and sweep around counter clock-wise so that south in 90 and north is 270. Usually when I do Astrological signs myself I start with Aries on the right and work my way around counter-clockwise. That's just the way I think of them. Likewise with triangles in trig function I start to the right with zero and work my way counter clockwise up and then to the left and down and around. To my way of thinking it might confuse students to continually show right triangles aiming to the left and not to the right.

EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE - AND I'LL PROVE IT!

Sketch-up as an interesting illustration of what it is to be "Co-Planer" or the lack of same. Here is the example. There are three dots on the same horisontal level or plane, and a fourth dot not up to the level or "plane" of the other three. It's the odd man out- - right? Not so fast. Back abound 1968 each Beatle, John Paul George and Ringo in turn at times felt as though they were the "odd man out" and without them the other three would get along. Have you heard the addage that three points "define" a plane? In math in a sense, to define something is to Own it. This may be why the Church wants to "define" God, so that they say that they own it and put their "brand" on Him. Well in our example of the four dots, let's suppose that like before three dogs were on the level but the dot in the upper right hand of the picture "looked" lower than the rest- - OK, just as before. But now draw the plane so that it passed through this dot and slants upward till it hits the front two dots. Now who is the odd man out? It's the dot in the upper left that is now above the plane. You can also slant the plane to the left instead of up - OK? That way the two dots on the left are hit as well as the upper right, but not the lower right dot is too high. Or you can go diagonal and draw a line between the upper left dot and the lower right dot. Now- - draw a plane from the upper left dot going upward to this line. Now the dot not connected is the dot in the lower left. There is Einstein's example of the elevator shaft in space for another illustration. Suppose you think you are free-falling through space. You see the lines on the shaft going past and you deduce that you're moving. Now suppose in reality at this time a braking motion begins to occur. A 1 G force is continually applied to your feet - - so that you are slowing down and stopping. Then you see what looks like the end of the elevator shaft and you "stop" just in time and start apparently moving the other way and keep going. I have many times graphed a 1 G continued force like this. It forms the shape of a parabola when a side vector is applied. But suppose that you already "stopped going down" long before you thought you were. In reality the shaft was moving Up at the rate of 2000 miles an hour. (pick a nice round figure. The speed of the shaft is constant. You only Appeared to be reaching the End of the shaft because your acceleration finally matched the speed the shaft was moving at 2000 miles per hour. You had actually reached the "stationary" point way before this. I only cite this personal example einstein himself used- - to illustrate that you have no real idea of what true Motionlessness is. Indeed, there is no way of proving it. I got a calculator when they first came out in 1974 and one of the first things I did was calculate how long it would take to reach the speed of light. It turned out to be just about one year at one G acceleration. I only say this because what if you were at 1 G acceleration for say, two years? Would the world come to an end? This is just something to think about.

HYPERBOLICALLY SPEAKING

The whole realm of "hyperbolic math" seems to be a major branch of mathematics I know very little about. I thought a place to start would be the definition of a hyperbola. The word is Greek for "over-thrown". Oddly the concept comes from space travel when an astroid body passes near another planet but it not captured by it but still has enough energy to overcome the planet's "escape volicity". I was puzzled how the Greeks could know that. You may know that when you slice a vertical cone with a horisontal plane, the resultant image is of a circle. If you tilt the plane (they call it an "eccentric" plane) the resultant image is not of an oval, but an elipse with (they say) the exact properties of a planet with an eliptical orbit. If the plane of the cone slife is allighed to the opposit side of the cone, they call this a parabola. (parenthetically there is another more basic definition of a parabola I won't go into here) And a vertical slice of a cone is a hyperbola. I'll add this: The farther you slice from the center of the cone- - the greater portion of the line is curved. (pause to reflect on this) There is a whole hyperbolic world. They have hyperbolic angles called "unbounded" angles, and I don't know what that means. There are hyperbolic triangles and hyperbolic planes. I don't understand those either. They used to call Base E, (before it was called the "natural" logerithm) they used to call it the hyperbolic logarithm. This may be because Base E is used twice in figuring out hyperbolic trigonometric functions. (This is another of those formulas I re-formulated so I could understand it better). They call them "natural" logarithms because they are easier (they say) to proform various complex equations with rather than base ten. (I don't understand those either)