Thursday, February 15, 2024

Films and Other Videos You Can Enjoy on YOUTUBE

Click on one and be taken to YouTube to see if you like it too.



            What information can I add briefly to the titles which would be of the most help to you to select one to view?


Cactus Flower     A film story.




Saturday, January 27, 2024

Geologic Time: more than dinosaurs and rocks

Let's learn something about geologic time. 


            The intention to learn can better one's chances for learning something great. Come let's begin to learn something right now. If you already know a lot about geological time this may not be for you. I am just a beginner at this big topic. Perhaps the only thing I will do quickly here is to blunder. Still I will try to do well.

            Just know it seems that learning about geologic time seems a bit like learning biology and some other such topics. People who know a lot about the topic seem to develop a language of their own, so just to begin, it looks like there is some new vocabulary to learn. It's like one has to know the magic words to work the magic spells.

            We can begin by getting into the meaning of some of those words it does seem like magic sometimes, but more realistically it is just science. Still those words can carry a lot of meaning, and so can we. It can be great to discover or rediscover that often we find that the more meaning that comes into our lives the more satisfaction we find there.

            Okay here we go. Geologic time has a different kind of time scale than we are accustomed to. Remember that I am just now learning these things so am not a great authority, but I am pretty honest. Anyway these geologic time people still use years, centuries and like that. Time that comes in equal units, each hour has the same number of minutes. Geological time is not all like that. Also even when they use the time we do, they tend to use some big numbers. Soon you won't be surprised to to hear talk of a time 541,000,000 years ago. But, in that amount of time one can find some surprising and interesting happenings.

            I said that there would be some new vocabulary. We will want to get them into order and get to understand them. Here are some words which name divisions of the geological time scale: an Eon is an important one; other names for divisions or sections of time are Periods, Epochs, and Ages. We'll get them in some useful order and learn a bit about each.

            The longest period of time which is "measured" seems to be the eon. Measured may not be exact here. The beginning of the eno is marked, but as of yet, it has no end. It has been divided into four eras, the Hadean, the Archean, the Protozoic or Protozoan, and the Phanerozoic. The beginnings and ends of these eras are marked by events or happenings. Geologically humans are part of this Phanerozoic era, which has not yet come to an end. The oldest era is the hadean, which is sometimes referred to as the Precambrian Super-eon.

            Don't despair; it is a new language, but is not one of the hardest to learn. How long has it taken you to learn your native language? Are you still learning?
How old were you before you learned your language well enough? Have you found your work or street language differs from your home language? Have you found a sport which has a language of its own? You may have noticed that I am a bit like a three year old in the Geologic language. We are learning together.

            I am not a teacher of this language, but I do know something about learning. It seems that no matter how we are taught we seem to learn by bits, mostly little bits. In time we come to see that some bits tend to stick together, that some seem to hang together pretty well. From there we often begin to learn more and better. So, long as we attend just a bit we grow in learning.

            Now I got to thinking that I could have made a better start at learning about geological time. Maybe I should or should have started with the phanerozoic era which the largest time where we are. Still, if geologic time knowledge were like a big round ball that we wanted to learn about (never mind why!) we could begin anywhere we could and begin there and go on from there.

            I expect to get things in more useful order as we go along. Soon you may see some bits seeming to tending to go together. I suspect that about now we are beginning to get familiar with some of the most useful vocabulary for understanding this kind of time.

            We will begin to discover that there are six important measures of geological time and that they are: Age, Epoch. Period, Era, Eon. Oh, oh! that's only five. Well we have named five measures of geological time and it looks to me that we have named them in a useful order. Age is the shortest, epoch is longer, Period even longer, An era is longer than a Period, and a Eon is the longest and contains all the others.

            So, it seems right to say that there are several Ages in an Epoch, several Epochs in a Period, several Periods in an Era, and several Eras in an Eon. Well, I think that we are wll on the way to knowing more about the subject than most people on Earth. I want to get us to a place whereat our understanding is even more useful.

            We jumped to eons from its most recent age the Phanerozoic and know that an en on is full of it, that is that its full of its ages and alsoof epochs, periods, and eras. Did  mention that the Phanerozoic began about 541,000,000 years ago or about 541 Mya and that it is still going on today. Mya stands for million years ago, and often saves us from writing so many zeros. Geologic time extends to times before we have discovered life. However, in many ages we look at age names often end in -zoic. Zoic seems to indicate cells, especially animal cells. We have a lot to learn. I can make mistakes and it is fair for you to correct me. This is an invitation for you to tell me of my mistakes to correct me.

           Continuing our look at important vocabulary for this topic. Ihere review the times and indicate that there are indeed six are used:
A Super Eon is made up of eons. This is the sixth time which I left out earlier.
Eons are divided into Eras.
Eras are divided into Periods.
Periods are divided into Epochs.
Epochs are divided into Ages.
Ages can be measured chronologically, as in years.

            So now, if you are smarter than I am, you may now be pretty sure that Ages are the smallest units of geologic time.

            Well, I think we have made a great start even though I do not remember that Periods are made up of Epochs. It may be time to check out some important and interesting detail. It is good to remember as we go along this geologic road, that geological time study is a kind of science. Like science it begins with observation. An important observation in geology is that there are layers of earth and rock on earth. That much of the upper layers of earth are stratified has an importantly useful observation. Geologic time is a work in progress, and so details will change and major concepts may change.

            Okay, here is a little more about eons, Eons have names. There geologic times like enos are sometimes begun with capital letters, and not just at the beginning of a sentence and sometimes they are not. And I do not know why.  I do remember that an Archean is a specific eon and it names a specific set of happenings. The Archean begins with an especially notable event  and ends with another such noteable event. We can check out those special events and may find them very interesting.

            Eras and each and almost ever geological time is divided for the next geological time and is one good place to look for interesting happenings. The name of one particular erais the Mesozoic. It may already possible that we can already guess that the mesozoic begins and ends in especially interesting events and that it is very likely that those  events will deal with some kinds of animals. Where is the animal event?

            You would not really have to be a genius to understand that the geological time scale divides up the past of our Earth into scientifically meaningful periods, but you be pretty observant and smart too. If you are close to being a genius with special interests you might find an interesting, pathe, trial, or highway to orient you by checking out the dynamical time scale used in astronomy and physics. But that is an other story. If you are interested in this geologic time scale and find yourself learning stuff related to it, please share a bit of that which you learn with us. I could use your help and most of us would really enjoy a different point of view being expressed here.

            Okay most of us may be interested in the stories; here we are interested in true stories. However, time can be important and interesting. Timing in a story can be very important. In a fiction detective novel change in our view of the timing could change our view of motive. In our geologic time ''scale'' the past is often more about order than about clocklike chronology. Often is about first this and then that or, first came the Flood and then came Abraham.

            I will close this introductory piece with some reminders and no stories. This essay includes some notion of how to evaluate the stories this time scale canorient us to. The idea here is to try to get to true stories. True stories may be beyond us. Honest stories are easier to find, but still golden. I am grateful that so many individuals in this field are capable of such a find degree of honesty and practice it to our benefit. But in this field more than a notion of logic is needed. Those who wish to communicate well in this field must also have some command of the scientific method.

            We can remember that the Phanerozoic eon is the current eon. It is notable that in this eon there is abundant animal life. In earlier eons there may by only cellular life. In the earliest eon we have not observed life. In the present of our Phanerozoic we it is possible to find our great variety of life. Life was not like this in earlier times it was very different, but may have had the great variety we benefit from.

            We can find out what BP means and remember what Mya means. We can find out that was in Cambrian Period strata where we first observed the earliest development of animal life, in what we have called the fossil record, in the form of hard shells. So,as in all science, study and understanding in the geologic time scale depends upon observation and the development of evidence,

            You can go to the following timelines and find many items and happenings from the Geologic Scale which point toward stories and hint of stories. Stuff that a significant number of  individuals find interesting, but no stories. Will we have to make our own stories?

             Go to Associated Blog Sites in left hand column of the top of this site.




Sunday, October 8, 2023

Life Like an Onion

The name of this worth-while, well made Movie is "Hero"


The star is Dustin Hoffman and the cast is good enough. Its called a comedy, romance, and drama. I call it a drama told in good humor with some love most of us can recognize. It seems that it suggests that there are reasons that we are the way we are and that there is good in each of us. Could it be that we each may need to need to be a bit heroic to live this life. There is more than one way to peel an onion.



                                                                                                Richard

Thursday, September 21, 2023

Writing: First Words

 You may be born with a talent. Writing is a skill you can develop

 

Skills are developed and maintained with practice. 


            As an aid to improving your writing skills you can keep a free-writing diary as a practice tool. You may also find that it is a great source of writing ideas.

            Keep your free-writing in a private diary, journal, or notebook. No one but you need ever read a word you put there. In that private place you can write whatever you want in any way you want to.
 

            "Free-writing" is writing without judgement or criticism. Do no editing, corrections, or rewrites. All there is to it is to do it.

            Do not throw away what you have free written. You can use it to discover subjects you can enjoy writing more about.

            In your notebook, journal, diary, write. Produce a finished piece of writing. Keep a topic in mind. Digressions are okay, but when you find yourself digressing in this practice bring yourself gently back to the topic.
 

            Digression are to be honored and respected. After all they do come from your beautiful mind. 
                

            The idea in this practice is to keep writing. Do not stop writing. Do not stop for anything but the most serious and urgent reason. 
            

            You may say to yourself "Let's remember the topic," but do not let a little digression of yours bother you.  Gently practice the discipline of keeping the topic in mind as you honor and value your digressions. 
            

            It does seem that we writers are very much about digressions. They may lead us to our best writing. Still we do not want them to keep us from finishing a piece of work. 

            As an aid toward helping myself to finish a piece of work I have told myself to write down everything I can think about the topic at the moment.                     

            Later you can look for your digressions in you work above.  Do another writing exercise based on your digressions. Let your digressions enrich your writing. Your  digressions may give you topics that motivate the real you.

             Peter Elbow's book WRITING WITHOUT TEACHERS has inspired me know that it is truly possible to write better with appropriate practice and Useful attitude. 

            Use the "comments" section below to contact me. Do so by clicking on "comments." If you see "no comments" click on it.

            Thank you for reading.

            Keep writing.

 

                                                                             rcs

                                                                                                 



Sunday, September 17, 2023

Memories of Covid 19

 Faith, Governance, This Virus, and Lessons To Be Learned

           

             Poor health is keeping me from posting much these days, but just now I feel stirred to write and publish this post.

            The genesis of this stirring seems to start as follows: Yesterday evening I watched a bit of a YouTube video by Richard Wolff. I suspect that I did not even watch it to its end. Last night I had dreams about our wars and dreams about our political beginnings. Vietnam seems to have dominated those about our wars and that dreams of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.

            This morning I awoke slowly, feeling weak, fatigued, and exhausted as has been usual in recent weeks. However, I soon remembered something of my dreams and tried to remember more of them with little success. Then I began to recall a bit of the Wolff video to which I had not paid close attention.

            It seems from my present perspectives that the video was about Lessons Learned (or learnable) from our Covi experience. I have not tried to revisit that video as I believe I would have in other days; so, some of what I write now may be more Sheehan than Wolff.

            As I remember, Mr. Wolff chose the following countries useful for comparing the quality of their dealings with The Virus. The countries he chose as good examples of dealing effectively with Covi: China and New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea, Cuba and Vietnam. The two countries he chose for dealing poorly with that virus were the United Kingdom and the United States. Wolf, it seemed, felt that he saw evidence that the people of the first six countries also had more faith in their government than the last two I mentioned.

               I believe that such comparing of the governance of a people with their ability to deal with This Virus, could aid us in learning an important lesson or two.

            Wolf himself seemed to believe that he had evidence that the people of the first six countries demonstrated a belief that their government had the power and ability to deal well with the Virus and so cooperated in that dealing. Wolff also seemed to have thought that the people of The U.K. and The U.S. did not have faith that, at this time, their government was ready, willing, and able to deal with This Virus successfully. 

            Do you think that our dealing with The Virus has to do with our faith in our government/governance? What do you think we might learn from our experience with the Virus? What is the state of our faith in our government? What would you like the nature of our governance to be? What is our responsibility for the nature of our government? What important governance might we be able to learn? What would be a good simple measure of the quality of our dealing with this Virus? Would the % of deaths or the number of deaths per hundred be a useful measure? What could we learn, that is useful, by looking at more successful dealing with the Virus as compared with the real nature of governance of, say, 100 countries? How might the U.N. be useful in this effort? Why? How might my going back to bed and forgetting about all this be helpful?

            My questions above may be taken as rhetorical, but there is a window below called "comments" and sometimes "no comments!" I that window you may put questions of your own, or answer mine, or make comments, or one comment.

            Thanks for reading.

 

 

                                                                                        RCS

 











Saturday, August 12, 2023

A Physicist

 Particle Physics


                Phil Yager, Dr. Yager, a physics PhD, and a friend, died some years ago. I did not know of his death until a considerable amount of time had passed. I missed him and still wish he were around. I knew him well enough to know that he had drive talent, and luck. I also know that his life was not easy.

                His physics was experimental particle physics. Experimental physics can be demanding an "elemental particles" seem more so. Phil's math was up to it. I feel sure that he found pleasure and satisfaction in his career.

                In a early explanatory paper he wrote in part, something very like the following: the physics of elementary particles is explored by colliding particles together and observing the results. He quotes Feynman as describing it something like: "this process of colliding particles as like colliding watches (fine mechanical Swiss watches), picking up the pieces and trying to find out how they worked." 

                Feynman was not only an accomplished physicist, but, I am late to discover, an author of works we can enjoy and benefit from.

                Phil was like many of us and liked by many. Still he spent an important part of his life with creative math and in observing a beauty almost none of us have seen.

                  One beauty has been called an elementary particle. Elementary particles have been called the smallest building blocks of our universe. They have been thought to no internal structure(so how divisible?). Their researchers think about them as zero dimensional "points," which take up no space. There seems to be about a dozen of them, even so they take up no room. They do take time. I am yet at a loss as to why they have not been called happenings rather than particles.

                It seems physicists have been working on the outer edges of human understanding. At least on the edge of mine.
                       
                I remember having been told of electrons, but remember little. They seem to me to be closely related to elemental particles. That may be a case of poor memory combined with ignorance. You who know more, even just a bit more come and share some of what you have learned. You can begin by using the comments add just below this post.

                I hope that I am not slipping into an intellectual swamp. I am coming to believe that for important and practical purposes there is no such thing as things. I have forgotten the those practical purposes, except that they have something to do with an approach to reality. Doesn't it seem that each thing is really a happening so everything is happening. Still, I probably write, speak, or think of the term "thing" daily.

                I remember Phil showing two different colliders, but I don't remember their names well and am not sure how to spell them. One was something like Cyclotron and the Bevatron. Spell Check seems to agree that my spelling is OK. Now, I understand, their are new and speedier colliders. I expect that a lot good physics and good engineering as well as wealth has gone into their creation and use. Many important people have considered them important. Early on they help us to atomic and hydrogen weapons. I need someone with more up to date  knowledge to provide us with a list of the some of the other benefits they provided. They exist.

                So, to stop claims about me not providing information, here is a list of elementary particles. I lack knowledge of their nature, but I can name them:
~ fermion -- reminds me of a famous physicist
~ neutrino -- doesn't participate in the strong reaction. Who can remind us of the nature of the '''strong reaction?" The neutrino does come in three flavors, electron neutrino, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos.
~ kaons
~ pions
~ protons -- sounds a bit familiar
~ anti protons
~ photons -- sounds a bit more familiar
~ charm quark
~anti charm quark
There must be a quark. What about a charm? and What about a beauty?

                I am embarrassed at demonstrating so much ignorance. I think my father told me to keep it to myself. This is probably be my last dip into elementary particles. I may live long enough to visit the topic of  physics again.

                Good bye Phil. My sister Gerry remembers you as Butch. Hope your mother knew that you were an early full professor.





                                                                                        Rich


Friday, August 11, 2023

Trinidad - Tobago

Island Country 7 Miles From Venezuela


Trinidad is a large island, 846 sq mi. about seven miles from Venezuela, near the mouth of the great Orinoco River. 


The people of Trinidad are from Black Africa, East India, and everywhere else. 

You can learn to bathe in glass there. You can also get a biodegradable coffin of hallucinogenic nutmeg on this interesting island.

The food is varied. The curried goat satisfying.

There  is an 85 foot tall red statue of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman. Its the tallest one outside of India.

The Maine Ridge Forest Reserve is the oldest protected forest in the Western Hemisphere. The 14,000 acres of forest were declared a reserve in 1776 while the island was under British rule.

Pitch Lake a 100 acre, La Brea Tar Pit like place, has been mined to pave roadways around the world. 

There is a beach where you can better your love life, do a sand exfoliation, and listen to Syrian music. 

Tobago is the smaller of the two caribbean islands which make up the nation of Trinidad and  Tobago.

Tobago has great ample sandy beaches.

The capital of Tobago is the village of Scarborough.

Kayak through the mangrove swamps of Tobago. 

If you are getting the idea that Tobago is more touristy of the two islands of this Island nation you are on the correct track.

Port of Spain is the big city of the nation and it is on Trinidad.

In Trinidad and Tobago you may begin to feel you are in the real Caribbean an you would be right. It is not all of the Caribbean, but it is a lot of it.

On the two islands there is magic, it comes down the great Orinoco, 
it comes from India, it comes from Africa, and it has found a home there.

Still, It pays to be a bit careful there. Some say that there too many birds. Many say one can get wet and dirty there.



                                                                                                             by Richard




Thursday, August 10, 2023

Considerations for Parents

 Each mother and father may find it good to let each daughter and son expect:

~ to be fearless in facing things like snakes, mice, and ghosts.

~ each disobedience to lead to an appropriate punishment. The punishment ought to fit each parent and child. For one such pair a frown might suffice.

~ remorse of conscience for ill-treatment of an animal.

~ to avoid making parents or teachers sad or angry.

~ Joy in being content with what one has.

~ to feel sorry at the loss of the good will of another.

~ to patiently endure pain and hunger, but nor onto death.

~ to strive from early on to earn one's bread.


                It is okay for a son or daughter to consider the eight expectations above.

                Short and, I hope, sweet enough.



                                                                                                    rcs