These Public Services' Author Background

I HOPE that the reality is near the last option! Is it actually likely that I totally understand all these subjects? Probably not! Many of these subjects have been attacked by the world's greatest minds for hundreds of years! The likelihood that a single person could solve even one would be significant . . . solving many of them, pretty close to inconceivable.

So why all these pages?

Well, first, I have discovered that by being given an education in Nuclear Physics by the University of Chicago, they gave me a preparation to know how to learn! So, recently, when I needed to (re-)learn some organic chemistry to be able to decently analyze the energy processes involved with photosynthesis and organic decomposition, it only took a couple months of heavy study to be decently competent in that field, such that the analysis of Global Warming and even to be able to know that the (free) devices offered to heat domestic hot water and the entire home will work as desired! It does NOT mean that I could handle all of advanced Chemistry, just the one specific area of it that I needed for this research. Ditto for an assortment of other fields, as they have become necessary in various researches for these presentations.

It has long been my observation that the bulk of intelligent minds tend to approach problems from pretty much the same directions. There is a tendency to climb on the backs of scholars that have gone before. This is certainly a good concept, and it represents the vast majority of advances in science and society in recent centuries. However, I think it sometimes causes later researchers to funnel their thinking along the same lines as those earlier giants. I see the possibility that assumptions made by those earlier giants are simply assumed to be true, without serious challenge.

I think that this universal approach can unintentionally introduce limitations and biases regarding their later assumptions and conclusions. Hey, for 1800 years, the ancient Greek Aristotle's view of science prevailed! I have to think that many of the later people who followed him must have contemplated things like a non-flat Earth and maybe even one that could move! But nobody dared question the great Aristotle, who everyone knew could not possibly be wrong about anything!

Most people are not aware that only around 200 years ago (1780), a highly respected scientist gave a Presentation at a Scientific Conference where he explained that winds are created from the inside of the Earth, as the "Earth breathes!"

This general tendency probably tends to encourage large numbers of INCREMENTAL improvements in theories or products or even social systems. However, when a problem is approached WITHOUT feeling any need to "stay within the lines", and if really strict logic is used and extreme care is applied regarding any necessary assumptions, the possibility exists where some entirely new concept might arise. This DOES happen once in a while, but all researchers are so trained to assume all previous research was sound, that it is somewhat rare. Worse, everyone in Academia is forced to Publish or Perish, and it turns out to be far easier to publish a Paper which is a slight improvement of an existing concept than to try to start from scratch with something which will not easily be accepted by peers. Peer review is a central part of getting such Papers published! If researchers are not in Academia, they are generally employed by some large Corporation, which insists on effective performance regarding creating profitable products! This causes few people to be in the position of being totally free to be creative!

Related to these comments, consider the following: Edison invented the incandescent light bulb around 1880, which has been IMPROVED many times but we are essentially still using the SAME technology! When Duryea and others invented the internal combustion engine around 1885, it has certainly been IMPROVED many times, but essentially our modern vehicles still use that SAME technology! Aircraft? Improved, but essentially from 1903 Wright Brothers! Electricity generation? Improved but essentially from 1900 Nikola Tesla. Locomotives. Steamships. Storage Batteries (a hundred more obvious entries here ...). We seem to thrive on making INCREMENTAL IMPROVEMENTS on accepted and proven technologies! Probably because that is the greatest assurance of making massive amounts of money!

But then there are people who invented the transistor and the laser and radio and television and the Internet and the microwave oven. Those sorts of things generally represented DIFFERENT APPROACHES to existing problems. Why don't we even consider that more often?

Is it really because we are so fanatical about making sure we make loads of money that people don't dare "go outside the box"? Yes, I can confirm that when you try "new and different" it OFTEN totally fails to do what it is desired!

One sad problem these days is that whenever anyone brings up the possibility of going-outside-the-box, the US Government steps in and sticks hundreds of billions of dollars of risk in the middle. Like in deciding to use up ONE-THIRD of all US CROPLANDS for an adventure to produce a MAXIMUM of around 3% of the vehicle fuel that US drivers use up, with the consequence that US food prices have already started to skyrocket. Wait until there is a weather problem!!! No one seems to have even thought about the disaster to our food supply (and its costs) which will occur then, a crisis of astounding nature. And all to try to produce enough Ethanol for around 3% of our motor fuel needs. (So, if someone is going to criticize ME for some concepts that might seem unusual, at least I have generally researched the performance of it AND the consequences and effects, something that our government seems either unwilling or unable to do! I wonder when they will figure it out that Ethanol was a MONUMENTALLY STUPID idea to try on such a large scale.

It is fine for "hobby scale".

I wonder when they will eventually realize that they have created a bizarre environment which INTENSELY ENCOURAGES bootlegging and moonshiners! (The alcohol that moonshiners made from corn used to be called ? You guessed it, Ethanol! The alcolol made by moonshiners out of tree parts is different, actually deadly, but that Methanol happens to be a popular motor fuel for racing vehicles).

So even the "brilliant new idea" of massively producing Ethanol, is actually an operation is VERY old and well established and that was extremely popular and profitable during Prohibition days of the 1920s. NOW our government has established an environment which will certainly encourage millions of people to start their own backyard distillery! Whether desperately poor people who lose their homes will make it to sell for motor fuel (at a few dollars a gallon) or to sell some of it as liquor (for maybe $60 per gallon), the groundwork is now set for millions of people to start doing that. Do our leaders ever read the papers to LEARN about such news as from the 1920s?

As it happens, I have NEVER had any interest in "making incremental improvements" in existing products. An example: In 1973, when there was a MidEast Oil Embargo, a lot of people started buying Potbelly and Franklin woodstoves which were around 25% maximum efficiency. That was a lot better than the 11% maximum efficiency that a fireplace has, but again, those are technologies from 1760 (Franklin stove) and even earlier for the others. At the time, I really didn't know a thing about woodburning or woodburners, but the necessity of seeing my uninsulated three-story 80-year-old farmhouse get LP gas rates that suddenly doubled, became the mother of invention! I decided to spend several months in Designing and Engineering my own woodstove, of which there was to be exactly ONE ever made! Before I built it, weeks of massive calculations indicated that it should be 81.7% efficient. The number was so much higher than any existing product that I immediately assumed that I had made a math error in the 57 sheets of calculations. I considered doing all the calculations again, or trying to find the error, but I eventually decided that it would be quicker and easier to simply learn how to weld and build it out of scrap steel! I was sure that it would work rather well. When I did build it, it turned out to generally have around 83% overall efficiency, although sometimes it was as low as 80%. Apparently the calculations did NOT have any major error in them!

(My woodstove is STILL unique in the business, and my design from 1973 is still much higher efficiency and much cleaner burning than any other product yet sold by anyone! Go figure!)

It really seems clear that virtually no one ever wants to "take a chance" with anything unusual. UNLESS they think it is PROVEN and also can potentially make them piles of money! Over the years, roughly 25 small companies tried to steal the design for my woodstove. Unfortunately, none of them had sufficient Engineering Education to understand why some things are critically important, and they each failed to make products that came even close to JUCAs. One guy even pretended to be a new dealer, where he bought one each of five different JUCA models (around 1978). Someone later told us that he took the brand new JUCA units home and cut them each apart so he could copy the piece sizes to try to make his own! We found out because he got sued for selling very dangerous products!

It is sad that virtually no one today seems to have any ethics! Around 2001, I contacted the city of Venice Italy to offer them FOR FREE a method where they should be able to physically raise the entire region around Venice at about an inch per month. Instead, aggressive promoters had convinced them that ONLY they could save Venice, by the city (and Italy) paying them around $3 billion for some foolish sea gates. I had explained that I did not want a dime, but that they could TEST my concept for a total investment of maybe $3,000 total! The promoters did not like me, as I was endangering their $3 billion! But no one ever seemed interested in even trying my concept, even though I had fully described it to a number of University Researchers who were considered experts. So I was quite surprised to find that three years later, three of those SAME University researchers (Nov 2005) were in the BBC News as trying to get Venice to give THEM around $140 million for MY CONCEPT! Weren't they supposed to at least tell me they were stealing my concept, or graciously offering to share their upcoming fortune with the person who had actually invented it? Wow! And what do you try to do to go after several University Professors in Italy, when I seem to have no real way to now even get their attention? Hmmm.

In the recent several years where I have felt it safe to disclose my unusual Water Pump for Third World Villages, and also the Seawater Desalinator for Third World Villages, to specific people (who generally assured me that they are Christian), the majority of those people, immediately upon receiving all the necessary information, told me that they were "changing their plans". Each one of then then described that THEY HAD DECIDED that they FIRST needed to get really rich, by SELLING my pumps rather than giving them away the way I have insisted. Once they become multi-millionaires, each has told me, THEN they would be able to get SOME pumps and desals to needy villages!

An amazing number of people seem to feel very free to use MY inventions as though they were their own! Didn't the ancient Greek Diogenes have trouble finding an honest man? Wow! I can relate! A significant sized company approached me in 2007 regarding an unusual golf training device that I had invented around ten years ago. They showed massive interest, but then once I had disclosed all the important things, they very suddenly told me that they had changed their plans. In fact, they told me that the decided to HIRE a LOCAL ENGINEER to do the necessary advanced Engineering for my device, rather than joining forces with me as they had told me just days earlier! I guess once you get a stupid person to give up all the valuable information, you don't think you need him any more! However, he was probably wrong on that one. As it happens, I am among around a dozen true experts on Gyroscopic Engineering in the world, and even for me the the calculations take a lot of time and effort. For them to show up to hire a local Engineer, expecting that person to have world-class knowledge on that specific subject, seems nearly certain to result in that Engineer needing to spend several years in advanced study (as I had earlier done regarding gyroscopes and precession). So I suspect that company screwed up in deciding to try to cheat me out of that invention! (For the record, there ARE some attempts now being made regarding such things, but they are so badly designed, with NO Engineering at all behind them, that they each have shown themselves to be total failures. But each of those companies insists that they are ready to make many millions in profits, from such garbage attempts at products. Sort of amusing!)

Even inside the field of Nuclear Physics (the field for which I was educated in College at the University of Chicago), I think the same thing (of a total lack of truly creative approaches) sometimes occurs. Around 1935, a Physicist named Hideki was thinking about the nucleus of atoms and that they certainly contained many positively charged protons, which all electrically repelled each other. It was already known that there was more material in the nucleus of nearly all atoms, and earlier (1930) Physicists had concluded that they must be "neutrons", electrically neutral objects that pretty much just take up space to separate the protons. Hideki did the simple calculations and found that no known force could counteract the repulsion of the protons from each other, so he described a "Strong Nuclear Force" which MUST exist to allow atomic nuclei to avoid instantly coming apart! Most of modern Nuclear Physics is all firmly based on Hideki's assumption and conclusion. Recently, in some investigations on some other matters inside the nucleus, I believe I have come upon extremely strong evidence that neutrons probably do NOT exist inside the nucleus, and that a Strong Nuclear Force is unnecessary in describing the stability of atomic nuclei! I believe it is certainly now provable that Hideki was completely wrong in his assumption and conclusion! Since most of modern Physics is based upon that, it is terrifying to think what might happen to our field if my research regarding that is correct! I have actually wished that I was wrong, and I have done everything possible to try to find flaws in my reasoning, but it seems absolutely sound! Interesting!

I now have the impression that Hideki had ASSUMED that neutrons existed inside the nucleus, since all Physicists of the time had accepted that concept, and so he saw the need to find some way of explaining stability. And ALL Physicists (apparently) who have followed have simply accepted that he was right! I no longer think he was! I see this as an example where things seem really "obvious" (neutrons seem to exist inside the nucleus) (a Strong Nuclear force MUST exist to keep protons from flying apart), while a different explanation might have equally explained the evidence that had been found.

In this case, I believe the evidence actually supports a structure where "loose" protons AND loose electrons exist inside the nucleus instead of their being bound together as neutrons, which are essentially just a proton and an electron stuck together. It gets somewhat complicated! But it would have HUGE implications in the field of Theoretical Nuclear Physics.

Here is another, also in Physics, but this time in Astrophysics. Einstein had many incredible insights, including that matter and energy are equivalent ( E = m * c² ). That insight caused him to realize many other new concepts, specifically that things behave rather strangely when anything approaches the speed of light ( the Theory of Relativity ). It has been proven countless thousands of times that time seems to slow down (although not actually noticed) when a velocity is near the speed of light. By the 1960s, an assumption was made (which I am now certain was completely wrong!) to extend that concept to something that nearly everyone is now familiar with which is generally referred to as the Twins Paradox. Allegedly, a twin that leaves the Earth in a spaceship and travels at near the speed of light to a distant star and then soon comes back, would be physically less old than his twin that remained on Earth. Much of the story is certainly true, regarding the time slowing during the CONSTANT VELOCITY part of the trip. But no one seemed to have ever considered the "TOTAL experience" of the traveling twin! Say that both twins were taught well by their parents and they eat three meals every "day". I see this: The twins have lunch together on Earth, and they both look up (with instruments) and confirm that the star Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light years away. The one gets in the spaceship, quickly accelerates up to near the speed of light. Relativity says that he would not notice anything unusual, EXCEPT that he would see A.C. to only be one light week away, really close! So he eats 21 meals in the spaceship (one week of food) and he gets to A.C. What is wrong with that (which is now in nearly every school text book)? HIS experience is what! His own log book entries (every hour) show that one week ago, he was 4.3 light years away from A.C., and now he arrived there. So he would be able to "prove in Court" that he had just traveled over 200 times faster than the speed of light! (And all Physicists agree that is impossible!) So even though Time Dilation is certainly true, the Twins Paradox certainly has to be completely wrong! (There IS a logical explanation of this, which does not contradict any physical law and which is actually VERY logical! It is among the pages in this domain.) (It has to do with a very opposite effect occuring to the traveler AS HE WAS ACCELERATING, where he had to age extremely rapidly [as seen by Earth] [without anything seeming odd to him].

One more, NOT in Physics! As a Christian, I have profound trust and belief in the Bible. In some areas, people think they find some references that they say conflict with "modern science", with the "Six Day Creation" being one of the ones often mentioned. I personally do not see a conflict there, but the discussion is fairly complex (part of which was published in the Ziggurat of December 2005). (In fact, the fact that the 14 specific events mentioned in Genesis 1, composed 3600 years ago, have only recently [the past 100 years] been confirmed to be in the correct sequence by science. For an ancient writer to have faked Genesis 1 without God's help, the odds against him getting the sequence so correct are something like 40 billion to one!) But I also noticed something that I have no clue about, and which I have never seen ANYONE even ever mention! Moses lived somewhere around 1600 BC. God gave Moses two "tables" (stone tablets) with the Ten Commandments written on them. Everyone knows that! What confuses me is that we humans had not then yet invented any alphabet (the first was around 300 years later) and no organized written language yet (written Hebrew was developed around 600 years after Moses). There were certainly stone symbols developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt (pictoglyphs, petroglyphs, heiroglyphs, cuneiform) (essentially stylized picture drawings) but they were definitely not sophisticated enough to present any advanced concepts such as the concept of Honoring the Sabbath or the sexual implications of one of the Commandments. There were certainly VERY complete ORAL languages in regular use.

Researchers have so far discovered seven separate systems where picture writing evolved into word writing (Sumerian, Egyptian, proto-Elamite, proto-Indic, Cretan, Hittite, and Chinese). Chinese was developed after Moses lived, and is the only one of them still in use today, and three of the others have not yet been deciphered. Hittite was also developed after Moses lived, which seems to suggest that only Sumerian(/Old Akkadian) and Egyptian symbol systems were available candidates! (Akkadian later developed into its subsequent dialects of Babylonian and Assyrian. Both of those dialects existed, as oral languages, in a crude form, at the time of Moses, but each developed into sophisticated languages at least 400 years after Moses lived.)

But evidence suggests that both of those symbolic systems (cuneiform and heiroglyphics) did not yet have the required sophistication to adequately present the concepts of the Ten Commandments. I wonder how many symbols would be necessary to express "Honor the Sabbath" which is actually a rather sophisticated statement. It might make sense for some modern expert to try to express that statement in Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols or in Akkadian cuneiform, and then have some other expert try to understand the Sabbath concept from the symbols. I suspect that a LOT of symbols may be necessary!

Christians and Jews rarely note that Moses lived around 1600 BC but that the texts he Taught were only ORALLY transmitted for about 600 years (30 generations) before they were finally written down (by Scribes, in Ancient Hebrew) around 1000 BC. So it is never really even noted that there was NO "written record" of ANYTHING Moses Taught, until around 600 years after he died. So I suppose it is natural that no one would have had specific concern regarding whatever was written down on the stone tablets!

(There are also many modern Christians who simply assume that Moses personally and physically "wrote down" all the extensive text of the First Five Books of the Bible. Such people are under the misconception that some written language then existed! If Moses were actually to have done that, rather than ORALLY transmitting those texts, he would have required a LOT of time to chisel many tons and thousands if pieces of stone blocks! At the time, he had far more important things to do, specifically, trying to keep all the Jews alive! Moses was certainly the "author" of those Books, but only in an ORAL TRADITION sense. It remained to around 600 years later before they were actually able to be written down (by unknown Scribes) in Ancient Hebrew.)

In any event, the simple question regarding what language God used in writing down the Ten Commandments on the Tablets, devolves to the fact that there was NO existing language which even the educated Moses could have understood! As a Devout Christian, I have NO doubt that there is some logical explanation for this! I just find it strange that no one seems to have ever even considered the issue!

I'll give a few examples:

• When I was in First Grade, the class was generally hyperactive and the teacher, a Miss Scott, would often get exasperated. A couple months into school, during the Math hour, the teacher needed to have a break. In order to occupy the 30 students for a long time, she had everyone get a piece of paper out, and add 1 to 2 and get the total. Then add 3 to that. Then add 4 to that. And so on up to 100.

  With 99 addition problems to do, clearly the class would be occupied for a LONG time. And the odds were that the 6-year old kids would make mistakes along the way, and probably have to do it all over! Her next hour should be calm, right? Wrong!

  Maybe half a minute after getting us started, I raised my hand. She thought I wanted to leave the room for the bathroom. I said, "No, I have the answer." She was NOT happy! She stormed to my desk. I had my hand over my answer, but she saw the sheet basically blank. She started going ballistic in not liking to be annoyed like that. When I raised my hand, she saw the correct answer! She made some weird sounds, and then shouted that I had cheated, that I had copied the answer from someone else! She quickly realized that was impossible, so then she accused me of stealing the answer from her desk! (But I was never near her desk!)

  It's tough when a 6-year old kid gets accused like that, and I didn't even try to point out that the other kids were probably only up to adding the 4! That night, my parents got a call to come in to the school to see the Principal (and to bring me). (I realized that I was in BIG trouble! I had earlier seen how my strict father had reacted when my older half-brother had gotten in trouble and where my father's time was required. I was really scared, a lot from school but even more from my father.)

  At that meeting, she went through the Riot Act to describe to the Principal (Mr. Golliher) and my parents, the problem and that she couldn't figure out how I "cheated" but that she KNEW that I certainly did. She apparently concluded that I somehow had seen the answer on her desk, even knowing that I had not been near her desk. This was pretty intense for a shy little kid. (I still remember it all VERY vividly!)

  (One good thing came out of that day! I REALLY didn't like not being treated fairly, and I have generally always tried to remember since then to try to "be fair" even when I had doubts regarding others!)

  After she was done, and after a pause, the Principal, a man named Golliher, (a REALLY nice man) came over to me, and bent down to ask me how I got the answer so fast. That was really nice, as he didn't seem to be automatically accusing me. I told him that I knew that you didn't have to add numbers in any special order. (I think the teacher might have taught us that.) I told him that I had noticed that 1+100=101, and 2+99=101, and 3+98=101, and so on, all the way to 50+51=101. It had seemed obvious that there were 50 pairs like that, each of which equaled 101. So the answer had to be 50 * 101 or 5050. If you see the pretty simple logic of this, you can see that nothing much would have to be written down! Not because I was smart or anything, but because those particular numbers made it easy.

  The next day, I was in Second Grade! For many years after, I didn't think that was a compliment, but just a way that that Teacher found to get rid of me so she wouldn't have to deal with me any more!

  There is a recent footnote to this anecdote! SEVERAL people who have read these foregoing paragraphs have torn into me! EACH of these individuals has accused me of having "stolen" this event from some other (famous) person's life! Wow! Each has also expressed tremendous disgust at me for "having stolen that anecdote from a famous person AND still had the audacity to mention my Christian aspects!

  Around 25 years after my "incident", I happened to hear a momentary comment on some PBS educational program about a similar problem and some mathematician as a kid. A few months later, the program was re-run, so I listened this time. It turns out that Gauss, the guy who I then knew was famous for his magnetism and electricity researches, was also a famous mathematician. When he was a kid, around 1784, he quickly got the answer to essentially that same problem. My impression was that he was 5 at the time, and not in school, and just doing his own studying, but I'm not sure about that.

  I went to the library and checked out several Gauss biographies, and finally found one that mentioned that incident in his life. It turns out that he DID solve the very same problem, but he did it in a slightly different, and much more elegant, way. Actually, the way he used is now used by professional mathematicians to solve that sort of problems, so it was a LOT classier than my crude way.

  Yet, these current critics tell me that statistically it is ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE for two different people to have such a similar incident, and that I should ADMIT that I somehow "stole" it from Gauss. This would be an interesting idea, but SOMETHING definitely caused me to skip most of First Grade, and some fantasy wouldn't have done that!

  Even MORE interesting to me (as I have a peculiar sense of humor) is that a couple of these people who have hurled accusations at me, have accused me of stealing the incident from a DIFFERENT mathematician, somebody named Cantor, who apparently lived in the 1800s! Well, not even counting me, how do these critics explain the ABSOLUTE IMPOSSIBILITY of two people having the similar experience when two of their heroes both seem to? (Pretty funny, huh?)

  In all the other wild accusations they have thrown at me, attacking my character, my honesty, my Faith, and a variety of other things, each has been aghast that I "dared" compare myself with their hero (whichever one that was!). I did nothing of the sort. Actually, I see no REASON for even TRYING to do such a comparison. All I did was describe what I thought was an interesting little anecdote (from MY life!!!) that fit in with this "unique perspectives" discussion. And, actually, I tend to wonder about little kids who somehow establish great "documentation" for such things. (My critics emphasize that the famous mathematicians are well documented as having done such things, where I, a mere impostor, have no such documentation. Of course, there might actually be some record of why a First Grader was suddenly promoted to Second Grade in that school's records!) (I KNEW my [poor] parents messed up in not hiring a team of reporters to follow their little kid around!)

  Finally, I would like to think that IF I had wanted to try to "impress" anyone, I would have chosen one of several "adult" accomplishments, like maybe inventing a truly advanced woodstove and then, starting with $3100, manufacturing and selling about $11 million of them, rather than something that happened when I was six. (Otherwise, I've been going downhill since First Grade!)

• Apparently, many years ago, a College Physics Professor gave a quiz to his students. He said that you were to be given a VERY high quality, high-accuracy barometer, and that you were to describe a method to determine the height of a tall building. His intention was pretty straightforward. Atmospheric pressure reduces at a very predictable rate as you get higher and higher. By accurately measuring the pressure at ground level and then at the top of the building, a well-known equation can give you the height of the building.

  Apparently, a student ignored this "obvious" solution and submitted a paper with TWO alternative solutions. (1) The expensive barometer could be carried to the roof of the building and dropped off, carefully timing the interval until it smashed on the ground. A simple gravitational equation would then give the building's height. (2) Take the (expensive) barometer to the building's owner and say "I'll give you this barometer if you tell me how tall the building is!"

  Seems to me that there are a bunch more possibilities. (1) If it was sunny, and the ground was level, set the barometer on the ground and measure the length of its shadow, and also measure its height. Then count your footsteps in the length of the building's shadow, to determine how long it is. A simple proportion (of similar triangles) would give the height of the building. (2) The building is REQUIRED to have a fire escape stairway, which is likely to have steps that are all the same height. Walk up the steps, carving a notch in the barometer for every ten steps you climb. You would soon know the building height.

• Think of a cube. Draw a diagonal line from corner to corner on one surface of the cube. From one of those end corners, draw another diagonal across a different face of the cube. (Like in the drawing) What is the ANGLE (in space, inside the cube) between those two lines?

  This is an immensely NASTY mathematical problem! It would take a LOT of effort to solve it, using any traditional approach.

  It turns out that there is a VERY different approach that can be used. The outboard ends of the diagonal lines happen to be at opposite corners of one of the OTHER sides of the cube. Imagine drawing a diagonal line on that side connecting them. You now have a triangle inside the cube, at some weird angle. Since a cube's sides and edges and angles are all identical, that triangle must have sides that are exactly the same length! That means that it HAS TO BE an equilateral triangle. That means the included angle (what we want) HAS TO BE 60 degrees!

  (In case you are curious, of the traditional mathematical ways of solving that problem, the one that uses the law of cosines is the easiest! So now you have homework to derive that solution!)

• The lumber and forestry industries have long been troubled by the fact that sometimes a single diseased tree exists in a wood lot of thousands of identical trees (that were artificially planted years earlier). Often, that disease showed NO outward symptoms, but also, often, the disease would quickly spread to many of the other trees around it. Since those trees would then become worthless, this was an important subject! But nobody could find any way of identifying such a diseased tree.

  Then, a creative forester was one day in such a grove, watching the trees sway in the constant moderate wind that day. He noticed that one single tree was swaying at a different rate than all the others. He realized this was a situation where Physics was useful, and that the trees were resonating like tuning forks (but at VERY low frequencies). The one with a different resonant frequency clearly had a (hidden) internal difference, which he realized was probably a flaw as a result of the disease. He painted a mark on that tree and had it cut down, and the disease was clearly there!

• Can you hold your arms out at a 90°angle? How about half that, or 45°, or a third of it, 30°? If you can, you can know some amazing things! While I was in college Graduate School, I used to climb up on a fairly desolate hill to do my Physics homework, particularly when it was a nice day. One day, up there, I noticed something that seemed interesting. When passenger jet airplanes would go overhead, the SOUND from the engines seemed to come from a spot in the sky well behind where I saw the airplane to be. It soon dawned on me that that was because the sound was taking a number of seconds to get down to me, while the light of the image of the airplane got to me almost instantly.

  As it happened, one plane was on a path to pass almost directly over me. When I saw the airplane directly above me, the sound seemed to be coming from a spot well behind it. I didn't have an entire plan at that moment, but I decided to count the seconds until the sound got to the point directly above me, which was 31 seconds. At that point, the image of the airplane was in the sky about a 30° angle farther ahead of it.

  It turns out that that's enough information to be able to figure out how high the plane was and how fast it was moving! Isn't that cool? Virtually no information, and yet it's possible to figure out some things that would seem impossible! Try thinking it through. It's pretty logical!

  Here's the way I looked at it. From the moment the plane's image was overhead until the sound was, was 31 seconds. That means that the sound that was created up there, when the plane was actually overhead, took 31 seconds to get down to me. Sound travels about 1100 feet per second in air. Therefore, the plane must have been 31 * 1100 or about 34,000 feet above me when it passed overhead! That's a pretty common height for long-range passenger aircraft, so I felt that was a reasonable answer.

  Now think about that triangle when the sound seemed to be directly overhead: the spot overhead, and the plane's location when the sound got down to me, and me. That was close to a right triangle, with a 30° angle (at me). Geometry or trigonometry can tell you that the two legs of that triangle are in the ratio of 1 to the square root of three (about 1.73). I already know that the long leg is 34,000 feet, so the short one (the horizontal one that was the path of the airplane) must have been a little under 20,000 feet. That means the plane must have traveled about 20,000 feet in the 31 seconds. So it had to have been traveling at 635 feet per second (or 430 mph). The airliner may have been slowing down to land at either Chicago or Indianapolis, so that answer made sense, too.

  Wouldn't it seem impossible to know those things? But they were reasonably simple to estimate, using minimal information.

• While waiting for slow railroad trains to pass, a person has some free time. Since a lot of tracks are rather poorly maintained these days, sometimes you can see the boxcars rocking back and forth on uneven tracks. If you watch carefully, you will see some rock back and forth faster than others that look identical. With physics, you can prove that 'full' cars that are heavy will rock more slowly (it's actually a sort of pendulum motion) and the empty ones rock faster (because the weight has a lower center of gravity). So, even if they look identical, you can sometimes tell which ones are full and empty! (The high-class way of saying this has to do with "rotational inertia" and "angular momentum")

• I should include an example of innumerable failures at such things! When I was a little kid, maybe 6 or 7, I would ride in the back seat when my parents drove anywhere. (This was some time ago!) Even then, I was an observant kid, and I somehow noticed that, when the car ahead in city traffic would step on its brakes, often I thought I could see one rear brake light just an instant before the other one. I vaguely knew about the speed of light. In a number of instances, I became convinced that I could see the taillight nearest me just an instant before I'd see the other one. I became convinced that it was because it was closer and that I was SOOOO good that the speed of light was within my abilities! Obviously, I was VERY wrong! It turns out that incandescent lamps take a moment to heat up enough to start giving off light. Back then, light bulbs were not made as 'perfectly' as they are today with all of our modern automated equipment, so there were variations between bulbs. (Not today!) I had SEEN something valid, but my interpretation of what I saw was WAY off!

• And then there are "silly" ideas! I am led to believe by friends that there are large markets for such things as the following, but I don't really see redeeming social value in such things so I don't really see reason to actively pursue them!
  • When I was in college, I decided to wire up a circuit where the turn signals on my car would blink out the Morse Code letters 'L', 'E', 'F', 'T' or 'R', 'I', 'G', 'H', 'T' instead of the slow usual blinking. An occasional driver would notice the odd blinking, and would get my attention, to tell me that I had a bad connection for my lights! As far as I know, no other driver ever recognized that it was Morse Code!

  • I added some features to the toilet in my house. It now recognizes whether the person is male or female and exactly what they intend to do, and then it automatically raises the lid and possibly the seat. Under appropriate circumstances, a small 'reading light' turns on, and when everything is done, it waits a little while and then automatically flushes. In a few months, it has not yet made any mistakes in any of this!

  • I hope to soon install in the same house a simplistic application of my PSST invention, where it will continuously be aware of where I am, to about one inch accuracy. If I am away, (it can't find me) I intend for the house to go into 'maximum security mode'. (A separate system continuously monitors doors, windows, the garage and the yard, to sense any possible intruder [or guest]). If I am present, it will have different modes for whether I am inside or outside the house. If it senses that I am in the bedroom, for example, and the time is late at night, then heating or air conditioning for much of the rest of the house will be turned back until it senses my movements in the morning, to save on heating/cooling bills. I am considering using the same technology to create a lawnmower that will automatically mow the yard in the middle of the night!

  • More recently, a really good potential application has occurred to me regarding the same PSST system. Imagine this: Instead of carrying a tiny device in my pocket for the location function, I make a necklace with it hanging as a pendant, and I never take it off. As with the full PSST system, the third axis, vertical can be added, so add it. Now, that same system would constantly monitor my location, as before. But now, I would program the computer analysis to react to specific locations. For example, within one foot of the floor, at the bottom of a set of stairs. Think about it! Why would a NECKLACE ever be in such a location? As far as I can see, for only one reason, I had fallen down the stairs! So, if the computer analysis determines such a location, maybe a loud voice message could try to wake me up. If the position remained, maybe a neighbor's phone could be automatically rung. A call to 911 would be somewhere in the list of contingencies.

    The computer analysis could be pre-programmed for any location where the necklace would be unlikely to ever be. If this would work, it might be the ultimate in a personal safety monitor, for elderly people who lived alone!

  • My creativity is continually coming up with such "silly" ideas! The dilemma usually facing me is trying to figure out which are just silly and which might be beneficial!

These assorted examples are meant to show that the "obvious" approach to a problem is not always the ONLY approach. More than that, an alternate approach might exist that more simply or easily or quickly offers a solution to the problem. It might even turn out that the "traditional" answer is not correct, and that only some alternate approach is capable of coming up with the correct answer.

For some reason, throughout my life, I have tended to see the world from such different perspectives! Combined with a College Degree in Physics, and a natural curiosity, I have always had a tendency to explore many subjects. Since these unusual approaches often occur to me, I then often find it necessary to study some new field, in order to determine if my approach might be valid and if it gives a solution that matches the traditional solution to the question. Usually, I find that they match up fine, and I had just found some unique way of confirming something that people already knew. I suppose that represents a lot of wasted effort. Friends sure seem to think so! But I think there has been value to me in doing this sort of thing. The fact that, usually, my conclusions perfectly matches things already known (by other methods) has tended to give me confidence that my approach has some validity.

THEN, when I get results that do NOT match accepted knowledge, I have to consider two possibilities. They really are right, and I made some blunder of assumption or logic or mathematics; or there might be a new insight like those included in these web-pages. As mentioned above, it would be awfully arrogant to seriously think that my solutions for these many subjects are better than those of the "experts" in those fields. Many of these pages have been included here because I just cannot figure out where my error must be, as to why my results don't match the accepted knowledge. In each case, I attempt to present the logic and arguments and assumptions that I used in arriving at my results. It seems likely to me that, in some of these specific subject areas, an expert will someday come along and explain where my error lies. No problem, there!

Are these pages all right? Not a chance! That's not my intent. I hope to offer alternate approaches for analyzing some subjects or problems. In many cases, these are problems that are generally considered enigmas. In some cases, I have already found that they DO work! In other cases, experimental confirmation of benefit has not yet been done. In yet other of these presentations, particularly the Theoretical Physics and Geophysics and Astrophysics presentations, ultimate confirmation of one theory over another may elude mankind for Centuries!

In addition, if kids and teens (who often seem to think like I do!) get confidence in knowing that there is someone else who generally thinks outside the box, wonderful! If someone else then gets confidence to "think creatively", cool! But they should also realize that the odds are that most of the time they will be wasting their time in doing thinking that lots of people before them have already thought through!

I can mention another ancient-history anecdote related to this. When I was a High School Freshman, I was required to read a short story about a John Colter. He was certainly a real and amazing person, who was part of the Lewis and Clark Expedition that first explored the American West around 1805. But he got separated from the group and was assumed dead, only to show up years later alive. HE WAS ALONE for those years! Certainly, he must have had many difficult experiences in finding ways to survive. However, the story that we read described how Colter was chased by Indians such that he had to run continuously for fifty miles and that another time where he got a reed to be able to breathe while underwater in a river and that he stayed underwater for over 24 hours straight! The story described how he OUTRAN all the Indian Braves that chased him, and that he ran for that FIFTY MILES to get away. The story indicated an endless list of astounding experiences that Colter had done.

Even as a young kid, maybe I was already becoming a good scientist! I was VERY suspicious about the accuracy of such unbelievable accomplishments! For a white man to outrun dozens of Indian Braves seemed pretty amazing to me. For him to have run continuously for fifty miles (TWO marathon races!) seemed hard to believe, too. So I thought about the PROOF of these things. THERE IS NONE! All those stories were provided by John Colter himself, as there were no other human witnesses. Even then, I was tempted to wonder if Colter might have "wildly exaggerated"! If so, it actually worked, because he is extremely famous for having survived and accomplished those many things. No one seemed to have every doubted how precisely accurate his stories were. As a scientist, and especially as a Physicist, I would now discard virtually all those incredible stories of Colter. He was still a very impressive person, as attested by many others in the Lewis and Clark expedition, and others who knew him. He probably didn't actually need to do all that exaggeration! He would still have been forever famous.

I hope you see the point of this. If someone TELLS you that the Earth is round, or flat, do you really KNOW if they are telling you the truth? If someone tells you that cigarettes are bad for you, or red meat, or Cyclamates, or atmospheric pollution, or that there is Global Warming, is it actually the truth, or is it just that person's opinion? As a scientist, it is centrally important to KNOW which of these is true or likely. Otherwise, you cannot build any logic, and get any useful conclusions. THAT is what science actually is!

Shortly after college, and a Degree in Nuclear Physics, I wound up living in a hundred-year-old farmhouse that had been abandoned for about 7 years. It had no insulation and 11 major rooms, in a NASTY climate of northern Indiana. After getting large Propane bills, for heating only part of the first floor of that house, I designed a woodstove with all the sophistication that a creative Physicist could manage. I never wanted to be in that business or any business. My intent was to make a grand total of ONE woodburner! I expected that my life work would involve doing research in some lab somewhere.

After the woodstove worked so well that I heated the entire large three-story farmhouse while using a total of one gallon of Propane during an entire winter (and that was for kitchen cooking), word got out. I eventually built a few, just to get people to leave me alone, and sold them at exactly what the materials cost me, $365.08. When those people told their friends, I eventually realized that I was in business. Within a year, I was 1600 units behind on production!

I didn't really enjoy being in business, but I knew that I was enhancing the lives of all the families that got them, and I thought that maybe that's what I was born to do. My company made a BUNCH of them, well over 25,000!

That motivation, and my creativity and my Physics background, combined with a financial freedom (because of the stoves) to explore such areas, allowed me to pursue many projects and therefore learn about many subjects. Many more ideas had occurred to me over the years, but I just have little interest pursuing anything that does not clearly have potential benefit to society, to Nature, or to God in some way. (A few of the projects described in my Public Service lists are a little borderline on this, but there were many other projects that had even less redeeming value, and I basically dismissed them. They tended to be things that would likely make lots of money, with that as their only goal.)

I was saved as a Christian when I was 19. It was an astounding and unexpected experience, while I was calmly sitting in a movie theater with my girl-friend watching the trailers before the movie began. Words could never express that incredible experience. After it happened, I turned to my girl and told her that we needed to leave so that I could find a Church somewhere to get Baptized. She had no clue of what I was talking about, and she told me how much she had looked forward to seeing that movie. So we stayed, but I didn't even notice the movie as I was so astounded by the amazing thing which had just happened to me! Ever since then, my religion has been important to me. I became a Pastor of a tiny non-denominational Christian Church in 1996. I soon realized that my unique set of motivations and talents would allow me to be an Instrument in His Work, by creating the BELIEVE site on the InterNet. (I had previously created a smaller version of it, that fit on a floppy disk, to give to anyone who wanted it. In 1994, I tried to give it to Willow Creek Community Church to get them to make 22,000 duplicate diskettes [which would not have been terribly expensive], so they could be given to all their Congregation members as a Christmas present that year! How often does a Church give Christmas presents to its Congregation? Unfortunately, Bill Hybels and his staff did not see value in what I proposed. But I still have great respect for them!)

It took me about 2.5 years of more than full-time effort to assemble and initially program the entire BELIEVE structure. Having done all that, my hopes were modest. My ultimate hope was that a single person found enough value from BELIEVE to either renew his/her own Christianity or to become a Christian. THAT would have made it all worth while!

I had long been distressed by the bias of information presented by many of the Churches I was aware of. Each one seems to be so terrified that someone would leave their Church and go somewhere else, they tend to say bad things about all competing organizations (and their beliefs). I truly hope their motivation was other than the income in the collection plate, but I worry about that.

As a result, I went to extreme effort to select the BELIEVE presentations to be informative, honest, accurate, complete, and as unbiased as possible.

From 1992 through early 1997, I made duplicate BELIEVE diskettes a few at a time and simply handed them out to various people that seemed to potentially be interested in its contents. During those four years time, I handed out a total of around 400 diskettes.

I signed up for a Free Trial of AOL in January 1997, as I had no idea what the Internet then was! AOL provided 2 megabytes of space for a person to upload personal notes or pictures or whatever. I didn't have anything to upload, but it occurred to me that the BELIEVE floppy diskette program fit on a 1.44 Megabyte floppy disk, so I uploaded it. In the first month, around 400 people accessed that file. As many people in one month as I had handed out in the previous four years! Seemed interesting!

So I learned a bunch about the Internet and making web-pages. I never "promoted" the BELIEVE site in any way, no advertising, no exchanging links, no accepting banner ads, nothing. It's really hard to logically see how 19,000,000 people visited BELIEVE in 2006 and 23,000,000 people visited BELIEVE in 2007! How did they find it? (Mostly through search engines, but I had NEVER tried to get Yahoo or Google or the others to even list BELIEVE! My personal theory is that I was simply supposed to create the web-site, and then the Holy Spirit would (somehow) get people to find it! It seems to be working!

This will certainly be an ongoing activity for the rest of my life, and it is a joy! As BELIEVE is getting better known (now about 70,000 visitors each day), the responsibility feels even greater.

Three recent (2005) "projects" might do some good. The one is a totally free method of measuring "average body density" to a precision of better than one part in a thousand, in a fun and simple two-minute activity! I hope that if kids find this a fun activity, where they do it each week, they might have an extremely precise way of monitoring the Bodyfat Percentage, such that Childhood Obesity (and Adult Obesity, too) might be reduced. The unique part of that is that the kid might have a "game-like competitive motivation" to become more aware of junk foods and exercise.

The second is a new and rather simple type of water pump, which is far more efficient than existing pumps and also does not require any electric motor to run it. My hope is that an American family might be willing to spend $50 for local materials to build such a pump, and then another $50 to ship the pump to some remote village in a Third World country which desperately needs safe drinking water. My hope is to completely bypass the Military-Industrial-Complex, and have individual American families "save the lives" of a whole village of desperate people.

Americans are very generous people. Many make donations of $100 to the Red Cross or the main Charities all the time. But then we hear that the Red Cross decided to spend hundreds of millions of the 9/11/01 donations to buy themselves new computers and office equipment! I am trying to provide a way that an American family might PRECISELY KNOW where their dollars are going! THAT FAMILY identifies a needy village, and THEY write the address on the box! Seems to me that represents a 100% efficiency of the donation!

My hope is that if even just 1% of American families choose to do this, which is around 700,000 families, they might then provide around 700,000 remote villages with life-saving safe drinking water! And NO ONE would be out more than around $100! I guess we will see if anyone chooses to actually do this, or whether it is actually doable. Many businesspeople insist to me that it will not work, and they give lots of reasons, usually involving government, military, or business corruption somewhere along the line. Maybe they are right! But it seems to me that if even ONE pump actually gets through to ONE remote village, the effort will be worth trying. The alternative is the status quo, of allowing countless millions of people to have horrible diseases due to having to drink sewage water, and all the rest.

The third recent invention is a simple, easy and inexpensive method by which any family on Earth can entirely heat their home and provide domestic hot water, without needing ANY fossil fuels to burn! If a lot of people would choose to use the (free) plans I provide, quite a substantial reduction of Global Warming effects might be achieved, almost immediately. In addition, all those homeowners would no longer have any heating bills either for their house or for their hot water!

Regarding BELIEVE, I feel strongly that any Instrument of the Lord should remain in the background, if possible, to allow the Glory of His Word to have the stage. That's why I didn't make a big production of who I am in the BELIEVE web-site.

I also hope that this text doesn't make it sound like I think I'm anyone unusually important. We're all the same, really, we just have different talents or skills, that's all. It seems that I have just put mine out on the table! Kind of scary!

And, if you have tried to work your way through any of my presentations, you already know that I have extreme limitations regarding compositional and literary skills! I hear endless criticisms about that, and all I can say is that I do the best I can, to present these assorted concepts.

There are three other specific concepts that might seem interesting to try to pursue. These three do not clearly benefit either society or the environment or the Lord, though, they just seem intriguing!

• Around 20 years ago, I came up with a complete concept regarding a science-fiction book or movie, which would be very "personal" but specifically extremely scientifically based. I am NOT a good writer, and I did not know what to do to try to pursue the idea. I made some inquiries, but it seemed that the only course was for me to have to hire an Agent and for me to write the entire book text or screenplay myself, which I doubt I am capable of, because it would turn out far too "clinical and cold". As I was trying to figure out what to do, the movie Jurassic Park came out, which had a surprisingly similar theme of being "actually scientifically possible". But mine was about alien beings, with the story being 100% solid science-based. I have always figured that someone would some day come along who might want to "ghost-write" it or collaborate on it. Not yet!

• Late in 2006, the NFL heavily promoted a competition where viewers would submit their own advertising concepts. Being pretty creative, and a football fan, I soon came up with an intriguing idea. Actually, I immediately thought it was highly likely that my concept would win such a competition. I suppose that might have been ego, but I don't think so! In any case, when I looked into it, the Grand Prize was a few thousands dollars worth of stuff, like tickets to the SuperBowl. I have long been aware that the mega-corporations pay millions of dollars to advertising agencies to think up new advertising ideas. In recent years, I think they have been wasting most of their money, as most ads in recent years have been pretty lousy! SO, if it should turn out that my concept should rightfully be worth millions of dollars (only because those ad agencies would have been paid that for my concept, for sure), I lost all interest in submitting it to try to get a few thousand in prizes, while giving up all the rights to my concept!

  I really think there should be some usage of my concept. It is actually the basis of a series of TV ads (around 15 obvious ones) and would be compatible with a number of different product types but would be expecially excellent for a company that manufactures sunglasses, like Ray-Ban. I have no clue as to how I could proceed without having to immediately give up the whole concept, where then the manufacturer would have no remaining incentive to actually PAY for it! Useful suggestions or contact with people in that industry would be nice!

• Very recently (March 2007), a truly creative thought occurred to me regarding a movie that would certainly be at least as popular as the Indiana Jones or Darth Vader or similar adventure movies. Considering that movie theaters are grumbling over the fact that fewer people are attending movies in their theaters (because so many now watch them on their own home TVs on rented movies), my concept would not only get millions of people to come to theaters again, it would get many of them to watch it many times! Seems like a concept that someone should be interested in, especially since the cash flow and profits would figure to be quite attractive to Hollywood types! Again, useful suggestions or contacts would be great!

C Johnson

( http://mb-soft.com/public/index.html )