Some Knowledge

In certain stars, the high mass and lack of thermonuclear fuel lead to collapse.  As the thermal energy that supports the star is radiated away, gravity compresses the gas to higher and higher densities.  If the mass of the star is 1.5 to 3.0 times the mass of the sun, there is supposedly no atomic force that can resist the crush of gravity.  With or without a massive supernova explosion, the spent star will collapse into a black hole.

The radius of a black hole is defined by the event horizon.  The event horizon is the distance at which the general theory of relativity predicts that time will stop because of the intense gravitational field.  Black holes are in many ways artifacts of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.  Because light interacts with gravity, it is possible that there can be such an intense gravitational field that light will not be able to escape.

It is theorized that the entire mass of the collapsed star will shrink down to a point smaller than a sub-atomic particle.  This is the so-called singularity, where gravitational force and density all approach infinite quantities.  Nevermind that the singularity lies inside the event horizon, where time has supposedly stopped.  The singularity exists at some infinite time in the future.

Black holes are thought to accrete matter from the surrounding universe.  This can happen by the object drawing in gas and dust from the surrounding regions of space, or by the black hole coming close to a star and drawing gas from the star into it’s gravitational field.  Any matter or energy that falls into the black hole will become a part of the black hole.  Any information such as mass, momentum, or temperature possessed by the accreting matter will be lost to the known universe.

Black holes suck up all the matter that has an orbit that intercepts their photon sphere.  The photon sphere is a region around the black hole in which a photon’s path would be bent into an orbit around the black hole.  The photon sphere is typically 1.5 times the event horizon.  In theory, there is nothing to stop a black hole from growing to completely engulf the universe.  Contrary to popular belief, a black hole does not hoover up material from space.  Any object that can go into orbit around a black hole will stay in orbit.  As long as nothing causes the orbit to decay, the object will not be sucked into the black hole.

Many physicists have spent considerable time working up the mathematical theory of black holes.  There is some observational evidence for these objects actually existing in space, and at the center of galaxies.  Despite what you might read in science fiction, there is no way to survive falling into a black hole.  The only universe you will emerge into if you try to travel through a black hole is the land of the dead.

For a longer and more detailed essay on black holes, check out this Wikipedia article.

There are many markets and venues for articles you might write.  In the old days, before the Internet, the few places to publish articles were newspapers and magazines.  You would contract work from an editor and produce an article on a given topic, and then you would get a check.  Things work a little differently today.

There is a much larger market for articles in the online world.  The billions of websites all are looking for content.  The hundreds of millions of blogs all post and generate content of various kinds of writing.  Then there are ezine distribution sites and all the commercial sites that all publish a lot of articles.  If you look for article marketing in any web search you will find an endless stream of data.  It seems everybody is looking for interesting, original content to publish on the web.

How does a person get paid for writing articles on the web?  It all boils down to the same strategy of selling something.  Money enters the equation when there is some product that you charge money for.  You might only use the article as bait to draw a customer’s attention to some product.  You might offer to sell a person an ebook you have created after they look at your original article.  There are many angles to the economic aspect of writing articles.

One website I saw today sells link-building articles.  They charge a lot of money to write an article that has something to do with your website, then promote and post that article to many online article directories.  A 750 word article might cost $700 from this agency.  If I could get $700 for every article I have on this blog I could take a year off and go on vacation somewhere expensive.

The idea behind writing articles for money is to write good articles that attract attention to your income-producing website.  If you want to look at writing as a job, you can always try to sell articles to websites and magazines for some cash.  There are many freelancing sites online that list writing jobs.  The problem with these is that they often advertise work that does not pay well.  I have seen people advertising a job writing an entire book for some publisher that pays as little as $100 for an entire book.  Some of the advertisements do not even list a price, but tell the writers to bid on projects.  This is just not profitable.

One place you can get paid for writing is Helium.com.  They give a small percentage of their profits from ppc advertising on their site after you post an article.  You can also bid on jobs for magazines and other article buyers that are listed in the marketplace.  The problem with Helium is that it pays very little money.  It is a good place to get some practice writing, though, and you can get feedback on your articles from other writers.

Writing is an enjoyable thing to do.  You can learn a lot about the world just by trying to write articles about various things.  It is good practice in the use of language for communication.  You might have to look into various business schemes if you are going to try to make money with writing.  There are many opportunities to cash in on creating content these days, and you are no longer limited by the restrictions of working for a paper publication.  Use the tools of the web to find your own way in the business of writing, and you will be able to enjoy your work and make some money.

Article marketing is distribution of articles to various websites, that republish the articles on user sites.  Basically, you write an article about some product, subject, or topic of interest.  You publish this article on an article distribution site, of which there are many.  Along with your article you have what is called a “resource box.”  In the resource box you put your name, your company contact information, and a link to your website.

When a person sees your article on the article distribution site, they can download an html version of the article that is ready to be put onto their own website.  Along with the article, they have to publish the resource box.  The resource box will supply a link back to your site from the website on which the article gets posted.  This is how article marketing works.

In article marketing, you write an interesting article.  You post your article where people can download it.  People copy the article and post it on their own site.  You establish yourself as an authority and generate back links to your website and business with article marketing.  There is a whole system of ezine article websites on the net just to distribute these articles.

Another meaning for article marketing is the use of little informative articles to promote some product or service.  An author might work with an advertising agency to generate these articles, which are then distributed to various markets like ezines and blogs.  The product promotion is done in a style that is not too unlike normal advertising, but there is no hard sell.  This is like a sneaky form of advertising that is just becoming more popular.

A person could use article marketing to generate more traffic for a website.  Also, a freelance writer might consider distributing free articles this way to promote their services as a writer to a larger audience.  The field of article marketing is relatively new, and the uses for short articles to promote some product or service is still evolving.

The first thing you will need to write an interesting article is information.  These days, just about anything you might be interested in finding out can be found on the Internet.  It is as simple as using a search engine to research your topic.  Of course, depending on your subject, you may have to turn to more traditional sources of information such as libraries.  There is a wealth of resources in just about any library, and immense libraries can be found on almost any college campus.  Get a backpack and some notebooks and head out to the library if you can’t find what you’re looking for online.

Chances are you will find more than you need to know to write any article from online sources.  Check out the Internet libraries like UPenn Digital Library if you want public domain books to quote from or research in.  Often times old sources of information will provide a simpler explanation of some phenomenon.  Always check old sources out for accuracy though, as science has a tendency to progress.  For history or literature, even some old books can be just as good as new.

Once you have read over your sources and taken notes on the information you will need for your article, it is time to start writing.  If you are working on a long article it will be helpful to make an outline.  Gather up the important information and the point you are trying to make and write an introductory paragraph.  The introduction of an article should get across all the important things you are trying to say.  Often times people will just read the first few sentences of an article and no more.  You want to make your purpose known as soon as possible in writing an article.

When you did your reading or other research, you will have written down some of the facts or observations that you will use in writing your article.  This is the main part of the information you will be trying to communicate to your readers.  People want to learn something when they take the time to read.  The facts will also give your article credibility and authority.  Make sure you have your information correct.  Writing is not only a process of communicating to a reader, but it also informs the writer, who may be learning something new when they work up an article.

It is better to have a more conversational tone when you are writing something than to be correct and proper and authoritative.  Official sounding language can be very boring to read.  Use an active voice.  Avoid too many adverbs and qualifying words that limit the impact of what you write.  Present your information as simply as possible and do not try to obscure your points with extra words.  An article is something people read to get information.  It is not a work of fiction that is meant to entertain.  Still, if you use a good tone of voice and are crisp and understandable, an article can be very enjoyable to read.

If you want to write an interesting article, you will have to have an interesting subject.  Not many people are interested in some little-known arcane fact about some aspect of a game that went out of vogue twenty years ago.  A lot of people are interested in celebrities.  This does not mean that you can not write a very interesting article about ancient Greek pottery.  It just means not as many people will want to read such an article.  For your writing to attract an audience it has to be about something that draws people’s attention.  Do some research online into what people are interested in and pick your subjects accordingly.

An article is not just a list of facts.  You should relate your subject to the broader experiences in life and explain why you think it is important to be concerned with this material.  All subjects are in some way part of human experience.  Even such strange and distant objects as black holes and neutron stars have some appeal to some people.  Anything that has been studied by human beings is possible subject matter for an article.  You might write an article about your visit to the park.  You might write about your own experiences in school or on the job.  You do not have to base your writing on the work of other people.  If you do your own scientific research, you are expected to write about your own work and relate it to the work of others.  The same process of gathering information and arranging it into an understandable piece applies.

Good research, an interesting subject, clear and entertaining style, and relevance to life are all ingredients in any good article.  Prepare your material and read over your work before you publish in whatever medium you use.  There are many things a person might be interested in reading about.  It is the job of the writer to identify and expound on a subject so that readers might be informed.

The official Speed Racer website is offering a driving game for sale and online play.  The game costs $9.95 and is a full screen driving simulation of the Mach 5, including auto jacks, cutter blades, and underwater or frogger mode.  The game is called “Speed Racer, The Great Plan.”

The game requires a Shockwave player, and can be played in online mode for free on a windowed screen.  If you always wanted to drive the Mach 5 and race against different characters, or just enjoyed the cartoon this might be an interesting game.  Driving control is with the arrow keys, as well as hotkeys to operate the different features of the Mach 5.  The download page for the free Shockwave version of the game is here.

The natural carbon cycle of plants and environment on earth can be used to supply energy to the world.  Solar energy from the sun is captured by the chlorophyll in plants, which take water and carbon dioxide and forms carbohydrates.  The light energy of the sun is converted into chemical potential energy in the tissues of the plant.  All life is based on and gets its energy from this natural process.  All the food we eat is derived from plant sources on some level.

It is simply a matter of using the available surface area of the earth to grow plants.  Trees, grasses, food crops, any botanical source of material can be used to generate power for use by man.  Trees can be grown and harvested every few years for use as fuel or for conversion into liquid or gaseous fuels.  Algae can be grown in ponds and processed into liquid fuels.  It will take some effort to convert from a system that utilizes fossil fuels, but it is entirely possible to use the energy from plants to run our society.

Care must be taken in implementing any kind of energy farming system that adequate land is left to grow food crops.  Waste material from the growth of food can also be used as fuel in biomass power generation schemes.  People might use the corn kernels for food and burn the cobs and stalks for energy.  Biomass fuels are not as dense or compressed as fossil fuels, so some research into transportation and storage might still need to be done.

The world will never run out of energy as long as the sun keeps shining.  Plants have been providing energy for the living creatures of this planet since only blue-green algae lived in the primitive seas of earth.  People learned to harness this energy for heat and light when they discovered the use of fire.  It may take some effort and funding, but the technology is already in place to use plants as fuel for the coming ages.

Artcyclopedia has a list of the thirty most popular artists as deduced by web links.  As you can see, Pablo Picasso tops this list of artists, and is given a mindshare rating of 100 to compare his popularity with that of other artists.

Next to Picasso on the list are Vincent van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, and Claude Monet.  While it is interesting to see how different artists rate on popularity today, this really says little about their work.

To find information on many artists and something about their lives and works, try the Artnet site.  Here you will find an alphabetical listing of all kinds of contemporary and historic artists.  There are links to the different works these artists have up for sale as well as listings for galleries that sell their paintings.

There are a lot of artists in the world.  What makes one artist famous and another unknown often has little to do with talent and a lot to do with marketing.  The high prices of some of the work of famous artists is in itself enough publicity to make them even more famous.  What becomes popular is often a matter of style or taste, and what gets publicity in the press.

If you are looking for art on the Internet there are thousands of sites where you can find information and art for sale.  You might try browsing through some of the paintings on Ebay when you have nothing better to do if you want to see how much some art actually sells for.  There are a lot of paintings that you can probably get for little more than shipping charges.  On the other hand, if it’s something by a famous artist, you might have to sell your house to buy it.

I took the afternoon off and went to Barnes and Noble.  It was a quiet drive into Northville.  The weather was hot and a bit humid, but not uncomfortable.  I parked the truck and walked inside.

I spent a few minutes looking over the bargain books.  Seems like the price of the cutouts is going up.  It used to be you could find things for two and three dollars.  Now, the lowest price was five bucks.  I really did not see anything I was interested in reading on the remainder shelves.  I looked at magazines and almost leafed through a couple on computers, but magazines are little more than books of advertising.  I’m not about to pay money for a bunch of advertisements.

I went over to the business section and looked for interesting books on Internet businesses.  There were half a dozen books supposedly telling me how to make millions online with Ebay or other programs.  I looked through a couple of these books, but there was suprisingly little information in these $25 items.  I looked at a couple books on business and money, but again, nothing caught my eye.

I went back to the gardening section and looked at books on growing organic vegetables.  Then I looked for farming books and found one that is supposed to be about running a small farm business.  I looked through this book and it looked interesting, so I picked it up.  The farming book had more information on running a business than the book on making money with a blog.  Maybe this book will be useful.

I have a lot of books.  I’ve got two rooms full of them at home here.  I think I am going to take some time off from writing all the time and just read for a while.  I looked around for something interesting to write about today, but I ended up playing simplistic games instead of blogging.  There seem to be a lot of people reading this blog.  At least there are a lot of people finding my article on the Candy Tracks game.  So far, more people have seen those three paragraphs than anything else I have written.  Maybe I should just review computer games and popular websites.

In any case, that’s about all for today.  Maybe tomorrow I will find something more interesting to write about.  Then again, maybe I will just go outside and start working on my garden.

Food riots in third world countries.  Increasing use of grains to produce ethanol for motor fuel.  The price of rice is increasing and demand has not slowed.  The world is headed for a crisis situation with food shortages increasing as the cost of production goes up.  Sam’s Club and Costco are already limiting purchases of rice in the USA.

What is behind this shortage in one of the world’s staple crops?  In my opinion, it is the price of energy and oil.  Agricultural production on a large scale takes petroleum to power machinery.  The cost of petroleum keeps rising.  Production costs for crops are going up.  When production costs go up, the consumer price goes up as well.  Also, with increases in energy prices, more food crops like grains are being fermented into ethanol for motor fuel.  The more grain that is turned into fuel, the less that is available for food.  Less supply with a constant demand means higher prices.  Higher food prices means poor people will not be able to afford food.

With the shortages in rice supplies, many countries are implementing bans on export.  This is an attempt to conserve a valuable resource.  The only answer to shortages in staple foods is to produce more of these commodities.  Increased production will offset increased demand.  Conserving fuels for necessary expenditures, like production of food and transportation of supplies would also go a long way towards decreasing the price of food.

The supply of fossil fuel is limited.  The world runs on the energy stored in fossil fuel.  As prices for fuel increase, prices for goods derived from fuels will also increase.  It is a simple equation.  It is how the world works.  If we are to have food that is affordable to all, we will have to do something about how that food is produced.  We will have to stop turning food into alcohol to run our cars.  In a worst case scenario, people will have to go back to growing their own food.  There is a limited amount of arable land.  It takes a lot of physical labor to grow food.  Perhaps the world will return to an agrarian society.  The alternative is that a lot more people will starve to death.

Governments need to stop being concerned with only the rich and start making policies that benefit all people.  A person is no less deserving just because he does not have a job that pays him a lot of money.  The capitalist system is the best we have come up with so far, but that does not mean there is not a better way.  Instead of cooking up needed food to run our cars, we should be looking for ways to feed all the people and provide for everyone, regardless of how much money they have.  Instead of stupidly depleting resources for no reason aside from that we can, people should be looking for alternatives to living off limited resources.  Human beings are the most intelligent creatures on this planet.  It’s time we used our intelligence to figure out a way for all people to live in peace.

Electronic gear all works on the same basic principles.  There will be a power supply to supply electrical energy to the device.  In most electronic gear, the power supply will take AC from a wall outlet, transform it to a lower voltage, then rectify and regulate it at some DC voltage.  When looking for problems with an electronic device, it is best to start with the power supply.

You will need a volt-ohm meter.  Check the fuse for continuity.  If the fuse is blown, check the transformer for a short circuit.  If the transformer checks out good, try replacing the fuse.  If it blows immediately there is some problem with too much current flowing somewhere in the circuit.

Identify the main power-using components.  This may be an output amplifier.  If it looks burned, it is probably fried.  If there is a crater in the package, the unit has failed explosively.  Your sense of smell can come in handy for finding things like burned resistors or popped capacitors.  Often, there will be a burned trace on the circuit board where too much current has melted the copper.

After looking around for obvious problems, it is time to check the power supply line for short circuits.  If an obvious short exists, you will have to do some work on the board.  This involves removing components with a soldering iron, de-soldering wick, or a de-soldering tool commonly called a solder-sucker.  Remove one device at a time, starting with the most power-hungry devices, because these will be the most likely to blow due to excess power consumption.  Check the circuit for shorts again after removing each device.

If you start with the output circuits and remove the devices in sequence, you will most likely find the bad circuit quickly.  Once you find the bad device, get a replacement and solder it in place.  Replace all the devices you removed and check the circuit again for shorts.  If it checks out good, replace the fuse and fire up the device.  Check that the voltage on the power rail is correct.  Check the device for proper operation.  Then, put the equipment back together.  The time you spend removing circuit boards and putting them back in the equipment will account for most of the time you spend troubleshooting and repairing electronics.

It only takes one shorted transistor or IC to break an electronic device.  If you are not lucky enough to be working on something that has had a catastrophic failure, you will need more sophisticated equipment to discover the problems.  I am talking about an oscilloscope here.  You will also need a circuit diagram if the device is not simplistic and laid out well.  You will need to trace the signal through the device with the scope and find out which circuit is causing distortion or signal loss.  This takes time.  You will eventually identify a bad device which can be replaced with the proper replacement.   You have to know what you are doing.

Electronic equipment all operates pretty much the same, in principle.  Once you know how a circuit is supposed to work, you can trace it for flaws and repair it.  It takes some basic test equipment and some knowledge of the device you are working on.  Information on how semiconductor devices operate is important to have.  Often, the problem will be nothing more complicated than a blown voltage regulator in the power supply.  Such faults are easy to identify by tracing the circuit with a volt meter.  If you want to learn electronic repair, get some old equipment, take it apart, and use a volt meter and oscilloscope to look at the circuitry.  Get some practice on tracing circuitry that works, and when you have something that’s broken, you will be able to figure out where it has failed.

As in any circumstance, exercise extreme caution in working on electrical devices.  Televisions contain possible lethal voltages.  Old tube-type circuits all have a high voltage plate supply that can kill.  Use insulated tools and do not put your fingers on any part of the metal circuitry.  Sometimes a malfunctioning device will heat up and can cause burns if touched.  Be careful that you do not come into contact with the mains of the power supply.  Safety is important.