Some Knowledge

A strangelet is a theoretical kind of matter that is composed of an equal number of up, down, and strange quarks.  In general, strange quarks, being heavier than up and down quarks, cause strange particles to decay by the weak nuclear force into ordinary matter.  It has been theoretically proposed that large numbers of these quarks in a single particle might be stable.

The proposed strangelet is supposed to have some odd properties.  It is theorized that this super-particle would have an electric charge.  It is supposed that a strangelet might catalyze a reaction with ordinary matter, changing it into more strange matter.  Some physicists have proposed that a single strangelet might cause the entire earth to be converted into a single particle of strange matter, thus destroying everything.

As of now, no such thing as a strangelet has been observed.  Several experiments have looked for these odd particles in the debris from heavy ion collisions in various particle accelerators. There has even been press coverage about the possibility of a particle accelerator destroying the earth if a strangelet was produced.

In my opinion, strangelets are a fantasy cooked up by bored theoretical physicists.  As far as I know, no mass accumulations of quarks have ever been observed.  Quarks combine into more or less stable elementary particles.  The possibility of a particle accelerator producing something that would destroy the planet is extremely remote.  The danger of a fictional state of matter has been highly exaggerated.

I don’t know what is wrong with society that makes the possibility of the end of the world so attractive.  Perhaps it is because everyone eventually dies that has people so fascinated with apocalypse.  I also do not know what is wrong with science that can not be satisfied with studying the universe that can be observed and insists on making up fantastical things that can not possibly exist.  I think it is highly irrational to attempt to study something that is physically impossible, like a strange particle that swallows up the earth.

When the price of oil increases, the stock market seems to decline.  There is a causative factor here.  Our economy runs on oil and other fossil fuels.  The energy to produce items is derived from this fuel.  When the price of oil increases, the cost of producing and shipping an item also increases.

Many of the goods produced by industry also contain significant amounts of oil in the form of plastics and other petrochemicals.  The increasing price of oil causes the costs of production to also increase.  To preserve a profit margin for an industry, the price of an item will have to be increased to cover higher costs.  When prices are increased, sales decrease.  It is a simple economic relationship.  People will be less inclined to buy some article if it costs more.  When sales drop off due to higher prices, profits decrease.  When profits drop, the price people will be willing to pay to invest in a business in the form of stocks and bonds will also drop.  Thus, when oil goes up, stock goes down.

The only way to decouple a stock from the price of fuel is to operate a business on a stable source of energy.  If a large investment was made up front, a factory could be run by wind and solar energy.  Transportation is going to be the weak link in any such scheme.  Aside from electric trains, there is no means of transportation that does not depend on the cost of oil.  Some day it will be necessary to run the world on renewable energy sources.  This time will approach faster as the cost of petroleum continues to increase.

The converse of decreasing stock prices with increases in the price of oil is that as oil prices decline, stocks will tend to increase in value.  This is because lower oil prices mean a decrease in costs associated with production and distribution of goods, which means prices on goods can drop and sales can increase.  Increased sales lead to higher profits for a business and more attractive stock ownership.  The relationship between the price of oil and the price of stock is a causative relationship.  It is very easy to see that as the price of oil increases, the economy will lose money.

There are a lot of problems in the world.  If we watch the news we will see nothing but all the bad things that happen to other people.  That is what the news is, for the most part.  If we are always focused on all the bad things that happen on this planet, we are likely to worry.  It is not possible to be happy when you are worried.

To find happiness we need to think about good things.  Having good times with your family and thinking about all the wonderful things that happen in the world can help us become more happy.  Being satisfied with the things we have is one way almost anyone can find happiness.  If we always want things we can not afford, we will not be satisfied.

Happiness is not something you can buy from a store.  Contrary to what you will see on TV, you can not buy things to make you happy.  If you want to enjoy life you will have to find happiness within yourself.  Being happy is an attitude that a person assumes.  You can think about all the sad things that happen every day in this big world and be sad all the time.  If you are sad because you think about all the sad things that happen, buying new clothes will not improve your outlook on life.

If we can be satisfied with what we have and think about the good things that happen in the world, we can be happy.  Taking care of yourself and the others around you can be a source of happiness.  Doing a good job at your work and helping others can make a person very pleased.  You can not buy some gadget and expect it to make you happy.  This is what the advertisers want you to believe so that you will buy more useless stuff.  We make our own happiness from our thoughts.  You should not let people control you with promises of happiness.  You will not fall for the tricks of society if you realize that you can find happiness no matter what your situation.

“The Music Lesson” by Victor L. Wooten is a pretty interesting book.  I picked it up the other day from Borders.  This book is about how a bassist meets a strange teacher who shows him how to be a better musician.

“The Music Lesson” is more of a novel than a manual of music.  I have read half of the book already and find it very well-written and interesting.  Michael, the strange teacher, seems to know something about everything.  He says he can not teach knowledge, but he can show a person how to find stuff out for themselves.  This strange attitude gives the book a good deal of character.

A lot of the information in this book has to do with looking at the world in a different way.  The information has a sort of magical quality to it, like when the narrator tries to learn how to pick CDs off his shelf without looking by feeling for their vibes.  I don’t really think anyone can do such tricks, but it gives a strange atmosphere to the book to have these mystical episodes described.

I think anyone interested in learning something about the magic of music might like to read “The Music Lesson.”  It is not an overly-expensive book in paperback and is very entertaining to read.  This book makes a good diversion from some of the things that may be confusing to a musician and offers a different outlook on the way music is played.

It’s very cloudy today.  It has already rained a bit.  I think this will be good for the garden.  I think a little rain is necessary.  It was so cloudy out this morning I had to turn the lights on in the house because it got so dark.

I know this is not much of a blog entry.  I don’t really feel like writing about anything in particular.  I have been thinking about starting to write a novel or something.  It takes me some time to come up with ideas for stories.  I have spent some time looking for writing tips online.  There are a lot of sites that claim to show people how to write.  I even looked at a few sites about how to write best sellers.  This was interesting, but I think if a person knew how to write a best seller, they would write the book and get rich.

There may be more rain headed this way this afternoon.  I know from watching the news that they got a lot of rain in Iowa and the surrounding area today.  This is not what those people need.  They are already having a lot of floods and stuff in that area.  Maybe somebody should come up with some way to control the weather.  I don’t think that will ever happen, but it is something to look into.  Maybe I could get a grant from the NSF to study weather control.  I doubt that will ever happen.

I did some gardening this week.  On Monday I weeded some of the corn.  Yesterday I planted gladiolas.  Today, I saw the rain coming and stayed inside.  Maybe I will go out for a ride or something this afternoon and find something to do.  It’s just another cloudy, rainy day, and I think I want to do something to distract myself from everything that seems to be happening these days.  Perhaps tomorrow I will write about something interesting.

The tribe reportedly found in the Amazon has been known since 1910.  The reporter who broke the story wanted to draw attention to the danger from loggers to the tribe, so he reported that the tribe was unknown.  Yahoo today reports that the lost tribe was “discovered” so that people would pay attention to the plight of the rain forest.

This goes to show the dangers in believing anything you read in the news.  Stuff that gets reported may or may not be actually true.  It’s very easy to fool people if they do not have access to the records of discovered tribes or to some information that would refute or confirm some story.

This reminds me of the incident in the 1970’s about the Tassaday tribe in the Philipines.  It was reported that there was a village of people discovered in the jungle who did not wear clothes and who had an unknown language.  I think even National Geographic fell for that story and made a TV special about this group.  It turned out that the Tassaday were just villagers from a local town who would pretend to live in the jungle for visiting anthropologists.  The whole thing was a scheme to make money off tourism.

I have to admit that the lost tribe story has a good amount of appeal.  A lot of people have read the little story I wrote about them based on news reports.  Apart from actually going to an area and learning a new language and traveling into the jungle, there’s really no way to tell for sure if these reports are true or not.  Then again, if it was reported that a lost tribe of martians had been discovered by the mars lander, a lot of people would probably believe that too.

The modern world is very much a culture of the automobile.  Everywhere you look there are roads and cars.  Even the people who don’t drive get around in cars and buses that use the highway system.  Modern culture is based on the convenience and utility of the motor vehicle.

Today, you can easily get from one location to another with a motor vehicle.  This allows people to live a good distance from where they work or shop.  Without a car it might take several days just to walk in one direction to a job you live a good distance from.  Petroleum distillates like gasoline or diesel fuel give people the power to transport themselves from one location to another easily and quickly.

Life did not used to be so convenient.  A commute of only a few miles might take the better part of the day and a good deal of energy.  If it was raining or the weather was cold, a journey might not even be possible.  Even if you had a horse and buggy it would still take a long time to travel from one place to another.  People used to be employed closer to their homes in the old days before massive industrialization.  It was only when factories and businesses began to employ vast numbers of people that the majority of people began to live in cities.  Before the industrial revolution most people lived on farms of some sort and worked the land to produce food.  Many things that were needed were made at home.  Even cloth for clothing was woven on a loom in the home.

The modern world is a lot easier on a person than the pre-industrial world.  People do not have to labor for long hours in the hot sun to produce food.  You do not have to chop many cords of wood to heat your house in winter.  People do not have to walk many miles a day to get to a job or to the store to buy things.  All of this convenience is made possible by the energy derived from fossil fuels.  The labor that used to be done with muscle power is now done by machines.

People live longer in the modern world than they did in the old times.  Much of this improvement is due to advances in the field of medicine.  Still, there is a lot of obesity and heart disease in our industrial society.  People who do nothing but sit around all day in an office or at home get out of shape and have various health problems.  The human body has a good capacity for doing work.  People evolved to survive in a harsh environment where all the work that was to be done was done by hand.  Today, people who need exercise often go to gyms to work out.  While it can be boring to exercise and do repetitious motions that seem to have no purpose but to tire you out, it is also good to keep your body healthy and in shape.

The culture of the automobile is spreading across the world.  Countries with large populations that used to be very poor are now becoming industrial.  Every day there are more and more roads and cars in India and China.  As soon as a culture gets money they want to have all the conveniences of modern life.  The increased demand for oil and mass produced items will drive the price of these things up.  In the future it will become more expensive to operate a motor vehicle.  Manufacturers will have to come up with designs for vehicles that do not use fossil fuel, once supplies of this commodity begin to run out.

The automobile has made it possible to live far away from where we work and do business.  We can drive great distances to go on vacations or visit friends.  Without cars, modern society would grind to a halt.  People would not be able to get to their jobs or do the work that earns them money.  We might have to go back to an agrarian society if it becomes too expensive to grow food on huge agribusiness farms.  The world would be in a sorry state if the oil ran out.  Still, we drive big, wasteful vehicles and take unnecessary trips.  There is no incentive to conserve the resources we have beyond the money we might save.

The car has changed the face of the world.  With cheap transportation available to all we can enjoy our lives and have more experiences than were possible in olden times.  Unless we come up with new types of vehicles that do not run on limited resources like oil, society may be in for a harsh change in the future.

Once again I have spent the morning reading.  I read a lot.  There is a lot to read on the net.  I enjoy reading.  Even if I am not finding out anything new, it’s like I’m listening to people talk about stuff that interests me.  People have a lot to say.  It’s good for the mind to learn about different things.

I am trying to figure out why some people believe in magic.  Magic is a popular subject.  Look at all the books that people sell about people with magical powers.  J K Rowling has made about a billion dollars with her books about a teenager with magical powers.  Is it just because people want to believe that impossible things are possible that makes them accept such illogical things as real?  I don’t know.  Belief in magic goes back in human history since before recorded history.  It is theorized that the cave paintings were used for magical purposes in catching game.  Man has an innate urge to try to control the world.

I find it strange that in these modern times when humans have found out how to control the environment and utilize sources of energy that some people still believe in magical powers.  The real magic is in science.  Look at medicine.  Long ago doctors used to employ magic spells to try and cure disease.  A Roman physician might prescribe prayers to various gods as well as potions to heal some illness.  Many of the cures were based on superstition.  Now we have found out some of the actual causes of diseases and science has provided us with medicines that actually cure many illnesses.  It wasn’t two hundred years ago that doctors were still using bloodletting to try to cure just about any disease.

So, I read a lot of different websites about thought forms and magical thinking and stuff, and I guess I am a bit sick of the subject now.  I could probably write a whole series of fantasy novels about people with magical powers and sell them to a publisher.  I don’t know why I would do this though.  I get upset sometimes looking through the science fiction book shelves at the book store, because you can not find science fiction buried in all the fantasy books about dragons and magic swords.  I find it odd that people are so entertained by what is basically wrong information.  It’s also kind of funny when you think about it.  All this flawed information about magic that is posted on what is probably the most scientific medium, the Internet.

I took a walk outside an hour ago and looked at the gardens and all the plants and the sky.  It’s good to take a break from things once in a while.  I spent yesterday afternoon weeding out the tomatoes and some of the corn with a hoe.  It was hard work in the hot sun, but it was good to get some work done.  When I finished with the garden work, I sat on the porch swing and read for a couple hours about finance.  Finance makes about as much sense to me as magic.  The systems of trade and money set up on wall street are all contrived and focussed on ripping people off.  None of the financial equations in this book make any kind of sense, because they are all based on estimations.  Finance is a fantasy system set up to trade in virtual wealth.  See how advanced man has become?

The sun is shining today and it’s not too hot outside.  Later I might go out to the garden and hoe all the weeds out of it.  This will be some exercise.  I suppose it’s good to get some exercise.  Work makes a person stronger.

For now I’m just going to sit inside here in my room and read and write a bit.  I don’t really have anything interesting to say this morning.  I watched the news for a while after I woke up and it was starting to get depressing.  They go on and on about the oil crisis and how high the price of petroleum is going to go.  They were talking about $500 a barrel this morning.  Perhaps it’s all the people who bought oil futures that are hoping it will go up this high.  Making money off other people’s problems.  Only on Wall Street.

There was a news story this morning about Winnebago, and a chart that showed how the price of their stock is going down as the price of oil increases.  It’s just obvious that a company that makes big vehicles is going to lose money and sales when the cost of fuel goes up.  People can not afford to burn gas when it gets expensive.  It’s going to cost a lot more to drive to work, and people are already trying to switch over to trains and buses and stuff to take some of the pressure off their wallets from the price of gas.

I’m surprised there’s not a big push by the government to develop solar power and wind power and other petroleum-less alternative energies.  You would think that if people knew that the oil was running out they would use the last of it to build a better long-term solution to the needs for energy.  The whole infrastructure of gas-burning cars is going to have to switch over to something like electric vehicles in the future.  It’s like the Six Million Dollar Man, we have the technology, we can rebuild it.  I think the problem is that people collectively still act like idiots.  Look at all the pointless wars and violence caused by large groups of people.  Collectively we are going to suck the earth dry of petroleum and then we will wonder why we can’t get from point A to point B on the earth.

There is some progress being made in the energy sector.  Already there are many wind and solar power installations.  Brazil gets all its motor fuel from sugar cane alcohol.  Still, the world uses a lot more energy than it gets from renewable sources.  If the price of oil keeps going up it will become economically feasible to build alternative power plants.  Maybe people will start farming algae for oil.  There are a lot of things we can do to get the energy we need.  Even nuclear fission power plants could supply the earth with electricity for thousands of years.  The only problem with nuclear is you need some place to bury all the radioactive waste they generate.  Wind, solar, and hydro power are a lot less polluting.

Right now, most of the sunlight falling on the earth is either being converted into heat or is just bouncing back into space.  A certain amount is being stored by plants as chemical energy.  This is really all we need to live.  Food, water, shelter.  People did not evolve to need jobs.  Human beings are not hive organisms like bees or ants, yet we live that way in the modern world.  If people would be content to stay in one general place all their lives and live simply without a lot of useless stuff they would probably find a happier existence.  Petroleum and fossil fuels give us the power to move around at will and to do more work than a man can do with his muscles alone.  Still, with these sources of energy, we are living on borrowed time, and another source of power should be found before what we have runs out.

I read about a machine yesterday called the Perendev motor.  This motor is said to run on permanent magnets, and is supposed to produce torque and rotation without any input of energy.  The inventors of this motor supposedly improved the design to use electromagnets and offer motor-generator sets for sale.  It seems this motor produces up to 300 kw of power out of nothing but repulsive magnetic fields.  It also seems this is an elaborate hoax to defraud people out of money.

I am just not surprised anymore by what I find posted on the net.  There seems to be a sect that lives in Switzerland that has a machine that produces electricity from a static electric machine for nothing.  They claim the machine runs and produces power with no input.  They claim the device can not be produced by a factory because the manufacturer would not understand the spiritual principles of the machine’s operation.  These people call themselves Methernitha and the device that produces this free energy is called a Thestatika.  I find this information humorous.  People with a ridiculous philosophy and a ridiculous generator living in the cheese district of Switzerland.

All these devices prey upon the same human fault: greed.  There are a lot of people who want something for nothing.  In a way, the entire economic system is based on greed.  Still, if you build a flashy looking electrical machine full of motion and sparks and claim it produces free energy, you will no doubt find some suckers to give you some money.  It seems the Perendev motor people have been taking orders for their free energy generator sets and are just pocketing the cash in return for a lot of excuses for why they have never delivered a device, working or not.  On their website they show a doctored picture of a John Deere generator as if it is a photo of their own product.  How can people run such an obvious scam in public on the net and not get busted?

The only thing close to a perpetual motion machine is the entire universe, and even that might not last forever.  You can not get energy from nothing.  Energy is neither created nor destroyed.  Energy changes form from potential to kinetic and back again.  The laws of nature do not allow you to get something for nothing.  The only reason that there are so many perpetual motion proposals is because somebody wants to get money from people for nothing.  I can’t believe that in the modern age when anyone can get almost any information they want, people still fall for these hucksters selling free energy devices.