It's another book about Donald Trump and his presidency.  It's also probably the last book I'll read on that subject, since I now know more about Trump than I want to know.  It's like reading a book about crap.  How many books do you want to read on that subject?  I only read it because it on the top 10 bestseller list for awhile, and a lot of the reviews said it was "a very funny book."  It was definitely funny in parts, but you soon get tired of humor about crap.  It's currently #24 on USA Today's list of bestsellers.

Here's a quote from the book:

From the start, Trump’s main trick was not to convince anyone that he was pure but rather to convince people that everyone else was dirty. Everybody lied and cheated at golf, on their spouses, and on their taxes. Trump was just better at being dirty, proving how smart and savvy he was. Only losers got hung up on the unspoken rules of the capital.

Another:

Were Republican leaders so unwilling to condemn Trump because their voters supported him so vigorously, or did these voters support Trump so vigorously because so few Republican leaders ever dared condemn his actions? Chicken, egg; egg, chicken.

And another quote from near the end of the book:

Biden’s inauguration included no mention of Donald Trump, the newly departed and deplatformed commander in chief who skipped town early in the morning with yet another unpleasant distinction to his name: he was the first president in 152 years to refuse to attend the swearing-in of his successor. It was probably for the best.

While the book was well written and funny in parts, I can only recommend it if you know nothing about Trump and want to learn something about him.  In that case, you might really enjoy the book a lot.

Meanwhile, the price of gas at the station down the street from me jumped another 15 cents today.  It's now $3.899 per gallon, up from $3.749 per gallon.  On August 11 it was $3.599 per gallon. That's an increase of 30 cents in 4 days!

Introduction                                Page   1
Chapter  1  -  What Einstein Knew           Page   3
Chapter  2  -  Stationary Points in Space   Page   6
Chapter  3  -  What is Light?               Page  11 Chapter  4  -  c+v and c-v                  Page  20
Chapter  5  -  Radar Guns and Relativity    Page  29
Chapter  6  -  Time Dilation                Page  44 Chapter  7  -  The Twin Paradox             Page  58
Chapter  8  -  What is Time?                Page  65
Chapter  9  -  The Variable Speed of Light  Page  69
Chapter 10  -  Inertial Systems             Page  71 Chapter 11  -  General Relativity           Page  76
Chapter 12  -  The Edge of Reality          Page  81
Chapter 13  -  The Big Bang                 Page  84
Chapter 14  -  Mathematics vs Reality       Page  94
Chapter 15  -  The Textbook Problem         Page 101
Chapter 16  -  Our Conflicted World         Page 119
Chapter 17  -  Physics' Most Sacred Belief  Page 125
Chapter 18  -  Conclusion                   Page
About the Author                            Page

Me: Having TWO DIFFERENT MATHEMATICAL MODELS for how light works, and sometimes using one model and sometimes using the other MEANS YOU HAVE A PROBLEM!!!!

Volney: No, it means that that model sometimes has light behaving like particles and sometimes like waves.  A more modern BETTER model, such as QED/QFT resolves this, but using older models is often simpler.

Me: In SCIENCE they work to SOLVE PROBLEMS.

Volney: By creating better (but never perfect) models.

Me: Mathematicians evidently prefer to LIVE WITH THE PROBLEM.

Volney: What problem? Mathematicians are interested in abstract concepts like numbers, not physics.

Me: Experiments show how light works.

Volney: Yes, and experiments disagree with many of your beliefs.

Me: WHICH EXPERIMENTS disagree with what I've written?

anyway, since the gay actor, no party/politician puppet, cocaine zelenske wants Crimea, a Rusian territory, as a military base (actually wanted already from 2014) I guess the Russians have choices, other then to regain Odessa, formally also a Romanian territory, then kick out the nazi uKranoids from the Black Sea. Then re_part the fictitious uKraine among Poland, Hungary, Romania, Belarus and Russia,

but you don't understand the cocaine zelenske is cocaine. You like want the proofs, but you don't want the proofs. The entire parliaments standing up, in standing ovation, to the images of the cocaine zelenske, ordering stuff and money from them. What a f**king shame. This alone puts down the entire capitalist western europe. What a shame, what a disgrace, what a f**king idiots put in charge to destroy own countries and s**t on the face of their own people.

NaZilensky's Downward Spiral Continues

What an idiot. Frogeting two atmic bombs over his country.

He West can't stop Putin.

At first I wanted to pre-judge your paper. But then some of your insights really electrified me, because I had seen them exactly in my experiments.

The author has now revised the page and retracted the claim that the experiments support variable speed of light. The descriptions of the experiments and their relation to the author's claims are not better than they were.

I'm working on a paper that will explain everything in detail. Yes, I was wrong. The experimenters all claimed that light can be received at c+v and c-v where v is the speed of an observer moving toward or away from the oncoming photons. I accepted what the experiments claimed. Now I see that the experimenters misinterpreted their own data. They didn't understand how kinetic energy can be added to a photon. I didn't, either, until recently.

When I finish my new paper in a week or so, I'll start a new thread about it.

I does not make sense to say that light is received at c+v or c-v or c. Light, like anthing else, only has a speed between two events, as the speed is the ration of the distance to the diration of those two events. Reception is a single event so does not have a distance nor a duration.

The experiments presented on the page http://www.ed-lake.com/Variable-Speed-of-Light-Experiments.html don't observe the enrgy of the photon. They measure the time of flight or difference between two times of flight.

The measured shift was 230 parts in 1000, with an accuracy of 5 parts in 1000. The predicted shift was 237 parts in 1000. According to Michelson/Gale, the experiment is compatible with both the idea of a stationary ether and special relativity.

It is troubling that there are no unambiguous, positive experimental results in the photon sector to support the local Lorentz invariance of c.

  

July 29, 2022 - Monday through Thursday, and sometimes on Friday I use my DVR to record a bunch of different late night talk shows: Stephen Colbert's "The Late Show," Seth Meyers'  "Late Night," Trevor Noah's "The Daily Show," Jimmy Kimmel's "Jimmy Kimmel Live," Samantha Bee's "Full Frontal" and sometimes Jimmy Fallon's "The Tonight Show" when he has interesting guests.  Then I watch those shows the next evening, skipping over the commercials, the music guests and anything else that doesn't seem interesting to me.

I'm sometimes surprised when they talk about news stories that I didn't see on the news shows I watch.  Last night there was a good example on "The Daily Show."  Trevor Noah talked about how some counties in Oregon want to secede from Oregon and become part of Idaho.  Huh? 

Checking the Internet this morning, I found lots of news stories about it. There are even some counties in Washington State and California that want to become part of "greater Idaho."



There are 9 counties in Oregon which have already voted to become part of Idaho, and 2 more which plan to vote that way.

It's all about politics, of course.  Idaho is conservative, and conservative Republican counties in Oregon want to secede from the liberal parts of Oregon and become part of conservative Idaho.

Fortunately, it cannot be done via a simple vote by a county.  It requires approval from the United States Congress, plus the state governments of Idaho and Oregon.  That could be a problem since the counties that want to join Idaho are mostly rural and have only 9% of Oregon's population while having 62% of Oregon's land.

Meanwhile, even though I can skip over the commercials on the evening talk shows, I watch the evening news directly and therefore cannot skip over their commercials.  And right now most of the commercials are about different candidates for Wisconsin governor, the U.S. Senate and congress.  And the Republicans seem to be running some of the nastiest people I've ever seen.  They not only use lies to attack the Democrats, they seem to be even more vicious when they attack each other.

That sometimes seems to be the only "good news" on TV.  Republicans are attacking each other.  

July 27, 2022 - Hmm.  The price of gas at the station down the street dropped another 10 cents.  The price of regular is now $3.99

People like to say that Democrats and Republicans now live in two separate realities, but that is incorrect. Democrats live in the real world, and Republicans live in a deeply delusional alternative ecosystem. The insurrection and the subsequent rewriting of history are proof that the Republicans have mastered a form of politics that depends on disinformation and propaganda. They have built a megaphone that drowns out the truth and any and all dissenting views.

Over a period of decades, the Republican Party built up a massive propaganda and disinformation apparatus that allows them to dominate politics despite representing a shrinking share of the electorate. This “MAGA megaphone” is embodied by Fox News and powered by Facebook and gives the GOP the power to bend reality.

No matter his original intent, Mark Zuckerberg had built a pro-Trump platform. No matter what they tell themselves, the people working for Facebook are working to push Trumpism. Without Facebook, there is no Trump. Without Facebook, there is no January 6 insurrection. And if Trump is reelected president in 2024, it will be because of Facebook.  

  It addresses the issue that caused me to get bogged down on my book.  I've been working on an outline for the new paper, but there's a part that I still have to thoroughly research and study.

In "Situation #1 in the illustration below, we have a police officer pointing a radar gun at an oncoming car.  The photons emitted by the gun have a specific oscillation frequency as they travel to the target, and they have a shorter oscillation frequency (more oscillations per second) when they return from the target.  The difference in oscillation frequencies allows the gun to compute the speed of the target to be 100 mph.  

  

In "Situation #2," the radar gun is pointed at a different target that is moving at a 90 degree angle to the radar gun.  In that situation, the gun emits photons with the same oscillation frequency as in "Situation #1," but the photons that return to the gun are no different from the photons the gun originally emitted, so the gun computes no speed for the target.

Since both cars are moving faster than the stationary radar gun, Time Dilation should be (and evidently is) involved in both cases.  But the energy that is measured by the oscillation frequencies of the photons plays a bigger role.  In "Situation #2" above, the car is moving at 100 mph, which means that a second is longer for the car than for the gun.  So the target receives photons that have more oscillations per second than what was transmitted by the gun.  But when the target sends photons back to the radar gun, because the gun is moving slower than the target, the gun receives photons that have fewer oscillations per second than what the target emitted.  The result is that the gun gets back photons that are identical to the photons it emitted.

What is different about the two situations that causes the radar gun to perform totally differently?  It appears to be the "cosine effect."  If the target was moving at a 45 degree angle, instead of 90 or zero, the gun would show a speed of 70 mph.  A 50 degree angle would show a speed of 64 mph.  A 60 degree angle to the target would how a speed of 50 mph.  80 degrees shows 17 mph.   I need to figure out how to explain why the angle at which the photon's oscillating electric and magnetic fields hit the target makes such a difference.  It's easy to describe logically and visually, but I need to find a way to explain it so that mathematicians cannot dispute it.

The Lorentz Invariance is at the heart of special relativity, which predicts, among other things, that the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant 186,282 miles (299,791 kilometers) per second, whatever the situation.

What, then, is creativity? It is the innate quest for originality. The driving force is humanity’s instinctive love of novelty—the discovery of new entities and processes, the solving of old challenges and disclosure of new ones, the aesthetic surprise of unanticipated facts and theories, the pleasure of new faces, the thrill of new worlds. We judge creativity by the magnitude of the emotional response it evokes.

creativity: the ability to make or otherwise bring into existence something new, whether a new solution to a problem, a new method or device, or a new artistic object or form.

Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, the ultimate feminist warrior, defeats some of the most terrifying aliens ever to invade a Hollywood set.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). One-armed World War II veteran thrashes a racist bully.

Casablanca (1942). In the end, a noble character shines through Bogart’s bluster and cynicism.

Alien (1979). An intense atmospheric exploration of a newly discovered planet, and a super-efficient monster parasite waiting there. With Aliens and The Thing (2011, remake of the 1982 film by John Carpenter), among the best science fiction horror movies ever made.

Introduction                                Page   1
Chapter  1  -  What Einstein Knew           Page   3
Chapter  2  -  Stationary Points in Space   Page   6
Chapter  3  -  What is Light?               Page  11 Chapter  4  -  c+v and c-v                  Page  20
Chapter  5  -  Radar Guns and Relativity    Page  29
Chapter  6  -  Time Dilation                Page  44 Chapter  7  -  The Twin Paradox             Page  58
Chapter  8  -  What is Time?                Page  65
Chapter  9  -  The Variable Speed of Light  Page  69
Chapter 10  -  Inertial Systems             Page  71 Chapter 11  -  General Relativity           Page  76
Chapter 12  -  The Edge of Reality          Page  81
Chapter 13  -  The Big Bang                 Page  84
Chapter 14  -  Mathematics vs Reality       Page  94
Chapter 15  -  The Textbook Problem         Page 101
Chapter 16  -  Our Conflicted World         Page 119
Chapter 17  -  Physics' Most Sacred Belief  Page 125
Chapter 18  -  Conclusion                   Page
About the Author                            Page

Many many college text books state that physics may sometimes appear contrary to "common sense," but what is "common sense" in the everyday world may not apply to the world of physics.  It also appears to be a way for teachers to stop students from arguing that what is being taught makes no sense.