DavidsPhysicsBlog

Musings on three P's: physics, politics and photography

[davidsphysicsblog]

The sock paradox

Well, Donald Trump has been indicted on federal charges in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. Preservation of democracy aside, yesterday was an important day for physicists and the US Patent Office alike, because if there’s one thing physicists and the USPTO can agree on is that there can be no perpetual motion machines. We take physical law as seriously as Trump scoffs at federal law. The endless road to indictment was getting tedious. “Mr. Michelangelo, when will you make an end?” To paraphrase Alexander Pope it seemed Trump “never was but always to be indicted!” So peace reigns again in heaven and on Earth.

I can go back to worrying about physical law, Newton’s first law of motion in particular.

“Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare.”

Oh sorry!

“Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.”

Firstly, I point out, it’s “every body” not “everybody.” The difference is not inconsequential. And saying this in a more colloquial fashion, it’s “a body at rest tends to remain at rest, a body in motion tends to remain in motion.” At least that’s how my first year physics professor put it.

Note there was already some hanky panky. hedging going on here with that word “tends.” Which is why it is important to look at Newton’s original Latin text. Newton doesn’t hedge his bets. He meant “will.”

But I have found a contradiction. I call it “my sock paradox.” I go to my sock draw in the morning, extract the pair I want to wear for the day, the others lie at rest in the drawer, seemingly snug together. I close the drawer and inevitably some sock jumps up to jam the closing. See figure above. What the hell!

God is in her heaven. Why has she chosen to piss both me and Newton off? What happened to all this “Corpus omni perseverare …” stuff?

At first, I thought it might be that Newton’s point about “motion in a right line,” might mean that his first law might only apply to Republicans. But no one is above the law, and Newton clearly saw this coming. “Unless it is compelled …” The goddess is clearly so upset over the “Roe vs. Wade” reversal that she has imbued my hosiery with negative energy to cause them to jump out of my sock drawer. It is done during the inspection process. And you thought those little slips of paper with numbers were innocent IDs. It’s a secret code between members of a cabal all around the world stuffing malevolence into socks. Never forget that,”Inspections have consequences!”

Sock feeling frisky and disobeying Newton’s first law of motion.

[davidsphysicsblog]

Encounters with robots -Part 2 Rumpole

Figure 1 - Messier 81, Bode’s Nebula (c) DE Wolf 2023

Figure 1 is a photograph that I took of Messier 81, Bode’s Nebula two nights ago using iTelescope T24, a 0.61-m f/6.5 reflector, in Auberry, California. It is another example of encounters with robotic eyes. Bodes’s Nebula is a spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. Messier 81 was first discovered by Johann Elert Bode on 31 December 1774; Bode being famous for Titus-Bode’s Law of planetary distances.

At first, I was a bit put off by the lack of sharpness in this image. Artistically it look like a little fuzzy pancake. But then I realized that I had looked at M81 myself with my own telescope the previous night, and that is exactly what it looks like. The appeal lies in the subtle color, in the incredible dynamic range between the galactic core and the outer band; it floats; it is gorgeously ethereal. M81’s core contains a black hole with the mass of 70 million Suns and 15 times the mass of the black hole at the center of our own Milk Way galaxy. Breath taking!

But moving from the sublime to the more mundane, what I really want to talk about today is my Roomba by iRobot. It cleans my house by command either using an app on my cellphone or using Alexa by voice command. My house has never been so clean! Every day I send it to a different room. It is constantly updating its map of my house. Yes, true learning! So, I think a true robotic encounter.

You are encouraged to name your Roomba. Mine is Rumpole. And everyday as I watch him systematically lumber to his task. I think of Leo McKern, who played this character on television.

But really, I tend to be reminded of the nineteen-sixties futuristic TV series “The Jetsons“ and in particular Rosie the Robot, the Jetson family’s XB-500 series robotic maid. Rosie came complete with a little frilly French maids outfit. Like Rumpole, she was forever cleaning.

Futuristic fiction always bears the flavor of modern times. The Jetsons takes place in a temporarily displaced 1960’s. It carries forward all the prejudices and quirks of the 60’s. Worse, of course, is Star Trek. Did we truly hope that the future would be just as sexist as the then present? Rosie is a human-like machine that pushes a vacuum around. Makes no sense from an engineering perspective. Rumpole takes a deep dive under the couch, in the search of alien dust bunnies. Indeed, on his first mission in my bedroom, he had an encounter with a paper towel under my bed. Rumpole growled a bit and spit it out. The paper towel did not fare as well.

(c) DE Wolf 2023

[davidsphysicsblog]

Encounters with robots - Part I

Figure 1 - Messier 51, the Great Whirlpool Nebula photographed by the author using Robotic Telescope T18 on the iTelescope.net network

To people of my generation, the concept of robots began first with Robby the Robot Toy of the 1950’s and more so with the stories of Isaac Asimov, and of the Hallmark Hall of Fame, science fiction at its height. We dreamed of a world of robots and androids and pondered weighty issues such as whether they would be programmed with a prime directive “to bring no harm to humans” and whether we would be so kind in return.

Well, fiction becomes truth! For decades robots built our automobiles, farmed our farms, baked and packaged cookies for us. But they were huge ungainly contraptions, and there was no sense that theycould be interacted with directly. Well, wake up Rip van Winkle! I find that I have come to consciousness in 2023 and encounter robots everywhere. They have crept up on us, and they now surround us, not necessarily in a threatening way but as our helpers. And, indeed, the word “consciousness” rings true. We have come to grapple with the question of their sentience and awareness, even if we like to tuck it away somewhere safe.

When I was a teenager I was very “into” amateur astronomy. Back then if you wanted to see something with your telescope, a star, planet, or galaxy say, you pulled out your Norton’s Star Atlas and carefully “star hopped” from some bright star following the map field by field until if you were lucky found the desired object. Recently, telescopes have evolved with various complex auto-alignment systems. Well, I will have to admit that with age crawling around in various awkward positions to look under and over my telescope to get it aligned, more often than not defeated me. It was all very frustrating! Recently I added the Celestron StarSense Autoalignment System to my telescope. It is a little robot that you tell to align my scope and it does. Then you tell it what you want to look at and it goes there and tracks the object. Purists may argue that this is very algorithmic and not true artificial intelligence. But it is truly marvelous, arguably the best thing ever, and it is robotics at its very best, since it takes a difficult task for humans adn makes it easy and trivial. That in the end is what robotics is all about. Farming the Earth and building automobiles is one thing, aligning my telescope quite another! I call my telescope Celeste. My telescope now is smart enough to have a name if not a soul.

Still there is the problem that I would like to have Celeste high on a mountain top and I would like her to have a larger aperture so that I could take marvelous astrophotographs. Enter the age of robotic eyes, telescopes that you can control remotely, all located in distant sites perfect for astrophotography – places like Nerpio, Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. I took Figure 1 of Messier 51, the Great  Whirlpool Nebula using a 12 inch robotic telescope (T18) on the iTelescope network. I have also used robotic telescopes on the Skygems Remote Observatories network.  The proposition is a simple one. You control the telescope, either in real time or on a schedule, and the telescope takes the image. Then you download and image process it on your home computer. These encounters with robotic eyes are truly wonderful and enriching.

Purists will argue that this is not the same as taking the image yourself on your own telescope. I feel about this the same way that I feel about the argument that film-based analogue photograph is purer and better than digital photography. In fact, our cameras have become robots and through the combination of automatic analysis of the scene and high dynamic range digital imaging sensors have freed us of cumbersome analysis of the image, freed us to be artists. So often I hear “show me the camera’s raw image,” as if that were somehow truer and purer. I personally always shoot in raw, but I process, true to the point made by Ansel Adams that “You do’nt take a photograph. You make it.”

So three robots enriching my life anyway: the Celestron StarSense Autoalign, robotic telescopes, and my digital camera. I am truly Rip van Winkle, awakening in a Brave New World. To paraphrase Miranda in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,”

O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous [machinekind] is! O brave new world That has such [robots] in’t!

[davidsphysicsblog]

Relinking and rethinking

My last blog here was April 13, 2020; so three years ago minus one month. That puts it in the middle of the 2020 election season and at the worst of COVID. I quit because of the election; so much vitriol on both sides. I just couldn’t take it anymore. And that has not gotten any better. These are scary, and for our little republic, tenuous times. We hang by a thread, and who’s that guy with the scissors? Probably it is some Supreme Court justice, or maybe the Speaker of the House.

From A. E. Housman “The Shropshire Lad,”

“Oh I have been to Ludlow fair  And left my necktie God knows where,  And carried half way home, or near,  Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:  Then the world seemed none so bad,  And I myself a sterling lad;  And down in lovely muck I've lain,  Happy till I woke again.  Then I saw the morning sky:  Heigho, the tale was all a lie;  The world, it was the old world yet,  I was I, my things were wet,  And nothing now remained to do  But begin the game anew.”

I don’t know the answer, friend, only the problem!

Three years ago was surrealistic and looking at my few blogs of that vintage they represent a kind of time capsule. Remember the fear? Remember the loneliness? Remember sterilizing your food as best you could? Remember “Yoga with Adrienne” and Zooms with friends and family to maintain your sanity and connection?

We came out of it - those lucky enough to come out of it - rather scarred and isolated. Everyone invariably now has their noses in their cell phones, avoiding visual contact, and the common curtesies of watching where you are going are now gone. It is Lewis Carol’s “Caucus Race” revisited.

“I will tell you how the Dodo managed it. First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (“the exact shape doesn’t matter,” it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no “One, two, three, and away,” but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out “The race is over!” and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, “But who has won?””

So we awake to, or rather into, a Brave New World” These social media platforms have become even more shallow and perplexing. It may be that they are worth abandoning again, maybe permanently. I am sure some AI application will inform me of my chosen path shortly. You can be pretty sure it won’t be straight and narrow.

(c) DE Wolf 2023

[davidsphysicsblog]

Social-distancing with the Derby Street Dinosaurs

Like most of you, I have been hunkering down in isolation and maintaining safe-distancing. I haven't posted in quite a while and since I've been walking in broad circles, for exercise, every day there hasn't been too much to photograph. Today was such a sunny and beautiful day that I decided to venture to the Salem Waterfront, in all cases maintaining a safe social-distance and wearing my face mask. What was there to see? In fact, I was so giddy to be out that I started photographing everything and over the next few days I'm going to post some of these images.

Figure 1 - Parking is free, but there is nowhere to go! (c) DE Wolf 2020

The first thing that I saw this morning was that the Federal Street Parking Lot was largely devoid of cars; so there were so many available spots. And then there was the scene of Figure 1. The parking stations were covered with trash bags. All of this means that parking was free but there was no where to go!

The town was quiet and largely deserted. You just had to be wary and shift sides of the street, if you saw someone coming. I wandered down Orange Street to Hawthorne's Customs House and then along Derby Street to the House of Seven Gables. Along the way I stopped to maintain a safe-distance from the Derby Street Dinosaur (Figure 2). You may recall a previous photo of him from a few months back, wearing a stovepipe hat fro Christmas. It is very important that he not get sick because he suffers from a chronic case of brontosaurus bronchitis.

Figure 2 - Practicing safe distancing with the Derby Street Dinosaur, (c) DE Wolf 2020.

Finally, I took the image of Figure 3, which leads me to an important question. With a deadly respiratory virus raging and killing our fellow citizens, why would anyone? Do they still think it all a hoax?

Figure 3 - Do they think it's all a hoax?

I will post more. But in the meantime, stay healthy and safe, dear readers and friends! It has been said that the trouble with our times is that we have no saints. That is wrong, our first responders, nurses, doctors, truck drivers, grocery workers, and delivery people who face this enemy for us every day are our saints!

[davidsphysicsblog]

Drinking life to the lees

“It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees…”

And so begins Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s truly wonderful poem Ulysses. There are a lot of life lessons to be learned from that poem, about perseverance, endurance, and living. “Lees” are, of course, the sediment at the bottom of a bottle of wine. And the phrase “drinking life to the lees” means “to the very last drop.” I first read that in High School and this phrase, and others from that poem, are never far from the conscious surface of my mind.

And so this morning, as I was drinking my morning coffee and staring into the nearly finished cup, the physicist within me marveled at the pattern of the residual grounds, the lees, and Tennyson came to my mind and it is all captured in The figure below.

But there is more, the physicist within me once stirred is not easily quieted, and I find took great joy in the little fractal rivers that carve the “Mississippi Delta” out of the caffeine laden mud. They are fractal yes, random little twists and turns of unpredictability. But they are not fractal in the sense that there is a physics driven size scale to the pattern that we see – driven by surface tension, ground size, and imperfections in the surface of the cup. Famously. in the movie Jurassic Park Ian Malcolm explains to Ellie Satler how subtle variations cause chaos in the descent of a drop of water down her hand. It is a great seduction scene and presents the essence of chaos theory right there in the bottom of the coffee cup.

When I was in graduate school there was the proud tradition of coffee and donuts before seminars. And there was a great black indolent dog, named KT, whom everybody loved and who only came alive for donut time. You would bring your little styrofoam cup into the seminar with you and then quietly massage it into a work of art – the best being to turn it inside out patiently until it resembled a sombrero. Then too there is the tradition of studying the physics of the coffee cup. Upon looking carefully you truly may find the universe in a cup of coffee. It so wonderfully mimics the physics of mega-scale phenomena like stellar dynamics and the thermal engines that drive the currents of the terrestial atmosphere and oceans.

Tomorrow morning, as you drink your cup of morning Joe, pause a moment and reflect on the meaning of life and the physics of the cosmos. It is all so near and yet so far away.

[davidsphysicsblog]

Why does it seem that my cellphone is spying on me?

In his seminal book, “The Singularity is Near – When Humans Transcend Biology,” Ray Kurzweil laments the fate of Artificial Intelligence (AI): “An underlying problem with artificial intelligence that I have personally experienced in my forty years of in the area is that as soon as an AI technique works, it is no longer considered AI and is spun off in its own field …” Kurzweil then goes on to give the example of speech recognition – although if you both listen and watch the closed captions to the nightly news, you might wonder how intelligent this recognition is. Still that point has stuck with me since I first read The Singularity is Near, when it first came out in 2005.

Well, friends there is no longer any denying the existence of AI in our lives. We have moved beyond what has been referred to as the “Dark Age of AI.”We’ve got everything from intelligent toaster ovens to self-driving automobiles. Recently, I saw, with a shutter, a news clip about self-driving eighteen wheelers. Yikes, I thought. But then I considered how many people have been wiped out by drowsy truck drivers. Which is better, which is worse?

Now, I am a great proponent of futurism. More importantly, I recognize that there is no denying technology, any more than there is denying climate change. There are good reasons to fear it, especially if your job is in jeopardy. Ultimately all our jobs are in jeopardy. But there is no stopping it. Technology always outruns its own ethical basis.  It has no morality. It just is. And the Luddites, who in the early nineteenth century rose up and destroyed textile machinery because they feared it would take away their means of employment are now reduced merely to a fancy word and a footnote. As I type this AI programs “spellcheck” me and “autocorrect” my grammar. Both of those words exist in the language only because of the AI revolution.  So, they are taking over our language as well.

There is also the nostalgia factor. My IPad and my Kindle do not feel or smell like a book. I so love these tactile and olfactory experiences. But the fact is that my whole library, which is voluminous, could easily fit in digital form on my computer devices, and I read at least three times faster electronically than on paper. Although one might ask, what the rush is? Ultimately, where this nostalgia is concerned we become like Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Minever Cheevy.”

“Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,

Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;

He wept that he was ever born,

And he had reasons.

 Miniver loved the days of old

When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;

The vision of a warrior bold

Would set him dancing.

 Miniver sighed for what was not,

And dreamed, and rested from his labors;

He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,

And Priam’s neighbors.

 Miniver mourned the ripe renown

That made so many a name so fragrant;

He mourned Romance, now on the town,

And Art, a vagrant.

 Miniver loved the Medici,

Albeit he had never seen one;

He would have sinned incessantly

Could he have been one.

 Miniver cursed the commonplace

And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;

He missed the mediæval grace

Of iron clothing.

 Miniver scorned the gold he sought,

But sore annoyed was he without it;

Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,

And thought about it.

 Miniver Cheevy, born too late,

Scratched his head and kept on thinking;

Miniver coughed, and called it fate,

And kept on drinking.”

 Isn’t it wonderful how all I needed to do was to type “Minever Cheevy” into my search engine, a form of AI and the whole text, which I first read on paper in high school pops up? This is but the first stage in the development of Kurzweil’s bionic man-machine.

And as I was typing the last, my cellphone dinged with the message from Bloomberg News that:

“Medical apps have made it easier than ever for doctors to treat people without ever seeing them in person.”

Is this getting just a bit spooky?

Which brings me to what I really wanted to discuss. I recently read Michael Chertoff’s “Exploding Data: Reclaiming Our Cyber Security in the Digital Age.” This book describes the megadata on each of us, which seems merely a collection of useless facts. Where we were every minute of the day, what we bought, what we ate, what we spent, and on and on. It is not the individual facts that are significant, but the Gestalt, that ultimately presents the threat, not just to individual privacy an liberty, but to national and world security.

Allow me to quote the ninth amendment to the United States Constitution. Yes, Republican friends there is more than the second amendment, which protects the right of madmen to buy assault rifles. But the little ninth amendment says merely:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

This is your right to privacy, people! The government does not belong in your workplace, in your home, or in your bedroom, for instance. And when we allow ourselves to be monitored 24-7, we give up that right, in part or in total.

And on the security side. Connect your home to the internet with devices such as smart electric meters for instance, where “the bad guys” have implanted administrative codes in the chips they made for us and we bought because they are cheap, and they can shut down our power grids.

In 2004, yes fifteen years ago, the Israeli military assassinated Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader and founder of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, by landing a smart missile in the lap of the wheelchair-bound Sheik Yassin. I am not suggesting that you have anything to fear from the fact that your own iPhone is tracking your whereabouts in real-time.

What has freaked me out was an IM session that I was having with a friend on my IPhone to set up a time to meet for coffee. When we had settled as to time and place, I went to add it to my calendar, hit the add button, and there it was Name of Person, Name of place, and time all neatly pre-entered for me. Starting with OS 10.0, we are now up to OS 12.2, the operating system has AI algorithms that search your texts and emails in this way. For convenience, right? I’m sorry it seems not so much as helpful as creepy and an invasion of privacy.

I am reminded of a second poem. This by W. H. Auden and called “To the Unknown Citizen.” Perhaps we might modernize the title to “To the Unknown Citizen and his Megadata.”

(To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be

One against whom there was no official complaint,

And all the reports on his conduct agree

That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a

saint,

For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.

Except for the War till the day he retired

He worked in a factory and never got fired,

But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.

Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,

For his Union reports that he paid his dues,

(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)

And our Social Psychology workers found

That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.

The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day

And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.

Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,

And his Health-card shows he was A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content

That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;

When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.

He was married and once in hospital but left it cured.

Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare

He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan

And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,

added five children to the population,

Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his

generation.

And our teachers report that he never interfered with their

education.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: e heard.

I feel a need to return photographically to a simpler time, to turn back the clock to the Willoughby of Twilight Zone fame, to a more mechanical time. The time of carburetors, now replaced by AI chips called injection systems.

(c) DE Wolf 2019.

[davidsphysicsblog]

The 108th Anniversary

Today is the 108th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. On March 25th, 1911, 146 people, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women lost their "American Dream" and died in the course of eighteen horrible minutes. Remember them when tempted to forgo constitutional norms in favor of political exigencies. Remember them when tempted to deny a century of social reform in the pursuit of Golden idols. We must never forget them.

(C) DE Wolf 2019

[davidsphysicsblog]

Who are these morons, and why has the Do Not Call Registry failed us?

They are after our money with a vengeance – a litany of calls offering nothing of value, threatening us with FBI arrest and IRS foreclosure. It is endless and unrelenting. I finally realized that 99.9 % of the calls coming into my landline were from” these morons;” so, I finally disconnected my answering machine and notified the two “techno dinos” that still used my landline number that if they wanted reach me, they had better call my cell. My cat who must endure the endless calls and beeping from the answering machine, and feign feline indifference, breathed an audible sigh of relief. I could, of course, have gotten rid of this line altogether, but I preserve it for my antiquated alarm system. All are “techno dinos” to a degree.

And the bad news continues. It is expected that this year 50% of cell phone calls will also be spam calls. The rate of growth in spam calls is astounding. According to the call protection company First Orion, which analyzed data from 50 billion calls over 18 months, 3.7% of total calls in 2017 were spam. This jumped ten-fold to 29.2% in 2018 , and its predicted this will rise further to 44.6% by early 2019 and far from finally to 50% by years end. Wow!

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched the Do Not Call Registry on June 27, 2003, and at first it worked well for us. What happened? We can especially ask that question in light of the fact that they continue to prosecute violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, which established the registry.

The problem is that technology has outpaced the little FTC. Banks of robots are flaunting the law and making calls through the internet. The worst of it is the ability to disguise phone numbers to resemble local calls, from your neighbors. Why is my “local carper cleaning company” calling me from Montana? I get three or four of these calls a day. I used to send texts like “I’m on my Way,” only to receive neighborly calls from the true owners saying I sent my message to the wrong number.

And, of course, Washington’s response to its own impotence is to privatize by passing the buck on to the carriers. I now get caller ID’s from Verizon that begin with “SPAM?”

So, the situation is not promising. We are left to hope that some software genius somewhere will create a wonder app for us to screen our calls. I’ve tried some of the current ones and they haven’t helped.

In the end, in answer to “who are these morons,?” We return to physics and I am reminded of a T-shirt that I saw at a kiosk in the mall recently. “The Universe is made of protons, neutrons, electrons, & morons.”

(c) DE Wolf 2019

[davidsphysicsblog]

On Astronomical Rarity

I am newly returned to a hobby of my youth amateur astronomy; so I went out on Wednesday night to photograph the super worm equinox moon. What does that mean? First, the moon was super because the full moon occurred when it was closest in its orbit to Earth. Second, it was the March full moon; so the worm moon, the first full moon of spring. You know bringing out the worms in the freshly thawed ground and all that. Wish they had called it the robin moon, instead of the yucky worm moon. Third, the full moon occurred on the night of the equinox when the moon cross the ecliptic. It was, we were warned, the last super moon of the year; wouldn’t want to miss that, however cold it was outside

I will share here a photograph of this super worm equinox moon. Notably, I took it with a hand-held, image stabilized, 640 mm lens with an ISO of 1600 at f/8.0 at 1/3200 sec.

Everything in astronomy is like that . “The next time you see that, you’ll already be dead,” is the common refrain. So you schlep out, and schlep your telescope out to see it, whatever it is. My favorite was waiting all those years to see Halley’s comet in 1986, which was a big disappointment; though I did see it. The next one will be in 2062. Sorry to say that I’m pretty sure I won’t be around for that. Which is also roughly when they predict that we will have computers with the processing power of the human race. Now that might be worth hanging around for, were it not for the prediction that by then global warming will have caused the demise of all the coffee growing places on Earth. A world without coffee? Yikes.

This is a lot like those silly date games. In 1961, Junior Scholastic alerted me that this was last time until 6009 that the year would be the same right side up and upside down. Wow, so long? I mean the last one was 1881, a mere eighty years prior. Needless to say, there is a word for this, a strobogrammatic year! Younger people may remember the dawn of the millennium on 01-01-01. That was followed the next year with 02-02-02. The party ended for almost another century with 12-12-12.

Then, of course, there is Pi Day every March 14th. That is 3-14.  On March 12, 2009 the US Congress passed a non-binding resolution officially recognizing Pi Day. Congress agreed to something? I point that out nostalgically. And you may remember super Pi day, which carried the absurdity out to five digits on 3-14-15. 

The significance of all of this kind of thing is reminiscent of Gilbert and Sulivan’s Ruddigore, namely

This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter            Isn't generally heard, and if it is it doesn't matter,            This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter            Isn't generally heard, and if it is it doesn't matter,            matter, matter, matter, matter, matter,            matter, matter, matter, matter, matter!

(C) DE Wolf 2019