Epicycles

I had lunch with a friend of mine (Mark, not Marc) today. We were talking about cosmology and quasars and red-shift and dark matter and all that. Neither one us of cares much for the dark-matter theory, not that we had any theoretical basis for our doubts, just our bullshit detectors giving off little warning noises. Than he tells me about Halton Arp who agrees with our view. He actually works in this field and has some basis for his views. Needless to say, he has been excommunicated by the American astrophysicists. Then we move on to epicycles.

Used to be, before Copernicus, that the Ptolemaic (the P is silent) view of the universe prevailed. You know the old story, the Earth is the center of the universe and everything revolves around us. Followers of Ptolemy (the P is still silent) had devised a complicated mechanical model using epicycles to describe how the planets moved. They had been working on this model for centuries, and as time past discrepancies were discovered, and each discrepancy was answered with another epicycle. Their model was so good that when Copernicus came along the Ptolemaic model was more accurate. Problem was that Copernicus assumed the planets were following circular orbits instead of elliptical. Eventually Copernicus was proved right, but it required a fundamental shift in the way people thought about our solar system (at least among people who thought about it at all).

So Mark and I, and Halton Arp and several other people, think we have a similar situation here. The establishment has a very detailed and fairly accurate, but completely wrong theory about how the universe works. There is another view (undoubtedly correct), but it is not going to get a hearing until there is proof, and there is not going to be proof until supporters of this heresy are allowed access to the equipment they need to prove it. It's the old catch-22.

As Mark says: If you take "Dark Matter", translate it to Latin, and read it backwards it spells "epicycle".

Update September 2016 replaced missing picture.

Update February 2021 replaced dead link.

TGV

Someone sent me a story about the French TGV setting a new world speed record. It is almost a year old, but hey, it's still cool. It is also a little scary. Something like that leaves the tracks and it is going to be like an airliner crash. I thought this was interesting:

"The train traveled almost as fast as a World War II Spitfire fighter at top speed."

My wife & I rode the TGV from London to Paris when we went to Europe umpteen years ago. It was shortly after the chunnel was opened. It was comfortable, quiet and smooth and pretty boring. I read most of the way. Did see a lot of French countryside. Looked a lot like Oregon or Iowa. Lots of farms and farmland.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture. TGV record speed: 357 MPH. Spitfire top speed: 363 MPH.

Photo Credits

I really like pictures, and since I figured out how to place them in my blog I have been using more and more of them. But with any new technology comes new problems. My recent post about Seattle had more pictures than text, which kind of screwed up the formatting. So I asked my family for suggestions and they pointed me to a couple of web sites. On one of them I learned about the <"p"> tag (paragraph). I tried it out and it helps. It didn't fix all the problems, but it at least the page is passable now, without a lot extra white space. I think if I am going to do much more of this I am going to need a second monitor.

Most of the pictures I have been using came from the internet. I used them without bothering to give credit to those who provided them. I figured that my use probably fell under the "fair use" category, meaning no one is going to notice. I would not mind giving credit for these pictures (not all are photos) if it was not such a pain.

I will typically do a search for an image, download a bunch that look promising, and then go through the pile and pick out the one that looks best. By that time, the origin of the picture has been lost. Oh, it could be recovered, but what a pain.

What we need is some way to attach credit/copyright information to a picture so that it follows it around. I know there are some people out there who would go in and remove the credit info just because they could, but I am sure there are a lot of people who use pictures who would be happy to have the credit info attached.

Oh, the picture? It was the best one I found when I searched for "photo credits". And it even has the owners name watermarked on it. Watermarking is okay here, but I usually avoid it.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Financial Hype

"Market Capitalization" is a bad term. It is used to mean the value of a company according to its' current stock price. Capital is a quantity of money gathered together for specific purpose, like making the purchases necessary to start a company. A company may sell stock to raise capital for new projects, or to retire debt.

Once the company sells stock, it no longer derives any benefit from any increase in that stock's value. People who buy and sell stock may derive some gain from its' sale, but the company that originally issued it does not, except perhaps some enhancement to its' reputation.

"Market Valuation" would be a better term, as it reflects how much the company is worth on the open market. However, even this can be misleading: without some research it is hard to tell how much of the stock is actually being sold. If 90% of the stock is held by one person with no intention of selling, then the value of the 10% that is on the market does not have much relation to the value of the company.

Bill Gates and Microsoft are a bad example of this. Bill owns most of the stock. The stock that is owned by other people goes up and down, and a lot of people have made a lot of money off of it. But what would happen if Bill decided to cash in a chunk of his stock? I suspect the price would plummet. So although he is rich, it is mostly just on paper. Take away his Microsoft holdings and he is just another billionaire.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Red GT Dream

I had another car dream this morning. I was driving a red GT. It was something like a Lamborghini, it had a similar angular style. I drove into a campus of modern glass and steel office buildings. It was kind of like a college campus, but it was a casino. There was no place to park. I was driving at a polite parking lot pace. I drove around on the walkways until I saw a group of couches and lounge chairs arranged on the grass outside one of the buildings. I used the car to push one of the couches off the grass and onto the sidewalk and then I parked the car where the couch had been. I got out and walked around to the other side of a partition and sat in one of the lounge chairs and started to worry about someone stealing something out of the car.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Seattle Masonry

Took John and daughter to Seattle this weekend to take another look at the University of Washington. Daughter has applied and been accepted, so we thought it might be good idea to take another look before she makes up her mind on where she wants to go. It was an easy trip. We drove up Sunday afternoon, spent the night at the Westin, toured the campus Monday morning and drove home that afternoon. Didn't try to cram as much as possible into our short stay, only had a couple of things scheduled. Walked around downtown for a bit Sunday afternoon, saw a seemingly high proportion of bums, or maybe that is just the suburbanites jaundiced view. Had dinner at PF Chang's, dessert at Coldstone. Basically the same thing we did on our last trip here in May.


The Westin gave us a room in the North tower facing Southwest so we could see Macy's (the old Bon Marche), the harbor, the docks and West Seattle. We were on the 39th floor this time which put us just about the same height as the top of the South tower.

Daughter had homework and she wanted to watch the Oscars. I cannot abide talking heads so John and I went to see the movie "Jumper" at the Cinerama, which was only two blocks away. I thought it was the best movie I have ever seen. It better be, it was the most expensive movie I have ever seen ($10.25). John thought it was terrible.

I read a lot of Science Fiction (see postscript) and I have read a few teleportation stories, but this one took the premise and ran with it in a direction I hadn't seen before. Of course, the business of "Paladins" versus "Jumpers" makes it very similar to the standard vampire storyline. Still, if you can "accept" teleportation, why not throw in a few anti-teleportation fanatics? The best part was teleporting the double decker bus from London into the middle of the desert. I know it was in the previews, but it was better in context. It was really cool, and I enjoyed it.

The Cinerama theater is amazing. It is an old, huge movie theater, right on the edge of downtown. It is not old like in Victorian / Gothic ornateness, more like old from the dawn of the space age. It's got that 70's modern style to it. And it is huge, it even has a balcony.

Monday morning we had breakfast in the hotel "cafe". Not really a cafe, more of a buffet, and ridiculously expensive, but it was easy and they did have a fabulous selection, or maybe I was just hungry. I had a bowl of fresh fruit and a croissanwich and tea. I did not really need to eat so much.

Drove to the University and parked in their massive underground garage. The sign at the front says full, but we are already in the driveway so we drive on in. Turns out it is only the carpool area that is full (90 cents a day). There is plenty of space in the full price area ($11 a day).

Walked across 15th Ave to Schmitz Hall to join the tour. There were only about a dozen people in our group. Guide tells us that during spring break they get as many as 150 people per tour. Most of their visitors come from Oregon, Washington and Alaska.

The tour takes an hour and a half. It is cool outside, but fortunately it is not raining. We walk and then stop and the guide talks. Occasionally we will walk through a building. One building we went through is the old physics building, now renamed "Mary Gates" hall in honor of the Bill Gate's mother and the massive donation he made that paid for renovating and expanding this old building.

We stopped in Red Square, so called because it is paved with bricks that used to be red. The guide claims the name has no political overtones, but you would not expect the University to let him say anything else, would you? After several years exposure to the weather the bricks are more brown than red. There are three tall squarish brick columns here. We noticed them on our last visit and wondered why? I mean no doors, no windows, no apparent use. They appeared to be another piece of stupid modern art. Turns out one of the columns provides ventilation for the underground parking garage. Some one decided one column standing there all by itself would look dumb so they built the other two to give it moral support. Anyway, there is some excuse for these eye catchers.

There was another piece of modern art in this square. A metal pyramid with an upside down, broken obelisk impacting the point. It would have been much cooler if the points were just touching, but there really wouldn't be any way to do that, would there? Well, at least not without adding some sort of external support.

The University has some really ornate stone buildings. They look like they could be ancient European cathedrals or castles or something. They are really quite elaborate. Modern stuff is really hideous in comparison. I suppose it is the pressure of economics. Maybe if we weren't pouring so much money into the military-industrial rathole, we could afford to build something a little nicer. Actually, there is no maybe about it, we could afford a whole bunch of better stuff if we weren't flushing all our money down the drain.

Looking down on Macy's department store from our hotel window, I noticed that the stone facing on the upper three stories was a slightly darker color than the facing on the lower three stories. Evidently this building was expanded sometime in the past. I never noticed this difference in coloration before, or if I did, it did not register. Now I am thinking why didn't they use the same stone as they used originally? Surely they have records of where it came from. Then I realized that maybe they did, it is just that the lower stories have been exposed to the weather longer and so the surface color of the stone has changed.

The builders had a similar problem when they expanded the old physics building into Mary Gates Hall. Here the effect was a little more difficult to detect as the building was faced with bricks of several different colors. Some places the colored bricks formed a pattern, in other places they seemed to have been randomized. You had to look closely to detect the difference. The old part is on the right side of the picture, the new is on the left. Earlier I thought I could see the difference in the photo, now I can't.

Denny Hall, the oldest building on campus, has a newish cupola / bell tower on top. The building is around 100 years old. The bell in the cupola is the orignal, but the cupola itself was replaced about five years ago. It is made of copper and has turned a uniform shade of dark brown. It has lost the luster of new copper, but it has not yet aquired the green patina of long time exposure.


Gas prices are going up, so I was pleased to discover that our mid-sized Japanese SUV (Mitsubishi Endeavor) was getting 30 MPG at 80 MPH.

We saw this tank on a trailer on the way home.


Postscript (I would have called this a sidebar, but I am not going to spend the time right now to figure out how to format a sidebar on this blog.): How do you say "a lot" without using the phrase "a lot"? A great deal? Quite a bit? Vast quantities? More that the average bear? My English teachers all frowned on using the phrase "a lot". It is vague to the point of being meaningless, but so are all the alternatives, unless you want to nail it down to how many books you read in a specific time period. Sometimes I will go for months, or even years, without reading any Science Fiction, but that is usually because I haven't happened across any. I seldom if ever find any in the bargain department at Barnes & Noble and new paperbacks are eight dollars! The last new paperback I bought was by David Weber, one of my old favorites, but I had to put it down after two chapters. He has gone off into this byzantine political nightmare and that just doesn't interest me.

Since we have gone off on a tangent about Science Fiction, I will mention that we stopped at the Magus Bookstore after lunch. I picked up two old stories ($3 each) by Anne McCaffrey, one of favorite authors. These two were predecessors to "Sassinak". I think I now have the complete series, so I can read it in order.

Update August 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Update December 2019 changed Eclipse to Endeavor when I realized I had the car model name wrong. Yea gods, how did that happen?

GMC Suburban Water Pump Replacement - Notes

Update: Part one of this story here.

This was a real shade tree mechanic type operation. Jack's Suburban was parked on the dirt driveway in front of his house in amongst the two dozen monster trees in his front yard. The ground was covered with tree litter making it a little more difficult to find any parts, like screws, that we dropped. We used a pallet of flagstones that were destined for the patio in the back yard, but being as they are heavy, they haven't made it there yet. It was not the best of tables. If we had dropped any small parts in the cracks between the stones, we would still be shifting the flagstones looking for them.

We were fortunate, the weather was very pleasant and no rain, and we didn't lose any parts into the flagstone labyrinth. The sun was shining and we were working in our shirtsleeves. We also came through relatively unscathed. I jammed my thumb into the pump once, and Jack got a cut on his hand, just big enough to decorate it with a little blood.

The steel strap we used to hold the water pump pulley while we unscrewed the fan clutch was a bar about one inch wide, a quarter inch thick and about 18 inches long. The hole for the screw was about 3/8" in diameter and close to one edge. It was also at the end of the bar. I think it would have been better if the hole had been placed about three inches from the end, that way the bar would work in either direction. As it was it only worked in one direction. In the other direction it would swing around until the square end of the bar was pushing against one of the flats of the hex of the fan clutch and would work against the wrench trying to undo it, so we would have to undo the screw holding it, flip the bar around, and put the screw back in.

It is not necessary, or beneficial, to remove the fan from the fan clutch. Matter of fact, it just makes things worse. You do become dexterous at starting and tightening bolts in the confined space between the fan and the pulley. A 16 penny nail with a right angle bend proved useful in aligning the bolt holes in the pulley to the corresponding holes in the water pump.

It would have behooved us to spread a sheet of plastic under the fan and over the undercarriage to keep dropped screws from crawling into the dark recesses of the frame.

We used a pair of channellocks about 10" long to manipulate the spring clamps securing the water hoses. These pliers were pretty new and the teeth were still pretty sharp, which helped. It sometimes took two or three incremental settings to get the clamp from totally relaxed to open enough to go over the lumps in the hose. For instance one grip would get the clamp open enough to go the over the end of the hose, but then you would have to adjust the pliers and take another grip to get it to open up enough so the hose would slide over the hose bib. Bigger pliers could probably have done it in one grip, but I don't know if you could have gotten them in the confined spaces we were working in.

This vehicle was about a '99 model, and it was about half metric and half American, which is really annoying. I could understand this when they started making the changeover to metric about a zillion years ago, but the fact that they still haven't completely changed over to metric makes me think either they are incompetent or lazy. Professional grade nothing. I suppose there could be some kind of internal civil war going on, or maybe they are just waiting for all the fractional engineers to die off.

GMC doesn't make a Suburban anymore. It's now called a Yukon. At first I couldn't remember what the model name was. After all, it's "Chevy Suburban" I think of right off, not "GMC Suburban", but maybe they used the same model name. But look on GMC's website and there is no Suburban to be found, only the Yukon.

Update. Replacing the water pump did not solve the problem. Turned out to be a bad intake manifold gasket which cost about $500 to have repaired at Master Wrench. They have done a number of repairs for Jack and he has always been satisfied.

Update October 2016 replaced missing pictures.