Tag: Learning

Everyone is exposed to elemental nitrogen every day.  Since it makes up about 78% of the atmosphere, it is impossible to avoid.  It is nontoxic, so being impossible to avoid is not in this case a problem.

Actually, it is good thing that nitrogen comprises that much of the atmosphere.  If the atmosphere were much richer in oxygen than it is (around 21%, the rest carbon dioxide and a few others), it would be impossible to fight fires.  More on that later.

In addition to being an inert diluent to oxygen in the atmosphere, nitrogen is also essential for life for many reasons, and we shall examine some of them in a bit.  It is also an essential building block for many important industrial materials and for fertilizers for plants.  Come with us after the fold and we shall examine this important element.

For those of you who read my pieces (here, and my other two regular series, Pique the Geek and My Little Town), you know that I appreciate multitalented individuals.  This artist certainly fulfills that criterion.  Not only a talented musician himself, he is also a studio wizard, outstanding technician, and excellent music producer.

I am not his biggest fan, but I do appreciate his talent and like very much several of his original works.  Please do not take this statement as holding him in some sort of dislike:  I like him very much but there are others that I like better.  This is not to detract from his contributions, but rather to describe my musical tastes.

He has been around for a long, long time with no apparent sign of quitting.  Please come with us to examine the career and some of the better (in my opinion) work of this creative genius.

I usually do not write about pure politics because many others here do it much better than I.  Whilst I keep up with politics, those of you who read my three regular, weekly series know that I am much more of and academic and a storyteller.  However, this is different.

He, and the despicable Sean Hannity have decided that it was wrong to give a proper burial, following the Muslim tradition, of Usama bin Laden was the wrong thing to do.  Nothing could be further from the truth, and I shall use their own favorite catch phrase to nail them.

Grahan and Hannity, and others of a similar mind, are drunk with the passion for revenge.  That is not supposed to be our way.  Justice, not revenge, is the American way, or at least is purported to be so.

This is going to be a busy evening, because there are several things to cover.  First, I shall give a correction to last weeks’ Pique the Geek after the fold.  Next, we shall discuss the very silly notion that 20121221 is the end of times.  Finally, we shall get some more information about 8-track tape technology from one of the original developers.

That is one of the nice things about blogging:  you “meet” a lot of people.  This individual (who gave me permission to identify by name) was on the development team just about from the start, and has written a memoir (JUST for Pique the Geek, by the way) and I shall add parts of it, in suitably sized pieces, at the end of PTG until we reach the end.

I had originally planned to write about the Noble Gases of the Periodic Table, but I happened to be puttering around the house when a TeeVee show about this came on today.  The interesting thing to me is that almost everything is just made up from whole cloth.

Self-deception is not a new cultural phenomenon, but it has always been popular.  Self-deception takes many forms.  Some kinds are harmless, such as the almost universal one of thinking that one is more attractive than one actually is.  Others can be devastating, such as thinking that one is, for example, thinking that one is obese when actually he or she is seriously underweight.  Interestingly, both of these conditions have to do with self image.  As a matter of fact, many kinds of self-deception have to do with self image.

There are other kinds as well.  In many of those cases it is not just an individual having deceptive thoughts herself or himself, but rather is encouraged to cleave to ideas that the individual probably deep down believes not to be true.  This is the basis of the idea of propaganda, when ideas are planted by outside sources.  There is one big movement that is current and we shall talk about it at some length.  

Easter is in Christendom the holiest day of the liturgical calender, celebration the day of the rising of Christ from the dead.  The purpose of this piece is not to discuss any particular religious viewpoint, but rather to look into the history of Easter and thus to understand some of the peculiar customs that are now associated with Easter.

This is not a “hard science” piece, but rather more of an analysis of how the modern Easter came to be.  Many of you who are regular readers know that my interests are much broader than just science and technology, and history is one of them.  However, I do believe that this piece is worthy of being called Geeky.

Before we get to the very ancient traditions that predate Judaism, not to mention Christianity, we shall look at how the date for Easter is calculated.  If it seems like Easter is very late in the year for 2011, this is because it is.

Most of you that read my posts know that I am an avid fan of Doctor Who.  I am not ashamed of that at all, and like the new ones very much, but they are not anything like the classic ones that ran from 1963 to around 1980 or so.  Those ones had the classic Doctors, Hartnell, Throughtan, Pertwee, and especially Baker.

They all had companions.  I liked lots of them, Jamie, Granddaughter (Susan, and they still have not explained that companion, his first, from 1963!).  But the most wonderful companion was Sarah Jane Smith, an investigative journalist.  She way played by the extremely attractive Elisabeth Sladen, who just departed from us this week.  Not only was she a companion for over three and one half years, she, unique of all others, returned many times to reprise the same character.  She was 65 years old, and had been married to the same man since 1968.

The Who Sell Out, the third album by The Who, was their finest to date and in my opinion is still one of their best works.  To be sure, it fell short hither and thither, but I think that it was great.  There are a number of reasons why it is so good, one of them being Kit Lambert once again producing.  As you recall from the previous installment, he was so much better than the hack Shel Talmy that there is really no comparison.

Another reason that it was so good was that it has a lot of energy for a studio album.  The third reason that I shall cite is that it was one of the very first concept albums, in that there was a unifying theme throughout the record.  Since it was on vinyl, it only runs around 37 minutes, so lots of material got scrapped when the final edit was done.  I shall include some of that material late in the piece.

Those of you that read this irregular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile of so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I never write about living people except with their express permission, but since these folks are long gone, they are fair game.  They were actually very nice folks, but had some quirks, as most folks in my little town did.

I do not know how they came into a little money, since they owned a nice (by mid 1960s standards) house on a large lot.  They were my neighbors just to the south where I lived.  I liked both of them.

This is sort of a companion piece to Friday’s Popular Culture piece about eight track tapes.  There was quite a response to that piece, and several commentators suggested that we talk about vinyl records tonight.  I have a great respect for my readers, so I am happy to oblige.

On the surface, records seem to be quite simple things indeed.  In practice, few things are further from the truth.  While the concept behind records is fairly simple, the technology is extremely complex to attain high fidelity, defined as sound reproduced with high enough quality as to give the impression that actual performers are playing at the time.  In other words, artifacts of recording and playback should be so small as barely to be noticed.