All Time and Frequency is One

Such a deceptively simple equation. The technical definition is Frequency (f) is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time (T). It is also referred to as temporal frequency.

I’ve spent most of my adult life working with communications technology and auditory processing issues.  So the concept of frequency as it relates to time fascinates me.  Always loving basic algebra, it occurred to me that you could write this equation a different way…

But what does it mean?

This simple equation relates time and frequency together as one.  Now a physicist would probably have a field day with my explanation, but if you interpret it more loosely, the cosmic all – represented by the “ONE” – is comprised of all time and all frequencies.  All past, present and future come together as one.

One Citizen One Vote

With the upcoming Republican convention in Tampa, I thought it a good time to suggest one of my pet slogans – One Citizen One Vote. Maybe someone will pick up on it. From my previous blog on the Dead Vote I commented on the sloppiness in our current system with keeping voter rolls up to date. That issue extends beyond dead voters. We are wasting more and more time dealing with recounts and legal challenges. It undermines voter confidence in the system.

Why does it have to be so difficult to let each person cast their vote accurately and efficiently? I think part of the issue comes from the independence of states and counties to implement voting. If you look at all the different types of voting systems used – you find differences down to the county level. If you look at the legal rulings, decisions are made at federal, state and county level. So with all these independent entities collecting votes using different systems and different rules – is it any wonder that the results are sloppy?

This doesn’t even touch the issue of voter fraud. Frankly, I’m stunned that people feel someone doesn’t need to show a legal form of identification to vote in this country. Legal ID is necessary to book a hotel room, fly on an airplane, register a car, and cash checks at the bank. In today’s highly technological society, we are all identified before we can do anything. Unless you want to live in the woods, grow your own food and never talk to another person, you’ll need legal identification. End of debate.

My concern is that this is an uncoordinated set of laws and systems that are only really seen at election time. Everyone complains, they struggle to get through the process, and then say “Whew!” done with that … and wait to complain again during the next election. Perhaps this is one of the areas where we can stimulate some job growth. Cleaning up our election system.

Cold Fusion – Dead or Alive?

Cold fusion is a type of nuclear reaction that would occur at relatively low temperatures compared with hot fusion.

In 1989, cold fusion gained media attention after electrochemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced they had built an apparatus which produced excess heat they claimed was created by nuclear processes. Massive rejection by the scientific community, as other scientists were unable to duplicate the process and identified flaws in the initial experiment, sounded the death knoll of cold fusion.  Two chemists dabbling in the area of physics… unthinkable.

However, work has quietly continued on cold fusion since then.  Very much flying below the radar…

During the past few years the cold fusion buzz has increased.  Best known is Andrea Rossi’s Energy Catalyzer or “E-Cat” system. The E-Cat is a Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) or “cold fusion” device that generates large amounts of heat for a miniscule cost.  Naturally, it is being subjected to intense ridicule while the world waits for a production deployment.  Stay tuned…

Impact of the 2008 Market Crash

U.S. household wealth fell by a record $5.1 trillion from October to December of 2008, almost twice the decrease in the previous quarter, as home values and stock prices plunged, Federal Reserve figures showed.

Net worth for households and non-profit groups decreased to $51.5 trillion, the lowest level in four years, from $56.6 trillion in the third quarter, according to the Fed’s quarterly Flow of Funds report yesterday. Wealth dropped $11.2 trillion in 2008 from the year before, the biggest annual decline since the government began keeping quarterly records in 1952.

What was the impact of the Stock Market crash of 2008?

This was the time when the baby boomers should have finally been moving out of the the job market and freeing up positions for younger workers.   With the market crash, the huge glut of boomers that dominated the job market for decades couldn’t leave.

So we have twenty-somethings with Master’s degrees working as baristas at Starbucks.   Many of the jobs available are part time because employers can’t afford to pay the medical benefits for full time workers – if they hire at all. Many are self-employed or contractors without much in the way of benefits.

The new media spin is that the 50 year experiment with the nuclear family has failed.   And we should all happily accept households that support 3 generations.   Boomers support their parents and their adult children because – with that many people – hopefully someone is drawing a paycheck.

The major question I have with all of this is what will our children inherit?

Lorna Byrne – Talks to Angels

Lorna Byrne is the author of the book “Angels in My Hair”.  She has also published several other books on Angels.

In Lorna’s website she says “I have been seeing and talking  with Angels since I was a baby. This may sound extraordinary, but I’m also just an ordinary person dealing with the challenges and joys of  everyday life, just like you.”

Lorna grew up in a very poor Irish family and was labeled as retarded – although now she says that they understand she is dyslexic. With those challenges, she married, raised four children and cared for an ailing husband who passed a few years ago. Throughout this entire time, Angels interacted with her and helped her write a book about her life and experiences.

Reading this book was an amazing experience for me. Many people say they can communicate with Angels but I haven’t heard or read anything that comes as close as the experiences that Lorna has. This is not “channeling” where a person is apparently taken over by another entity who talks through them.  Lorna sees and talks with Angels like she sees and talks with us.

I have had the opportunity, twice, to see Lorna Byrne while she was touring America for a book signing.  We had a few minutes to talk as she signed the book and blessed me and my family. Lorna sees into a dimension that most of us can barely sense much less interact with. In today’s world where we are so grounded in the physical and the material, it was inspiring to touch a plane of existence through Lorna’s eyes that most of us will never connect with in our life times.  Maybe in Lorna’s case I should say Angels Flying Below the Radar…

The Dead Vote – 1.8 Million still listed as voters in the US

A February 2012 Press Release from the PEW Center on the States  released statistics that showed one in eight voter registrations in the US are invalid.  Almost 2 million of those voters were dead.

• At least 51 million eligible citizens remain unregistered—more than 24 percent of the eligible population.
• More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters.
• Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.
• About 12 million records have incorrect addresses, meaning either the voters moved, or errors in the information make it unlikely any mailings can reach them.

My current state of Florida recently found 53,000 dead people still on the polls as registered voters.  To their credit, they’re trying to clean the records up.

My former state of Maryland has always had rumors flying about the dead vote.  The issue has been a major concern in the larger Maryland counties of Baltimore, Montgomery and Prince George’s as well as Baltimore City.  In one well publicized case, Ellen Saurbrey, the Repubican candidate in the 1994 Maryland gubernatorial elections, claimed the dead vote influenced the results in favor of her opponent.

Neither party wants to admit that inaccurate records can help them win elections.  I wonder if this is part of the reason that the problem has been allowed to go unresolved for so long…

In today’s world of electronic tracking – where your credit card company knows within hours whether you’re in a different part of the country – we should be able to track people and clean up the voting records.  All of this inaccuracy is embarrassing and undermines our country’s credibility.  We make a big deal about having democratic elections in other countries and yet the US, with all our technology and skill, can’t make sure that a living, breathing person is voting at the polls.

Amazing…

Multi-disciplinary approach

I’ve come to the conclusion that good ideas bubble up from unlikely places.  It’s not that the likely places don’t have good ideas, but it seems to me that the visibility that comes from being a likely place doesn’t help.  Too many things blocking the way.  Especially if you challenge the status quo.

“If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting” – We’ve all heard that statement before.  But if you think about it… it sums up part of the problem.  Groups/organizations/corporations/governments all continue to do the same things… and continue to get the same results.  Maybe it’s financially motivated, maybe it’s that an idea is “Not invented here!”, or maybe it’s all about control.  Whatever the reason, someone looking at a problem from a different angle sometimes brings about the breakthrough needed to make a major positive change.

There is a phrase I like – take a multi-disciplinary approach.  It means take ideas/people from diverse areas and throw them together.  And seeing what happens…

A friend of mine was a researcher at a major university.  He told me this story about a professor who worked in the field of audiology who did a sabatical with a group that studied vision.  The professor introduced them to concepts that had never been applied to the field of vision.  The amusing part for the professor was that the papers written on their collaborative efforts were cited more than any of the papers written in his own field of audiology.  Not that his work in audiology wasn’t good.   But he helped the vision group breakout in totally new directions.

So what can we do to bring in new ideas to the same problems we’ve been struggling with?

Norman Borlaug – Credited with saving a billion lives

Have you ever heard of Norman Ernest Borlaug? An Iowa farm boy who received his Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota, Borlaug helped win the “battle to feed humanity”. He dedicated his life to thinking about ways to get more crops from every acre, especially in poor countries.

Borlaug took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving a billion people worldwide from starvation. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply and has been called the “father of the Green Revolution”. Later in his life, he helped apply these methods of increasing food production to Asia and Africa.

Saving the lives of a billion people seems pretty significant. But how many of you have ever heard of him before?

Apple and Microsoft – Drop-outs change the World

Have you ever thought about the significance of the two most important personal computer/software companies in existence today being started by college drop-outs?

In 1976, Steve Wozniak invented the Apple I computer. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple computer in the garage of Jobs’s parents.

Bill Gates was attending Harvard and – with the support of his parents – left school in November of 1975 to form Microsoft. Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his studies.

One could say that this is a prime example of what makes America great. Of how brilliant young entrepreneurs can build powerful companies out of nothing.

One could also look at it from a different perspective…

These two companies were formed by individuals that were not very visible. No one perceived of them as a threat to the established computer industry. Large corporations with tremendous resources could have launched similar technologies. The largely unrealized innovations of Xerox PARC are a prime example. Instead, these two companies and their founders were flying below the radar and ultimately had more impact on how the world uses computers today.

Earthlights – a Call for New Energy

Earthlights

Several years ago I attended a keynote presentation by Dr. Bob Metcalf at the Metro Ethernet Forum. Bob Metcalf is famous as one of the actual inventors of the Ethernet. The audience waited excitely to hear what he had to about the future of Ethernet technology. But what he talked about surprised us all.

Dr. Metcalf showed us all a beautiful picture of the Earth from space. It showed the night side of the Earth. You could easily see which countries were using the most energy. What he said about the image struck a note. Dr. Metcalf said (I’m paraphrasing) “The rest of the world doesn’t want the United States to go dark, the rest of the world wants to be lit up”. He talked about the fact that we could not “conserve” our way out of this situation. We needed a new form of energy that could light up the planet.

I’ve thought about his comments often over the past few years. Conservation, while very important to preserve the quality of the planet, will never address the growing need to light up the planet. It will never make the “have nots” feel better. They will only feel better when they “have too”. Forgetting about how we get the energy for a moment… think about the goal to give everyone on the planet access to clean, cheap energy. If everyone had access to energy, the quality of their lives would improve incredibly. There would be less jealousy, less hatred if people didn’t feel like they were being deprived. It would defuse much of the global tension.

Just like we set a goal to land a man on the Moon within 10 years, I believe we are totally capable of solving this problem. But we may need to fly under the radar to accomplish this.