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Stargazing has always been a one of my hobbies. One morning (read 4:00AM) I noticed that Mars was not where I thought it should be. Checking an astronomy web site, I found I was wrong, Mars was right.

While browsing the constellations on the star map, I noticed that Orion the Hunter was chasing Taurus the Bull. That’s just wrong. First of all, the bull should be chasing Orion. Secondly, the dot-to-dot stick figure in the constellation Taurus, does not look like a bull at all. It looks, well feminine and pornographic. Sorry, but it does.

Then something occurred to me. I’ve always felt a “disconnect” between Prehistoric Man and Modern Man. I mean, we both have the same brain. They were as clever as we are. Maybe more so. But, what is there that both of us can look at and relate to?

The stars, of course. The “connect-the-dots” groups of stars we call constellations. I can imagine prehistoric folk, sitting around, taking turns making up different creatures and (probably ribald) stories, as the stars moved across the sky.

Some Puritan-minded wet blanket probably changed Taurus the Bull from Alice the Floozy. Poor Orion.

I had the pleasure of helping a friend establish a wireless connection between a laptop computer and a Wi-Fi enabled modem/router/thingy. That’s not what we are going to talk about today.

Being a boarder-line sociopath and a bit of a geek, helping loved ones with technical problems does my heart good. That’s not what we are going to talk about today either.

Today class, we’re going to discuss electricity and radio waves. Back in the 1700’s, scientists were doing all kinds of crazy things. Just to see what would happen. Nowadays, a scientific experiment usually has a predicted outcome. Back then, it was all fun and games (OK, I’ll say it, “till someone got hurt”).

One day, someone swung a magnet (one of their favorite toys) near a copper wire, and guess what. Electrons started moving inside the wire. Like magic.

Someone else tried pumping lots of electrons through a wire and discovered radio waves emanating from the wire. Like magic.

Fast forward to today. Electricity and radio waves are ubiquitous. If we could see radio waves, we’d be blinded. And as for electricity, well what can I say. Look up ubiquitous. But it’s still all magic.

No one has a clue as to why it works. We’ve mastered the creation and manipulation of these two things. But it’s still a mystery as to why magnetic waves move electrons and why moving electrons make magnetic waves.

Anyway, that’s OK. A little mystery in life is a good thing. And without all the resulting technology, I might be sitting on a street corner, ranting at passersby. Instead, I’m sitting in my warm and cozy home, babbling at you

Footnote. The title should have been “smoke and mirrors” but…long ago, Wifey and I had a neighbor who said “speaking of tongue”. She meant to say “speaking in tongue”. She was very religious and a bit dim. We did not correct her (or laugh in her face). But to this day, whenever one of us gets goofey, we’ll say “speaking of tongue” and we’ll both wind up on the floor, rolling around like drunk monkeys.

This one is for all the gals. I do not watch The Oprah Winfrey Show. It’s nothing personal. I’m sure she is a wonderful person. Maybe I’m afraid it will damage what’s left of my brain. I’m sure it would damage my street-cred down at the union hall. Anyway, a reliable source told me that the following information was heard on her show.

Nature intended that women were not supposed to be skinny. Like almost everything else in our lives, it has to do with the survival of the Human race. If a woman has a healthy diet and gets some exercise, she will be her right size and shape.

In order for our species to survive, the size of the female population is way more important than the size of the male population (sorry guys). If the human population were reduced to a couple of guys and ten women, we could possibly repopulate the Earth. If the genders were reversed (two gals and ten guys)…forget it. Besides, how could two women possibly clean-up after ten guys? We’d drown in our own filth.

So, a certain amount of body fat helps insure the survival of each woman. Which in turn helps guarantee the survival of the species.

Please note, I did not make any wisecracks about Ms. Winfrey. Not that I’m afraid of her “people” tracking me down and beating the crap out of me. Got to go now, someone is at the door. I hope it’s the Jehovah’s Witness’.

ps…someone suggested I put up a sign saying “Trespassers will be Violated, Survivors will be Shot”. (see the web log entry for November 9, 2007 titled Prostitutes Only).

I’m thinking about taking up pipe smoking. I smoked a pipe back in the 1970’s…just to be cool and different.

I have smoked cigarettes since I was fourteen. I found a pack on the sidewalk, on my way to school one day. From my first puff, I was hooked.

Ninety percent of smoking, for me, is getting nicotine hooked up to my neural receptors. So I can function as a normal human being. But (here’s where you come in dear reader) ten percent of my smoking is, contemplative breathing. (Is that a clever phrase or what?).

As noted earlier, we Humans are able to control our breathing. If we choose to take a deep breath, we can. Now here’s the cool part. Between our brain and the top of our spinal cord, there is a lump of neural tissue called the Reptilian Brain. It controls all the stuff we should not mess around with. Like our heart beat and adrenalin and such.

The Reptilian Brain is really really stupid. It can’t tell what’s real and what’s make believe. If you have a nightmare and wake with your heart pounding, it’s just your stupid Reptilian Brain…fooled again. But we can control this Reptilian Brain…by breathing.

To take advantage of this situation, whenever you can, sit quietly and breath deeply and calmly. Your R.B. will think, “Hey, everything is OK. Let’s lower the heart rate and blood pressure and how about some endomorphs?” You don’t have to think about anything except your breathing.

By the way, to take a deep breath, don’t do it like in the cartoons. Start exhaling by pulling in your tummy (that’s a medical term) and inhale by pushing your tummy out. What you’re actually doing is contracting the muscles in your diaphragm, but let us not get too technical here.

So yes, smoking kills. But at least I’ll be calm. And with pipe tobacco I may smell better too.

This is going to be really boring, so feel free to skip it. It is my hypothesis that what we call gravity is actually the interaction between matter and space. More precisely, the interaction between localized dense space and generalized dense space.

A couple of definitions here…When I say matter, I am referring to atomic nuclei. When I refer to space, I’m talking about the space all around us.

The concept is simple. Imagine a still photograph of a bubble of air under water. In this hypothesis, the bubble represents matter and the water represents space. The air bubble is displacing the water.

So, one teeny tiny atomic nucleus will displace a correspondingly tiny amount of space. But, (here’s the exciting part, folks) when an enormous number of nuclei displace an enormous amount of space, the space around this collection of nuclei becomes very dense.

Keep in mind that the space far from this collection of matter is pressing back in on the displaced space. The space in and around our Sun is generally dense space (GDS) and becomes less dense at a distance.

Any object will generate localized dense space (LDS). When LDS is generated in an area of GDS, the greater resulting density will seek it’s own density in the GDS. The object will move towards the greatest density it can find. It will “fall”.

There are other really cool implications to this hypothesis that I’ll bore you with at a latter date. Like why Black Holes are black, why planets and stars are (generally) round, why there’s a limit to the size of heavy elements and how this impacts Einstein’s Relativity.

post script;  The History Channel recently aired a history of the Big Bang Theory. They spoke of the great insights and discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler et al. When they came to Newton, I thought ‘Here comes the whitewash’.

But I was wrong. They quoted Newton as saying ‘I do not know what Gravity is. I will leave that for others to explain’. The narrator went on to say that to this day no one has figured it out.

The Unified Field Theory states that the four elemental forces in nature are related to each other and that this relationship can be expressed in one elegant equation. Like Einstein’s equation relating energy, mass and the speed of light, E=MCC.

To this day, the UFT equation has eluded every great physicist including Einstein. Three of the forces have been related elegantly. But the fourth force requires 11 dimensions of space to fit into the equation. Not an elegant solution.

The fourth force is gravity. Plain old everyday gravity.

I don’t pretend to be as clever as a physicist, but I contend that gravity is not a force at all. Sure, let go of a rock and it moves and accelerates downward. But I do not think we understand why this happens.

Gravity as a force, was postulated by Isaac Newton in 1687. There is no question that Newton was a genius. He created equations used to this day NASA for putting satellites into space. He invented Calculus. And he did all this with paper, a quill and his brain…in 18 months!

He was also a closet Alchemist. Alchemy in his day had been condemned as a pseudo-science for over fifty years. It had been outlawed in most European countries. Turning lead into gold and creating the Philosopher’s Stone were laughable by Newton’s contemporaries. But Newton insisted that an object (say the Earth) could reach out and affect another object (say the Moon). He called this property of all objects the “Force of Gravity”.

At the time, most of his peers considered this to be far fetched and smacked of Alchemy. But Newton’s other achievements were so awesome that his opinion on gravity was accepted. Keep the baby and the bath water.

Herein lies our dilemma. If Newton’s Gravity is wrong, what do we replace it with. Well, I have a possible answer and it has to do with the true nature of space.

We don’t know a lot about the nature of Space. We assume it is pretty much the same everywhere. But we know it can be bent and curved. We assume if it has density, but is this density constant throughout the universe?

I propose that Matter displaces Space, causing Space to be more dense around an object. More on this later. Mister Science’s little brain is tired and he needs a little lie down.

Have you ever smelled something and immediately experienced a vivid memory from your past?

Apparently, the sense of smell is strongly linked to Memory. This is a basic survival tool in animals. A scent triggers a memory that triggers a survival response.

Humans have the most inadequate sense of smell of all animals. To compensate, we have evolved Sequential Memory. In stead of memories linked to scents, our memories are linked to other memories.

Sequential Memory leads to self-awareness, which leads to the creation of God.