Things I Would Have Loved to Know About Physics Before Making It My Major

Posted on 13 June 2015 by Larry Russwurm

What with the current glamourizing of physics with Cosmos and The Big Bang Theory (although some might say that sitcom deglamourizes physics), more and more people are probably looking into physics as a career choice. Decades ago I started down this same path so I’d like the curious of you to know a few things that your guidance counselor or university rep might never tell you.

1. When discussing freedom with a successful physicist they might liken it to school. Then they’ll have to go back 10 years from their most recent schooling to grade 11. In that wondrous year they had total freedom in selecting one (1) of their courses. So of coursed they panicked and took biology (yet another science).

2. Potential physicists will always cross any picket line to get to their schooling. After all, what else can fill up 16 hours in each and every day during the school year?

3. Physicists wish the slow people in high school made it to university, too. That way they would get everything explained to them at least twice. The main reason so many potential physicists fail in early university is because they never learned to ask questions themselves. This is of course because they never had to because everything in high school was always explained at least twice.

I’m sure many more hurdles remain in the physics career path that I failed to cover. For more information, speak with your friendly neighbourhood physicist. Or if that fails you, speak to your friendly neighbourhood Sheldon.

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Naming Dog Breeds After Location and Job

Posted on 6 June 2015 by Larry Russwurm

It’s popular amongst the many breeds of dog to name them after their geographic location they were first bred in or the job they were bred for. The German Shepherd is named after both. And throughout this post I intend to use that template for German Shepherds as well as other dogs.

The German Shepherd emigrated from Germany to the New World. In such a large disruption of a population they even shifted occupations. Ask any American to imagine a police dog. The vast majority will imagine the inaptly named German Shepherd. So I suggest a name change for this breed. They henceforth will be called American Police Dogs.

Those Labrador dogs are behind the times, too. In 1949, Labrador and Newfoundland were annexed by the country of Canada. And I can’t even imagine the roll of seeing eye dog or even helper dog being done by another breed. So I suggest these dogs should be called Canada Seeing Eye Dogs.

Then there is the name hound. What on Earth is that name supposed to represent? No, no, we can’t let this lie. Their job is that of the baying sniffer dog. It borders on silly to have working dogs like these being in the city. I suggest the name Rural Baying Sniffer Dogs for these breeds.

What is the adjective most used to describe a junk yard dog? Why “mean” of course. And what dog automatically pops into your head when you hear the word mean? You may be ashamed of it, but I know you thought of a Pitbull before any other type of mean dog. Of course the purpose of a mean dog at a junkyard is to guard the place. So I hereby dub the Pitbull to be the Junk Yard Guard Dog.

Then there is the Doberman Pinscher. These dogs are many times trained in groups to be attack/guard dogs. Who can afford such security? Why the rich of course. So I say we call these dogs Rich Attack Dogs.

I can hear you saying “Just wait a minute, you are talking big breeds of dogs. Surely you can see the small dogs as having jobs to do like being an early door bell.”

Look. If you want an early doorbell it is just as effective having a motion sensor. And its even better to have a camera for insurance purposes. The main job of small dogs is already much in use in the language. They are called Toy dogs for a reason. And in fact these dogs are ubiquitous thus there is no need to use a geographical marker. These dogs will remain Toy dogs.

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Are ‘Twenty One Pilots’ ‘Green Day’ Fan Boys?

Posted on 30 May 2015 by Larry Russwurm

On the surface the band Twenty One Pilots are light years different from pop punk Green Day. First of all Twenty One Pilots are a keyboard centric band as opposed to the guitar centred music of Green Day. (This is more an ’80s/’90s thing as Green Day features pianos on some songs and Twenty One Pilots gets as close to a guitar as to have mandolin on some songs.) GreenDay features no rap and has guitar solos. Twenty One Pilots rarely solo, even on keys, and is much more likely to have a rap verse in their songs.

Still the evidence of TOP being Green Day fan boys is of consequence.

Both are small bands. Green Day existed as three piece for the majority of their career. Only on the 2012 albums did they add a second guitarist. As I understand it TOP started out as a three piece but for their only two signed albums they are just a two piece band. Maybe both bands just would rather not get in the way of their fellow band mates.

The name Twenty One Pilots comes from an Arthur Miller play about a man that sold faulty airplane parts in World War II that cause the death of twenty – blah, blah, blah. We all really know that TOP was formed with that name at the end of 2009 a year noted for one of the best Green Day songs ever – Twenty-One Guns.

Of course TOP stole the number from this song and finding a noun to attach the number to was easy as everybody wants to be a pilot.

But the most convincing evidence of all came with the release of their current album, Blurry Face. Green Day has a habit of arranging their songs on the album in a way that leaves a high at the start, a slump in the second act and a high or climax at the end. I proved it with the graphs on this previous post.

So now let me graph Blurry Face with Increasing Pleasure versus Song Placement axes.

blurryface2ndactslump

The second act slump is rather obvious. I contend that TOP stole this idea from Green Day. And why not? It only seems to work on an album where most of the songs are quite likeable.

So it has been proved that Twenty One Pilots are Green Day fan boys.

Earlier I mentioned that Green Day was a pop punk band. There’s a label that some are trying to attach to TOP , I just don’t agree with it. Some call them schizophrenic pop because they are supposed to bridge genres. I disagree with this moniker. Schizophrenics are “split brained” in that part seems conscious while another part of their brain seems totally different or from the outside. Schizophrenics are unaware that their brains have multiple, thinking parts. Instead they ‘hear voices’. TOP are quite aware of their multi faceted music.

Perhaps they could be called kaleidoscope pop. In that when you spin it, something new pops out. I just want to have this name used before its time is up. Spinning music on CD or record is much rarer now than it used to be and might eventually disappear altogether.

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Stealing From the Rich to Give to the Future

Posted on 23 May 2015 by Larry Russwurm

I came across this article about what is purported to be Britain’s oldest living tree. The tree is about 4 000 years old. I was going to read the article and then probably forget it. But I noted that it was a yew tree.

Yew trees are noted as being one of the best woods to make a bow from. From the title I gave, you are probably one step ahead of me and have already figured that this tree would have been around in the time of Robin Hood.

Now Sherwood Forest (Robin Hood’s stomping grounds) and Somerset (where this tree is to be found) are quite far away from each other by British standards. But I’ve heard rumours that the real, historical Robin Hood might have been well traveled enough to have traveled deep into continental Europe. So it is more than possible that Robin Hood or any of his merry men could have crafted a bow from this very tree. Indeed the act may have helped contribute to the tree’s huge age.

I live in southern Ontario and the oldest trees here are hardscrabble ones along the rocky Niagara Escarpment (yes the escarpment is what makes the famous falls). They, too, have lived for thousands of years. Indeed, the harsher living conditions are believed to have contributed to their longevity.

So would it be any surprise to a gardener, that pruning a plant or tree might add to its longevity. Removing one branch for a bow from this old yew tree might have been exactly like gardening and allowed the tree to live until our time. So making a bow from this tree could be like giving to the future.

How would Robin Hood or the merry men have stolen from the rich then?

Well back in Robin’s time many of the forests were protected by being royal forests. Commoners weren’t allowed to hunt in royal forests. Indeed they weren’t allowed to fell trees or carry weapons. So it is likely that making a bow out of part of a tree would be called stealing by the aristocrats.

So Robin Hood and his merry men might have stolen from the rich, via this Somerset tree, and helped it live to our time.

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Now is the Most Favourable Time for a Certain Type of Tourism

Posted on 16 May 2015 by Larry Russwurm

You might not have guessed that today’s tourism is greatly favourable. After all a year or two ago may have had better tourism numbers. I’m not talking year over year favourability but the difference between a few decades ago and now. It all started with the pick-your-own-numbers lotteries.

I especially think of a certain Ontario lottery ad that has aired recently. This ad shows groups and crowds of people while a giant arrow points out the millionaires in each grouping. This presents the idea that lottery winners are amongst us and rubbing shoulders with us.

Now the pick-your-own-numbers lotteries have onerous odds to overcome. Might I just say that the odds of winning the jackpot are so slim that no one ever, at any time should win any of these lotteries. But wait, you say, obviously someone does win these lotteries, they show the winners on television and in the newspaper from time to time.

Yes, yes the winners do exist. But their secret isn’t blind luck. The lottery business is being controlled secretly by big time travel.

In the future, time travel will be big business. And its most successful period to send people back to will be the pick-your-own-numbers lottery era. That means us.

Consider today’s citizens wanting to travel back in time, say to ancient Egypt or Greece. Most of the Egyptians were involved in the back breaking work of building the pyramids. Some holiday. Ancient Greece could place you in Sparta. That city had a majority of the people being slaves. Odds are you, too, would be a slave. Being able to also pick that you would be one of the ruling elite totally changes the picture.

So why would our time be popular? I bet some people from the far future dream about our time. But that is only if they had the status of the top 1%. Winning the lottery provides this for them.

It is unlikely that the far future, possibly 50 000 years or more removed from us, contains any of our paper or metal coin currency. As a result, the first thing that a traveler from this era would do would be to panhandle. They’d only have to raise a few bucks to go to phase two, which would be to buy a winning lottery ticket. Winning numbers would have been saved from our time, all to examine luck to make sure that everything checked out. If for instance the number 9 was popping up more regularly in winning jackpots it would be important to trace it back to a fault in the randomization and failing that, maybe 9 just is more slightly popular for no known reason.

Anyway the future would have saved all our lottery results. They would shift the winners from format to format through the intervening years till finally time travel was developed. And then the numbers could be used.

So it is my belief that time travelers are living like kings on our lottery money. That ad with the arrows that pick people out of groups? I now see that as someone pointing out all the time travelers amongst us. They’re everywhere. Now if I could just get one of them to open up about the future, I would have my path set for me as an insightful writer of the future in the field of science fiction.

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Alberta Tory Strong

Posted on 12 May 2015 by Larry Russwurm

albertatorystrongInitially I thought that this cartoon was funny. So I drew it up and inked it. Then reading it again I thought that it wasn’t really funny it was just a retelling of events. And that was my problem throughout the whole sad story of Bill C-51. I would have loved to have waged a campaign of a political cartoon a day against. it. The only problem was I saw nothing funny in the least about it. So I made exactly zero cartoons.

Still I publish this cartoon and list it under humour for the one thing I truly think is funny. I drew Stephen Harper crying about such a minor thing as the NDP winning the Alberta election. Maybe he quickly grimaces too, But we saw that instant of tears.

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Beautiful yet Horrific Lyrics

Posted on 2 May 2015 by Larry Russwurm

The song Ebony and Ivory by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder has such a nice sentiment in its lyrics that I’m a bit hesitant in pointing out its flaws. The main lyrical hook of the song goes like this:

Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony,
Side by side on my piano keyboard, oh Lord, why don’t we?

That sentiment is race relations gold. So how could anybody be such a grinch that they could object to these fine lyrics?

Well I am that grinch. While having nothing but respect for the race relations perspective, the problem with this song is the ebony and ivory international trade aspect. If inspired by the song to make all piano keyboards out of only ebony and ivory we would have a big problem.

Ebony is a wood that comes from tropical trees. This wood has been protected in different trade agreements. Indeed, Gibson, a manufacturer of guitars recently got in trouble for illegally importing ebony for use in its guitars. If we don’t protect these trees, the world might be short a species that our thirst for fine wood in musical instruments caused.

For those of you that do not know, ivory comes from the tusks of elephants. For many years the trade in ivory has been controlled. No longer are the white keys of pianos made with this material. If suddenly all pianos and keyboards were to be made out of ivory, we would undoubtedly drive the elephant into extinction.

If for no other reason we must keep the elephant alive to be the surrogate for mammoth clones. Only when we get enough mammoths are we allowed to even think of the extinction of elephants.

Have we examined all the biological processes of the ebony trees in the tropics? I doubt it. Until we have examined all possible chemicals these plants create, we shouldn’t be allowed to let it become extinct.

Using this perspective, the lyrics to Ebony and Ivory could easily be:

Ebony and ivory, driving two species to extinction,
Just so my piano keyboard has a more poetic black and white.

But I can’t help but think of an easy fix for this song. Just substitute black plastic and white plastic for ebony and ivory That way the lyrics would simply be this:

Black plastic and white plastic live together in perfect harmony,
Side by side on my piano keyboard, oh Lord, why don’t we?

The plastic lyrics leave no guilt from possibly causing an extinction. Maybe they are less artful. I’m willing to risk that for the peace of mind they give.

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The Great One and the Next Ones

Posted on 25 April 2015 by Larry Russwurm

Ever since Wayne Gretzky lived up to his junior hockey hype, scouts and NHL pundits have been trying to predict each successive “Next One”. That phrase wasn’t coined when Mario Lemieux came on the scene, but if it was it would have been likely to have been pinned on him, too.

With Gretzky being the “Great One”, who were these next ones? Well in order, I heard much hype over the aforementioned Mario Lemieux, Eric Lindros, Sydney Crosby and (still in junior hockey) Connor McDavid.

Only Eric Lindros and Connor McDavid didn’t lead their NHL team to the Stanley Cup. Obviously Connor McDavid hasn’t had the chance yet and Eric Lindros appears to be the only failure amongst the “Next Ones”.

I’m not quite sure what went wrong with Lindros in his early years. Maybe it was grandstanding parents. Maybe the Philadelphia Flyers simply had to get rid of too many quality players for him. He didn’t win a Stanley Cup in his early days and the successive concussions he suffered mid and late career prevented him from getting any Stanley Cups. Of all the next ones, Lindros was the lone dud.

May I now posit that Lindros was a dud simply because he didn’t go to Pittsburgh or Edmonton.

The Great One played for Edmonton in his young prime and won 4 out of 5 cups in a row. Mario Lemieux played for Pittsburgh and collected two Stanley cups in a row. Sydney Crosby has won the Stanley Cup Once with Pittsburgh and him and his team are still competitive to this day.

Now someone I know has said that the Edmonton Oilers are currently where good players go to die. If they opt for Connor McDavid this time around, I don’t think their unlucky streak needs to continue. Perhaps he can reach his full potential there and maybe those other highly sought draft picks will help round out the team.

As history has shown, Edmonton, like Pittsburgh is likely to make the most of its Next Ones. And getting a Next One is so statistically unlikely that I have to wonder how Edmonton and Pittsburgh have both rated two of them.

Perhaps they made a pact with the devil. Perhaps they are like those lottery winners who “stupidly” keep playing only to win again. Maybe these two teams have the dirt on all the other teams in the NHL so they wind up with what they want. Perhaps the 1st draft pick lottery just isn’t that fair.

Whatever it is, Pittburgh and Edmonton have beaten the odds and gotten two Great Ones apiece. So maybe they will beat the odds and win more Stanley Cups this decade with those great ones.

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Those Mysterious Flashes on Ceres

Posted on 18 April 2015 by Larry Russwurm

Deep in the asteroid belt sits the globular asteroid Ceres. Nasa’s Dawn probe has been investigating this asteroid from only thousands of kilometers away. The most intriguing part of the observing has been two flashes from different parts of the giant asteroid. No scientist has yet adequately explained these flashes, so allow me my own chance at explaining it.

If I am correct, more mysterious flashes will come from the two locations. From both places, expect the next flash to be of short duration as well. Then the third flash will also be of short duration. This will be followed by three distinct long flashes. Which will be followed by three more distinct short flashes.

The astute of you have already guessed that the flashes will be signalling SOS in Morse code. And I expect it will all be due to the same cause that I have read about again and again in many different books. The cause will of course be the kidnapped Hardy Boys.

Once the government of the US realizes this, pressure will be put on the government and NASA to rescue the poor boys. And, indeed NASA is planning a manned trip to an asteroid as a precursor to a Mars mission. So the boys will be rescued – eventually.

How could two bright sleuths such as themselves have made it to Ceres? While the boys are smart they aren’t rocket geniuses. So I doubt they could have gotten there by their own wits. No, they must have been kidnapped by someone that was smart enough to build and finance a better space mission than NASA.

In this era of private enterprise making it into space, an evil genius could have stole enough money and good enough plans to get to Ceres. And when the Hardy Boys found out about the illegal source of the evil genius’s finances they were banished to that asteroid.

But the boys were wise and remembered the Dawn probe would be there, all they had to do was contact it. And by using large mirrors to reflect the sun at the probe, the Hardy Boys have figured a way out.

Who knows how the pair got separated, but if Frank thought of the mirror, Joe could also think of the mirror idea. And both would probably have excitedly talked with the other about the Dawn probe before being separated. Finally both would be likely to have known about future NASA missions.

But this is the end of their youthful sleuthing. By the time NASA rescues them they will be the Hardy men.

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Female Song Names

Posted on 11 April 2015 by Larry Russwurm

Only this week did I hear that Barry Manilow married his manager. His manager is a male which leads me to suspect that he’s been gay all his life. Barry Manilow has kept his private life close to his chest. But I wonder if he has always been public, the trick being that he just talks in code.

Maybe a gay witch hunt in the seventies prompted him to write the song Mandy. On the surface this is a song about a love for a woman named Mandy. But now, knowing that he is gay, I wonder if smart people were supposed to notice that “Man” is directly in Mandy’s name so of course he has always been gay to the people who noticed.

And now that I have been alerted to this talking in code thing, I wonder about Boston and their hit single Amanda from the eighties. Sounded out, Amanda could mean “A man -duh!” which seems even more obvious than Manilow’s Mandy.

Tom Scholz, the writer of Amanda, is married to a woman at this date. Brad Delp the singer of this song unfortunately committed suicide a few years ago. But he too was linked to women by marriage and had a fiancee at the time of his death. It seems unlikely that Boston will ever admit Amanda means A man -duh!

Perhaps my suspicions are true. Amanda is a song about a guy who is about to say “I love you” to Amanda. The sudden vowing of “I love you” might be because of earlier trepidation to reveal to “A man -duh!” his love. And it took Boston 7 years to finally release this album. Perhaps the band had trepidation in revealing to “smart” people that one or more of them were gay. It is more than possible that this new suspicion of mine will never be confirmed.

But while we’re on the topic of female song names, it has always bothered me that the most used female name in the title of a hit song is Sherry. There is both the song “Sherry” by The Four Seasons from the sixties and “Oh Sherrie” by Steve Perry in the eighties. Sherry just isn’t that common of a name. I’m always surprised that by hit songs it is the most popular name.

But now that we’re looking at girl names in songs as code, I can’t help but point out that sherry is an alcoholic beverage. Perhaps Bob Gaudio of the Four Seasons and Steve Perry are alcoholics.

While there is dirt about the supposed life of Bob Gaudio in the musical Jersey Boys, this take doesn’t suggest he ever was an alcoholic. Indeed it does suggest that one of the wives was. Perhaps Gaudio could control his love of sherry.

Spelling Sherrie differently than the alcoholic beverage could be many things. It could be Steve Perry throwing us off the scent. It could be to differentiate the song from the Four Seasons. It could be updating the name for a new decade. But there is little mention about Steve Perry being an alcoholic. Still, I suspect he loves sherry just as much as Bob Gaudio. And that, to me, is why there are two hit tributes to the “girl” called Sherry.

Which brings me to my final question. Are any hit songs about women, really about those women? Or do songwriters all choose to talk in code?

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