Large Thoughts

I’ve been having large thoughts lately. I’ve been thinking about the universe. Those who study such things say that when we talk about the universe, we must distinguish between the universe and the "observable" universe. We know how big the observable universe is. We don’t know how big the entire universe is. It may be many orders of magnitude larger than the observable universe. In fact, it may be infinite.

Before the universe was … I almost said “created”, but that would be jumping to a conclusion … before the universe came into existence, there was a void: no space, no time, no matter, no energy. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Many people are under the mistaken impression that before the Big Bang occurred, there was just empty space, and the Big Bang was an explosion that occurred somewhere in this empty space. But that is not the case. Before the Big Bang, space did not exist. Time did not exist. Hence my use of the term “void”. The Big Bang created “spacetime” and all the matter and energy within it.

All very good. But at the instant of the Big Bang, something else came into existence … something we don’t usually think of as coming into existence … something we tend to think of as always having been here. And that something was: the laws of physics. Plank’s constant. The speed of light. Quantum physics. And all the rest: mathematics, geometry, trigonometry, integral calculus, differential calculus. Etc., etc., etc. Isaac Newton didn’t invent calculus. He discovered it.

Where did the laws of physics come from? Why should there even be any laws of physics? If the void had existed for eternity without spawning a universe, then why should our universe have suddenly popped into existence 13.7 billion years ago? Why did the Big Bang (“creation”, if you prefer) happen at that particular moment? Why not a trillion years earlier … or later? Why not never? Does a question of time in a timeless epoch even have meaning?

And now, theorists theorize that there may be many universes … perhaps an infinite number of them. This collection of universes is called the multiverse. The laws of physics may be different in each universe. In many universes, the laws of physics are such that matter could not form … or stars could not form … or life could not develop. In our universe, the laws of physics, by sheer coincidence, turned out perfectly for us.  According to this theory, we live in a rare “Goldilocks” universe where all the laws of physics just happen to be fine tuned for us to be here. That’s not a very satisfying explanation. You might as well say it was magic.

The health care question

Some facts about the health care bill:

First, you don't have to buy health insurance. If you choose not to, you'll be treated differently at tax time. Just as single people and married couples are treated differently. Just as homeowners and renters are treated differently. Just as business owners and wage earners are treated differently. And on and on. No one will make you buy health insurance.

You say we can't afford it? The Congressional Budget Office, which both Republicans and Democrats acknowledge as non-partisan, says the bill will reduce the deficit over ten years. The CBO has a large group of accountants who have pored over the legislation with computer spreadsheets and have come to this conclusion: we're better off with it than without it. You may not believe them, and you're entitled to your opinion. Just realize that they have hundreds of pages of numbers and you have an opinion.

I'm for it. It's wrong to add a "surcharge" to every medical bill I pay in order to pay the bills of the uninsured. Why should someone else's health care expense be added to my bill? Shouldn't people be responsible for paying their own bills?

The law requires motorcycle riders to wear a helmet: society isn't protecting the motorcyclist from himself; society is protecting itself from the expense of caring for people for weeks in a hospital, months of rehabilitation, or possibly a lifetime of institutional care. Society has a right to insist people take action to mitigate the consequences of risky behavior if those consequences might otherwise fall back on society.

An advantage of having government pay for health insurance for the poor is this: If our society chooses to allow people to not have insurance, their unpaid bills should be borne by our entire society and not just by people who get sick.

Just my humble opinion. But I'm right.

Early November

Below is a cell phone photo I took today in the park across the street. My phone has a very poor-quality camera, but still you get the idea that fall is here. Most leaves have turned, and some trees have lost many, and some have lost almost none. Walking around the neighborhood I see big piles of leaves raked to the curb. Some of the piles are huge. I walked past one that must have taken many days to create (or many people working for only one day). That takes determination … or maybe, a leaf phobia. Personally, I’m not real big on raking leaves. I’ve found that if you leave them alone, nature takes care of them by itself … it doesn’t need our help. They gradually disappear on their own schedule. Where they go, who knows? To a big leafpile in the sky, perhaps. Of course, in this “civilized” land, just as we have to keep all our blades of grass trimmed to exactly the same length, if a leaf touches the ground it must be gotten rid of NOW.

There was a Halloween festival in the park, and the serpentine track in the grass is where the Haunted House stood. The track was caused by hundreds of kids tromping through the House.

Here’s a closeup of the tree in the above picture. Very colorful.

It’s been a fairly warm autumn. Roses are still blooming beside my house. This yellow rose is one of several blooming below an awning on the south wall of my house.

More later.

Reminder XR & UltraLite

One day in November of '07, I decided to teach myself how to write applications for Windows. To learn how to code, I needed to start coding. But what kind of program should I write? I recalled how difficult it was for my mother, when she was in her 80s, to remember to take her medications. It was impossible for her to keep track of what she had taken and when she had taken it. So that was the inspiration for my first program: a medical reminder program. I called it RxReminder. But during the almost-two-years I worked on it, someone else trademarked the name RxReminder. By then I had a lot of files that started with the letters "rxr", so I changed the name to Reminder XR™ (same initials). Along the way I also decided to write a medical reminder program in Javascript so it could run inside a web browser. It wasn't just a "lite" version of Reminder XR, it was an "ultra-lite" version. So I called it UltraLite™.

I learned a ton about how to write Windows programs. I created a website to offer my program to the public. The website is was "www.FreeMedicalReminder.com".

June beetles

The June bugs are out and about. More accurately, Cotinis nitida, the Green June beetle. Today is the first day I've seen them and it's the middle of August. The sight of June bugs takes me back to childhood. I recall seeing them as a boy, catching them, feeling their prickly feet stabbing at my palm, examining them, watching them buzz away - clumsy, near-sighted fliers thudding into houses and cars. They're supposed to crawl out of their underground homes in June. Hence the name. Why haven't they appeared before now? Is it a global warming thing? Is it climate change? Is Obama behind it? Is the CIA screwing with the June bugs? Or is the CIA screwing with the calendar? Perhaps the June bugs are on time, and it's us who are two months late.

Wikipedia says "Junebug is a common nickname for men who are juniors born in the southern United States." I don't think I've ever met anyone nicknamed "Junebug". Maybe it's a local thing.

I'm back

I shouldn't let my blog languish like I have. But really, there hasn't been much to write about. For the last month I've been working intensely on my reminder program. I'm obsessed about getting it to a release candidate. I've developed two websites so far, and neither is public yet. They're just testbeds for the html and Javascript. One is a Comcast personal site here that is plain old html. I just discovered wix so I have a Flash website here. When I started writing the program, I called it RxReminder for lack of a better name. Then, when I went to get the domain registered 18 months later, I found that while I was working on the program, someone had trademarked the name and registered the domain name. So what am I going to call it? I chose the rather lame Reminder XR ... it has the same initials: RXR. Still searching for a name that isn't already taken. And should I sell the program, give it away, or what? I wouldn't mind making a few dollars for the many hundreds of hours I've worked on it. On the other hand, I believe in the concept of community service, of giving back, of doing something to help other people get through the day.

The National Weather Service says my local temperature is 99°. It's August in Central Virginia. I'm a little surprised that it's ONLY 99°.

It reminds me of my last trip to the beach, two Augusts ago. The heat index stayed around 115° every day. The sun was the kind of sun that makes you feel you're getting a 1st degree burn by just stepping through the door. When I got a sunburn while sitting in the shade, I cut the trip short.

(Another memorable thing about that trip to the beach was that 50 miles into the trip my right front disc caliper seized up with the brake ON. I was in the middle of nowhere, so I drove the next 100 miles with the brake on. I had 220 horses and 4-wheel drive - one locked up brake had zero chance of stopping me. But when I got to the beach and found an auto shop, that wheel was smoking hot, and I mean that literally.)

There's something about August. I recall driving into Helena, Montana, one sunny August day. The air was hot and the sun was blistering. I remember thinking, "this is the hottest place I've ever been", and maybe it was. I've never been to Death Valley, but if it's hotter than central Virgina in August, then no thank you.

Seeing The Space Station

I just watched the International Space Station (ISS) fly over my house. At 5:07 AM, it rose out of the northwestern sky, sunlight reflecting off its solar panels, becoming higher and brighter by the second, and flew seemingly directly over my house. I watched it become fainter as it sank lower into the southeastern sky. It was visible for about 6 minutes. It wasn't the first time that I had seen the ISS.

The last time I saw it, I was living in Roanoke. I had left my apartment and was walking to my car and just happened to look up. Like just now, the ISS was high in the sky. Unlike just now, there were two points of light traversing the sky, one following the other. The trailing point of light was sunlight reflecting off the Space Shuttle, which was in the process of docking with the ISS. Or maybe it was undocking. I watched them until the earth eclipsed their sun and they suddenly switched off; first the ISS blinked out, then the shuttle blinked out.

I didn't get up early to see the ISS fly over. Rather, I haven't gone to bed tonight. Or, I didn't go to bed last night. Is tonight already last night at 5:30 AM? Yeah, tonight is in the future over 12 hours away.

It's strange to see the Space Station go overhead. Moving so fast, so quietly. Knowing there are people up there riding on that point of light in the sky. Knowing that in about 90 minutes they'll be up there again in the very same spot - relative to planet Earth, that is. I certainly won't be in the same spot to see them again. Earth's rotation is carrying me eastward at 1000 miles per hour. When the shuttle is again directly above the spot I was in at 5:07, I'll be about 1500 miles to the east.

The ISS is not a spectacle, but it's definitely worth seeing.

RxReminder

I'm almost finished with RxReminder. The setup program used to install a registry key so that RxReminder would start when Windows starts. However, that turned out to have a serious flaw; the application wouldn't work properly until it was closed and restarted. So now I have the setup program place a shortcut to the application into the common startup folder.

I also upgraded the program icon. The old icon looked like this:



That design has evolved and now it looks like this:

The to-do list is getting short. The main thing I have to do now is add error-handling code in critical spots.

Stay tuned.

VirtualBox and Windows 7

I'm writing this from a Windows 7 computer. It's running on Sun's VirtualBox, a free, open-source virtualization product that is installed on my Vista box. I can put Vbox into fullscreen mode, and then there's no hint that it's running on a virtual box. It looks and feels like you have a pc with Win7 installed. Or... I can put Vbox into seamless mode, and then I'm back at my Vista desktop, but I can still run Win7 apps and they appear on my desktop as if they were Vista apps. Pretty cool.

I tried using the Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, and it did work, but I think the Sun product works better, and it definitely gives me access to more of the physical machine's resources. Sun's Vbox required me to go into the BIOS and enable the iVT setting (Intel Virtualization Technology®) before I could successfully install Vbox. Windows 7 is a free download from Microsoft until August 2009. It expires in July 2010, but until then it's a free preview of Microsoft's next OS.

I just tried to upload a screenshot - and totally forgot that the pictures are on my "real" computer. That's how good the illusion is. I'll publish what I have and switch back to the real computer where my photos are located. (Back in Vista now.) This is my Windows 7 desktop before I began installing applications. (Click image to enlarge.)

(Back in Windows 7.) Now, check this out. I wanted to post a picture of the Windows 7 desktop in fullscreen mode. So I went back to Windows 7, put it in fullscreen mode, hit "Print Scrn", opened Paint, hit Ctrl-V, saved the image to my Win7 pictures folder, started up Firefox and now I'm writing from Win7 again. Here's the desktop in fullscreen mode. (You'll notice I've added a few icons to the desktop.) Notice, also, the desktop is no longer in a "box" as in the above photo. There's no way to know that this Windows 7 desktop is really just a process running on a Vista machine.

Dog Zoe

My previous post was about Zack and Zoe, only I didn't have a real photo of Zoe, only a composite photo, a 'shopped impression of Zoe, all fur and teeth. And bark. A lot of bark. I managed to get this photo of Zoe. (OK, maybe it's been 'shopped just a little.) I don't know what Zoe looks like when she's being nice. I haven't yet experienced that side of her nature.