Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla was born in July of 1856, in what is now Croatia. He came to the United States in 1884, and briefly worked with Thomas Edison before the two parted ways. He sold several patent rights, including those to his alternating-current machinery, to George Westinghouse. His 1891 invention, the "Tesla coil," is still used in radio technology today.
Around 1900—nearly a decade later after inventing the "Tesla coil"—Tesla began working on his boldest project yet: Building a global communication system—through a large, electrical tower—for sharing information and providing free electricity throughout the world. The system, however, never came to fruition; it failed due to financial constraints, and Tesla had no choice but to abandon the Long Island, New York laboratory that housed his work on the tower project, Wardenclyffe. In 1917, the Wardenclyffe site was sold, and Tesla's tower was destroyed.
In addition to his AC system, coil and tower project, throughout his career, Tesla discovered, designed and developed ideas for a number of important inventions—most of which were officially patented by other inventors—including dynamos (electrical generators similar to batteries) and the induction motor. He was also a pioneer in the discovery of radar technology, X-ray technology and the rotating magnetic field—the basis of most AC machinery.Biography.com
The WiTricity® technology story begins late one night with MIT Professor Marin Soljačić (pronounced Soul-ya-cheech) standing in his pajamas, staring at his mobile phone on the kitchen counter. It was the sixth time that month that he was awakened by his phone beeping to let him know that he had forgotten to charge it. At that moment, it occurred to him: “There is electricity wired all through this house, all through my office—everywhere. This phone should take care of its own charging!” But to make this possible, one would have to find a way to transfer power from the existing wired infrastructure to the phone—without wires. Soljačić started thinking of physical phenomena that could make this dream a reality.
a short thought for the black inventor of baby buggy
(for WH Richardson)
I guess you remember him
if you ever had to carry a baby
a bundle of joy
wrapped in swallowing clothes
but he gave you a choice
to either carry or buggy
to hold or tug them along
through the whining streets
little feet lifted in air
like a prayer
if you have one
call his name
racing through the streets
with wheels and then
peel back the layers
of history, remember
his name
"Close to the Tree," Robert Gibbons, Three Rooms Press (VERY good read!) *****
Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.
Today Juneteenth commemorates African American freedom and emphasizes education and achievement. It is a day, a week, and in some areas a month marked with celebrations, guest speakers, picnics and family gatherings. It is a time for reflection and rejoicing. It is a time for assessment, self-improvement and for planning the future. Its growing popularity signifies a level of maturity and dignity in America long over due. In cities across the country, people of all races, nationalities and religions are joining hands to truthfully acknowledge a period in our history that shaped and continues to influence our society today. Sensitized to the conditions and experiences of others, only then can we make significant and lasting improvements in our society.
The baby buggy is an invention, an application of Newtonian mechanics for the greater common good. Since xenophobic, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals tend to sadly procreate, this information should cause some consternation and epic episodes of Cognitive Dissonance. Que trolls: 3...2...1... It's also the birthdays of my favorite Civil Rights hero Mamie Goodwin-Douglas (sister), who put her life on the line many times for the world we take for granted, and my father Robert Harrison Goodwin (June 19, 1925 - August 26, 1999), a man who knew service (USN); boxing and hardship, facing indignities with dignity. One the fourth occasion his employer deemed him worthy of going to supervisory school only to (again) train his next Caucasian manager, he quietly retorted: "I expect I'll retire now." Since Pop had the time, they couldn't argue. He spent the remainder of his days before the lung cancer in reasonably good health working in his vegetable garden - doing exactly what he wanted to do. He is still missed.
Using the "magnetocaloric effect" to build a low-temperature magnetic refrigeration device. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Spectral-Design)
A large, rotational magnetocaloric effect – which could be used as the basis for a low-temperature magnetic refrigeration device – has been observed in crystals of the compound HoMn2O5, according to research carried out by scientists in Canada and Bulgaria. This finding expands our knowledge of magnetocaloric materials, adding to our progress towards a practical and environmentally friendly magnetic cooler that might be usable in a domestic setting.
In recent times, the potential of magnetic refrigeration techniques as an alternative to traditional, vapour-compression solutions has been attracting considerable attention. This is mainly thanks to the lower energy demands of the technique, and the fact that it is not reliant on hazardous fluids. Such devices take advantage of the magnetocaloric effect – a phenomenon in which certain materials change temperature in response to an externally applied magnetic field. Such fields cause the magnetic dipoles of the atoms within magnetocaloric compounds to align. To balance out this decrease in entropy – and thereby satisfy the second law of thermodynamics – the motion of the atoms also becomes more disordered, and the material heats up. In contrast, when the applied field is removed, the process reverses and the material cools. In magnetic refrigerators, these temperature changes can be harnessed, using a fluid or gas, to drive a heat pump. This relates to the ozone layer and how we could use technology to reduce the size of the hole over the Antarctic. UV radiation is filtered by it to make our existence possible. Kind of an important thing, since Monday's post on warp drive technology - though inspiring - is still in the theory stage. The only spaceship we currently have is under our feet.
The sun emits light waves with a range of frequencies. Some of these frequencies fall within the visible light spectrum and thus are detectable by the human eye. Since sunlight consists of light with the range of visible light frequencies, it appears white. This white light is incident towards Earth and illuminates both our outdoor world and the atmosphere that surrounds our planet.
The interaction of sunlight with matter can result in one of three wave behaviors: absorption, transmission, and reflection. The atmosphere is a gaseous sea that contains a variety of types of particles; the two most common types of matter present in the atmosphere are gaseous nitrogen and oxygen. These particles are most effective in scattering the higher frequency and shorter wavelength portions of the visible light spectrum. This scattering process involves the absorption of a light wave by an atom followed by reemission of a light wave in a variety of directions. The amount of multidirectional scattering that occurs is dependent upon the frequency of the light.
-ROYGBIV (huh?)
-Why are the skies blue?
-Why are sunsets red?
You could also just enjoy them (but, understanding them is such a conversation starter):
Photograph of Maui sunset by Becky Henderson
Thrill your dates/science/physics teacher (and I pray those sets are "mutually exclusive" ) in the fall with the answers at:
...whether or not we achieve it, it is fascinating that we're giving science discussions on it! Besides, this KILLS any previous designs of starships (without being too far off as well).
Instead of nacelles, it looks like we'd have two hoops enclosing the vessel. No "pivoting at Warp 2" recommended...see the video presentation below. The dilemma can be summed in this humorous meme (not meant to insult anyone, but if you do a Google search, it's likely to come up):
The science behind the humor: it took about as much fuel as the shuttle weighed to get it into orbit. Fuel would then be spent (emptied), and Newtonian mechanics - momentum and gravitational pull of planets mostly - would be the predominate force moving a craft forward. The only interstellar vehicle that's left our solar system is Voyager 1 on August 25, 2012, launched in 1977 when I was decidedly (blessedly) in high school. With abs...and hair on my head... 35 years is a long time for a one-way trip. NASA is attempting to reduce such journeys to a human lifetime, and maybe make it a round trip. Even 1/10 c (the speed of light) would be a civilization-changing accomplishment. Look at the picture above. Nope, it’s not a snapshot of a Star Wars scene, or any other sci-fi movie. It’s what you get if you combine a NASA physicist working on achieving faster-than-light travel with a 3D artist, and the result is freaking AWESOME. And yes, you heard correctly, there are scientists working on faster-than-light travel, and this is what the ship could look like in the future.
According to Pew Research, we as an American Publicare far more partisan/polarizedthan we've ever been. It affects who we live next to; where we shop and worship (or not); where our kids go to school; who we befriend/follow on social media. I think it affects how we take in knowledge, how we measure knowledge and what wecountas knowledge.
Dimensional barrier...unknown energies...antimatter...dark energy...x element (?)...I applaud their near Star Trek level techno-babble.
Though it mixes comic companies, he reminds me of Toby Maguire in the original Spiderman movies. Similar to Peter Parker's epic lunchroom fight with Flash Thompson, everyone moving in slow-mo; the look of sheer terror and befuddlement is entertaining when Barry Allen realizes he's not quite human anymore (or, as they allude, he's a meta-human).
Anyway, this post is reminiscent is when I encountered comic book characters, other than reading them in the comics. It would be on Saturday mornings, rising early at 6 AM, glued to the set until 3 PM ending with the Lone Ranger and Tonto. It's how I know the Apollo moon landing happened (when Jonny Quest reruns gets interrupted for Neil Armstrong, as a 6-year-old, you can get a little excited). I, of course, wasn't disappointed.
I hope you enjoy it in the fall. Along with Arrow, Gotham, Agents of Shield, the fall line up - minus "reality" television - should be fun (again).
Location-based social networks are allowing scientists to study the way human patterns of behaviour change in time and space, a technique that should eventually lead to deeper insights into the nature of society.
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: The increasing availability of big data from mobile phones and location-based apps has triggered a revolution in the understanding of human mobility patterns. This data shows the ebb and flow of the daily commute in and out of cities, the pattern of travel around the world and even how disease can spread through cities via their transport systems.
So there is considerable interest in looking more closely at human mobility patterns to see just how well it can be predicted and how these predictions might be used in everything from disease control and city planning to traffic forecasting and location-based advertising.
Today we get an insight into the kind of detailed that is possible thanks to the work of Zimo Yang at Microsoft research in Beijing and a few pals. These guys start with the hypothesis that people who live in a city have a pattern of mobility that is significantly different from those who are merely visiting. By dividing travelers into locals and non-locals, their ability to predict where people are likely to visit dramatically improves.
Zimo and co begin with data from a Chinese location-based social network called Jiepang.com. This is similar to Foursquare in the US. It allows users to record the places they visit and to connect with friends at these locations and to find others with similar interests.
They're doing the testing at high altitudes to simulate thin atmospheric conditions on Mars. In a twist, the flying saucer isn't coming from the Red Planet...we're sending our own.
NASA did not conduct the flight test of the agency's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range in Kauai, Hawaii, during its designated launch period. The project's reserved time at the range will expire Saturday without NASA being able to fly the test because of continuing unfavorable weather conditions.
NASA will hold a media teleconference at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT) on Thursday, June 12 to discuss what this delay in the LDSD testing means and possible next steps for the project.
Speakers will be:
--Mark Adler, LDSD Project Manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California
(a) Top view of the crystal structure of monolayer phosphorene, and side views of the occupied orbitals, corresponding to (b) bonding orbitals and (c) lone pairs. Courtesy: Phys. Rev. B
Single electrons hopping between individual atomic layers are responsible for opening up a bandgap in multilayer black phosphorus (or phosphorene) – a new technologically important 2D material. This unexpected finding, from researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, is very different to what happens in other 2D materials like graphene and the transition-metal dichalcogenides.
Like other 2D materials, such as graphene and the transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), black phosphorus has dramatically different electronic and mechanical properties from its bulk, 3D, parent and so may find use in a host of novel device applications. And just like graphene (which is a sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice), black phosphorus is a layered material containing individual phosphorus atoms that are arranged hexagonally. Each atomic layer is held together by weak van der Waals forces. However, in phosphorene, the surface is puckered, and this seems to make all the difference when it comes to bandgap behaviour.
Bulk phosphorene is a semiconductor with a moderate bandgap of between 0.31 and 0.35 eV, but the monolayer material is predicted to be an insulator with a much larger bandgap that varies with the number of phosphorus layers. Although such predictions have already been confirmed in laboratory experiments, researchers are still unsure as to where this considerable bandgap broadening comes from as the material is scaled down to monolayers.
A ''super computer'' has duped humans into thinking it is a 13-year-old boy, becoming the first machine to pass the ''iconic'' Turing Test, experts say
Hannah Furness, and agencies
A ''super computer'' has duped humans into thinking it is a 13-year-old boy to become the first machine to pass the ''iconic'' Turing Test, experts have said.
Five machines were tested at the Royal Society in central London to see if they could fool people into thinking they were humans during text-based conversations.
The test was devised in 1950 by computer science pioneer and Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing, who said that if a machine was indistinguishable from a human, then it was ''thinking''.
No computer had ever previously passed the Turing Test, which requires 30 per cent of human interrogators to be duped during a series of five-minute keyboard conversations, organisers from the University of Reading said.
But ''Eugene Goostman'', a computer programme developed to simulate a 13-year-old boy, managed to convince 33 per cent of the judges that it was human, the university said. 1
“Eugene” and four other contenders participated in the Turing Test 2014 Competition at the Royal Society in London. Each chatterbox was required to engage in a series of five-minute text-based conversations with a panel of judges. A computer passes the test if it is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time. Eugene convinced 33% of the judges it was human– the only machine in history to do so.
The competition was held on the 60th anniversary of the death of Alan Turing, the great British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst , computer scientist and philosopher.
During World War II, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain’s code breaking center. He led Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, and improved the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
The great Alan Turing was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of “algorithm” and “computation”. Turing is widely considered the “father” of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
The shameful British government prosecuted Turing for being gay, showing no respect for a man whose contributions to Britain and the world were enormous. He accepted treatment with estrogen injections (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison, and later committed suicide. 2
Credit: ApplySci blog
"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture." Bertrand Russell
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Here’s how mathematicians might define the sport of wrestling. A system composed of two mechanical agents coupled via mechanical actions such as contact and collision. The aim of the contest is for one agent to floor the other while maintaining its own balance. The rest is just show business.
That’s more or less exactly how Katsutoshi Yoshida and pals at Utsunomiya University in Japan describe the sport in developing a mathematical model of wrestling which they go on to test in a numerical simulation.
Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors.
This produces a feeling of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance etc.
For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition).
Festinger's (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance).
Dr. Tyson interviewed Steven Soter on his Internet Star Talk Radio show, who along with Anne Druyan (and Carl), was one of the original writers of COSMOS:
I have a naive hope that with the right information, human beings tend to respond to it and make logical decisions. Even in the fictional Star Trek timeline, it took a while before the humans actually "got it," and started behaving in a civilized manner towards one another (it only took several millennium of ignorance and cruelty, after all).
Like Big Bang/climate change/science denial; like mythologized faked-moon-landing-conspiracies; like fraud creation science versus actual, I have been sadly mistaken. Similar to the debate on evolution at the creation museum between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, it did little more than fill the airwaves and social media posts with something novel to view. In Ham's case, he was literally "preaching to the choir" of the sternly-resistant-to-new-information-congregation. From the link heading the first paragraph:
Leon Festinger (1957) proposed cognitive dissonance theory, which states that a powerful motive to maintain cognitive consistency can give rise to irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior.
According to Festinger, we hold many cognitions about the world and ourselves; when they clash, a discrepancy is evoked, resulting in a state of tension known as cognitive dissonance. As the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, and achieve consonance (i.e. agreement).
"Boldly going where no one has gone before" sounds like almost a daily/weekly inoculation against dissonance. You must record the new findings in your captain's log, dismiss what you previously believed, and move on. Cognitive dissonance inoculates one from taking in new information and forming new modes of thinking from it, the equivalent of placing index fingers in ears to sing-song "la-la" nauseatingly. It's been heartbreaking to see some of the comments on Facebook or Twitter from trolls that have a loud opinion and memorized talking points from bamboozle artists, but no actual experience in science or facts. [Thankfully, to the benefit of my blood pressure] I've learned to read and not engage: dissonance tends toward excited, incoherent, twisted-logic responses. Inevitably when I did engage previously, my goal would be sharing knowledge; their goal is authoritarian compliance to a quite twisted worldview. It's as if the criteria for winning a debate is how loudly one group or another can howl at the moon.
For better or worse (hint: I lean towards better), the 13 disk DVD will go on sale Tuesday. I'll likely buy it to support the show and its advocacy of science.
Just as likely as - despite the evidence before them - some will continue, at self-disillusioned disadvantage, to howl at the moon.
I used a reference to the Kardashev Scale to answer the following question (proposed to me by a friend on Facebook):
"Do you think mankind will ever master time travel?"
Short answer: no, with caveats.
I did qualify my "no" also with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and gave a link on Entropy. I also pointed out that every moment of our existence, we are time travelers - the motion of course, traveling forward.
In the series "Hannibal," the infamous Dr. Lecter discusses his longing for Mischa, his sister (you'll have to read "Hannibal Rising" by Thomas Harris to get the back story). In a nod to "Rising," he spoke of dropping a teacup in one scene of the season finale (most of which as someone who read the book series I did NOT predict coming), and hoped to see it reassemble, presumably witnessing the flow of time going in reverse, thus he would see his beloved sister again. That is a longing for something Entropy doesn't allow - backwards time travel.
I also pointed out as a species, we're not even at Type I on the Kardashev Scale:
Type I: able to marshal energy resources for communications on a planet-wide scale, equivalent to the entire present power consumption of the human race, or about 1016 watts. Here, Carl Sagan begged to differ, due to power gradation, we're more like (on his measure) a 0.7 civilization, or 7 x 1015 watts. We have pockets of deployed resources, but definitely not "planet-wide," else there would be no economic distinctions: east/south side to west side; 1st and 3rd worlds. Perhaps we could edge up our score with renewable alternatives?
Type II: surpasses this by a factor of approximately ten billion, making available 1026 watts, by exploiting the total energy output of its central star, using a Dyson sphere.
Type III: evolved enough to tap the energy resources of an entire galaxy, ~ 1036 watts.
Type IV and Vhere (along with the source of the shway photo above)
Let's take Chris Pine - the current Captain James T. Kirk. He weighs 175 lbs or 80 kg.
The Trek transporter converts humans into pure energy, ignores Heisenberg Uncertainty (via a Heisenberg compensator, of course...o_9), and somehow miraculously reassembles them perfectly, managing not to create horribly misshapen"Kirk-copies."
Utilizing the famous (Special Relativity) E = mc2:
80 kg x (3 x 108 m/s)2 = 7,200,000,000,000,000,000 N-m = 7.2 x 1018 Joules, or 7.2 x 1018 Joules per second (watts), clearly putting 23rd Century Warp Tech somewhere between a Type I and a II (I'm calling it "1.12"), at least to accomplish "scattering a man's atoms" about the universe (gotta love Bones McCoy's wordplay).
However, Wormholes are theorized to exist, as were once Black Holes (see Kip Thorne's "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy"). I was astonished to find out that Einstein and other physicists of his day did-not-want Black Holes to exist (at that time, they were called Schwarzschild singularities). It was pointed out in Kip's book that the solutions in General Relativity predicting Black Holes were initially themselves astonishing.
Wormholes, if detected, are probably very tiny and would take some kind of "exotic matter" to stabilize it for anything like the Enterprise, Defiant or Voyager to traverse it safely. That would put us squarely in Type II and out of the fossil fuel choke hold, plenty of food, world peace; "tea: Earl Grey - hot." A Wormhole would be a bridge in time as well as space, (Heimdall! Open the Bifrost!), but I think your time travel would be limited to the manufacture date of your Star Gate, i.e., if you made it 7 June 2014, this is as far backwards that one could travel (no reverse-breaking teacups or grandfather paradoxes).
So in essence: like any good Trekkie, or the mourning Dr. Lecter: I'd love to see it, but I don't think I will in my lifetime. We'd have to get smarter as a species than we've currently demonstrated in science.
Before Neil deGrasse Tyson, there was Carl Sagan. Handsome, articulate and witty, Sagan wasn't a man about town. He was a man about the cosmos. A tireless proponent of the universe, he was a pioneer in bridging the gap between science and nonscientists.
He was a giant among his peers, too. Sagan received 22 honorary degrees from colleges and universities throughout the U.S., published more than 600 scientific papers and articles, authored best-selling books and hosted a record-breaking public television series, "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage." He discovered how Venus was heated -- through the greenhouse effect (something scientists later learned also happened on Earth) and that the red color of Mars came from windstorm dust rather than vegetation. NASA explorations eventually proved he was right [source: Kiger].
Sagan was born in 1934 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1960 with a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics, then taught at Harvard and Cornell, where he became the director of Cornell's Laboratory for Planetary Studies and the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences.
Some of Sagan's most memorable contributions occurred outside the classroom. During the 1950s and 1960s, he was NASA's astronaut whisperer. He offered advice to the Apollo crew before their journeys to the moon and conceived experiments for other planetary expeditions, including an interstellar record designed to greet the unknown inhabitants of deep space [source: Center for Inquiry]. And that's just one cool thing on our list.
Your very own robot shopper? Dream on (Image: EPA/Corbis/SergeiI Ilinitsky)
...the only apocalypse we might see is the one we stupidly bring about.
So long, robot pals – and robot overlords. Sentient machines may never exist, according to a variation on a leading mathematical model of how our brains create consciousness.
Over the past decade, Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues have developed a mathematical framework for consciousness that has become one of the most influential theories in the field. According to their model, the ability to integrate information is a key property of consciousness. They argue that in conscious minds, integrated information cannot be reduced into smaller components. For instance, when a human perceives a red triangle, the brain cannot register the object as a colourless triangle plus a shapeless patch of red.
But there is a catch, argues Phil Maguire at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth. He points to a computational device called the XOR logic gate, which involves two inputs, A and B. The output of the gate is "0" if A and B are the same and "1" if A and B are different. In this scenario, it is impossible to predict the output based on A or B alone – you need both.
Illustration showing a proton (red) confined by magnetic-field lines (green) running down the centre of a Penning trap (yellow). (Courtesy: G Schneider, University of Mainz)
The most precise measurement ever of the proton's magnetic moment has been made by an international group of physicists. The new result – combined with a similar measurement planned for the proton's doppelganger, the antiproton – could help explain one of the deepest mysteries of physics – why the universe's matter seems to vastly outweigh its antimatter.
Every fundamental particle has a nearly identical antiparticle with opposite electric charge. Physicists' leading theories indicate that particles and their antiparticles were created in equal amounts during the Big Bang and should have annihilated each other long ago. But the universe is full of matter and lacks antimatter, suggesting that an undetected difference might exist between the two.
Scientific American: see link "Casimir-like interactions" in Abstract
Abstract:
We show that it is possible to use a massless field in the vacuum to communicate in such a way that the signal travels slower than the speed of light and such that no energy is transmitted from the sender to the receiver. Instead, the receiver has to supply a signal-dependent amount of work to switch his detector on and off. This type of signalling is related to Casimir-like interactions and it is made possible by dimension ---and curvature--- dependent subtleties of Huygens' principle.
Physics arXiv: Quantum Collect Calling Robert H. Jonsson, Eduardo Martin-Martinez, Achim Kempf
On Monday (today) the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to unveil proposed regulations that could be the biggest step the U.S. has taken yet toward dealing with climate change. The regulations would limit emissions from power plants, which currently account for 40 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, by far the biggest source.
“There’s a good chance that when history is written, this will be seen as the moment when the U.S. fully committed to combating climate change,” says Michael Greenstone, professor of environmental economics at MIT. “It’s a tremendous step forward.”
My hope at now a few years beyond half a century, that I've been a good example to you. Above all, I hope you know me as "Pop" and never encounter the man I was before I met your mother. Oh, he could write a military communications-electronics plan, he witnessed the rise of DARPANET to its commercial evolution the Internet; he knew engineering, physics and advanced mathematics; he was as much the Trekkie you enjoyed as we watched "The Next Generation," "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager." He was also at that time shallow, self-centered and quite useless to the human species. He mistook conquest for intimacy.
That man was eager to be a part of the crowd; ran with the dogs of the porch; became a "player" because - before your mother - I apparently could not let on to the Ferrell military wolf pack at that time I was in an actual "relationship" with any woman; influenced easily by others that were themselves not as cock-sure and confident of their swagger as they had led on. Many of them are now the "old-men-at-the-bar": buying drinks on the fantasy someone still wants to see their wrinkled, sagging-without-pants butt-ugly-naked bodies; or interestingly ministers, I assume to atone for our previous promiscuous sins.
I've been reading the trend on Twitter: #YesAllWomen. It would be far too easy to distance myself from the massacre that occurred in Isla Vista at UC Santa Barbara, or the attacks resulting in greater than 200 girls kidnapped by Boka Haram. They are related, reflected in the same dark mirror as the hash tag that has over a million hits world wide from the continent of Africa, Europe, Pakistan and the Americas.
It was not your video games that created this; it was not hip-hop music; it was not a "lack of family values." Those are merely symptoms of misogyny.
It was us: men and the culture of entitlement we've created for ourselves.
It has been imbibed deeply in the stories we've told ourselves: Eve and the apple; "once upon a time." Always, it is the "Prince Charming" that rides to the rescue and slays the evil dragon, never the woman who saves herself. Always, it is Cyrano and Christian contesting and collaborating for the possession of Roxanne, even if by proxy for Cyrano. The feelings of the female and to whom she would like to couple - Adam, Charming, Cyrano or Christian - is seen as an afterthought, irrelevant, a non-issue. Roxanne would have gladly chosen Cyrano (which, is kind of creepy as they were cousins) had he only "asked" rather than worship her from the shadows and treat her like fragile china, a possession: a THING, a brass ring; a prize to be won. The most pious chronicles, the most fantastic, fantasy-based stories; the most "romantic" narratives of all time objectify women as second-class human beings, and not full, equal participants in society. It even extends to the sciences, sadly:
I am writing this to you to disabuse yourselves from such notions. Even at the height of my youth, I could easily walk up to a table of young ladies at any bar in Austin, Texas and ask all (say five) to dance - all five could turn me down. My feelings would be hurt, but I'm not so injured that I'm homicidal. Being "shot-down"/rejected is a part of the agreed "game." If successful at this game, I was guilty of the violence of the lie ("love" is a four-letter-word); the cheat (the ambition to fill a black book and impress the aforementioned "pack"); the steal (as in wasting their precious time); the killing of hope (see previously "lie") and the baggage these women inevitably took into their relationships beyond me. These women: daughters, sisters, cousins, mothers, friends, lovers - humans, deserved better.
Your grandfather gave me some advice that I later put in a haiku:
Father's wisdom: a
Man has caught a woman when
She embraces him.
Meaning: if you don't say or do anything too stupid, you probably - with some manners and patience have a good chance at a relationship, which may only be a friendship, and that is quite fine. The choices of sharing her life and/or her body are hers, and not your entitlement. We need more friendships between the sexes, and less of the following:
Women are not "goals": notches on your belt or proof of your masculinity. Women are not property as slaves, goldfish or Labrador retrievers. Numbers do not prove your virility, they would instead prove your shallowness, and increase the possibility of an STD. There are other greater things you could be known for that could help others; solve an intractable problem; advance the human species and show the positivism of your background, culture and inner natures. No simply means no, which as another human being they have a right to say. I speak this life into you at 50+ so you can glean from my own sad mistakes. My quote:
"Experience isn't the best teacher: other people's experiences is the best teacher."
1 in 3 American women, 42 million women, plus 28 million children, either live in poverty or are right on the brink of it. (The report defines the “brink of poverty” as making $47,000 a year for a family of four.)
Nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women, and these workers often get zero paid sick days.
Two-thirds of American women are either the primary or co-breadwinners of their families.
The average woman is paid 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, and that figure is much lower for black and Latina women; African American women earn only 64 cents and Hispanic women only 55 cents for every dollar made by a white man. More at: TIME.com.
The above comprises US data, the world is similarly worse. It would appear that the path to world peace is not in the bombs we make, but in the way we treat our women.
Because of this misogynistic culture - underpaid professional cheerleaders, exploited hip-hop video vixens, over-sexual game avatars and reality TV show stars, there are some women that will support their own exploitation unawares. It is a form of Stockholm syndrome; insidious mental conditioning through consumer marketing. You can only help to an extent, but my advice would be to wish them well, move on to someone whom you can both love and respect. Rage or the enactment of violence should never be a part of your interactions. The women you encounter are daughters, sisters, cousins, mothers, friends, lovers: humans!
It is the same way you would like to see me (or any man) treat your own mother.
As men, we need to clear this dark mirror, atone and try again, mightily. Love always, Pop
