Thursday, December 1, 2016

Three-Chord Songs

To print one of these songs, left click on it, right click on the image in the resulting page, select “Copy image”, open a new word-processor page (Word Perfect or Microsoft Word), then click menu “Edit” and on the Edit ladder select “Paste”.  Now click menu “File” and on the File ladder select “Print”.










Two-Chord Songs

To print one of these songs, left click on it, right click on the image in the resulting page, select “Copy image”, open a new word-processor page (Word Perfect or Microsoft Word), then click menu “Edit” and on the Edit ladder select “Paste”.  Now click menu “File” and on the File ladder select “Print”.






Monday, November 28, 2016

Ballad of Webb Doss


Bell County’s most memorable son
for the Cummins Family reunion ~1975

When I was a young lad in the county of Bell
Webb Doss was a man that I came to know well
His parents had money and built a fine home
Which Webb Doss inherited when they were gone

The years went by and his fortunes decreased
He had a strong aversion to elbow grease
He avoided all labor with exceptional skill
And rested himself with a passionate will

When winter wind blew and his house became cool
It was too far to walk out and tote in the fuel
So instead of fetching from the wood pile at night
He discovered that furniture burned warm and bright

And when all the furniture had been consumed
He pulled down the walls of the outermost room
Each winter a wall in the fireplace got hove
Till all that was left was a kitchen and stove

Now squirrel hunting wasn’t too much of a chore
If he could take aim from his own back door
If he ever did any work besides that
Then he managed keeping it under his hat

Although his requirements were modest indeed
He had several schemes to take care of his needs
He found out how gullible people could be
And took advantage of their naivety

Whenever his shoes became tattered and frail
He wrote a shoe company their products to sell
And when he received his shoe-salesman kit
He found in the samples a comfortable fit

He obtained all his cloths by a similar means
And swindled a company of a shipment of beans
He was very clever with paper and pen
Without Webb Doss where would Bell County have been

An agent of a company sustaining a loss
Inquired in Bell County where to find Webb Doss
They all directed him to Doss’s place
Where this man confronted Webb Doss face to face

But Webb Doss retained his aequanimitas
And said “Mr you got the wrong Webb Doss
“Oh you’ve made a dreadful mistake I fear
“For lots of Webb Dosses are living round here”

Webb ordered a set of false teeth in the mail
But he was reluctant to pay up the bill
Said they fit so bad that his whole body hurt
So how could he pay them if he couldn’t work

Now Webb Doss knew how to make politics pay
He wrote to all candidates with this to say
“I’ll work for you here as you campaign commences
Send 100 dollars to cover expenses

He picked up this money from every contender
And wrote them describing his services rendered
Saying “You’ll likely carry the County of Bell
“Send 100 more and we surely can’t fail”

When Roosevelt came to the president’s chair
He took a great interest in Doss’s welfare
Each month a check was mailed right to his door
So Webb didn’t have to work any more

But one time his check was a little bit late
Webb went to the bureaucrat very irate
Said “Your money comes from the same place as mine
“So see to it that I receive it on time”

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Folk-Guitar Basics

Guitar basics for folk, country, bluegrass, cowboy and gospel
(To print text for easy reference:  Highlight it by smearing mouse cursor from top left to bottom right.  Right click on highlighted text, then from ladder select Copy.  Open new word-processor page, eg Word, click Edit and select Paste, click File and select Print.  To print chart for easy reference:  Left click on chart, right click middle of graphics page, select Copy Image.  Open new word-processor page, click Edit and select Paste, click File and select Print.)

 * A beginner might be amazed at how many songs in our culture require only two easy chords and how many more require only three.  A small minority require four or more.
 * My song-lyric collections (eg Wailing for Wuv) use numbers to specify chords – each chord presented as a superscript on the syllable where the chord begins, almost always at a downbeat.  People enjoying the number system can be seen at:  All smiles tonight,  Blue eyes crying in the rain,  Church in the wildwood,  Darkest hour.
 * The basic chord-number system is presented in the image below (major chords only, learn minor chords on your own).  The lower-case letters at the top of the B7 diagram show the notes to which the respective strings of a guitar should be tuned (get a clip-on electronic tuner).
 *  The numbers on the strings and between the frets show where your fingers go to make each chord (2=index, 3=middle, 4=ring, 5=little).  Until you can play most of the chords easily, begin each learning session by playing all the chords one after the other, left to right, F#, B7, E, A, D, G, C and F.
 * Below the chord pictures, are tracks with numbers 2, 5, 1, 4.   The numbers in a track are written below the chords typically associated in a song.  Consider the second track from the top, the chords used in the key of A, ie 2=B7, 5=E, 1=A and 4=D.
 * After playing all the chords, select a song to sing from the Two-Chord Songs or Three-Chord Songs.  If you don’t know a satisfactory key for your voice singing that song, then start by trying an easy key like A or D (ie 1 = A or 1 = D).
 * If you can’t tell instinctively what note to sing first, it will be good to hum the three chord notes (1,3, 5) repeatedly.  They can be found by holding the 1 chord and picking the strings labeled 1, 3 and 5 at the bottom of the chord diagram.  Play and hum those three notes several times.  Then, while strumming the 1 chord, hum the half scale (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1) up and down several times or the whole scale (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1).  After that, you should be able to start your song on the right note.  By the way, it’s worth noting that every song begins on the 1, 3 or 5 note of the 1 chord, and every song ends on the 1 note of the 1 chord, the key note.


Friday, November 18, 2016

If you were God

Fellow humans:
 * If you were God (objective and benevolent), what would you think of humankind today?  Would you be disappointed that we haven’t bridled our reproductive, acquisitive and profligate urges?  Would you hope that we soon recognize that every effort toward sustainability, shared contentment, justice and peace will be wasted without reproductive restraint?
 * Would you condemn us for driving thousands of other species to extinction by exploiting them, encroaching on their space, and by polluting air, water and land?
 * Would you suspect us of willful ignorance for failing (after 3000 years of written history) to see that unrestrained population expansion condemns us to repeated famines, contagions, confrontational migrations and endless tribal conflicts, nation against nation, religion against religion, race against race, language against language, community against community, philosophy against philosophy?  Tribes cannot decide to share limiting resources with other tribes.  Proponents of such sharing are considered traitors.
 * Would you weep to hear our leaders and pundits proposing that we solve our contentment-distribution problem by faster exploitation of non-renewable resources, when we are already awash in products both practical and trivial?
 * Might you be raising up a prophet to tell your subjects how to incentivize lower fertility rates in crowded and arid lands?
 * The chart below presents fertility rates.  Thirty-six African countries between the northernmost six and the southernmost six have fertility rates to double or triple their populations with every generation, as do four Muslim countries.  No Latin American country has such a high fertility rate, though Guatemala is close.  There are several such maps on the web.  Compare the fertility-rate map with the Maplecroft food-insecurity map.  It's hard to escape the conclusion that international food support and other relief should be contingent on contraception success.



Friday, November 4, 2016

Radio Signals

 *  What is the signal that a radio-transmitter's antenna emits that a receiver's antenna absorbs?  It seems to me that a transmitter cannot produce a photon as long as a radio wave and that a radio wave cannot be singular, coherent or smooth, except perhaps at absolute zero temperature.

My conjecture:
 *  1)  During a radio-wave cycle, millions of electrons will emit photons that depart individually, intermittently and separately.  Those photons can’t assemble to make a single photon or even a coherent wave.
 *  2)  Each transmitter-antenna electron constantly undergoes thermal agitation at IR frequency, so no electron can move without interruption in response to its radio-frequency EMF, and no electron can emit a photon of radio-wave length given its collisions with thermally vibrating elements.
 *  3)  Thus, an electron of the transmitting antenna must emit numerous IR-length photons during a cycle, so the signal leaving the transmitting antenna must be showers of IR-length photons alternately carrying a net energy for accelerating electrons toward one or the other end of a receiving antenna.
 *  4)  During a phase of the radio-wave cycle, emitted photons must affect receiving antennae in a way expected of a growing or propagated magnetic field transverse to the transmitting antenna.  During the next phase, the action must be opposite.  Would that work be attributable to photon spin?  If so that might say something about photon spin.
 *  5)  It appears that the windings of a toroidal coil with rising EMF emits a signal mimicking that classically attributed to a growing magnetic field, but no magnetic field is found outside the toroid under continued EMF.  IR-size photons emitted from the windings could account for the rising-EMF signal with no continued-EMF magnetic field outside the toroid.  That is, the signal outside the toroid is a photon shower of specific spin, what I propose to be the radio signal.

 *  Perhaps my discomfort with existing descriptions of radio signals is due to my misunderstanding of the doctrine that an electron radiates when changing velocity, not when coasting in its inertial frame.  Can it emit just from receiving a changing EMF?

 *  I presume that Maxwell’s equations describe radio-signal emission and absorption phenomenologically.  Good for engineers,  But I obviously doubt that the actors are those usually imagined in applying Maxwell’s equations.  If I’m correct, then a revised accounting for radio transmission is due, one good for physicists.

 *  I would appreciate receiving addresses of internet sites providing evidence or arguments for or against my conjecture about radio signals.  Reply to David Regen  at  xms@bellsouth.net

Friday, October 7, 2016

Electromagnetic Radiation

 * In recent weeks, I’ve tried to learn the conventional wisdom surrounding atomic structure and electromagnetic radiation.  Some of my thoughts are presented in an earlier posting.
 * Radiation is described and accounted for with two main theories that don’t mix easily, classical physics and quantum mechanics.  It is my belief that a proper understanding of atoms and radiation must reconcile both theories, by modification of classical theory to account for quantum behavior.
 * Charged particles undergoing acceleration emit electromagnetic radiation.
 * According to the classical theory, an electron is surrounded by its force field which could be spherically symmetrical when the electron is inertial.   Accelerating the electron displaces its field with respect to its most recent previous field, the new field being propagated radially with light speed from the electron.  There is a spherical dog-leg-field shell where the new field replaces the old, that shell expanding at light speed from the electron.  This is a compelling description of radiation from an accelerated electron.
 * Quantum theory provides no such mechanistic accounting for radiation from an accelerated electron.  It's more about absorption or emission of energy incident to electron jumping among orbitals of an atom.  But the classical theory fails to account for the fact that the energy from an accelerated electron doesn’t radiate spherically, it departs as an energy bundle (photon) in one direction and proceeds without inverse-square weakening, able to energize an electron in a distant target atom.
 * Needed is a theory of an electron’s force field or of events associated with emission that would account for the photon.  It seems that the electron’s field might not be spherical but more like a beacon directed randomly in various radial directions, or perhaps directed with respect to neighboring charges.  Alternatively, one might imagine that the photon (energy bundle) takes a direction dictated by the force accelerating the electron perhaps following a trough in the dog-leg-field shell.
 * It may be worth noting that these theories attempt to explain our commonest experiences: vision, warmth, cold; our commonest tools: glasses, magnifiers, lasers, furnaces.  Contemplating these matters is about as entertaining as music, socializing, art, literature, theater, more satisfying than rest or pleasure quest.  Discussing them should be even more fun.

Reply to David Regen  at  xms@bellsouth.net

Monday, September 26, 2016

How many deplorables?

 * Republicans waxed sanctimonious over Hillary Clinton’s proposition that half of Trump’s supporters were deplorables – meaning racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, etc.  Half may be an underestimate, since these characteristics express low-brain tribal drives inherited from our ape ancestors.  We all share these primitive drives; but Democrats bridle them, for the sake of justice, more than do Republicans.
 * Republicans absorbed the Dixiecrats when LBJ signed the voting-rights act.  When we Democrats were celebrating a brilliant black president with his exemplary family in the White House, gun sales to non-democrats skyrocketed.
 * Clinton failed to list the anti-scientific climate-denying Rush-Limbaugh sycophants, who overflow the basket of deplorables.  How can Floridians vote anti-science Republican while ocean warming and acidification destroy their sea life and rising sea level swamps Miami and salinates Florida’s ground water?
 * There is hardly room in the basket for the insatiably greedy who hire lobbyists to bribe Congress for financial advantages benefiting the already rich.

Thursday, September 8, 2016

Quantum dynamics

* I might be happier, if I could understand the interactions among elemental particles and between such particles and space associated with emission and absorption of photons.  I wonder:
* Why don’t an atom’s electrons fall into its nucleus?  What geometric or mechanical change of an atom’s electron is associated with emission or absorption of a photon?  Is it a change in orbital radius or could it be a change in orbital vibration?
* Reading between the lines, I suspect that every photon has the same composition (a common number of wave cycles, 1 or n, or 1 pulse) and that the wave or pulse of every photon has the same amplitude.  Accordingly, a photon of twice the energy has twice the frequency and half the length -- or something like that.
 * Photons are not quantized, except by virtue of their emission and absorption dynamics, unless we can believe inflationary and relativistic red shifts to be quantized.
* It should be fun to imagine the composition and dynamics of antenna-emitted radio waves, these being generated from innumerable jerky electrons being accelerated phasically in opposite directions.  The photon conglomerate presumably disperses during inverse-square spreading.  Would such photons have odd shapes?  Since they induce corresponding oscillations in receiving antennae, they must retain information about the direction of electrons that produced them.  A corollary is that photons are pulses, not waves. A wave shouldn't retain such directional information.
 * The microwave background consists of very-low-frequency photons.  I recon that the microwaves of a radar or oven are not photons but are conglomerates of higher-frequency photons, perhaps longer IR photons, which cooperate in driving electrons in a target antenna or food alternately in opposite directions at microwave frequency.  The retention of directional information is easier explained if photons are pulses, not waves.
* The finding that electrons (having electric and magnetic fields) interfere in the double-slit experiment may not prove that particles per se have wave character.  However, a similar result with neutrons seems convincing, though mysterious.  Could it be that the fields of opposite charges in a neutron do not cancel but extend side by side throughout space?
 * How can I reconcile my deterministic convictions with probabilistic particle behavior?
 * What data support detailed electron orbital models?

Reply to David Regen  at  xms@bellsouth.net
I started a conversation thread at Physics Forum

Key-word links
Planck Blackbody Quantized Light Wave/Particle Duality

deBroglie Bohr Atom Structure EnergyOrbits DoubleSlitInterferance MatterDuality

History of quantum theory, John Bell Entanglement Test Einstein vs Bohr

Entanglement John Bell –> Experimental Test Quantum Computer

Microwave background from Big Bang Plasma Orange to Red to Microwave shift

Edge of Universe (Observable) Particle Horizon Inflating Space Red Shift to Oblivion 4-D Curved Univ

Electron Wavelength Orbit = Standing Wave

Mass of Energy m = E / c^2   Combined parts have less mass than sum of singles ; Potential Energy can be neg

Space-Time Causality in 4D Space ;   s.i. = (dx)^2 - (c dt)^2 future already exists

Physics Photon dimensions

PhysicsForums Size of photon particle 

ResearchGate What is the cross section size of a photon?

RP Photonics Encyclopedia Length of a Photon

ScienceForums Does a photon have physical volume or geometrical size?

Photon Energy vs Frequency

Double-slit diffraction of neutrons

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Tennessean's worst letter yet

Re: Race relations take a tumble by Hugh Fulford, July 26.
* Considering the growing prevalence of photographing phones, social media and exploitive partisan leaders, race relations might have been much worse by now were it not for Obama’s calm systematic leadership.  In any case, the referenced letter makes me despair of an effective national conversation toward racial reconciliation.  The necessary humility doesn’t come naturally and is utterly lacking among Mr Fulford’s ilk.
* We are lucky that Barack Obama came along when he did.

Monday, May 30, 2016

Obamacare criticized

 Re: Obamacare fails to solve health-care problems, by Sabi Kumar, Nashville Tennessean, May 29.
* Sabi Kumar condemns Obamacare for failing to provide Americans with insurance comparable to that of senators.  In fact, by removing the pre-existing-condition barrier and life-time-payout limit, ACA has delivered senator-like insurance to private-sector Americans of senator-like rank and income.  Moreover, ACA gave millions of middle-class Americans access to affordable health insurance for the first time.  It would have covered millions more had it not been sabotaged by Republican state governments.
* He implies that a better health-care law could have passed when democrats were the majority in Congress.  In fact passage required compromises with conservative politicians of both parties and with influential lobbyists for insurance-industry preservation.
* Kumar notes that many individuals and employers chose to pay the penalties for noncompliance rather than purchase health insurance.  This resulted in fewer healthy subscribers, hence losses by insurers.  Would he espouse higher penalties?
* If Kumar is sincere, he would embrace the ACA modified so as to remedy deficiencies he identifies?  That can happen only when Democrats have the presidency and the Congress.

Sunday, May 8, 2016

Gathering of curious

More Discussion Topics

Proposals
1 Code-labelled ammunition
2 Dobro capo, Scalene triangular prism shaped
3 Junction-box improvement
4 Safe child transporter, rear key turn to prevent alarm
5 Stinky paint balls to scatter rioters
6 Stink bombs to influence rouge foreign leaders
7 Sticky LoJack
8 Instant engine jettison, parachute deployment, air bag, helicopter
9 Instant engine jettison, powerless or floating airliner, floatation deployment
10 Headlights that turn with steering
11 Dentist 37deg water squirter
12 Dentist lamp that stays on patient’s mouth
13 Dentist lamp positioned entirely by foot/knee controls
14 Dentist chair positioned entirely by foot/knee controls
15 Dentist power tools automatically sterilized between patients (O3, UV, steam)
16 Digital storage of denture mold
17 Nuclear steam turbine for 24/365 surveillance drone
18 Device for rounding copper pipe end
19 Device for smoothly bending/straightening copper pipe
20 National ObitAlert (newspaper service)
21 Charged and permeable local anesthetic for electrophoretic infiltration
22 Submarine bulkheads with lift bars for submersible guided hooks
23 Submarine with deployable floatation bags
24 Laser grid
25 DNA of nummular eczema vs nearby skin
26 Inertial cast-iron-drain clean-out-cap opener
27 Bidirectional clean-out access
28 Improved drain snake
29 Tyrant Retirment Paradise
30 Automatic home-mortgage principal adjustment, shared risk
31 Semi-truck jack-knife resister
32  Engineers adjusting fiscal policy to approach politically decided targets

Questions
1 Magnetic field structure (?granular?)
2 Radio-wave structure (?granular?)
3 Photon shape/dimensions
4 Photon destiny
5 Gravity ?=? Space repulsion ?=? Dark energy
6 Field of electron, still vs moving (special relativitiy)
7 Spherical-bell-like oscillations of electrons in orbit / energy states
8 Ideal society?  Shared provision, Rights respected
9 Sovereignty theory, need for leadership, spokespersons
10 Primitive drives, survival and civilization
11 Policies for extending a society, justice for future?
12 Inevitability and melioration of events/experience
13 Roles of evolution and desire in deterministic universe
14 Difference between neutron about to decay and those not about to decay
15 Electron gun in vacuum or on graphine
16 Mechanisms of heterogeneity and organization of universe
17 How cesium oscillations counted
18 What motions slow clocks, orbital about still observer, orbital about rotating observer?
19 Where are all the big-bang photons that didn't become matter?  What are they doing?

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Wondering about nature

What would it be like to gather monthly with people curious and informed about nature, just to share curiosity and information with like-minded people?  Interesting topics are abundant.

What force started galaxies spinning coordinately, considering Newton’s laws of motion?

Do electron orbitals form ringing spherical bells more stable when symmetrical (satisfied)?

What does change of energy state look like with emission or absorption of photon?

Could gravity be a repulsive force from space shaded by matter?

Structure of superconductivity?

Structure of superfluidity?

In a gas (Hydrogen, Helium, etc), what is heat, temperature?

What are photon's dimensions?  How target matter?

Are radio waves emitted and captured in electron-jump packets?

What features of photons are same for all?

Interaction of transverse electron streams, in space, in wire?

Are stable magnetic fields particulate, granular?

Are stable electric fields particulate, granular?

Describe field of moving charge.

Appearance of still electric field seen by moving observer.  Moving grid.

Most distant objects viewed in curved space.  In opposite directions.

Meaning, value, ethics in deterministic universe, in a decaying universe.

Who owes national debt?  Need it be payed?  Where is it?

Profit, private wealth and debt distribution.

Consequences of free trade.

Imagine ethical tribalism.

Consequences of unfettered migration.

Ethics of rational migration.

Law: Peace despite primitive human drives.

What would racial justice look like?

Roles of, value of and need for recreation, entertainment, distraction.

Can we handle the truth?

Consider dynamic relations between adjustable independent variables (taxes, regulations, laws) and desired dependent variables (prosperity distribution, satisfaction distribution).

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Short history of Republican conservatism

* Republicans are harvesting a half century of successfully cultivating conservative extremism.  It began with a gift of white supremacists from the Democratic party when Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.  This gave rise to the southern strategy implemented by Republicans beginning with Nixon.
* It continued with Reagan’s claiming that federal programs to help the disadvantaged in fact harmed them, that unions and labor laws harmed laborers, that environmental regulations were silly, that international family-planning providers shouldn't be allowed to discuss abortion, that job loss from out-sourcing was offset by lower consumer prices, that all weapons systems deserve development, that tax-rate cuts would increase tax revenues.  Despite citizens’ love of tax cuts, Reagan wouldn’t have won were it not for Iranian revolutionaries holding Americans hostage during the election year.
* Under propaganda from the congress and industry, Clinton abandoned affordable health-care ambitions and added conservative initiatives of his own, like free trade, welfare reform and bank deregulation.  The country prospered owing to our head start in the digital revolution, the resulting productivity rise and associated financial speculation.
* With the help of Gore-caricaturing comedians and a conservative Supreme Court, Bush II followed Clinton, promising further tax cuts which he implemented.  When the national conversation turned to stagnation in Afghanistan, to Karl Rove’s urging 9/11 be put to maximal political advantage, and to insider trading at Harken Energy, Bush squelched that conversation by assembling troops in preparation for possible invasion of Iraq, leading to America’s biggest crime since slavery.  Hillary Clinton’s email flaws and Benghazi failures pale beside Bush’s cynical and disastrous use of military discretion.
* Inevitably bank deregulation, fair-housing programs, perverse bond ratings and an economic slowdown gave rise to financial collapse near the end of Bush’s tenure.  This was addressed first by bank bailouts and later by mortgage relief, because rational tools for addressing the predictable collapse could not be produced prophylactically by a government of checks and balances.  Rational tools (shovel-ready federal projects planned and waiting, reversible automatic mortgage adjustments) are still lacking.  The result has been vast profits for real-estate and stock-market speculators at the expense of the working class.
* Election of a black president woke up and consolidated Republican conservatives as Second-Amendment/Tea-Party fanatics.
* For the past three decades, the above political dynamics were accompanied by the rise of hateful and dishonest broadcasters, Rush Limbaugh and his imitators, occupying the anti-intellectual space created by Reagan. Also during that time, Republicans have diligently supported their candidates for local and state positions down to school boards; and, at every opportunity, they have systematically redrawn districts to maximize Republican success.  We have sorted ourselves into politically homogeneous districts, some where progressives, intellectuals, environmentalists, futurists, humorists, even moderate conservatives must self censor.
* The result is Republican presidential aspirants unfit for national leadership.