It's too quiet in here lately!

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Kellemora
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It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by Kellemora »

I'm starting to get worried I will be arrested for vagrancy, since I'm the only one who showed up a couple of times, hi hi.
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yogi
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by yogi »

The good news is that you DO show up every day. :mrgreen:

Truth be told I check the site several times a day. Logged in people stay visible for only 15 minutes if there is no activity from them. The elephant in the room here is that there is no elephant in the room. All the registered members of this site have either moved on or left this planet for a higher existence.

Frankly speaking this website died a few years ago. A normal webmaster would have shut it down in 2010 or there abouts, but this master is not normal. There are no current plans to vacate the domain. In fact there is a phpBB software update waiting to be installed. It's a fix to fix the last update that would break our database when the update was applied. It's not like I expect a sudden influx of interested parties to sign up and start chattering. I simply like maintaining the public forum and enjoy reading the spam mail, researching the bogus people who try to sign up, and, lately, reading the extortion threats from unidentified parties. There must be a hella lot of bots out there with nothing better to do than to descend upon a website with no activity. It would be hilarious if it were not such a nuisance dealing with those morons.

I miss the good old days when there were dozens of people posting to our bulletin board. One reason I created this forum in the first place was to keep an eye on what the masses are thinking about current events. There was no shortage of opinion. A lot of arguing ensued and if you think it got dirty and radical on Facebook, you should have been here in our early days. A lot of that chaos is saved for posterity in our archives. It makes for interesting reading and shows that people have not really changed during the lifetime of this website.

One of the constants I can't help commenting on in light of today's current events has to do with political abstractions. For whatever the reason might be, the conservative minded folks were the ones who seemed to easily drift off into surrealistic thinking. It certainly was a rare minority who did that, but it almost always started in the Right Wing. The only difference I see between today and back then is the number of people caught up in the extremes. Many more people are vocal these days. I'd say most of that is due to technology giving them a easy and anonymous means of expressing themselves. Confrontation is a lot safer in Cyber Space than it is in the Real World where you can get shot when somebody disagrees with you. There are radical liberals too, but they are by far outnumbered by their polar opposites, or at least that is how it appears in the open discussions so prolific on today's Internet.

I had to moderate certain discussions, which came off as taking sides. In retrospect I can now see how that was the beginning of the end for Brainformation Forums. I tried to be fair and evenhanded, but eventually somebody gets pissed and others follow. You see the same thing occurring on Facebook with Zuckerburg trying to clean up his act. A ruckus from the Right Wing (once again) claimed unfair bias. Jack Dorsey is experiencing the same sort of backlash over on Twitter. I guess I'm in great company, but they have all the demographics.

So, what to do with Brainformation is the question. We could attract a crowd of special interest people if we claimed to support a special interest. However, I don't know enough about any one thing to make a discussion forum based on a single topic. We do get visibility in the major search engines. Every once in a while I get a legitimate message regarding something that was posted many years ago. That means what we write here is going out and being indexed by the web crawlers. They thrive on massive content, which we don't offer, and thus we don't get a lot of visibility. But we do get some. We should engage in something controversial and see if the world responds. Then again, I have reason to suspect we are being monitored by the FBI, et. al., so that we need to be careful about how controversial we get. :lol:

In any case, there is no reason to feel intimidated by your solitude. You are not really alone, even if you can't see who is watching you.
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by Kellemora »

I've honestly learned to keep my yapper shut on millions of issues.
Seems like if I add my two bits, I get stuck for months rehashing the same things over and over again.

Glenn and I tried to get more writers to join, but there is just too much competition, and writers don't have much free time to devote to things other than writing. I'm in that same boat, which is why my work is going so slow.

A number of years ago I was the moderator for an active chat room.
It got so bad in there for awhile, we had to monitor each entry and read it before letting it pass onto the board, so the job became sheer work for many of us. After a couple of nasty flair-ups we simply shut it down for a few months and started over at a different host with more up to date platform and a way of checking the posts before they posted. People even complained about that because their posts were blocked by the system, hi hi.
Some day AI will be handling almost everything to do with communications.

Have a great day Yogi!
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by yogi »

There were Bulletin Board Systems way before the Internet became organized. In many respects it was like amateur radio where people hooked up home brew equipment and communicated with each other. The similarities were what attracted me to computers and the Internet. By the time I got connected the network was full of kids in chat rooms. Some of them were outrageously successful and some were simply outrageous. The "discussion forum" venue was new to me when I first connected to the worldwide web. It was reminiscent of the old rag chewing days on 10 meters, but done with a keyboard instead of a microphone and linear amplifier. By the time I decided to venture into my own discussion forum, the format was already changing. Social Networks were the thing back then and mostly populated by college students who wanted to isolate themselves from their parents. That's exactly why Mark Zuckerberg started up Facebook.

Social networks changed the game. There were more features available in them, but something more significant happened in parallel. Discussions, per se, were deprecated and the new mode of communicating was one liners in a serial feed. Twitter went one step further and limited it to 140 characters, the size of a text message back in those days. So, if you had anything to say to your friends, it had to be done in less than a full sentence. It turns out that the social network format was very efficient and what used to take paragraphs and threaded posts in discussion forums could now all be done on one screen. It was quick and simple for those people with little time and/or short attention spans. Places like Brainformation Forums could not compete.

The kids have moved off Facebook many years ago. What goes on there currently caters to their parents. What goes on here caters to their grandparents. It's now back to live chat with the added novelty of real time video. The latest guy to shoot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh was a big fan of one of those apps - Gab.com. So, we have been left in the dust with no prospects of attracting an audience like we had initially. Those folks just don't exist anymore. What does exist in bulletin board form are special interest groups. Linux tech support is a great example. As you must know there are tons of single topic discussion forums, even for authors. They are all well established. I'm not interested in competing with them either. It would be too time consuming not to mention expensive. All our old soldiers have not died; they simply morphed into something else. Apparently you and I didn't. :mrgreen:

Most likely there is a huge list of topics you and I could disagree upon. LOL I've learned a long long time ago that listening (reading) is much more informative than arguing. At one time I tried to get people here to recognize the difference between debate and discussion. I created a forum with a ton of rules and guidelines that would keep participants in a debate context. Few participated, and those that did could not actually debate. Few could hold a decent discussion as well, but at least there were not rules for that other than common etiquette. It gets too emotional when somebody questions your beliefs. So, you are doing the right thing by maintaining a silence. If nothing else it's keeping you sane.

We have some nifty features that never were used for moderating posts. One is exactly what you describe. I can set a forum so that nothing gets published without a review from a moderator first. That might have kept the extremists contained, but then it certainly would drive them away. It was a tough call. I could either censor somebody or allow them to verbally attack perceived opponents at will. There were good arguments for both approaches. One day somebody went too far and I applied the censorship powers the admin is endowed with. She left and took a few star posters with her. Keeping it civil was perceived as taking sides. :rolleyes:

YouTube is annoying with it's default to continuous play. There is a way to stop that but I seldom bother. I just look at the video of interest to me and shut down the web page after that; unless I'm posting it here. I then copy the URL and let you deal with the non-stop playing of video on YouTube. LOL
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by Kellemora »

Ah, the days of the BBS and Usenet. You wouldn't believe my phone bills back then, hi hi.

At one time, I belonged to several groups, each one taking up a little more of my time than I had to spare, so little by little, especially after I landed a work at home job, I had to cut out those that I spent too much time on. I still kept all that had some advantage to me and my work though.

I only belong to a couple of small writers groups and rarely visit their forums as it is. At first I tried to help a few newbies, but then those who have been on there for eons told them not to take my advice, and here I was working for a publisher at the time so knew exactly what they wanted and needed in the way of more folks doing what I was doing for them.
I think in any group you end up with some know-it-all who doesn't really know diddly squat, nor can they offer something helpful when a question is asked. Just bombard those who do respond to the questions.

Had to take the frau back to the doctor, so am running about 5 hours late getting started on my work for today, and I have lots to do before I can see the end of the tunnel.

I don't mind the YouTube autoplay, there is often something of interest next in the queue.

Have a great evening!
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by yogi »

I never got very involved with IRC networks, but our dearly departed friend, Glenn, did have an interest. He talked me into visiting one that could have been of some value to our forum. It was awkward as Hell to use and from the get go a bit shady. People would form special interest groups on the network and then try to get others interested. We never had more than a few followers and most of them were the result of Glenn's efforts. I did some homework and discovered that this particular network was sponsored by a group of anarchists. It's been too long for me to recall who they are or who the individual promoters were, but at the time they were generating bad press for themselves. This is exactly the kind of group that the Intel people, CIA, FBI, et al, monitor. Once I found out who sponsored the server I was very low key. The network eventually closed down without explanation. I can only guess why.

Anyway, current day IRC channels are infamously known as the Dark Web. I follow a few of those shady characters on Twitter, but nothing of value is published directly there. There have been a few times when I came across lists of interesting documentation. For example, not too long ago Ajit Pai was doxed. Not only was all his personal information published, but so was that information for every member of his family and several close business associates. This list had names, addresses, phone numbers, and financial information - net worth. I found the list about Adjit interesting not because I had his home and mobile phone numbers, but because of all the friends he supposedly had. The server with this information didn't stay up for more than a couple days. I thought of Glenn's discovery when I ran across this Ajit Pai exposé.

Every successful forum has at least one "star" poster. They are obnoxious and often belligerent, but they are the reason why the forum is popular. These outspoken people generally have a cult following which is good for creating interest if not low on credibility. We had a couple over the years and I often wondered what happened to them. They probably are members of congress now.

I hope Debbie is doing ok. I was caregiver for my mom and spent way too many hours learning about how doctors conduct business. For a time I knew more about the local hospital than I did about the local grocery store. It can be stressful especially when you have things that simply cannot be put off at home.
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

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Been so many years since I looked at Usenet, I have no idea how to get in to them anymore. But come to think of it, I think my Thunderbird e-mail program might have a way, but I've not checked into it. As you said, nothing worth visiting for anymore now that we have the WWW.

Don't want to say anything bad about the dead, but Glenn was into a lot of not so savory things.
The one thing I can give him a lot of credit for is he was a real go getter, trying to help gain followers to the websites he belonged to. Heck, he's the one who brought me here.

I'm twice a widower, plus took care of Debi's mom in her final years. I put more miles on my cars taking them to doctors appointments, and spent numerous hours sitting and waiting for them, plus sitting with them. It's not a job I would want anyone to have to do. It's hard, heartbreaking at times, and in the end, you are always disrespected, but it is their pain talking, not themselves. You just smile and do all that is necessary to keep them as comfortable as possible.

Debi is doing OK and is back to work. She landed a great job at Ace Hardware three days a week.
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

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I'm thinking that what Glenn showed me was actually an arm of the Usenet. I don't really know when the term 'Internet' became popular, but it seems to have superseded use of the term Usenet. The basic function of the two networks are nearly identical. Today the biggest difference is the commercial use of the Internet. I'm pretty sure Usenet administrators were all freelance and not in it for the money. That too has changed given the need for nefarious creatures of cyber space having a need to keep in touch with one another. You can now buy and sell malware, drugs, and child sex slaves on the Dark Web (Usenet), for example.

Thunderbird can be used as a news aggregator, formerly known as an RSS feed. At one time Brainformation Forums offered an RSS feed to people looking for content on their websites. One or two people took us up on it and it was all kind of cool. We only had live updates from one of the dozens of our forums, but that was more than enough content for the people who actually made use of it. phpBB doesn't offer that option anymore as far as I can tell. In any case the RSS feed reader in Thunderbird isn't the same as what you and I know as Usenet. Most of those Dark Web people don't have a widely known public feed. They would be too easy to track down if they did. It's now usually a connection to a portal that can redirect you to your special interest group. There is often some vetting before you are allowed into the group, but many of them will take all comers if you can find them.

I have an RSS aggregator program called Feedreader on Windows 7. For the past couple years I've been using Twitter as my main news source instead of scanning the RSS feeds. I went back to Feedreader a couple weeks ago and was shocked that half the news feeds did not exist anymore. Big ones like Google News no longer offer RSS feeds and now use web pages instead. It's the "mobile" thing to do. I guess the articles always were on web pages but many people no longer broadcast them RSS style. Twitter is much less organized and more difficult to filter out the trash than RSS formats, but then it has the advantage of being real time and direct from the source. I often chuckle to myself when I read something on Twitter and then half an hour later it hits the television news. Getting the news straight from the source isn't always reliable. Take the presidential news briefings as an example. :rolleyes:
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by pilvikki »

well, greetings, dudes!

i've had a wee problem with both loki and my sodding room having a leak, right over my desk! where else? loki also still getting overheated, must be hot topics, lol!

so, when i got home from my albert sitting i just left loki in its bag and sitting on the floor of this chaotic room. everything is everywhere, first it was drying out, then just waiting for SOMEone, please! come and fix the damned roof! been waiting for weeks now...

the bee problem was taken care of at least, no more good morning buzzing to wake me up.

when you mentioned glenn suggesting an additional place for possible member harvesting :lol: , was it forumgarden? i think i still have a membership there, or maybe not?
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by Kellemora »

I only turned on RSS feed for about a week, turned it off and never looked back at it again.

My main purpose of being on Usenet in the first place many years ago, had to do with the various Crafts groups.
Made some good friends on their and we talked together on other venues for well over 20 years. A few either got too sick to continue our conversations or up and died. One I talked to daily suddenly dropped our conversation for around three years, then joined back in again for about five years then disappeared again mainly due to illness.

That's actually one of the biggest problems with the Internet. Unless you have small groups in contact with each other, you don't know what happened to someone, unless someone else close to them lets us know.

Hi Pil - glad to see you back. Glenn and I crossed paths a few times over the years, each time associated with another venture. But didn't begin to converse regularly until he joined one of the writers groups I once belonged to. I often wonder what ever happened to all the BOINC credits he amassed. Back when I was with BOINC I got enough credits to get a BackPack brand CD writer. I still have it, but it is obsolete now.

Have one more task to finish before lunch, CU all L8R.
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by yogi »

Complicated as computers can be, there isn't a long list of things that can cause them to overheat. On rare occasion you can pick up some malware that maxes out the resources of your computer. This is easy to discover using the Windows Resource Monitor, but may not be easy to get rid of. By far the most common cause of overheating is an accumulation of dust bunnies. All you need to do is take off the back cover and chase them bunnies away.

The internet is a wonderful resource that brings many people from diverse parts of the world together. That's our mission at Brainformation in fact. I've tried just about everything that's out there at least once, but the mobile devices of today are in a world of their own. The peer to peer contact is pretty much the same as always, but the methods are changing all the time. As you might know Microsoft is working on a holographic interface with Windows 10. I'm not sure what they intend to do with it, and it seems like they don't know either. However, I can imagine a small hologram of you appearing on my desktop someday, my real desktop and not the computer, and us having a conversation. This virtual and augmented reality stuff combined with artificial intelligence is mind boggling to contemplate.

You are correct about people MIA on the Internet. Just about all of them have no connection to my real life. I'd have no way to know if one went MIA, like Pilvikki with her leaking roof and hot computer. However, I can make some good guesses. I follow several hundred people and organizations over at Twitter. One day about 40 of them just vanished. I'm guessing they were all Russian bot accounts and Twitter finally started cleaning house. What I didn't realize is how many of them I thought were real.
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

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The fins on the heat sink over my CPU gets loaded with brown dust, and the one on my wife's computer gets loaded with dog hair and pet dander, so it looks grayish white. I used an air compressor to blow out all the computer a couple times a year. Or more often if need be. I have one computer that the power supply overheats and shuts off. Can't restart the computer, but if I wait a few days then it will fire right up, but die again an hour later, hi hi.

I do almost everything on the computer now, and don't know how we ever lived without the Internet.
Well I do actually. I used to spend two to three hours every other day in the library doing research.
And running around to the photo copy companies to have my manuscript wax board paste-ups imaged and reprinted.
Even after we had the early computers, we didn't have printers decent enough to produce a manuscript. Editors and Publishers would not accept copy printed with a dot matrix printer. Too hard to read and correct.
I bought a Swintec Daisy Wheel Typewriter with a serial port so I could print from the Apple II+, it allowed stop codes to be included in the manuscript so you could stop the printing process to change typewheels from Pica to Italic.
This was a boon for me and the frau doing work at the time. After we mastered the stop codes, we also invested in Daisy Wheels that were Pica Bold, and Pica Underlined, plus several other Daisy Wheels in Elite, Script, and Symbols.
The benefit of doing this was it placed us at the top of the heap for Editors, because we got their changes back to them almost immediately. They didn't have to wait for entire retypes of the pages since we could just make the changes and reprint the entire manuscript. Of course, as better printers came along, we dropped back down the list fairly fast.

I saw a semi-holographic keyboard. At first I thought it was just a projection onto the tabletop, and it must have sensed a specific movement of the fingers to know you pressed a letter. We even surmised it picked up a color change of the fingernails, at least until we saw someone with fingernail polish using a similar unit which blew our theory out the window.
I've seen a lot of holographic images projected into mid air, but in almost every case, there was a fine mist of water in the air, like a light steam vapor. Although, there was one that used multiple lasers which didn't require vapor in the air.
I don't doubt that some day soon we will see all kinds of technology we can't even dream about yet as being feasible.
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by yogi »

One day, not very many years ago, I decided I wanted to photograph a rainbow up close. I rigged up the garden hose to spray a fine mist into the sunlight and, voila! Until that little experiment I thought I knew how rainbows were created. My idea was that the water droplets changed color depending on the angle of the sun rays reflecting off them. In other words I expected to see thousands of rainbow colored droplets coming out of my garden hose. To my astonishment there was a holographic cloud of prism colors hanging among the drops of water. It makes sense that the water causes the light refraction, but I did not expect the rainbow light to appear outside the water droplets. So, in essence, I created a rainbow hologram. :cool:

I'm guessing something similar was going on in those 'holographic" images you witnessed. But, as I understand it, a true hologram only involves light. Coherent light from several laser sources, for example, can be set up to create an image in mid air similar to my rainbow. At one point in my distant past I read exactly how it's all done, but it's way beyond my recall capabilities now. But, if Microsoft is going to make it part of their OS, it can't be that difficult.

like you, I clean out the dust bunnies from my tower using a small air compressor. It's convenient but I have to cringe each time I do it. The compressed air also compresses the humidity so that essentially I'm spraying my computer with a very fine mist of water. Also, the fast moving air creates static electricity when there isn't a lot of humidity. They recommend using canned air which is moisture free, but the static can still build up. A brush and cloth are fairly safe if they are anti-static in nature. Then again, I've not blown up my computer yet, so why change my ways? :mrgreen:
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

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My little air compressor has a Silica Gel cannister in-line between the big hose and the little hose for the air-brush. My slightly bigger air compressor for the garage doesn't have this, but does have the two paper filters.

Real 3D TV uses lasers that emit light when two laser beams intersect inside the empty box, which probably has some type of gas inside.. Thought we would see them in homes years ago.

I've seen some interesting things done with a computer and Projection Units.
We were at Dixie Stampede last month, and they use projectors to keep images moving along the back wall, above where all the action is going on. If they turn on two or three different projectors showing the same image at the same time, it appears to stand out away from the wall. I'm thinking they are using the same tricks as was done with red and blue lenses and 3D motion pictures you had to wear the glasses to see properly, only without needing the special glasses.

No two people can see a rainbow the same way. When I used to drive OTR a rainbow would appear to change as you moved on down the road, especially if it was a winding road. Watched one go from super wide to super narrow in the course of about 3 miles. The colors are always in the same order though.

Wasn't sure if I was already here this morning, it's been a long day and I'm behind on everything, as usual, hi hi.
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by yogi »

Yes, that was your second post for the day, but who's counting? :mrgreen:

The Dixie Stampede background show is a no-brainer. I'm confident that you recall those "ViewMaster" devices that were popular when we were kids. You peered into what looked like binoculars that had a disk with photographs inserted where the lens would normally be. The view was of a single scene from two slightly different angles. This gave the perception of three dimensions. That type of 3-D (which was actually 2-D) could easily be projected onto a screen. I don't know how the animation was handled, but I bet that if the projectors were perfectly synchronized by computers you would see the 3-D effect. The colored glasses we all wore to see 3-D worked on the same principle. The colors acted like filters to keep the two camera angles separated. That allowed for 360° viewing while the Viewmaster was only a head on view.

I understand the concept of perspective when viewing rainbows. What I did not grasp, and still don't have a complete understanding of, the way the light of the rainbow is projected into thin air. I always thought it was a reflection off the drops of water. Apparently the water just acts as a prism and projects the spectrum of light outward. How it all gets coordinated into a pretty rainbow is still a mystery. LOL

Actually, light itself is still a mystery to me. I've had it explained to me by physics teachers and working scientists, but colored light just doesn't make sense. They say all the colors are absorbed by the object except the ones you see. OK, that's believable, but what makes different objects absorb different colors? Somehow that part of the equation cannot be explained by mere mortals.
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

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We had several of those stereo viewers when I was growing up. Each disk had two images of the same thing taken with camera's set about 3 to 5 feet apart.
You don't exactly get the same results projecting two of the same image on a screen, even if using two different camera shots like they did with the viewer disks.

I had a solid glass ball many eons ago. Like a prism, it would create light beams of various colors, but only worked if the sun shown directly in the window to the glass ball sitting on the edge of a shelf across the room, so the light could shine downward onto a table or desk.
Don't know if you remember Tensor lights or not, I had one on my desk for years.
Found out that if I turned it so the bulb faced upward, and held my little glass ball over it, it would make a perfect ring of colors on the desktop.

Color is an interesting study, but it depends on whether you are talking about Light or Reflected Light.
When talking about Light, the presence of all colors produces pure white, while Reflected Light, the presence of all colors produces black, or just the opposite.
I'm sure you know each color has its own wavelength, and how we perceive the different colors of a rainbow has more to do with our own eyes. In reality, the spread of color in a rainbow is perfectly smooth across the wavelengths of color, but our eyes see the colors as bands of color because we cannot perceive the graduation, so our brain picks the seven colors to give what we see more meaning to our brains.
You can prove the gradient of color in a rainbow is smooth across the entire rainbow by taking a photo of rainbow with black n white film. You won't find any bands appearing on the image.

If you think of colors the same way you think of a radio dial, if you tune the radio to 98.7, you are going to pick up the station operating on that frequency. Light works the same way, if you tune the dye used to color the cloth to Red, you are going to see Red. Add a little Blue to the Dye and the color you see on the cloth is Purple. Sorta like tuning the radio dial half way between the Red Station and the Blue Station, you end up on the Purple Station.

As an aside: All of our senses from smell to hearing to sight all work on wavelengths, and probably touch as well.
I've claimed this for most of my life, and only now are they beginning to see this is true.
Just look at the radio waves and how as they keep getting tighter the move from audio to radio, to light, to light our eyes cannot perceive, and on upward to wavelengths that produce heat, etc.

Yes, light is interesting, and just as complicated as radio waves. Just as you can mix audio wavelengths inside of radio wavelengths, we can also mix radio wavelengths inside of light wavelengths.
Probably not in our lifetime, but some day there will be no wires to carry our electric from the power plant to your home. It will be done using light waves carrying energy waves. Of course they'll do this just to cause static on our radios, hi hi.
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by yogi »

You're right about the vibrations and the senses. In the universe there is matter and there is energy, all of which exists due to molecular motion. When the temperature gets to be absolute zero, some theorists say all motion stops and thus no energy is produced. Quantum physicists suggest the atom would be at its lowest possible energy state, but its particles keep on moving. All this movement, of course, has been characterized in terms of frequency.

The particle of my interest is the photon. The wavelength of the photon determines its color. Thus seeing a rainbow is the result of the water drops spreading out the various component frequencies of white light. As you say, white light by definition is all the colors combined. At this point I'm not lost entirely, but seeing color is reminiscent of that falling tree in the proverbial forest. Does it really make a sound if nobody is there to hear it? Thus, does color really exist if nobody is around to see it? I suppose we can extend that line of questioning to the limit and ask if the universe really exists if no sentient being is around to perceive it. In theory, of course, it all exists with our without it being sensed.

Somebody once told me that if I could explain the phenomena of color to a blind person who never experienced it, then I would understand fully how and why color is produced. It doesn't take human eyes to create colors. The eyes only sense part of what is actually there. That tells me something intrinsic to various forms of matter is responsible for our perception of color. Exactly what that "something intrinsic" is remains a mystery to me. Our ability to sense, or tune into, the frequencies of various colors does not explain how the colors are generated in the first place. Again, going back to the standard explanation that all the white light frequencies are absorbed except for those which are reflected back does not cut it. Why did tomatoes decide to absorb everything but red and cucumbers absorb everything but green? Tomatoes are still red and cucumbers are still green even if a color blind person observes them ... or are they? I think I understand the perception of color. I don't think I understand how specific colors are produced.

The ViewMaster worked so well because they were able to separate the view from both cameras. Your left eye could not see what the right eye was seeing when using one of those gizmos. That is why 3D glasses are filtered using two different colors. The filters separate the view from two different cameras. When two images are projected upon a screen, the brain does not see two separate channels. It sees the two combined. I'm guessing the reason why the perception of depth was possible at the laser show you witnessed is due to the same reason I could see a rainbow off the end of my garden hose. It's a reflection.

And, the concept of wireless power is not only proven but also in use. I believe there are satellites which collect energy from the sun using solar panels. That energy is turned into microwaves which are beamed down to a receiving antenna on terra cotta. The microwave receiver then turns the beamed down energy into electricity. There was a plan to do this commercially to power up remote regions of the planet. I've not read much about it being deployed, but it's happening as I type this message.
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Kellemora
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by Kellemora »

There is color whether we see it or not. Think of it this way, location 98.7 exists whether there is a radio station using that frequency or not. The frequency we named Red exists, whether we see the color red or not.

Physicists also say it is impossible for a Hummingbird to fly, and utterly impossible for them to fly across an ocean, due to the energy required and their minuscule fuel tanks. Yet we know they not only fly, but also migrate great distances without a refueling stop.
I think outer space is considered absolute zero temperature, yet we have thousands of constellations with millions of planets moving around out there.

Don't over estimate what the blind can perceive. Including those who were born blind.
I used to transport several to their various appointments and meetings.
Some became blind for one reason or another, but others were born blind.
Not only can they perceive color in their mind, although it is more difficult for them to get the names we use to the colors they see, having never seen what items or named by what colors.
Of those I spoke with about colors, they have associated the correct names based on how we perceive things to be.
As an example: One of the gals used to say a comfortable warmth hitting her face is yellow, and if it gets warmer it's orange, and too hot is red.
I wasn't trying to confuse her by saying when we see an object, if it is blue we feel cold, if it is green we feel warm, it's just that some colors make our bodies feel certain ways. That being said, the Sun which warms your face is in fact yellow.
She also said something else interesting. If you are in a room with no light you say it is dark, or if no light at all black. So everyone assumes a blind person only sees black. The thing about that is, black is color, right? If I'm seeing black, and something startles me, I see different colors, some bright, some not so bright. And almost always, before the colors fade back to black, we see a color next to black which we think is what is called red, but without sensing high heat.
We know the sky is blue, and water although called blue is clear or no color, and grass and trees are green at the top with gray stalks. The feeling of things rough indicate they may be gray. What I've not yet perceived are clouds. Floating fluffs of white in the sky too high to touch, but they can turn black before it rains.
We talked several times, one was about how she knows what color clothes to wear. She told me they are marked as to what goes with what on the tags. She also commented that blues are impossible to understand, because blue does not always go with blue, hi hi.

Images that need the colored glasses to view, without the glasses they are like looking at a printed color image where the registration was off. You have blue sticking out one side, and red sticking out on the other side. Like a major misprint, hi hi.

I know Tesla worked on the wireless transmission of power, but ran into serious difficulties. If anyone was in the beam they would be toasted. Just about like being in a microwave beam, it's curtains for those who step into it.
As a Ham Radio Operator, I messed around for a short time with a small microwave transmitter. I think I spent more building the necessary vertical reflective antenna than I did on the transmitter. I was getting nowhere fast so sold everything to someone else who was working on the same thing. Originally we were going to try and communicate back and forth, but so many other things pulled us away from ever achieving that goal.
Laser pens were fairly new on the market, been around for a short while, but newer laser devices used for etching came about, and with these we could reach great distances using pulsing signals.
Like using microwaves, we had to use a reflector antenna, and these darn laser diodes would burn out nearly everything we used as a reflector. The silver on first-surface mirrors burned out in under 5 seconds, polished aluminum in about a minute, and polished stainless steel in about five minutes. So we tried making long tubes before the beam hit the first reflector. This helped, but only extended the burnout time by about half an hour. For some reason, the second reflector never burned and could last a long time. Then the lens had to be just right, and they were costly to have ground.

I think the wavelengths higher than microwave, and near the upper end of light is where electrical transmission without wires will probably take place.
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

Post by yogi »

An electromagnetic field varying it's field strength at a frequency rate of 98.7MHz/second clearly is a theoretical possibility. It's one of an infinite number of possible events across the entire radio frequency spectrum, but I have my doubts that it occurs spontaneously in nature. The analogy would be the color red, for example, which does not exist unless something filters out all the other colors and reflects back the red frequency.

I've read the old saw about bumble bees and humming birds not being able to fly. They obviously do which tells me the formulas used by the predicting physicists are flawed. That kind of thing happens frequently. A theorist will come up with a number set suggesting an explanation for a phenomena, but some time later the theory is shown to be incorrect. It's simply a lack of understanding and missing information. The laws of physics do not change because we don't understand them.

I'll admit that I've only met a handful of blind people in my many years on this earth. I don't recall discussing the phenomena of color with them. It would be extremely interesting to know how the blind woman associated warmth with the color yellow, given that she never witnessed it as a sighted person. My first question would be is her version of yellow the same as mine, or is she calling blue yellow because she has no reference point? The brain is a marvelous organ that we hardly understand, and it's not beyond it's capability to generate colors in the mind of a blind person. If the color yellow is universally interpreted as warm, then there is something deeper going on than the human senses at work. Your example of a blind person seeing the "color" black isn't consistent with physics. Black is the absence of all color, which is why one might initially think a blind person only knows darkness.

Perhaps the reason why the sun's energy is not sent to earth via satellite microwave power is due to it's heating effects on human tissue. LOL The experiments I read about didn't involve enough power to melt down anything. It was just a proof of concept. Yet, if you think about it, microwave communications are pretty standard operating procedures. It's all line of sight and out of the way of any human traffic. I would bet they can do something similar with satellites.

By the way, outer space is not absolute zero. There is a constant background radiation level around 3 degrees Kelvin. They figure it's something left over from the big bang.
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Re: It's too quiet in here lately!

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As far as electromagnetics go, I think everything has one or more operating frequencies. Or for practical purposes, let's just say everything hums, including rocks. That don't mean we can hear it without sensitive equipment to pick it up.

Black can be both, the absence of all color, and the presence of all color, depends on whether you are talking about light, or solids. At least that is how I understood it when I was in skewl.

I've visited numerous caves over the years, and one of the things they do is turn off all the lights so you can see what total darkness or being blind is like. In this case, the absence of all light is black. You can't even see your hand in front of your face in a location where no light penetrates.

We don't know what a blind person perceives as the color yellow, for all we know it could actually be green they visualize mentally. But somehow, probably from being taught, they know the sun is yellow, grass is green, and these two blue articles of clothing do not go together, hi hi.
The only thing we really have to go on is folks who became blind after seeing all the colors. Yet they describe the same feelings using the same colors as those who have never seen.

About the only thing I know about outer space is it is out there, hi hi.
But as the years go buy, we keep learning a little bit more, it's not as lonely out there as we once perceived.

Some day if I have time, we can get into a discussion about the big bang. Just because I believe the bible, doesn't mean I don't believe in the big bang or in a young earth. Folks just misinterpret what the bible says and jump to unfounded conclusions is how I see a lot of the crazy notions the thumpers come up with.
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