I’ve completed as much of my video about infinity as I possibly could in one week. I made it through five of six sections, but the last one is probably going to be very visually intensive and I’d like to spend about as much time with it as I have spent with this one. This brings up an interesting point about me that only really applies when I’m creating video.
As with any creative sort of project that I might undertake, I exploded into this one, animating nearly half of it in a single day. But when it comes to video, my commitment to the project declines rapidly in each following day. For some reason I lose my fervor after a day or two, but only when doing video. Writing, websites, or other projects are able to command my attention for as long as it takes, but with video I have yet to maintain a driving work ethic.
By now I should known better than to undertake a project like this, which could be really nice if done properly, knowing that I’ll do around 90% of the work on the first day and then abandon it all together if it takes more than a week. You’ll notice that this video has potential to be more than it is, but because I did it all so quickly it comes off a bit weak. And yet, if i hadn’t done it so quickly it might never have been completed!
Anyway, without further adieu, here is my video:
Infinity
So there you have it. There is one part missing from this, which I intend to complete by next week. Basically though, the point is simple. If the Universe is infinite, then everything would exist every where at all times. As such, time travel, or travel through large areas of three dimensional space, would be as simple as figuring out how to “be” there instead of “being” here.
Anyway, this whole concept really just hit me one night while I was feeling bored. I had been reading a lot of Albert Einstein and Popular Science at the time, so that may be part of it. Anyhow, as the thoughts occurred to me I saw fit to record them. The original type-written documents were created in MS Word on a government computer. One day my entire drive was wiped clean. When they restored it from a system-wide backup, many of my documents were missing. Among the missing items was a training manual that I had been typing up for incoming analysts. I had the blessing of my supervisor to do it though, so I’m not sure why it was seized. But along with it went my typed up copies of this proof.
Lucky for me I had already printed a hard copy of it before all of this happened. Though this was technically illegal, the material taken was of my original creation. I felt I had every right to it and, because i suspected a possible attempt to suppress it, I felt I had an obligation to hold onto the information. It made little to no sense to me then. Now it seems more like the childish musings of an amateur. Either way, now it’s “out there” for others to interpret.
It is with regret that I must post yet another critical post about the American banking system. Our banks have become corrupt, power hungry hegemonies that are able to cause as much or more terror in American lives than Al Qaeda has ever been able to. Witness the latest attempt on the part of my wife’s bank (because I don’t have a bank account) to rob us of our money, the money we have placed in their hands on good faith and believing that they would be honorable with its handling.
This year the IRS seized all of our tax return, nearly $5000. Then, they seized most of our share of the stimulus package, roughly another $900. Then, several months after we filed a complaint, they returned just over $1000 to us by way of check, even though we had signed up for direct deposit. The minute I had that check in my hand I went to the ATM to deposit it. When my wife is at work I have to do it this way because I don’t have an account of my own. I deposited my wife’s check and our tax check at the same time and for the first time ever we had over $2000 dollars in our account at one time!
That was, until the bank reversed our deposit. Despite the fact that my wife was given an available balance that included both checks, which meant that both had been approved and made available, we now have less than what we need to pay rent with in our account. The bank gave no warning, and made no attempt to contact us. We began to buy groceries and sundries that we hadn’t been able to buy in a long time, only to find out that we had been eating into our rent, despite having had over $2000 in our account the night before.
Why did this happen? Because the bank knows that an account like ours that normally hovers around $0 is going to begin a spending trend when money suddenly appears in the account. By taking the money out and not telling us, they can sit back and watch us overdraft like madmen. Then, when they freeze the account for having a HUGE negative balance, they can return the money to our account, minus their cut in “fees.” It’s a racket, I’m telling you this from experience. The banks do whatever they can to steal your money. You’d be better off putting your money in a jar and burying it, no joke.
Shame on all American Banks! Shame on the American Government for allowing such an environment to exist.
Just a short note to those of you who are yourselves writers. I have just been given the “green light” by the Department of the Navy to publish my manuscript, “Five Years in Hawaii: A True Saga of International Adventure and the U.S. Naval Intelligence Community.” I am sooooooo excited! I already have an agent in mind but even if things don’t pan out there, I have been developing some concepts for releasing it myself as a POD (print-on-demand) item.
Before I begin let me remind my readers that I said this was a “loose” theme. This post is related to the idea of infinity, but perhaps in a more abstract sort of way. Today I’m writing about my Grandpa Ronald, father of my Mother. He was an interesting person who led an exciting life, in my opinion. He has always been a source of mystery for me, and because I didn’t know him very long — he disappeared in 1986 — I have to take the word of others about him. But what things I do know about him would seem to controvert the commonly accepted story of his life.
My Grandpa was allegedly a mechanic in the Air Force, but I don’t recall any photos of him in uniform so I can’t confirm this. When he got out of the military he became a crane operator. He was one of two crane operators who worked on the castle at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. The long standing story was that my grandpa had installed the top of the castle at Disneyland. We have a photo of him in the crane. But get this — it’s a small world after all.
My mother is a recently retired elementary school teacher. Because of her status she has been able to vacation more and, in a recent trip home to Southern California, where she spent most of her youth, she was standing in line for an event. I don’t recall which event, she may have been standing in line at Disneyland for all I know, which would just be even more strange than this story already is. My Mother was telling her friends about how her father had installed the top of the castle at Disneyland when another woman in line approached them and made a statement.
“Excuse me, but it was my father who installed the top of the castle at Disneyland. He was a crane operator with Fowler & Sons.”
“Well, my father worked for that same outfit — Fowler & Sons — and we even have a picture of him in the crane.”
Now, being that they are from the Baby Boomer generation and not from Generation X or beyond, they exchanged email addresses and agreed to communicate again on the matter when my Mother returned home from her vacation. Sure enough, when they sent some pictures back and forth they realized that both men had been operators of that crane, and neither could prove who had operated the crane at the moment that the castle was crowned, so far as I can recall.
But the story goes well beyond this. At some point he was supposed to have gone to work operating a crane for some oil company or another. He worked in Saudi Arabia, where he obtained a decorative set of swords. Later working in Venezuela my Grandmother is said to have gotten in to a sword fight with their maid because the hired help had fallen in love with my Grandpa. Nobody was killed because my grandfather saw fit to intervene at that point.
Obviously, I met my grandfather late in his life. He was already living with cancer and breathing on an oxygen tank that he rolled around with him. He was kind to me, and truly enjoyed teaching me things. He showed me how he grew strawberries and grapes. He taught me how to make a dove call by cupping my hands together and blowing between my thumbs. He once built a television set from a kit because he and his neighbor were bored.
In the summer of 1986 my Mother and her new love interest Harrold, the man would become my Stepfather, were going to school in Gunnison Colorado. It was not the first summer that we had spent up there, but it was the first time that we would come home to a shocking revelation. My Grandmother was in a panicked state. She said that she had gone to the bathroom and my Grandpa had shouted through the door at her that he was going to go check the gas level in his car. She thought it sounded odd, but was predisposed and couldn’t follow up on it immediately.
When she came out of the bathroom she went straight to the driveway to ask him what he meant. His car was gone and she couldn’t find him anywhere. He was never heard from again. My family has searched for him. I’ve flown in a chartered Cesna with Harry and my Mother to scan the desert surrounding Mesa County Colorado for his vehicle, but to no avail. No trace of him or his car have ever been found. As a youth I had wanted to report the events to the then popular television show “Unsolved Mysteries” but my parents didn’t think it was a good idea for some reason.
It’s known that Grandpa had made an odd statement to his neighbor just days before vanishing. He said that he had “Found an easy way…” When questioned as to what he meant my Grandpa claimed that he hadn’t meant anything and quickly changed the subject. Someone suggested that he may have been tired of the pain from his cancer and hired someone to help him die. I’ve heard plots that include massive doses of pain killers and a junkyard crushing machine. I’ve heard many theories.
Many years ago I inherited a briefcase that had belonged to my grandfather. Inside were a plethora of documents pertaining to an unpatented invention of his. After examining the contents it became clear to me that his invention was a magnetic motor of some kind. There wasn’t enough information in that briefcase to put the whole picture together, and that was intentional. He had enlisted the help of two friends to keep the project hush-hush. One of those men was an Australian machinist.
Somewhere around my 14th birthday I managed to get a current phone number for this gentleman in Australia and I gave him a ring. To my surprise, and despite the secrecy surrounding the contents of the briefcase in my possession, he spoke quite freely about the concept. His role was to create a working prototype, something which he suggests that they were never able to do.
Back to the theories for a moment. I’ve heard one that suggests that indeed they were able to fabricate a working prototype, an act that got the attention of an oil company in the wrong sort of way. The theory goes that in order to keep a lid on the magnetic engine in order to ensure continued windfall profits on oil, he may have been abducted or bought off. The fact that I was able to raise his Australian counterpart on the phone by searching public phone records sort of deflates this notion a bit. But there’s another, newer possibility.
I quite recently inherited a coin collection that belonged to My Grandparents. There are coins from many nations in there. Some would seem to corroborate the stories of my Grandfather working for oil companies in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. But there are coins from some other places that had me tugging at my goatee as I sorted through them. Unless he collected them by chance through drunken exchanges in foreign bars or something, I think they sort of force me to view the entire story of my Grandpa Ron in a new light. I think that there is another theory brewing, the credence of which is just as unknown as that of any other theory proposed.
One coin in the collection caught my attention mostly due to it’s age. On the back of the coin was printed the date 1916 and on the front all of the text was written in Latin abbreviations. I was hoping that it might be worth a little bit of money because it would make a good gift for our daughter at high school graduation or something like that. A sentimental gift with material value. So I typed in the words from the coin and let loose the Google machine. What I saw was a bit of a let down:
But not all of the coins were so ordinary. Some came from places where Americans simply didn’t travel — Soviet Russia for instance. Others came from areas where oil production (and therefore a plausible reason for my Grandpa to have been present there) wasn’t exactly high yet violent political struggle had been present for centuries. Even today the idea that my Grandpa might have been up to more in those counties than operating cranes in pursuit of crude oil seems at least a little bit plausible. Of course, the problem with this theory, as with most of the others, is that it doesn’t bring us one step closer to knowing what happened to him. Where did he go? We may never know.
But this is where I derive an infinite curiosity for my ancestor, and for the world as he saw it — a conquerable domain built upon simple and reliable rules. Perhaps at some point in the near future I’ll document and detail the contents of that breficase. The motor described within is indeed capable of near perpetual generation of kinetic force. Would an oil company go to lengths to keep such a motor from making it to market?
This week, as I mentioned in the radio show, I’m going with a loose theme of Infinity. I’m a fan of the theoretical and as such it’s hard for me to look away when I stumble upon something truly interesting on the topic of everything. When I found the video “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” I sat grinning like a young teen who had stumbled upon his father’s smut collection.
Though it’s not directly about infinity it does describe the setting for the potential of the infinite. If you watch the part about the 7th Dimension you’ll note that the director states that every possible outcome for every possible universe exists in a single point which we normally call infinity.
The video inspired me. As soon as I publish this post I’ll begin work on my own animation about my thoughts on an infinite universe. The script for my video will be a “proof” that I wrote late at night while on watch in the Navy. I had just read “Ideas and Opinions” by Albert Einstein and my mind was on things much bigger than myself.
It started with me just staring off into space. I began to imagine what it would be like to live in an infinite universe. Before I knew it there were diagrams and examples floating around in my head. I quickly opened up Microsoft Word and began recording what I was imagining. I’m not sure where that surge of thought came from or if it was even logical.
I could be completely off the mark with my ideas, but I wouldn’t know because I’m not a mathematician, nor am I a physicist. I only know that as these thoughts occurred to me that night, I felt that they were important enough to write down. After typing the whole thing up I printed it out and had two colleagues take a look at it, but neither seemed very interested. The document has sat on a bookshelf ever since.
That is, of course, until the above video came into my life. Now I plan to take it from text to animation and then illicit the opinions of a larger audience (the Internet en mass). If you have your own thoughts, theories, or questions relating to infinity, please leave a comment!
Thanks for reading.
JMK
P.S. I have not yet read the accompanying book, but it is on my list. You can find it below:
