An Ode to my Brother Dave: (created 4-21-10, spelling corrections 10-31-10)

My brother, Dave, was something special.

He died the day after he turned 40 years old. But that isn't why he was special. My Dad never got past his early death and he died about 2 years later.

About 4 months before Dave died, my wife, Meegan, and my Mom and Dad were all down visiting him at his house in St. Charles, IL. Dave had taught me so much when I was a kid and inspired me to be so much more than I ever should have been.

Dave was a super smart nerd and his 3 closest friends were super smart nerds. We didn't have any extra money as kids and Dave learned to make everything electronic from scratch. He was always interested in electronics. He got into shortwave radio. He learned Morse code. He hooked up a 100 ft. antennae outside of his bedroom and talked with people all over the world. He build a Tesla coil in 1968 and he had me help. He wrote stories and songs and I doted on them and memorized them. When he built something electronic, he had to build the box out of scrap sheet metal, that's how poor we were. But I never knew we were poor. I thought everyone did that.

He entered the high school science fair every year and always placed and never won. In 1969 he built a little motorized cart with photo sensor eyes that would follow a flash light around in a dark room. Years later, companies were still trying to make solar panels that faithfully tracked the sun.

In 1969 he also built a heat to electricity converter. He built it in a one gallon fish tank, it involved iodine, and it converted even tiny amounts of heat to energy. The science fair judges didn't understand it and he didn't win anything for it. Don't we all wish we had it today. In college I got a degree in chemistry and I can't figure out how he did it.

Dave let me hang out with him and his super smart friends. Dave had a reflecting telescope and would show me Mars and Saturn's rings and the mountains on the Moon. After we were both married and would be able to get together just a few times a year, Dave and I would talk and inspire until the wee hours of the morning. I would be so tired, but wouldn't go to bed until he was all talked out. So on this night shortly before Dave was to die unexpectedly, our Dad was outside with us, it was winter and cold and Dave had set up his telescope and was showing us stuff. Dave blurted out that he had always tried to keep up with me. I asked what he meant by that. I had spent my whole life being impressed with him and trying to keep up with him. He was the smartest person I had ever met. My Dad laughed that we had both spent so much of our lives trying to keep up with each other, but that it was cold and we should all go inside. I only saw Dave one more time before he died. God I miss him.

Bye for now, Doug

Humor (created 3-5-10)

"Put off til tomorrow what you can do yesterday

from a Time Traveling Procrastinator

Wedding Song (created 3-5-10)

My daughter married the love of her life on 6-24-06. She asked me to sing a song at the reception. She didn't know I was going to write it also.

This song has been growing inside of me since I was 17 years old. At some of the new chapters of my life, I am inspired to write a few new verses. Such was the case here. Of course, this was a specific event, so I only sang the verses which were appropriate.

"When I was just a lad so small
I looked up at my father tall
and prayed that someday I would be
a tall man just like he.

The years they flew and I grew
but somehow not nearly as tall
as the man my father was
when I was just that lad so small.

But I knew I'd have children of my own
who'd look at me with eyes wide open
and dream about me in their heads
and then I'd be that tall man.

I soon had those children of my own
but still I wasn't nearly as tall
as the man my father was
when I was just a lad quite small.

But I knew that in my children's eyes
that I was tall, not at all small
and to my family, I now proclaim
you make me proud, you are all tall.

My daughter and I walked down the aisle
Her face lit in a beautiful smile
To wed the man she loves the most
I sing this song as my toast.

She found her man, who stands quite tall
He will never treat her small.
At their wedding with their guests
we wish them love and all the best.

In their new life as his wife
They'll stand together to face the strife
The vow is "For Better or Worse"
Standing tall, they'll steer the course.

Cause like her mother, she stands firm
She is a rock in life's storm
To her husband she gives her all
He gives his best, for her he's tall.

Cause when he was just a lad so small
He looked up at his father tall
and prayed that someday he would be
a tall man, just like he."


At the end of the song, my rather undemonstrative brother came over and gave me the hug of a lifetime. Need I say more.

Bye for now, Doug

An Inspirational Young Man (created 2-22-10)

The Junior Olympics in Fencing took place 2-12-10 thru 2-15-10 in Memphis, TN. My nephew, A.L. qualified and I asked to go with his Dad and him. I had fenced a little bit in college and I wanted to help with the driving.

We got to see a lot of good fencing and some great fencing.

My nephew did not embarrass himself. He had never been to a large competition like this before and he did OK.

But there was a young man there who caught my attention. I was noticing all the different styles and techniques the fencers used and got to the point where I could recognize a fencer by the way they fenced. But this one man, D. H., looked like a different fencer every time I watched him. He presented a different attack and a different defense based on what his competition threw at him. His footwork was different, his stance was different. We watched him moved through the elimination rounds, each time facing a more difficult opponent. Then we saw him matched against someone he didn't have a prepared game plan for. D.H. copied what his opponent presented, figured out the weaknesses of it and then dominated him.

In his last bout, both the opponent was presenting something new and the director was also. I have to give a little bit of explanation here. I am talking about foil fencing. The kind done to settle duels and used by Shakespeare in Hamlet. When used to settle duels, it was not to the death, it was to first blood, but with rules. There was a judge to say whether the prick you gave was legal or not. Most of it hinges on "right of way." The fencer with "right of way" can score a touch, the fencer without "right of way" does not score a touch even if he physically pokes his opponent.

So this director (judge) was giving D.H.'s opponent "right of way" for moves that D.H. didn't agree with. And here is the amazing thing, D.H. could have argued with the director, he could have gotten mad, he could have just tried harder to do the same things that he had been doing. But he didn't. He asked the director for explanations, (which the director patiently gave) and then D.H. adapted his fencing not only to his opponent, but also to the director. He was down 10 to 2 when he got it figured out and the match ended at 15 to 13. He lost but he made such a comeback and came so close.

In all fairness, when D.H. adapted, his opponent also experimented and changed and won.

We went to congratulate D.H. and were talking about upcoming tournaments where we might see him next year. He said that he is 19 and will be too old to fence at Junior Olympics next year. My brother-in-law commented that D.H. must fence on his college team.

And here comes the last thing to be impressed with. D.H. says "Oh, I've graduated from college already and have a job."

This young man was athletic, posed, polite, smart and adaptable.

I am now over 50 years old. I have been finding it hard to adapt to what the bosses in this new world want of me. I need to take a lesson from D.H. and be adaptable, to both my competition, and to my judges.

Thank you D.H. for teaching this old dog a good trick.

Carbon Sequestration 1: granite in coal combustion (created 1-2-10, slight modification 01-03-10)

Would adding pulverized granite to the fluidized combustion bed in a coal fired power plant convert the carbon dioxide to carbonate and bicarbonate, and convert the granite to silica?

This is the natural process the earth uses to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It's called the weathering of rocks. This mechanism might be the cause of the earth entering it's current ice age state. When the India tectonic plate crashed into the Asian tectonic plate about 35 million years ago the Himalayan mountains resulted. This exposed so much granite to the atmosphere that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air was dramatically reduced and the world entered the current ice age.

Coal fired power plants already incorporate rock into the fluidized combustion bed. They currently used pulverized limestone which removes sulfur from the waste gas. The use of pulverized granite will have some new problems to overcome. The conversion of granite (a silicate mineral) to silica will probably cause glass and slag formation and cleaning problems. But that's just a problem for the engineers to solve.

The entropy and Gibb's free energy calculations indicate that this should actually be both spontaneous and exothermic.

You heard it here first.

Bye for now, Doug

Religious 1: Heaven and Hell (created 1-1-10)

What if whether we are in heaven or hell depends upon our state of mind, on how we feel about ourselves. And the one justice in this system would be that after death we have total knowledge about how our actions affected other people. All the things we did and rationalized to ourselves as being okay or "not my problem" we realize how they hurt other people and we can't hide from this guilt and exist in torment over our own actions. The few people who look back at their lives and see only good things resulting from their actions exist in a state of the utmost satisfaction for a job well done.

Fitting this with the eastern beliefs in reincarnation, those people unsatisfied with their lives would chose reincarnation to avoid the self-loathing they cannot avoid in the hereafter.

I'm not starting a new religion, it's just a fun idea to kick around.

Bye for now, Doug

Ideas: 2: Magnetic oxygen purification (created 12-7-09)

Diatomic oxygen has a single bond and two unpaired, unshared electrons. It isn't obvious to me why this should be, the two unpaired, unshared electrons should "pair and share", but they don't. I am told this is confirmed via their spectra.

I this is true, then
1) does that mean the two unpaired, unshared electrons are locked into the same spin as each other.
2) does that mean the oxygen molecule is magnetic
3) does that mean that oxygen molecule can be oriented in a strong magnetic field so that it won't effuse through holes too small for them to go through sideways. Nitrogen molecules do not have this unpaired, unshared electron phenomenon, so they would not orient in a magnetic field and they would effuse through the hole too small for them to go through sideways, because some of the molecules would randomly be oriented to go through longways.

Indeed, I have read that oxygen IS paramagnetic. Maybe this would work.