Date: 26 Mar 2008

From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: OK'd Printer

>You’re good. Your comments on the book cover and on the War that we are NOT waging are good. You should write a book sometime. A quarter...25¢. each book.

     Ah, that’s chicken feed, in technicolor.

>In your case, you would want flashy and exciting. I would think something like with the top blood red and blood running down the book from that area and the title in that red area in stark black.

    I would want to use some Mexicanny colors, as well.

>There are no fonts associated to Mexico that I can think of but there are a jillion fonts and since the folks you are writing about came from there some primative font might do good.
And there is the juxtaposition of technologies that might be of interest...like a scene of a priest holding an obsidian knife in one hand and a flowing heart in the other with it held high offering it to the Gods and the site is obviously preColumbian but there is a jet vapor trail in the sky.

     That's good. But remember, the picture must also include a Viking warship fleeing for land before a Carribean hurricane.

>No,  now you are being silly.

     And an image of two-headed, feral, rabid dogs with extra fifth legs growing out the sides of their necks, lurking in packs with fangs barred in front of crumbling, ice-encrusted skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty half blown-away with the upheld torch sagging sideways (courtesy of the jihad).

>On to a thankful other subject, I will send you these Image du Jours if you don't mind and you can check my zeros.

    Send them. I owe you favors for a few Samuel Smith ales.

>Did you know that there are drawings and property is being purchased so that the world's largest mosque will greet all approaching Heathrow, to proclaim that Britain is the first modern country to be taken over peacefully by Islam in a jillion years. They have protests in some cities now and the Islamist carry signs proclaiming that they are the new Britons and soon Britain will be a fundamentalist (but still modern) nation. (After they remove every portrait from every museum and burn them and destroy every statue with a human figure.)
I truly believe this will happen. I don't know when but I will see the beginnings of the desolation in my life time.

      Now that really IS scary. I didn’t know about the Heathrow mosque. England had better get her royal act together. It’s enough to make me wish that Maggie Thatcher were still prime minister. You remember, of course, how the John Birch society et al used to say that communists would take over the western free world without ever firing a shot. It never happened. But this time, you know ... I’m not so sure that it cannot happen. Allah is, apparently, more powerful than either Mao or Marx.

     I read a commentary a few moons ago that said, in reference to the Muslims rioting and burning everything they could find in Paris back a couple or so years ago – the commentary said that when the Watts riots occurred in the 60s, the protesters were holding signs that said "Give Me a Job." The Muslim rioters and arsonists in Paris were holding signs saying "God is Great!"

    We are at war.

>No. THEY are at war. We are at peace until we become Islamist. That or death. They will kill and die for their religion. We only ridicule ours. We do not think it is worthy to kill or die for anything.

     Right, I would have to agree with this. But that sure doesn’t mean we cannot find an excuse to wage war. Bush’s little war in Iraq is not being waged because he or anyone else in D.C. believes in anything. It is a bellicose, face-saving farce. Wiping out the Taliban – that was good. I approve of it. But invading Iraq was a rash, premature move. 4,000 and counting. It’s a friggin’ civil war for godssake. Let them kill each other. Who cares?

     Personally, I think we should have invaded Saudi Arabia and grabbed all their oil. (OK, OK ... that's just wishful thinking.)

>Archie Bunker proposed an even better solution a long time ago. He said that when everyone enters the air liner, they are handed a loaded, automatic pistol. They give it back when they get off the plane.

     That would be interesting to see. But, the Muslims should not be given guns. Only Christians and Jews and Buddhists. Hindus? I’m not sure about them. They feed rats in the temples and worship starving cows. And the Sikhs are pretty scary. And the Taoists -- I'm not sure they have enough nerve to operate a semi-automatic handgun. They'd probably let it drop to the floor during one of their ahimsa vegan chants, and some Muslim would grab it up and start shooting, redounding to the glory of Allah.

>Right now the book has evolved and "Learning To See" might not be the best title. Bettie and I are brainstorming right now.

     May I suggest "The Unbearable Horror of Descrying" or perhaps "Pluck Out Thine Own Eye Before it Learneth to See"? I’m just trying to be helpful.

    Back to courting and seducing on-line teaching factories ...

    Charlie

Date: 28 Mar 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion

Subject: still trying

     This is why I would rather dig ditches than program or work with a fucking computer. I have tried for LITERALLY a half hour to send this e-mail to you, using three different mail servers. The previous one apparently did not include the attachment. Damn those people. If I had written software that bad, I would have been fired.

    Last attempt:

>We do not read for entertainment on a "device." The people most familiar with such devices...laptops, desktops, whatever, do not read anything. Most are almost illiterate. We look for information on the computer and not read for pleasure.

    You're funny. And what you say is (usually) true and correct. You're funny and right. Good combo. You would make a good producer for somebody. (Or good husband?)

>I have the complete works of Shakespeare in several versions in both digital and analog formats and I would not use the computer, even though I would have immediate call back to see whom was whom, what the period was, what certain words and phrases meant. And these things are done by highlighting the word on the screen and clicking to go back to the character list and the like.

     I have reading on "screens". I love books with palpable pages, into which I can insert bookmarks.

>Charlie, I am beside myself in trying to do this cover business. I have too many conversion factors working here. I will muddle through but I will have to do some more research to do it.

     Well, now you're scaring me. If you, of all people, are having difficulty with muddling through and not having a system -- YOU, of all people -- what the heck chance do I have at executing that same task?

     Oh, I know. I'll just hire you as my consultant. And you can say, "As your consultant, I hereby advise you ..." You love to say things like that, don't you? :o)

    I am at the present time very "psyched", as the hippies used to say. I have made a major discovery. You'll recall I made that little joke-ish comment recently about "I knew that someday my master's degree would be worth something", or something like that. Well, I think I have found the keyhole into which to insert the enzyme of my M.S. degree, thereby effecting a transformational shifting of the tertiary and quaternary muddle of my lost-at-sea life (good god, talk about mixing metaphors ...)

     Have you any idea (I did not!) how huge the "online" teaching profession has become? I read (though I'm not at all sure that I believe it) that 70% of all students are enrolled in online courses. True or not, that is at least indicative of something that is true: Online teaching is booming, and they are hiring, and will be hiring, more and more instructors. You need a master's degree to do it. They are also looking for people with real-world, professional experience in the fields they are to teach. They are also looking for people who have previous classroom teaching experience.

     Well guess what, Ken. I have a master's degree. I have over 20 years of experience in software development and mathematical modeling in quantitative finance, physical and biologic science, and supercomputing. And I have taught and/or tutored at four colleges. Imagine that.

    I just ordered $70-dollars-worth of books from Amazon (three books) about how to get a job and keep a job and manage your time and acquire the software tools and so on to be an online instructor. I was going to send out about 70 resumes, but now I'm waiting for the books to arrive before I do it. I may get some good tips.

     I want to respond to parts of the e-mail you've sent in the last couple of days, but right now, I reading one of my books. Amazon is so damn crafty -- they are REALLY good at business. One of the best. They offered me, for $2.49, to have access to the full text of one of the three books I just charged to my debit card. So I did it. I now have to go back to reading my online book.

   Soon ...

   Charlie

   P.S. Here is a poem I wrote, in the style of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsburg, to and about my life with my former wife. Every word of it is true, based on real-life experiences. I wrote it in a hospital bed, in a state of semi-despair, with IVs and trache tubes and stomach tubes hanging out of me. And yes, missing my wife and my life. For your entertainment and/or amusement. It's entitled "And That Only", and it's unfinished. It'll probably remain so.

   OK ... now it's a WP attachment.

    Bye for now.  Charlie

Date: 29 Mar 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

>Here is an old grandfather with very basic computer graphics problem who asked a 5th year art/computer major what program she uses and if it can control gamma, move clips with the edges as blurred as the subject material, if it can change contrast in one section without removing the section and then manipulating it, and then moving it back to the original. That sort of stuff.

>She has no idea.

    I have PhotoShop Elements, which is cheaper than the full-fledged PhotoShop. But it does everything I have ever wanted to do. It does all that you mention above, and about 10 million more things, too.

>I guess by now you'd just of soon'a' not had me find you, huh? But e-mails don't have to be read all at one time...or even at all...and they don't all need to be answered. I am just thinking out-loud at you.

    Truth is, you write some of the most interesting e-mails I've ever received, and I enjoy them. I think you must type faster than I. And I'm pretty sure (understatement) that you manage your waking hours better than I.

    Speaking of time being spent on thinking out loud at each other with our fingers ... I just this morning received e-mail from a beautiful, bright, cool woman who I have not heard from in over thirty years. We worked together at the deaf-blind-retarded children's camp in Mississippi. She is now an M.D., as is her husband of 28 years, living in Eugine, Oregon. She went back to school and did graduate work in philosophy, anthropology, bla bla bla bla bla. The point is, she asks me (because she had a dream about me and awoke with a strong desire to find out what I've been doing for 30 years) -- she asks me, as I just said, "Charlie, what have you been doing for the last 30 years?"

    Now, this is a smart and interesting woman. How much time would it take me to tell her what I have done for 30 years? I need to apply for on-line teaching jobs and finish my novel. Maybe you could e-mail her and tell her what I've been doing. Let me know if you have the time. [insert smiley face here]

>More anon.

   Still MORE???
   (Just kidding, you know.)

   Charlie

Date: 29 Mar 2008

From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: Image du Jour #3 - "Long and Short"

>These particles are not atomic particles, as have been mentioned earlier, but are physical to the point of being .000002" to .00008" in diameter. However, as small as they may be, they are moving very fast and may be meeting a spacecraft going fast itself. One of these micrometeorites can leave a .002" diameter pit in a spacecraft window. For long missions in high-flux density environments, the window could soon become unusable.

       I wonder how it is, statistically, that some disaster or near-disaster has not occurred with any of our space flights. There's a lot of God's debris and human junk whizzing around out there (I started to say "up there", but that is outdated.)

       Oh, just a jolly I just thought of. The Flat Earth Society still exists. They can be found online. But the guy who started the society a long time ago was serious. He spent hours trying to measure curvature in large lakes and seas, and he found no evidence of curvature. He even said -- this is my favorite -- that he had accumulated the data to show that some of the longest rivers in the world fall in elevation, over thousands of miles, by only one or five or ten feet. He says, how can the earth be curved if a river falls in elevation by such a small amount? Obviously, the earth is flat. The thing that keeps the oceans from falling off the edge is the Great Ice Wall encircling the flat Earth. We have not seen it because all the governmental agencies and scientists have hidden it from us and will not allow us to go there.

     The present-day Flat Earthers have turned it into a spoof, thank heavens (no pun intended).

    Charlie

Date: 29 Mar 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: Something Else

     I pretty much agree with all you wrote, and it is insightful. I'm glad you are teaching courses. Students should be exposed to instructors who think like you do and who are not afraid to verbalize it. History is a living process, and it is quite fascinatingly complex. Most "history" misses the kind of insights you come up with. I should send you sometime my treatise (if you've never heard it) on the causes of the nature of the relationship between man and woman.        No one says this stuff, but it's so clearly true. Maybe I'll cut-and-paste you my treatise. (You also need to see my treatise on the "progressive consumer tax". I know that is supposed to be a textbook example of an oxymoron, but that's only because the people writing the textbook are not as smart as I am. This is a tax plan that Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, and Libertarians would all approve of enthusiastically. It's brilliant.)
     I have seriously considered going back and getting an M.A. or M.S. in some kind of interdisciplinary area including history, philosophy, anthropology, etc. I just have to figure out how to fund it.

     A passing note of interest to me: You still occasionally use the word "liberal" disparagingly. I agree with what you say in most the contexts of your usage the term; it's just that I prefer to disparage the term "politically correct", which attitude and position I almost always unmitigatedly excoriate. It's just that, how can it be that positions such as "the occurence of accelerating anthropogenic global warming is extremely likely to be a correct proposition" or that "many people tend to treat animals very badly" (as Bettie knows) -- how can it be that such things are labeled "liberal" beliefs? This is no more correct that it would be to say that my wanting to defend everything from the Magna Carta to Galileo to the U.S. constitution and bill of rights from these fanatical Muslims makes me a conservative. I ain't no conservative, and I ain't no liberal. And I would be completely unelectable, as would you, if we were silly enough to run. (Hey, it's a compliment.) I don't toe nobody's party line.
      I find it very interesting that we -- you and I -- seem to be so much on the same wavelength about the majority of things. Isn't that strange? I think that the external observer would put us in different political/social camps, and yet we think a lot the same. Hmmm ... well, the reason does not matter, because I have to get back to the novel and the online jobs.
     You know, of course, I have not the time to respond to every sentence or paragraph of the things you e-mail to me. However, the pictures and the accompanying descriptions are darn interesting. I am impressed with what you did. You are a jack of all trades with an engineer's mind.

    Charlie

Date: 01 Apr 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Sometimes you don't gotta even know how to spell Kalkulus.

    Sorry I haven't responded to your e-mails of the last two days. I'm being pressured by these online schools to respond to their requests for phone appointments (this is for going to school, not working as an instructor at the school -- I haven't really got to that part yet, though I am still furiously doing research).

     In one of your e-mails you mentioned that DeVry (you attended DeVry!!??! -- they're on my list, as student and as instructor) taught you just exactly what you needed to know to get something done, and you didn't stand around the water jug philosophizing about calculus.

     Well, you're perhaps a bit like my character Odd, who is Dylla's brother, A.D. 1000-something in Norway/Ireland. He is a genius among geniuses, and his sister Dylla has powers of a witch and is a seeress, and probably part goddess. But that's irrelevant to my point. (The mere awareness of the irrelevance of my divers digressions has never effected a significant reigning-in of my profligate prolixities, of which your hawk-eyed perception has perchance -- nay, indeed, I might even venture to say: doubtless -- has made you well aware.)

       The point is, my Norwegian character, Odd, has observed during his travels on his father's (his father is king of Norway) ships that as one heads south the pole star shifts downward. (Polaris was not almost at the center as it is today, but they still called it the pole star.) So Odd said to himself, if the pole star looked as he imagined it then we were, thinks he, to erect a vertical instrument with wires precisely placed horizontally at even intervals and then make sightings (on land, where the wave-tossing ceases) of the elevation of the lodestar as a function of how far we have travelled (based upon information from approximated average speeds with knotted ropes, from sunstones, lodestones, etc., which data Odd accumulated assiduously on his sea journeys.

     From comparing his geometrical drawings (not using math, just geometry of the eye) with his sightings using a vertical device, he realized that the exact movement of the pole star up the horizontal wires with distance travelled was not what was predicted by his drawings.     However, he realized that if you made the flat earth curved like a circle, and assume that "straight up" to you is always perpendicular to the tangent to the earth-circle where you are at (and he doesn't know the words "tangent" and all that -- he just drew the pictures), then you get the proper motion of the north star, agreeing with his drawings of the curved surface. Thus did he deduce that the earth curves. He also observed that eclipses of the full moon by the earth required that the thing doing the eclipsing was shaped like a circle, and he observed that things disappear over the horizon with distance, which implied a downward curvature.

     See? Who needs calculus and trigonometry if you have a sharp eye and a sharp brain?

     Charlie

Date: 05 Apr 2008

From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion

Subject: RE: Little Projects

>We have evolved the conversation into that which I do not do. There are a million of these things and I hate them.

     Ah, Ken, Ken, Ken. Tsk, tsk.

     Do the following: Take one of your Mobius strips and -- hey, really -- I'm not kidding. Go this instant and get one of your Mobius strips which you don't mind messing up -- or make one real quick that you don't mind messing up. Ideally, it should have a width of at least 1.5" or 2" or so; that will make your project a bit easier.

     I'm waiting ...
(fingertap, fingertap, fingertap ... )

    Are you back yet?

   Is the Mobius strip in your left hand? OK, good. Now take a pair of scissors into your right hand. Use the scissors to poke a little hole somewhere in the strip, in the dead center of its width. For example, if your strip is 2" wide, poke your little hole 1" from the edge. Now carefully cut the whole strip right down the center of its width, all the way around. Rather than getting two separate strips, you get one new, single loop, but it's twice as big as the original. Hmmm ... that's kinda wierd. But here's the real surprise. Now repeat what you just did. Cut the new, bigger loop right down the center if its width, all the way around.

     Look what you've got now!!!

     Man, now that's a bar bet winner!

    There is a three-dimensional version of a Mobius strip. It's a bottle (Klein bottle) with one side only. It's so very pretty. I think I may order one.
    Maybe I should make a bar bet, which you can ponder at your bar. How long do you think it will take me to get all the comments done on all the pictures?

    Later ... Charlie

Date: 5 Apr 2008
From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion

Subject: RE: Little Projects

>Let me ask you this, what is the Mobius strip’s application? Really. If I made one out of titanium, or copper, or I made one of cast iron and super-cooled it? When do we get to the pay off? That question shows the basic difference in you and I, and that ain't bad...it just IS. Maybe it is the eternal engineer/scientist puzzlement.

    Well, did you know that there are factories that use very long Mobius-strip belts to run through all the turning wheels, because the wear occurs to "both sides" (but of course there is really only one side ... go figure), and therefore the belt lasts twice as long, at least theoretically.

   Since you love useless things so much, how about this. You wanna see what is one of my two favorite equations? (The other one is too long to bother with right now.)

    It is the value of the square root of -1 raised to the power of the square root of -1. If i, as usual, denotes the square root of -1, then the equation is:

    i ^ i = 1 / squareroot (e ^ pi)

   or you could write it:

   e ^ pi = 1 / (i ^ i) ^ 2

   This is one of the weirdest things ... it's just beautiful. And scary.

   Speaking of applicability, did you know that when the mathematics scholars came up with topology early in the 20th century, they were thrilled with themselves because they had invented a branch of mathematics which was completely, utterly inapplicable, utterly useless to the world of nuts and bolts. They were so proud of themselves. It was a "fuck you" to the world of applied mathematics and engineering and physics. They had discovered a perfectly pure branch of mathematics which was Platonic and True. They (it is joked) used to (and still do) sit around, drawing publicly funded paychecks, drawing circles and the sides of pretzels, just wiggling with abstract ecstasy.

   And then, guess what happened. Boy, did this piss the topologists off! This guy, A. Einstein, came along in 1915 and figured out that precisely the mathematical tool he needed to describe his theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity) was -- you guessed it. Topology.      Einstein taught himself topology, with the help a former student of his who was a topology genius.

    I think that is a great story. But this has happened over and over in the history of math and science. It seems that every time the theoretical mathematicians proudly come up with something completely True and Worthless, some pesky physicist comes along and finds a way to apply it to the real world. Ha ha ha.

   By the way, the Klein bottle and the Mobius strip both came out of topology. As for the usefulness of the Klein bottle: It is a very pretty bottle, as I have said. I would like one in translucent midnight blue, to set on my bookshelf and collect red Georgia clay.

   Bye  -- Charlie

Date: 5 Apr 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

>Today's image shows just another diamond ring effect during a solar eclipse. But that is not the moon masking the sun.

>What is it?

>When Apollo 12, with Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, and Dick Gordon, was in lunar/earth transit after the nation's second lunar landing, they saw this eclipse.
The sun was being eclipsed not by moon but by earth.

>This is one of the rarest eclipse photos and acquired (by humans) just once.
In all of us, there is a part and a time when practicality and scientific thought should give way to the spirit and emotions. This photo has less scientific merit than a similar one I would make just four months later from a Mexican mountain top.

>Mike Collins was alone.
>Mike Collins was as alone as a human had ever been.
>He was by himself -- 240,000 miles from home.

>Dimensions of the spirit do not exist -- the spirit has no bounds.

     Wow.  Good writing.
     This reminds me of Neitzsche. Here is a quote from Neitzsche, interspersed with a comment by the guy writing the article:
      Neitzsche wrote:
      Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"...
     The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns?"

    Comment:   The madman asks questions which imply that: we are plunging continually, backward, sideward, foreward, in all directions. There is no longer any up or down. We are straying as through an infinite nothing. We feel the breath of empty space; it has become colder. The night is continually closing in on us—we need to light lanterns in the morning. Then he continues:  "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

      Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners... "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet.

     This is where practicality and scientific thought gives way to the spirit and emotions.

   Charlie

Date: 6 Apr 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

To: Ken Cashion

    Do you read all these things like Scientific American and Science? Man, it's scary. The ice loss in the Arctic, the Antarctic, and Greenland is not just progressing steadily, it is accelerating. It appears that what we have going on here is a positive feedback loop. That's scary. But what will be will be. I won't be hanging around here on our noosphere Mother Goddess long enough to see the sad denouement.

     I just thought of a great historical example of why one might not want to throw out the "bad" data points. Ernest Rutherford is the man who discovered that the positive charge in an atom is concentrated at a very tiny central region of the atom -- i.e., the nucleus. (The other competing hypothesis had been the "raisin-muffin hypothesis", or something like that, which posited that the negative electrons were distributed throughout a spread-out positive medium, like raisins in a raisin muffin.) This is how Rutherford found out that there was a compact nucleus -- in fact, he found out *because* he was getting rare, askew data points that fell far away from the mean.

Once at Manchester, Rutherford found a well-equipped laboratory. He also found a 25-year-old physicist named Hans Geiger. Geiger had been Professor Schuster's assistant. When Rutherford took over, Geiger agreed to stay and work with him on alpha particles.

Together, Rutherford and Geiger developed a detector that could count alpha particles. It was an early version of the Geiger-Mueller counter we use today.

Geiger used his counter to test a new way of detecting alpha particles. The new detector was a screen coated with zinc sulfide. Each time an alpha particle hit the screen, it would emit a tiny flash of light called a scintillation. In order to see the scintillations, Geiger had to peer at the screen through a microscope.

Now Geiger was ready to do an experiment. Rutherford had noticed that when a beam of alpha particles passed through a thin foil, its image on a photographic plate was blurred. The alpha particles were colliding with the atoms in the foil, and bouncing off at a small angle. When a beam of particles interacts with a target in this way, it is said to be scattered. Rutherford and Geiger hoped to learn something about atoms by counting the scattered particles.

Geiger got his alpha particles from a radioactive "source." To create a narrow beam of particles, Geiger placed his source behind a slit. Fifty-four centimenters from the slit he placed a zinc-sulfide detector. The alpha particles emerged from the slit and hit a spot in the center of the detector.

Geiger put a thin foil in front of the slit. The alpha particles went through the foil, but they did not come out in a narrow beam. They spread out like light from a flashlight.

Geiger moved his detector across the beam. At each new spot he counted the number of alpha particles hitting the screen. From his measurements he calculated the average angle of deflection of an alpha particle that had passed through the foil. It was very small, less than one degree from the center path.

At about this time, a student named Ernest Marsden joined Geiger at the lab. Geiger asked Rutherford to suggest a project for the young man. Rutherford told him to see if any of the alpha particles were being deflected by more than 90 degrees. That is, he was to see if any alpha particles were bouncing back toward the source.

A few days later, Geiger reported that Marsden had indeed observed alpha particles deflected by more than 90 degrees.

Rutherford was dumbfounded. From Geiger's measurements, he knew that the probability of small deflections adding up to more than 90 degrees was less than one in a billion. Yet when Geiger and Marsden counted alpha particles, they found that about one in 8000 was deflected by a large angle.

Rutherford could think of only one explanation for Marsden's result. The alpha particles must be colliding with something small and heavy inside the atom.

Hantaro Nagaoka had been right. The atom's positive charge was concentrated in the center, with the electrons in orbit around it. The small, heavy center of the atom is called the nucleus, from the Latin word meaning kernel, or small nut.

    When Rutherford was told about the result (> 90 degrees) he said, "It was as though I had fired a high-caliber bullet at a thin sheet of tissue paper, and the bullet bounced back into my face!"

    Those pesky data points.

    Of course, the above historical story has nothing to do with the snowbird.

    Whatever ... later ... Charlie.

Date: 7 Apr 2008

From: Charles Dillingham
To: Ken Cashion

Subject: Re: Unsolicited advice & That Irish Question

>So to write the course, I had to read about Ireland and I didn't know much about it at all.
I primarily wanted to know "who started it?" What guy, or guys, started all the crap between Ireland and Britain?
>I read one book after another and each time I would think, "Ahh...here is where it started. If that jerk had just kept his mouth shut and his hands off other people's property...." and then I would read where something had happened further back and that was not the cause...this new thing was.
>I had to go as far back as quasi-reliable history would permit. I might have dug more into the "Irish Question" than on anything I have shoveled through.
>I know now.
>I know when, where, who, and what...and I know why and how. And naturally, it was not as simple as I really, really wanted it to be.

    The stuff you write is more interesting than many of the other books on the same topic, because you take a fresh look at things. Often it is a controversial look, but that's OK.

    I believe, seriously, that you should consider writing a book about Britain and Ireland (which will also unavoidably include the Danes, Norwegians, Franks, germanic folks, etc.). When you spend so much time typing these things up for e-mail, you really should save them and gather them together and proofread them. (Unless of course you just don't want to write a book on the subject -- but hey, isn't it just about your most favoritist subject?)

    If you wanted to do this, I would be willing to proofread for you. I know Bettie does that, but I think the more eyes the better. You make the occasional typos as does everybody, but sometimes there are suggestions that I would make about the way you say things -- sometimes I don't quite get what you mean, because you are typing at near-light speed and you know what you are saying although the reader may not. This, again, is true of all writers; that's why many eyes are a valuable resource. (And by the way, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better grammar checker than I. That's one good thing about Maryhelen, my housemate. She has a good ear and she makes very useful suggestions about my writing. I usually take her suggestions. But she doesn't correct my grammar, which is not in need of correction unless it's a typo; she does make suggestions about style and word choice and what to say more or less about.)

     Here's an example of something you wrote that is very well put. This is an example of why I think you should write a book.   You wrote:

   You wrote: Dig up some dirt and light it. That's cute (but of course, it's true). I learned about those winds across the pond when I went to the cliffs of Maher. (sp?) At the time we got there, a big storm was blowing in from the ocean, and I can guarantee you that those gusts of wind were hurricane force. No one would have dared to walk to the edge of the cliff. To see straignt down, you crawled on your belly and snuck your eyeballs over the edge. And it was evil cold (and wet). One girl was running downhill into the wind (not close to the edge) with her arms extended and flapping. She was trying to take off. It didn't work, but we got a picture of her. (My wife took the picture, along with almost everything else.)

    Re. anthropologists and archaeologists: I have no problem calling them "scientists" at all. The ones that I will not call scientists are the practitioners of computers, sociology, psychology, and education. Education degrees are such crap. I've told you about the five things that must be done to save education in this country, four of which I know how to do and the fifth I do not. But one of the ones I do know how to do is immediately eliminate any requirement for "education courses" to be allowed to teach. The education bureaucracy is as maddening as the government bureaucracy. It's like believing that taking courses can teach you to write like Shakespeare.

    See, you don't wanna get me started.

    Go work on a book. I think I'll do the same, as soon as I finish reading this book about on-line teaching and then order some software. I have finally given up. The whole imbecilic world is so slavishly addicted to that bag-of-dirt bad joke called MS Word that I am having to break down and buy it. I still won't use the thing -- I cannot even make it work properly. I'll use it only to check WordPerfect's conversion into Word format to see that it is correct.

Later ... Charlie.

Date: 7 Apr 2008

From: Charles Dillingham

    You should be more careful. Science magazine, like Britain's Nature magazine, is one of the most prestigious journals in the world, and is read by most Ph.D. scientists. Most "educated" non-scientists in this country would be unable to understand it at all. The second half of the journal is so difficult to read that people with Ph.D.s in a field of science other than the field of the article (e.g., a physicist reading an article about chemistry) say that even they have difficulty understanding what they are reading. This is NOT "scientific popular press".

     AP, UPI, Reuthers, etc. are jokes. The only place I know to get good general news is the New York Times. And it's tottering on the brink. They just recently reduced the page size, for dumb-down show-biz reasons. The number of pages stays the same, so now the articles will not be as long. This is good for most people, since they don't have long enough attention spans to read those long, serious, boring articles that are hard to read and that make you have to think. I just remembered that for a while somebody was publishing a "newspaper" -- I don't remember where or how I came across it, but I certainly didn't buy it. It was called something like "Happy Times". Every single article in it were intended to make you happy. No wars, no politics, no famines, no plane crashes. I was just insipid vapidity about cat being rescued from trees and people winning the lottery and beautiful new churches being built and babies being born.

      Gandhi walked a lot with bare feet, so his feet were caloused, and because of his vegetarian diet he was rather sickly, and he had bad breath. Hence, he was a super-caloused fragile mystic plagued with halitosis.

Until next time ... Charlie.