Category: Teaching

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a rural sort of place that did not particularly appreciate education, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

When I was around eight or so Uncle David built a jon boat out of marine plywood.  Uncle David is really good at woodworking and makes some nice pieces.  As far as I know it was his first attempt at a boat.  I rarely write about living people, but the humor in this piece is not at Uncle David’s expense and I bet that he gets a kick out of reading this.

He did a really good job of it, and it looked really nice.  It took him several days to finish it, and since they lived just across the street I watched quite a bit of how he built it.  He had gotten some plans from somewhere, but could have built it without any prepackaged plans because he was that good.

If you follow this series closely, you will remember that the last element that we covered was lithium, and so the next one should be beryllium.  However, I wrote about beryllium recently and so you can just follow the link.

Last week I wrote about fireworks safety, and my piece was prescient and unfortunately evidently not read by some unfortunate youths in Arkansas.  My friend, who often comments here using the handle justasabeverage, sent me the newspaper article by email the other day that covers the topic after the fold.

I am not ready to start a new, long series about music just yet, so tonight we shall discuss the hate filled, venom spitting American Family Association (AFA).  This is one of the most conservative, evangelical groups that exists and qualifies as being termed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

I go back a very long time with the AFA.  When I lived in Arkansas, their radio stations were everywhere (as they are now) and they had also started a website, afa.net.  They also run a radical news organization, onenewsnow.com (ONN).  It is interesting that this could be pronounced either “one news now”, or “one new snow”.  I like the latter better because their “articles” are a big snow job for the most part.  It is ironic that ONN is also the acronym for Onion News Network, and their stories are often more realistic that the AFA ones are.  I commented on some of their news articles and drew the wrath of the son of the founder.  I wish I still had the emails that he sent me; they were mean spirited and nasty.

Before we get very far into this, let me make my philosophy clear.  I am not a believer in any religion, but I am not one of those “evangelical atheists” who want to make it difficult for believers.  I just do not think that public funds should be expended to promote any religion, regardless of what the particular religion is.  Likewise, I do not think that public funds should be expended to suppress any religion.  I am a live and let live sort of person, unless someone threatens me or my loved ones.  The AFA, in my estimate, threatens all of us who do not agree with them.

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a rural sort of place that did not particularly appreciate education, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

Before we get started, please allow me to wish our great Nation a very happy 236th birthday!  Although the United States is not completely perfect, it is indeed a more perfect Union than had ever been conceived up to the time, and remains more perfect than any other.  As long as the People are in charge, this will not change.  Actually, I sort of begrudgingly look at 04 July as the anniversary, because I believe that the Nation actually came to be with the adoption of the Constitution of the United States on 04 March 1789, making it 213 years old, but the Founders chose 04 July, so I shall not argue too much.  Actually, the Declaration of Independence was signed on 02 August 1776, but the wording of the document was approved by the Continental Congress on 04 July 1776.  By the way, John Adams preferred 02 July because that is when the Congress voted to secede from the UK.

There were not very many formal observations of Independence Day in Hackett when I was little.  Actually there were none.  However, we still celebrated it in our own ways.

This time of year I generally write about fireworks since they are integral to the celebration of Independence Day.  I have written some rather technical pieces in the past, so this time I thought that it might be a good idea to write about some safety factors that users of consumer fireworks should observe.  Even though consumer fireworks are designed to minimize risk of injury, there is a finite probability that accidents and injuries will occur.

Many of you know how much I enjoy the music of The Who, and I shall work them into this piece.  It happens to involve one of the most treacherous pyrotechnic composition, flash powder.  In a former life, I was a professional pyrotechnician, and I am still scared of flash powder.

Many accidents involving consumer fireworks are either personal injuries caused by negligence (often alcohol fueled), ignorance, or bravado (also often alcohol fueled).  Many other accidents involving these products have to do with unintentional fires cause by firework use, storage, or transport.

We shall finish this rather long series with some live material from the canonical work of The Moody Blues.  My aim is to present some of my personal favorites, recorded during the period that they were contemporaneous at the time that they were released.

There is a really nice set of videos on YouTube about the Isle of Wight festival in 1970, but they do not fit into the format for this series because they were excerpted from a documentary about the festival and have lots of talk and not much music.  They are worth checking out, but this in not the venue.  When you do, check out the first on when they have some cameras on the back of the sound system.  Notice that many of those Hiwatt amps are labeled “WHO”, and a few are labeled “TULL”.  Yes, they also played there.  What a concert!

I normally do not write about current events in this series, but this is actually related to experiences that I had when I was little.  Many of you who read this regular series are familiar with the people to whom I refer to as The Girl and The Little Girl, two people extremely dear to me.

The Girl is 19, and her beautiful daughter is three.  Their family had two cats, Bella (whom I call Lal after the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Offspring” where Data named the android that he created that from the Hindi word for “beloved”), and Jace.  Jace was a tom Tabby (actually more likely a Maine Coon Cat) who both girls lived dearly.

The girls were out of town Friday when I got a call from The Girl’s mum asking me to come and pick up Jace’s body from the street in front of their house.  He had been run over by a car, and by the looks of things died instantly because of massive head trauma.  I do not think that he was even aware that his demise was in progress.

Lithium, the element with the atomic number (Z) of three, is as old as the universe.  It, along with hydrogen and helium, were formed at the time of the Big Bang, making it primal indeed, although much of the lithium that we encounter was synthesized in stars.

Lithium is much less common in the cosmos than it should be, and that is in part due to the fact that the two stable isotopes, ⁶Li and ⁷Li, are much less stable than many other light nuclei.  This might sound contradictory, but there is a property of atomic nuclei called binding energy per nucleon that measures the stability of nuclei.  Both stable isotopes of lithium have binding energies per nucleon lower than any other nuclei except for deuterium, tritium (which is radioactive), ³He, and of course hydrogen which has a zero binding energy because there are no neutrons to require binding.

Last time we discussed the peak and decline of The Moody Blues and in particular the studio part of the album Caught Live + 5.  I was going to stop with their studio material at that point, but several readers asked me to complete the Mark II band by including the music and my critique of Octave, Mark II’s eighth studio album.

For details about the production, release, and artwork on this record, please use the link just provided.  I think that you can already tell that I am not wild about this record, but it does have its moments.

I do find it to be exceedingly weak in comparison with their canonical material, and the passing of the Mellotron and Chamberlin leaves it without the signature, hauntingly beautiful sound of The Moody Blues.  Another thing that really bothers me is that they had a studio musician to sit in, and to me that is the antithesis to the canonical albums.  His name was R. A. Martin, and he played the exceedingly annoying saxophone parts and some less annoying horns.  In any event, we should just jump into the music.

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a rural sort of place that did not particularly appreciate education, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

Since the summer solstice just occurred a couple of hours ago, I thought it might be interesting to see how we kept cool(ish) in the summer all those years ago.  At that time, residential central air conditioning was just about unknown in my part of the country, with only the very newest homes sometimes having it.

It gets brutally hot in the summer in west central Arkansas.  As the summer progresses, pay attention to the national weather maps on the news and note that very often the temperatures there are comparable with (and connected to) those in the very hot areas of the desert southwest part of the country.

As a matter of fact, there are several flora and fauna characteristic of the desert southwest that are native to the Hackett area.  Roadrunners are quite common, and I have found many a tarantula.  Prickly pear cactus is also abundant.

I am feeling a bit wistful tonight, so please bear with me.  On this date 35 years ago the former Mrs. Translator and I were married.  I was 20 and she was 19.  We had both been in relationships before, but as soon as we met we knew that we were going to be special to each other.

I was at a friend’s house one afternoon and a powder blue 1976 Camaro pulled into the driveway.  I do not recognize the car.  It pulled up to where my friend and I were and driving it was the most beautiful girl that I ever saw.

She was my “type”.  Petite, with long, dark, hair that had just enough natural curl.  Her voice was not shrill, but not masculine either.  As Goldilocks would say, it was just right.  I was 18 and she was 17.  It was not what is termed “love at first sight”, but we were immediately attracted to each other.

Helium is one of the elements that most people see (well, not see since it is a colorless gas) in everyday life.  We are familiar with it because it used to fill toy balloons so that they rise in air.  We shall get around to the calculation about that later.

Helium also is used for large balloons, blimps, and dirigibles for the same reason:  it is lighter than air and so provides lift (not aerodynamic lift, which is provided by air passing over a wing surface) and so causes objects to rise, but these large craft have a payload where toy balloons do not, at least in most cases.

We also know it as the gas that causes voices to take on a bizarre, high pitch.  We shall also discuss the reasons for that.  But for me at least, helium is of extreme interest because of its quantum mechanical properties.