### Apollo BBS Archive - April 18, 1990

    Public & Free Bulletin Board command:$C

    Message: 64827
    Author: $ Paul Savage
    Category: Chit Chat
    Subject: John Cummings
    Date: 04/18/90  Time: 05:32:22

     Thank you for the applause. Those were thoughts I have had for several
    years, having been raised with a professional educator of the "old school",
    and having seen the decline of quality education, it is not too difficult to
    see the real problems inherent in the present system. All one needs to do is
    evaluate the present systemic priorities. Politics is #1, with sports a
    close second. Education is somewhere way down the list.
     While communication is an all-important factor in the maturing process, it
    might be a good idea if our children began their educational adventure with
    the most fundamental of all abilities, reading. If a child can read with a
    high degree of comprehension, he can learn anything. Without that basic, he
    can learn nothing else. I am strongly in favor of an ungraded primary for
    the first 5 years of schooling, with nothing being taught for the first 2
    years except reading. Only when a child can read at an acceptable level and
    speed, with an acceptable degree of comprehension, is any other subject
    introduced.
     Do youhave any thoughts on such a cirriculum?

    Message: 64828
    Author: $ Roger Mann
    Category: Chit Chat
    Subject: jeff/b&a
    Date: 04/18/90  Time: 08:37:44

    And just what is that supposed to mean ? Einstein also said that "God
    does not play dice with the Universe". Is this some sort of Gospel according
    to St. Einstein that true believers are to swallow without a complaint
    because the great Einstein said it. Also, the quote is out of context. What
    does "convinced physicist" mean ? Why does Einstein think there that the
    distinction between past, present and future is an illusion ? And for that
    matter, how does Einstein define past, present, and future ? Does Einstein
    think that a world-line is an illusion ?

    Message: 64829
    Author: $ Roger Mann
    Category: Chit Chat
    Subject: solitons
    Date: 04/18/90  Time: 08:41:02

    I still don't know what a soliton is.

    Message: 64830
    Author: $ Melissa Dee
    Category: Chit Chat
    Subject: solitons
    Date: 04/18/90  Time: 14:08:06

    It's a soul that weighs a ton.
    (Thought it was worth a try...)

    Message: 64831
    Author: $ Melissa Dee
    Category: Answer!
    Subject: Gordon/Learning
    Date: 04/18/90  Time: 17:05:10

    I finally got a chance to read your posts on learning.  I couldn't agree
    more.  I often feel that going to college is keeping me from learning.  I
    have only 21 credits left to graduate but only 5 of them have anything to do
    with my major.  I have to finish taking Spanish, which I would probably
    enjoy learning if I didn't feel it was something I HAVE to do; I have to
    take enough upper division classes, regardless of what they are about, just
    to show that I took 50 credits of 400 level classes.  It's so frustrating.
    I could've been out of school and started on my work by now if it weren't
    for their arbitary rules.  Granted, part of it is my fault for not KNOWing
    all the rules and planning correctly but I did go for help and the advisors
    didn't know $h!+ and I ended up taking 3 classes that I could have taking at
    upper division level.
    My morale each semester is getting worse and worse.  If I could take less
    classes (I started out with 18 this semester) and didn't have to work... no
    I think it's just the added stress of worrying about the money.
    In any case, one way or the other, I have a year left.

    Message: 64832
    Author: John Cummings
    Category: Chit Chat
    Subject: Learning/Paul Savage
    Date: 04/18/90  Time: 19:22:22

    So far, I have 10 grandchildren (more on the way) all under 1st grade, so
    yes, I have thoughts on the subject. One is--check out the Peoria School
    District and what they are doing to teach reading to "underpriveleged" or
    even "bi-lingual" farm laborer kids--and after kindergarted to 3rd grade,
    they score higher than 70% of the rest of the state! THEY TEACH READING!

    Message: 64833
    Author: John Cummings
    Category: Chit Chat
    Subject: Politics/Rod
    Date: 04/18/90  Time: 19:32:08

    Communism/Socialism has failed around the world because it is inefficient
    and because it denies private ownership and therefore stultifies enterprise.
            Capitalism succeeds (comparatively) because it grants the rewards of
    enterprise to the worker-entrepreneur; the more he makes, the more he keeps.
            The more we take (tax) from the entrepreneur, the less likely he is
    to take the risks and make the effort to build more. (The Laffer curve is
    not perfect, but it does illustrate the situation.) How, then, does a
    decent Christian capitalist (Rod) structure the system so that it takes
    care of the homeless and helpless while still motivating the entrepreneur to
    continue taking the risks and investing the speculative capital to guarantee
    the growth of the system?
            I suggest: 1. Reward charity. Motivat the entrepreneur to give to
    the underpriveleged--even if to develop a market.
            2. Clean up "charities." I feel good about writing a check for
    Mother Theresa's order, ripped off by the sheriff's office phone beg.
            3.Improve welfare bureaucracy. Does the state spend $3 to get $1 to
    benefit the poor? It should be the other way.
            4.Mental health to the poor sick, jobs to the poor unemployed.
    Any comments? Rod?

    Message: 64834
    Author: $ Jeff Beck
    Category: Answer!
    Subject: Roger/before & after
    Date: 04/18/90  Time: 21:06:57

    I don't know.  I merely thought it was an interesting statement and
    tangentially relevant to your remark.  Perhaps you can ask him someday,
    when you reach "Christian-agnostic" heaven.

    Message: 64835
    Author: $ Jeff Beck
    Category: Chit Chat
    Subject: solitons
    Date: 04/18/90  Time: 21:09:24

    "I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a
    narrow channel by a pair of horses when the boat suddenly stopped; not so
    the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated
    round the prow of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then suddenly
    leaving it behind, rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of
    a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well defined heap of
    water which continued its course along the channel apparently without
    change of form or diminution of speed.  I followed it on horseback and
    overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an hour,
    preserving its original figure some thirty feet long and a foot to a foot
    and a half in height.  Its height gradually diminished, and after a chase
    of one or two miles I lost it in the windings of the channel."

    -- Scottish engineer and ship designer John Scott Russell, upon an
    experience had while riding his horse along the Union Canal near
    Edinburgh in August 1834.

    A complex wave can be described as made up of a number of sine waves, each
    of a different frequency.  In water, waves of different frequencies travel
    at different speeds.  Because there is nothing to hold these different
    frequencies together, a wave would ordinary break up into smaller
    disturbances and finally the chaos of dispersion.  Waves suffer dispersion
    because in a linear world individual sine waves are independent of each
    other.

    The wave Russell observed owed its stability to nonlinear interactions
    binding the individual sine waves together.  These nonlinearities caused
    individual sine waves to feed back into each other, in such a manner as to
    create the reverse of turbulence.  Instead of smoothly oscillating water
    becoming increasingly fragmented, at a critical value the sine waves
    coupled.  As one sine wave tried to escape from the wave, its interaction
    with the others held it back.  Russell called this wave a "wave of
    translation," which today is called a soliton, or solitary wave.
    Russell began experiments, and noticed that the speed of such waves was
    related to their height.  A tall, thin wave could catch up to a short
    fat one.  He was able to use soliton principles to show that the sound
    of a distant cannon is always heard before the order to fire because
    the cannon sound moves as a soliton and so travels faster.  He was also
    able to use soliton principles to correctly calculate the depth of the
    atmosphere.  Ten years after Russell's death in 1882, the Dutch
    mathematicians D.J. Kortweg and C. de Vries wrote down the nonlinear
    equation, called the KdV equation, which contains Russell's wave as its
    solution.  This equation confirmed Russell's observations about what
    happens when two solitons collide.  This is backed by modern water tank
    experiments and computer modeling.

    A high, thin, soliton catches up with a shorter, fatter soliton, and the
    two waves meet and coalesce.  The combined soliton separates so that the
    faster, higher one travels on at its original rate of motion, leaving the
    short fat wave behind.  Where the two soliton waves cross, there is no
    separation of one wave from the other, yet the two waves emerge intact.
    In the 1970s, Henry Yuen and Bruce Lake from the TRW Defense and Space
    Systems Group realized that back in 1890, physicist and mathematician
    Sir George Stokes' theoretical investigations indicated that it was an
    oversimplification to apply the principle of linear dispersion to very
    deep water because in the ocean nonlinearity must be taken into account
    in such factors as the effect of gravity at various depths.  Using Stokes'
    nonlinear terms, Yuen and Lake derived a cousin of the KdV equation; it
    shows that while solitons in deep water don't exhibit the simple
    relationship between height and speed observed in Russell's solitons, they
    can nonetheless move for great distances without any change in shape and
    can survive collisions.  Photographs of these solitons have been taken by
    satellites.
    A tsunami is another type of water soliton.  However, because of its
    enormous wavelength and this relationship to the ocean's depth, it
    is treated mathematically like a soliton in shallow water.  Tsunamis, only
    a few inches or feet in height in the ocean, can travel intact for
    thousands of miles.  When it reaches the continental shelf, nonlinear
    effects at the seabed act to shorten the wavelength of the wave and
    increase its height.

    Atmospheric solitons have been observed.  The first recorded atmospheric
    soliton was a mass of cold air that moved across Kansas on June 19, 1951.
    A sudden change in air pressure proceeded along a temperature inversion at
    a height of over a mile.  Records show that the soliton front was more than
    a hundred miles long and travelled at about 12 mph for several hundred
    miles.  In recent years meteorologists have learned that atmospheric
    solitons occur in two forms: an E-soliton (elevated, and analogous to
    Russell's water wave) and a D-soliton, or "wave of depression."  Near the
    Tharis Ridge on Mars, the properties of the atmosphere change slightly in
    the early morning hours of late spring and early summer.  This results in
    a soliton disturbance that sweeps along the ridge.  According to some
    theories the Great Red Spot on Jupiter (actually, several spots on Jupiter
    and one on Saturn) is an enormous E-soliton trapped between two D-solitons.
    A boost for the soliton theory came from observations of Jupiter's South
    Tropical Depression, which appears to be a D-soliton.  In the 1950s this
    disturbance approached the red spot, appeared to enter into it and vanish,
    and then slid out intact and unchanged on the other side.  Scientists at
    the University of Texas have succeeded in producing a "red spot" in the
    laboratory using a rapidly rotating cylindrical tank into which fluid
    could be pumped from an inner ring and withdrawn from an outer ring.  When
    the right pumping rate and speed of cylinder rotation was used, some of the
    fluid began to rotate in the opposite direction and produce a region of
    shear where vortices appeared, began to merge, and formed a much larger and
    more stable "red spot."

    In the 1950s a study of electron movement in vibrating metal lattices gave
    evidence of solitons in solids.  The field of statistical mechanics deals
    with the relationships of energy to change at the molecular and atomic
    level.  A central assumption of statistical mechanics is the equipartition
    of energy.  It had always been assumed that when a system is given a little
    extra energy (a bit of heat, for example) that this energy will rapidly
    become distributed over the whole system.  Whenever energy is concentrated
    in a particular part of a system then that system has the potential to do
    work.  According to the principle of equipartition, this energy will tend to
    dissipate.  Shortly before his death, physicist Enrico Fermi, aided
    by the mathematicians Stanislav Ulam and J. Pasta, decided they would
    look at the vibrations in metal using the then state of the art Maniac I
    computer. The internal structure of metal contains a stable pattern, called
    a lattice, of atoms.  When energy, in the form of heat, is given to the
    metal it causes the atoms to vibrate in a collective way.  There are many
    different modes of vibrations within a lattice, and each of
    these is associated with a characteristic energy.  According to the
    principle of equipartition, if all of the heat energy were to be given to
    a particular vibration of the lattice the energy would soon distribute
    itself to the other modes.  The plan was to feed one mode with energy and
    watch how this energy obeyed the strictures of thermodynamics by
    distributing itself through the other modes.

    Fermi, Pasta and Ulam set up a model containing five modes.
    In order to mathematically represent this sharing of energy it was
    necessary to add a tiny extra term; a nonlinear term representing this
    sharing of energy between modes.  If it was not added there was no way
    that energy in the model could pass from one mode to another.  However,
    this tiny additional term dominated the whole system and transformed it
    from a linear, well-behaved lattice into an arena for solitons.
    When the Fermi-Ulam-Pasta calculation was carried out no one was seriously
    thinking about solitons, so the three were quite confident that once the
    system had settled down from its initial burst of energy, the energy would
    soon be parceled out among all the other vibrational modes.  As expected,
    after a few hundred cycles of the calculation, mode 1 began to fall rapidly
    in energy and modes 2,3,4 and 5 began to gain.  After 2,500 iterations of
    the equation, everything was still going according to plan.  Then,
    something wonderlandish occurred.  While vibrational mode 1 continued to
    lose energy, mode 4 began to gain energy at the expense of all the other
    modes.  By 3,500 cycles mode 4 had peaked and now mode 3 was beginning to
    gather energy.  To their complete surprise, energy was not being shared out
    equally but was bunching itself together in one or another of the modes.
    By the end of 30,000 cycles energy was not equipartitioned at all but had
    returned and gathered itself again in the first mode.  The result was
    especially shocking because it was found that this concentration of energy
    doesn't depend on the strength of the nonlinear interaction; even a very
    weak coupling of feedback will cause this coherent wave of energy.

    Magnetic fields can exhibit soliton behavior as well, in the form of
    "tunneling."  Ordinarily a magnetic field can go through a piece of metal
    quite easily.  In a superconducting metal, magnetic transparency is
    switched off.  At the critical temperature at which the metal converts
    into a superconductor (itself a soliton) the magnetic field finds itself
    suddenly unable to enter.  However, if the magnetic field is increased,
    there comes a point when solitonlike vortices of magnetism are created that
    penetrate or tunnel into the superconductor.  In effect, one soliton passes
    through another.  Soliton vortices are also found in superfluids, which can
    flow without creating turbulence.
    Another type of soliton penetration called "self-induced transparency"
    occurs when light and matter engage in certain nonlinear interactions.
    Certain solids reflect and absorb all the light that falls on them.  In
    these absorbing systems any light energy that manages to penetrate into
    the solid is immediately absorbed by its atoms.  This absorbed energy leaks
    away in the form of atomic vibrations (heat).  The only effect of trying to
    force light through an opaque surface is to heat its surface.  However, if
    the light falling on the solid becomes particularly intense, as in a very
    high energy burst from a laser, then the solid becomes transparent and the
    light pulse passes through unabsorbed.  With a sharp laser burst, all atoms
    in the lattice are excited and interact nonlinearly with the light so that
    the two are momentarily fused to form a whole system along which its wave
    front operates collectively.  This soliton is not strictly light nor atomic
    excitation.  It is a complex nonlinear combination called a polariton.

    Solitons are also important in biological systems.  Until the development
    of soliton theories, the problem of understanding how packets of energy are
    transported down very long molecules was called "the crisis in
    bioenergetics."  In the world of linear molecules energy always tends to
    spread out so that the right concentration would never get to the right
    site.  Russian scientist A.S. Davidov proposed that nonlinear interactions
    would help transport energy along the helical coils of a protein molecule.
    Davidov theorized that below a certain threshold, energy is carried by the
    normal vibrations of the helix "backbone" and tends to dissipate across the
    whole molecule.  Past a critical point, nonlinearity balances the forces of
    diffusion and allows a bound packet of energy to travel along the helix at
    just over a thousand meters per second.
    Solitons are also employed in biological systems for movement of signals
    along nerves.  After WW II Alan Hodgkin, with the help of his student
    Andrew Huxley (half-brother of Aldous the novelist), Hodgkin determined
    that nerve transmission involves a localized pulse that travels down the
    nerve at constant speed and without dissipation.  In addition, each pulse
    is generated only when a certain critical threshold of energy is reached.
    This research earned Hodgkin, Huxley, and John Eccles the Nobel prize.
    A whole new area of study developed to investigate how solitons collide,
    pass over irregularities in the nerve fiber, and interact at junctions.

    Message: 64843
    Author: $ Dean Hathaway
    Category: Entertainment/Movies
    Subject: Concert
    Date: 04/18/90  Time: 22:44:25

    ************************************************************************
    *                        LIBERTY ROCKS Presents:                       *
    *                                                                      *
    *                             RANDY HANSEN                             *
    *                               Performs                               *
    *                             JIMI HENDRIX                             *
    *                                                                      *
    *                             GIN BLOSSOMS                             *
    *                                                                      *
    *                      CHUCK HALL & THE BRICK WALL                     *
    *                                                                      *
    *                              HANS OLSON                              *
    *                                                                      *
    *                 Saturday, April 21st 3:00 to 9:00 PM                 *
    *                          Mesa Amphitheater                           *
    *                                                                      *
    ************************************************************************
    *                               TICKETS                                *
    *                $5.00 Advance, available from Dillards                *
    *                          $7.00 Day of Show                           *
    *     Save $2.00 on your Day of Show admission when you register       *
    *                 to vote at the Mesa Amphitheater!                    *
    *                      CHILDREN UNDER 12 FREE                          *
    ************************************************************************

    Message: 64844
    Author: $ Dean Hathaway
    Category: Chit Chat
    Subject: Last
    Date: 04/18/90  Time: 22:55:41

      This thing is being put on by Arizona Libertarian Party to encourage voter
    registration and hopefully garner some new Libertarians. I will be there as
    a Deputy Registrar. I distributed publicity posters to record stores today
    and have a few complimentary tickets left over from bribing store managers.
    If anyone would like to go and can't afford a ticket, let me know.
      See You There,
        Dean H.

    Message: 64845
    Author: $ Dean Hathaway
    Category: Get-Togethers (GTs)
    Subject: Shoot-out
    Date: 04/18/90  Time: 22:56:47

      Maybe we should start talking specifics about where we are going to meet
    on the 28th and so on.
       See You Later
          Dean H.

    Message: 64846
    Author: $ Rod Williams
    Category: Chit Chat
    Subject: John
    Date: 04/19/90  Time: 01:31:27

    I am an atheist, not a Christian.  I am only a capitalist because in this
    present-day land it takes paper money to survive.

    Mankind is not ready for a system that will work because we are still to
    ignorant of an animal for it to.

    Neither am I a communist or a socialist.

    However, judging from what I see in this system, I'd say it sucked.

    The average person in this country will work from January 1 to May 5 in
    order to pay taxes.  That's up several days from last year and it keeps
    rising.

    As a famous person once said, "Taxation without representation is tyranny,
    and taxation with representation ain't so hot either.