This is related to another post, here http://georgesblogforfriends.blogspot.com/2012/09/turn-signal-lever.html
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Officer Chris Warren and Katrina Rodriguez
This is related to another post, here http://georgesblogforfriends.blogspot.com/2012/09/turn-signal-lever.html
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Obesity And Fatty Liver Disease
My wife keeps on telling me how bad the liver of an obese person looks. Yellow. Doesn't have its color anymore.
Basically the officially recognized mechanism is: you eat and drink yourself to death, then your liver turns into fat before turning into scars when you get cirrhosis.
Let me tell you my opinion. This is not the causal chain. (I think studies are big wastes of money or maybe ways to funnel money and bribe the society while making it believing that this or that medicine or treatment or diet is good.)
I strongly believe that people overeat and do get obese because of the toxic environment ant inherent toxicity of processed food and chemistry based agriculture.
The body defends itself by craving more food when available because some of the toxins are being temporarily stored into fat, like first in the transformed liver cells then into the other fat tissues of the body and some other toxins are being absorbed by the extra fiber from "cleaner" foods.
If the "temporary" conditions become permanent, then you remain permanently obese, get fatty liver disease, and/or cirrhosis.
Human body is pretty well adapted to the use of alcohol. Of course it's a factor but not the main cause.
Basically the officially recognized mechanism is: you eat and drink yourself to death, then your liver turns into fat before turning into scars when you get cirrhosis.
Let me tell you my opinion. This is not the causal chain. (I think studies are big wastes of money or maybe ways to funnel money and bribe the society while making it believing that this or that medicine or treatment or diet is good.)
I strongly believe that people overeat and do get obese because of the toxic environment ant inherent toxicity of processed food and chemistry based agriculture.
The body defends itself by craving more food when available because some of the toxins are being temporarily stored into fat, like first in the transformed liver cells then into the other fat tissues of the body and some other toxins are being absorbed by the extra fiber from "cleaner" foods.
If the "temporary" conditions become permanent, then you remain permanently obese, get fatty liver disease, and/or cirrhosis.
Human body is pretty well adapted to the use of alcohol. Of course it's a factor but not the main cause.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Santa Claus
"Sinterklaas [sɪntər'klaːs] (or more formally Sint Nicolaas or Sint Nikolaas; Saint Nicolas in French; Sankt Nikolaus in German) is a traditional winter holiday figure still celebrated today in the Low Countries,
including the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, as well as some
parts of Germany, French Flanders and Artois. He is also well known in
territories of the former Dutch Empire, including Aruba, Suriname, Curaçao, Bonaire, and Indonesia. He is one of the sources of the holiday figure of Santa Claus in North America.[1]"
My opinion as a hobbyist in linguistics, is that the name Santa Claus name does not come from a child's mispronunciation of Sinterklaas or Saint Nicholas.
Where it's coming from? I have no idea but if you take the letter n from the middle of the word and put it at the end, guess what's resulting? Too much of a coincidence especially when we try and switch the spelling of the name Claus, which i never heard in US, to the more common word claws.
Don't know about the creation of the name or the character but the use of it and the taking of the main stage at Christmas after so many years raises questions...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus
My opinion as a hobbyist in linguistics, is that the name Santa Claus name does not come from a child's mispronunciation of Sinterklaas or Saint Nicholas.
Where it's coming from? I have no idea but if you take the letter n from the middle of the word and put it at the end, guess what's resulting? Too much of a coincidence especially when we try and switch the spelling of the name Claus, which i never heard in US, to the more common word claws.
Don't know about the creation of the name or the character but the use of it and the taking of the main stage at Christmas after so many years raises questions...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Blog Has One Year!
One year since i started the blog. 277 posts. Never thought i would get here. It helped me a lot organizing my memories. Most of the posts contain old ideas triggered by daily facts but lately there are many posts regarding my daily life. With this occasion i also changed the name and address of the blog. One year from now and i will still find reminders of the old address and broken links. (:
:) Happy anniversary blog and thanks to all who ever read anything of it!
:) Happy anniversary blog and thanks to all who ever read anything of it!
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Romanian - Sanskrit Comparison
Cristian Ioanide - In Memoriam
"In principle, every difference between two related languages should be explicable to a high degree of plausibility and systematic changes, for example in phonological or morphological systems are expected to be highly regular (i.e. consistent). In practice, the comparison may be more restricted, e.g. just to the lexicon."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics
The generally accepted Indo-European theory in linguistics states that all languages in Europe and India have a common ancestor, the hypothetical PIE or Proto-Indo-European language.
However there are major disagreements regarding this hypothetical language and the reconstruction attempts so far lay in the domain of bizarre. No serious academic attention had been directed into reconstructing this hypothetical language. In dictionaries so far (like the Romanian Explicative Dictionary or DEX) though there are many basic words deemed as of unknown origin, generally attributed by some authors, mostly biased nationalist, to the Dacian language or the language we all assume it was spoken in Dacia before Romans arrived, there is not on single etymology given as PIE. In French i haven't seen a single word given of unknown etymology or as PIE but in both languages i found words that certainly remind me of Sanskrit. The English lexis may be also as rich as Romanian in Sanskrit roots. Interestingly enough, the words are distributed in different languages, as if Sanskrit divided or distributed separate chunks or lists of words to different inheriting languages though many are overlapping, like from English and Romanian.
It is almost impossible to believe that Romans did not keep or no archives are found regarding the different aspects of life in Dacia during their direct administration period which lasted some 165 years including basic lexis or pieces of written language. No written records are to be found in any archive about the Dacian language (with some dubious exceptions).
The subject of such records being hidden in archives for political reasons or even destroyed is a completely different story i won't start to dig in right now.
So personally following an intuition triggered by an anecdotal information i found in an article i read in early 90s which stated that a numbered a Romanian basic words are matching with perfectly similar Sanskrit ones like apa-apa (water), gand-gandiva (thought) etc. i tried to look in current online dictionaries like spokensankrit.org (formerly .de) just to verify. To my surprise they all seemed to have a Sanskrit corespondent, almost identical, down to pronunciation.
So i took the list of Romanian words of unknown origin (Wikipedia version) and started to look in that dictionary for more matches and found an abundance of words of undoubtful (to me) Sanskrit origin.
I assume the online dictionary mentioned above that is based on the widely recognized Monier Williams Sanskrit dictionary which is also available online from the University of Koln is still not complete though it numbers over half million entries. There are in there words that have obviously too many entered meanings [by volunteering contributors] of which some being even opposite, many probably coming from only one occurrence in an isolated text maybe used as metaphors. No one can tell. But i was pretty conservative in building this list and picked correspondences only from the roughly first 10-20% of meanings confirmed by the most redundancies (or close meanings) in the rest of the entered meanings staying mainly in the Monier Wiliams safe area. Interestingly, there are words, like gata that have the same corresponding many meanings both in Romanian and Sanskrit and this is obvious only for those who know Romanian as i cannot add more entries for words with different meaning in Romania being beyond the current purpose of this modest work.
Never finished checking that list because while browsing the dictionaries i started to find more and more words that where not on that list having a greater resemblance with Sanskrit words than with Latin or Old Slavonic (the precursor of all modern Slavic languages) of which etymologies are officially given in Romanian dictionaries and i started to build a list on a spreadsheet with all the words i could find that seemed to me closer to Sanskrit than Latin and Slavonic which are the officially accepted by academics main ancestors of Romanian language, besides the still largely unknown Dacian language. All words from the basic or day to day usage Romanian language lexis.
I also added verbs that seem similar in writting, pronunciation and meaning with nouns and adjectives in Romanian. https://sanskritstudio.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/the-sanskrit-past-passive-participle/. I am not a linguist but i assume in a few thousands years of separation some past participles may have morphed into adjectives and even nouns. Same thing happened in the dictionary itslef, noun from Sanskrit are translated like verbs in English.
Also while browsing this online dictionary i had the surprise to also come across many English words that seem to have a direct corespondent in Sanskrit of which some i added in a smaller list that is also included in this blog post.
My conclusion so far is there are many Sanskrit words in Romanian, maybe as many as 50% of the lexis of Romanian, but when they match, some of them identically as pronunciation, most of the time they do not coincide as first meaning. This indicates a strong but very old connection.
Could the reason for finding so many Romanian words of possible Sanskrit origin be the Dacian language was closed to Sanskrit which was also close to PIE. It is up to linguists in the future to follow these hypotheses. This work is by far not complete and i strongly believe what i found is intriguing enough to requires their attention. But i am also afraid many already knew about all these complex and contradictory issues, since i don't know, the first contact of modern western civilization with the eastern one, probably since German linguists Franz Bopp built the first known grammar of Sanskrit and for some obvious political reasons they chose to delay their findings until people of the world will be able to better deal with the Indo-European linguistic theory that if was to be applied would probably require extensive rewriting of dictionaries and why not, maybe history itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Bopp
When i first started to study the lexis of Sanskrit i started to ask myself how i will pronounce the words. In the end i realized the pronunciation follows pretty much Latin, as the several existing transliteration types use mainly Latin alphabet.
However there is an alternate way to figure pronunciation. Since Google Translate cannot translate Sanskrit and there is no other site on the internet that i know of that can pronounce any typed words in Devanagari script one can trick Google Translate to pronounce Sanskrit as Hindi since Hindi uses the same alphabet and almost the same pronunciation.
So i added links to every word in the list (done with Google Spreadsheets) written in Sanskrit with Devanagari script so you can click on then on the little speaker icon under the box where the word appears to hear the pronunciation. Most of those words do not even exist in Hindi.
There are also links provided for every Romanian word to Google Translate for both translation in English to eliminate any doubt and pronunciation for comparison of pronunciation with the paired Sanskrit words and also links for every Sanskrit word transliterated with Latin characters to different dictionaries where i found that word. There are more than 700 links in total.
Google Translate is not particularly good with Romanian phrases although lately it got much better. However, for individual words it is acceptable. The computer generated pronunciation in Romanian is kind of rough, compared to the one in Hindi, but good enough for the purpose.
For Devanagari script pronunciation of each separate letter here is an easy to use interactive page.
http://www.digitaldialects.com/Hindi/alphabet.htm
For comparing the words i used the following on-line dictionaries and lists:
"In principle, every difference between two related languages should be explicable to a high degree of plausibility and systematic changes, for example in phonological or morphological systems are expected to be highly regular (i.e. consistent). In practice, the comparison may be more restricted, e.g. just to the lexicon."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics
The generally accepted Indo-European theory in linguistics states that all languages in Europe and India have a common ancestor, the hypothetical PIE or Proto-Indo-European language.
However there are major disagreements regarding this hypothetical language and the reconstruction attempts so far lay in the domain of bizarre. No serious academic attention had been directed into reconstructing this hypothetical language. In dictionaries so far (like the Romanian Explicative Dictionary or DEX) though there are many basic words deemed as of unknown origin, generally attributed by some authors, mostly biased nationalist, to the Dacian language or the language we all assume it was spoken in Dacia before Romans arrived, there is not on single etymology given as PIE. In French i haven't seen a single word given of unknown etymology or as PIE but in both languages i found words that certainly remind me of Sanskrit. The English lexis may be also as rich as Romanian in Sanskrit roots. Interestingly enough, the words are distributed in different languages, as if Sanskrit divided or distributed separate chunks or lists of words to different inheriting languages though many are overlapping, like from English and Romanian.
It is almost impossible to believe that Romans did not keep or no archives are found regarding the different aspects of life in Dacia during their direct administration period which lasted some 165 years including basic lexis or pieces of written language. No written records are to be found in any archive about the Dacian language (with some dubious exceptions).
The subject of such records being hidden in archives for political reasons or even destroyed is a completely different story i won't start to dig in right now.
So personally following an intuition triggered by an anecdotal information i found in an article i read in early 90s which stated that a numbered a Romanian basic words are matching with perfectly similar Sanskrit ones like apa-apa (water), gand-gandiva (thought) etc. i tried to look in current online dictionaries like spokensankrit.org (formerly .de) just to verify. To my surprise they all seemed to have a Sanskrit corespondent, almost identical, down to pronunciation.
So i took the list of Romanian words of unknown origin (Wikipedia version) and started to look in that dictionary for more matches and found an abundance of words of undoubtful (to me) Sanskrit origin.
I assume the online dictionary mentioned above that is based on the widely recognized Monier Williams Sanskrit dictionary which is also available online from the University of Koln is still not complete though it numbers over half million entries. There are in there words that have obviously too many entered meanings [by volunteering contributors] of which some being even opposite, many probably coming from only one occurrence in an isolated text maybe used as metaphors. No one can tell. But i was pretty conservative in building this list and picked correspondences only from the roughly first 10-20% of meanings confirmed by the most redundancies (or close meanings) in the rest of the entered meanings staying mainly in the Monier Wiliams safe area. Interestingly, there are words, like gata that have the same corresponding many meanings both in Romanian and Sanskrit and this is obvious only for those who know Romanian as i cannot add more entries for words with different meaning in Romania being beyond the current purpose of this modest work.
Never finished checking that list because while browsing the dictionaries i started to find more and more words that where not on that list having a greater resemblance with Sanskrit words than with Latin or Old Slavonic (the precursor of all modern Slavic languages) of which etymologies are officially given in Romanian dictionaries and i started to build a list on a spreadsheet with all the words i could find that seemed to me closer to Sanskrit than Latin and Slavonic which are the officially accepted by academics main ancestors of Romanian language, besides the still largely unknown Dacian language. All words from the basic or day to day usage Romanian language lexis.
I also added verbs that seem similar in writting, pronunciation and meaning with nouns and adjectives in Romanian. https://sanskritstudio.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/the-sanskrit-past-passive-participle/. I am not a linguist but i assume in a few thousands years of separation some past participles may have morphed into adjectives and even nouns. Same thing happened in the dictionary itslef, noun from Sanskrit are translated like verbs in English.
Also while browsing this online dictionary i had the surprise to also come across many English words that seem to have a direct corespondent in Sanskrit of which some i added in a smaller list that is also included in this blog post.
My conclusion so far is there are many Sanskrit words in Romanian, maybe as many as 50% of the lexis of Romanian, but when they match, some of them identically as pronunciation, most of the time they do not coincide as first meaning. This indicates a strong but very old connection.
Could the reason for finding so many Romanian words of possible Sanskrit origin be the Dacian language was closed to Sanskrit which was also close to PIE. It is up to linguists in the future to follow these hypotheses. This work is by far not complete and i strongly believe what i found is intriguing enough to requires their attention. But i am also afraid many already knew about all these complex and contradictory issues, since i don't know, the first contact of modern western civilization with the eastern one, probably since German linguists Franz Bopp built the first known grammar of Sanskrit and for some obvious political reasons they chose to delay their findings until people of the world will be able to better deal with the Indo-European linguistic theory that if was to be applied would probably require extensive rewriting of dictionaries and why not, maybe history itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Bopp
When i first started to study the lexis of Sanskrit i started to ask myself how i will pronounce the words. In the end i realized the pronunciation follows pretty much Latin, as the several existing transliteration types use mainly Latin alphabet.
However there is an alternate way to figure pronunciation. Since Google Translate cannot translate Sanskrit and there is no other site on the internet that i know of that can pronounce any typed words in Devanagari script one can trick Google Translate to pronounce Sanskrit as Hindi since Hindi uses the same alphabet and almost the same pronunciation.
So i added links to every word in the list (done with Google Spreadsheets) written in Sanskrit with Devanagari script so you can click on then on the little speaker icon under the box where the word appears to hear the pronunciation. Most of those words do not even exist in Hindi.
There are also links provided for every Romanian word to Google Translate for both translation in English to eliminate any doubt and pronunciation for comparison of pronunciation with the paired Sanskrit words and also links for every Sanskrit word transliterated with Latin characters to different dictionaries where i found that word. There are more than 700 links in total.
Google Translate is not particularly good with Romanian phrases although lately it got much better. However, for individual words it is acceptable. The computer generated pronunciation in Romanian is kind of rough, compared to the one in Hindi, but good enough for the purpose.
For Devanagari script pronunciation of each separate letter here is an easy to use interactive page.
http://www.digitaldialects.com/Hindi/alphabet.htm
https://www.google.com/search?q=Cuv.+autoht.+site%3Adexonline.ro%2F,
https://www.google.com/search?q=Et.+Nec.+site%3Adexonline.ro%2F
http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%C4%83_de_cuvinte_rom%C3%A2ne%C8%99ti_mo%C8%99tenite_probabil_din_limba_dac%C4%83
Sanskrit dictionary linkable per word and meaning
www.sanskritdictionary.com/ (default IAST transliteration)
Sanskrit dictionary linkable per word
http://spokensanskrit.org/
http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/monier/indexcaller.php
Dictionary not linkable per word (need to manually input the words below)
http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de
For Devanagari script pronunciation of each separate letter here is an easy to use interactive page.
http://www.digitaldialects.com/Hindi/alphabet.htm
Here is also a link to a Google sheet that holds the same table with the table itself framed below in this blog post.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rFNHh0hUZoX05HMLQmA041H2pGj3fAPdmwAoGkkkJMk/edit?usp=sharing
[On August 18 2017 i discovered spokensanskrit.de has changed to spokensanskrit.org. I am currently working to restore all broken links below. Already re-established first 100 links. For the new links you have to scroll right.]
Also here is a link to a much shorter list that probably could be much longer with English words that could have direct sanskrit etymology and also the table.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z30OzrhFN6aiqmK_cra0rv8z_wfRr0WJd9LxS5tsKrQ/edit?usp=sharing
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Dacian_POW_IMG_6358.jpg
Roman Statue of a Dacian POW in 2nd century AD
Monday, December 10, 2012
Sunset
Sunset just ended. A few minutes ago it was really glorious. Grabbed my new little camera, remove the mosquito net at the small window above the sink in the kitchen and took a few shots. While at it i hear this diesel engine sound. A school-bus full of children just under the window. It's not the first time i see it. It probably comes from Eagle Crest from one alley and goes back to it on other. It's not picking or leaving anybody.
 |
| From the kitchen window, posting time. click to enlarge. |
76
Talking about jobs. I remember my last one. Between April 06 and July 06 i had a brief job at a 76 gas station in Beaverton, OR. At that time it belonged to ConnocoPhilips and owned at least partially by Lukoil of ... Russia. I didn't know until after the orientation. Then, i also found out that Chevron uses additives in gasoline that are almost as good as 76s. And the fact that not all gasoline is created equal. And why we should never buy gasoline from store stations because they accept in their tanks the lowest quality, the one that all major gasoline suppliers refuse.
At the intersection of Cedar Hills and Walker Rd. Also as told at orientation, the busiest 76 and generally the busiest gas station in the NW.
12 pumps. 2 or 3 guys per busy shifts. Convenience store.
Curiously enough that job was between two major dental works. And i was on antidepressants at the time since the last time in the hospital in 75. Mirtazapin. My prescription was 30 milligrams, as agreed with the doctor, to be cheaper for me at copay and officially i was supposed to break them in two. But i was breaking them in 4 and getting only 7.5 milligrams. And i think that was too much as well. Now i think the only benefit of that was the antihistamine action of Mirtazapin. And i was not feeling myself. I was living like in a dream.
Dr. Jeff Call of Gentle Dental did a root canal and a crown. The crown was supposed to be ceramic only but then he switched to metal and ceramic. It still has some galvanic reaction if i touch the exposed metal part of it with a fork it starts hurting really bad.
Dr. Douglas Boyd of Portland did and apicoectomy. The apparent necessity of it was an overfill to a root canal done by dr.Negru of Aloha, OR. On July 27 2006, the same day when Mr. Băsescu, the President of Romania did a visit in Washington DC and the ex-Prime Minister Mr.Tăriceanu fell from his motorcycle. The surgery went wrong and i had to quit the job. I couldn't eat solid food for several month.
Later i found out that in fact the pain to that tooth was due to an insufficiency of vitamin C and probably a periodontitis. No surgery necessary. In fact i would not be fair if i wouldn't tell Dr. Boyd tried to convince me not to do it.
But what happened in between is more interesting. Job was officially part time. But due to the very busy nature of the place and the fact that they couldn't keep nobody to work there for long time because of being so busy and hard to run all day from one pump to another, it became full time and even over time.
The only guy who was working there for a long time before and after me was Charlie. Charlie the communist with the crooked teeth. He said he was communist but had no idea of what that was. He said he was an alcoholic, he would get pissed if he didn't have his beers every day.
After job i started chatting with other Romanians over the internet out of being so homesick and lonely. Started drinking Cuba Libre in top of antidepressants and started a blog which i later abandoned.
I caught a few days with temperatures over 100 degrees. At 46 and out of shape, i thought i was going to die but i didn't.
Each pump had a printer and most of the customers were asking for a receipt. But some times the printers were jamming or running out of paper and we had to run inside to get receipts from the cashiers. And had to stay in line with the other customers, that had priority. And one day, shy at first then more bold i started fixing the printers and refilling them with paper. Soon i became unofficially the guy who did that on my shift. It was like a promotion and it gave me an ascendance over the younger guys.
They were a couple of black guys, can't remember their names now. When i was coming to my shift, around 11 AM, i was almost every time finding them with half of the printers not working and with their tongs out from running inside to get receipts. So i was fixing those first thing.
One day i decided i should try and make them fix those for themselves. So i showed them how to do it when nobody was around so many times until they got probably annoyed and started doing it themselves. But only when i was there.
But when i was coming at my shift, again they were broken.
One day one of them got fired for no big reason.
I never realized why the thing with printers was happening. But lately when i realized the impossibility of me getting a job according to my experience and qualifications, i think i started to understand.
Some categories of people are not allowed around here to do certain "more qualified" types of works which are reserved for insiders.
At the intersection of Cedar Hills and Walker Rd. Also as told at orientation, the busiest 76 and generally the busiest gas station in the NW.
12 pumps. 2 or 3 guys per busy shifts. Convenience store.
Curiously enough that job was between two major dental works. And i was on antidepressants at the time since the last time in the hospital in 75. Mirtazapin. My prescription was 30 milligrams, as agreed with the doctor, to be cheaper for me at copay and officially i was supposed to break them in two. But i was breaking them in 4 and getting only 7.5 milligrams. And i think that was too much as well. Now i think the only benefit of that was the antihistamine action of Mirtazapin. And i was not feeling myself. I was living like in a dream.
Dr. Jeff Call of Gentle Dental did a root canal and a crown. The crown was supposed to be ceramic only but then he switched to metal and ceramic. It still has some galvanic reaction if i touch the exposed metal part of it with a fork it starts hurting really bad.
Dr. Douglas Boyd of Portland did and apicoectomy. The apparent necessity of it was an overfill to a root canal done by dr.Negru of Aloha, OR. On July 27 2006, the same day when Mr. Băsescu, the President of Romania did a visit in Washington DC and the ex-Prime Minister Mr.Tăriceanu fell from his motorcycle. The surgery went wrong and i had to quit the job. I couldn't eat solid food for several month.
Later i found out that in fact the pain to that tooth was due to an insufficiency of vitamin C and probably a periodontitis. No surgery necessary. In fact i would not be fair if i wouldn't tell Dr. Boyd tried to convince me not to do it.
But what happened in between is more interesting. Job was officially part time. But due to the very busy nature of the place and the fact that they couldn't keep nobody to work there for long time because of being so busy and hard to run all day from one pump to another, it became full time and even over time.
The only guy who was working there for a long time before and after me was Charlie. Charlie the communist with the crooked teeth. He said he was communist but had no idea of what that was. He said he was an alcoholic, he would get pissed if he didn't have his beers every day.
After job i started chatting with other Romanians over the internet out of being so homesick and lonely. Started drinking Cuba Libre in top of antidepressants and started a blog which i later abandoned.
I caught a few days with temperatures over 100 degrees. At 46 and out of shape, i thought i was going to die but i didn't.
Each pump had a printer and most of the customers were asking for a receipt. But some times the printers were jamming or running out of paper and we had to run inside to get receipts from the cashiers. And had to stay in line with the other customers, that had priority. And one day, shy at first then more bold i started fixing the printers and refilling them with paper. Soon i became unofficially the guy who did that on my shift. It was like a promotion and it gave me an ascendance over the younger guys.
They were a couple of black guys, can't remember their names now. When i was coming to my shift, around 11 AM, i was almost every time finding them with half of the printers not working and with their tongs out from running inside to get receipts. So i was fixing those first thing.
One day i decided i should try and make them fix those for themselves. So i showed them how to do it when nobody was around so many times until they got probably annoyed and started doing it themselves. But only when i was there.
But when i was coming at my shift, again they were broken.
One day one of them got fired for no big reason.
I never realized why the thing with printers was happening. But lately when i realized the impossibility of me getting a job according to my experience and qualifications, i think i started to understand.
Some categories of people are not allowed around here to do certain "more qualified" types of works which are reserved for insiders.
Resonance
It is very hard to understand from the article in Wikipedia. Let's put it simple. Let's say we have a guitar with 6 chords. Each chord has a different thickness. If it is normally tuned you can pinch one chord and make it vibrate and all of the others will stay pretty much put. You will hear only the chord that you pinched until the vibration get dampened by the friction with surrounding air.
But if you intentionally put on the same guitar or even on two different ones two chords of the same thickness and tune them to make the same sound, if you will pinch one chord pretty soon the other will start vibrate and make the same sound. It will absorb half of the energy of the first chord and they both will vibrate until will spend all the initial energy and die. We can say they resonate at a resonance frequency and that is the frequency you tuned them to.
In buildings. Especially in those made of panels. Each panel has its own resonance frequency and more than one harmonics. Most of them will be the same size but will not have the same frequency as are assembled differently depending on the contact with the frame. If you can find a way to transfer some vibration to the walls from a source at resonance, you can make them vibrate. In a building made of panels you will have practically all kind of resonances at a multitude of frequencies.
If you use a blower in the parking lot or a noisy car or a plane passes by, some of the panels will vibrate in resonance with the instant frequency of the blower that changes constantly sweeping a range of frequencies.
A multitude of scenarios can happen. Usually dust falls from the walls. Air gets pumped inside and outside the walls bringing very unpleasant odors, bacteria and fungus from the walls inside and nutrients from the normal dust inside back in the walls.
More complicated things can be imagined as some walls in the building will have different substances in it, like formaldehyde, smoke from neighbors, etc. Depending on the frequency, only some walls will vibrate and fill the apartment with a certain thing, on demand. Even the bottles under the sink with things like chlorine, 409, etc. Once i found them all with their cap loose.
Every internal organ of one's body must have a resonance, and it can be different from one person to another as organ sizes match the person's size.
Yesterday across the street somebody used a creosote sweeping log to clean the chimney. For about 4 hours the place was filled with creosote smoke and i felt terrible. Shortness of breath, knot in my throat, dizziness for several hours and ruining the rest of my day. I think some of that smoke turned into dust and falls from the walls while vibrating.
The noise itself can be annoying in a residential area.
Last night around 11 i went to bed. I was tired and slightly buzzed as i had a glass of cheap red wine not long before. I was about to fall asleep when my wife came and opened the bedroom's window together with the balcony door.
I liked the fresh air coming from outside. I didn't like i was waking back up. Then several cars passed by. One of them made an unusual high pitch loud sound for about 30 seconds. Probably a defective transmission or a rattle. The room got filled with some very fine dust. Smelled like wood dust. I closed the window. Then i started feeling very ill. Arrhythmia when laying down. Probably systemic allergy.
I went back up and started pacing around. Every time i tried to go back to sleep i had shortness of breath and arrhythmia. I turned on the computer. Spent a couple of hours until i felt good enough to go back to sleep. Everything came back to "normal".
Right now across the street right now are blowing leaves with power blowers. If i open the windows there will be at least 50 dB flooding the apartment. But even with the doors closed my ears almost hurt although i don't hear much.
This to me is happening for at least a decade. Hours lost almost every day to it. Time ruined. Life ruined.
Today. For a few hours there will be leaves blowing in the neighborhood. Then at night creosote smoke. Slammed doors from the neighbors all day. A new week is starting.
My plan for today included applying for some jobs. Now i write in the blog.
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Aquarelle
by Ion Minulescu - 1920
In the city where it always rains three times in seven days
All the citizens on sideways,
Walk by two while holding hands,
In the city where it always rains three times in seven days,
Covered under old umbrellas
Sighing, bending,
Wet from raining,
All the citizens on sideways
Look like automated puppets taken out of the storefronts.
In the city where it always rains three times in seven days
You can only hear on sideways
Steps of those who walk by two,
Counting
In their mind
The falling
Of the raindrops from umbrellas,
From the gutters,
And from sky
With the power of a cry
Giver of a life that's latent,
Useless,
Monotone
And absent.
In the city where it always rains three times in seven days
An old man and an old woman -
Looking like two broken toys -
Walk on sideway hand in hand...
In the city where it always rains three times in seven days
All the citizens on sideways,
Walk by two while holding hands,
In the city where it always rains three times in seven days,
Covered under old umbrellas
Sighing, bending,
Wet from raining,
All the citizens on sideways
Look like automated puppets taken out of the storefronts.
In the city where it always rains three times in seven days
You can only hear on sideways
Steps of those who walk by two,
Counting
In their mind
The falling
Of the raindrops from umbrellas,
From the gutters,
And from sky
With the power of a cry
Giver of a life that's latent,
Useless,
Monotone
And absent.
In the city where it always rains three times in seven days
An old man and an old woman -
Looking like two broken toys -
Walk on sideway hand in hand...
Friday, December 7, 2012
Guess Who's Buzzing Today
At 4:57 PM today i came from a short walk. My neighbor at Nr.9 came down the stairs with a pair of barking dogs when i wanted to climb so i backed down. I went to the car and then to the mailbox. Exactly when i reached the car, a plane flew just above the building. I mean, not 1500 feet as the legal limit, not 500 feet, not even 300 feet but merely ... what? 150 feet maybe? It could have touched the building at Nr.45 across the alley. Almost no noise at all which means the pilot cut the engines down to idle. Really dangerous at that altitude in a residential area full of trees. It was also pretty foggy. I waited patiently two hours (actually more than two, as i forgot and then remember because of the OHSU helicopter flying more recently and really shaking the building, vibrating the walls' panels and pumping outside the dust from the walls and the mineral fiber in the attick, like every time where you have an enclosed volume within elastic walls, when those walls vibrate, the air inside is getting slowly pumped outside and the other way around.) so i can look at the history of flights on Web Track. I was curious to see what airline that was. Look for yourself and wonder. Beware that data on the site is slightly erroneous as it shows the plane flying some 900 feet SE of the building and 2700 above sea level which would be 2000 above the ground, well within legal limits. I mean i couldn't have seen it from outside near the west side of the building if it was flying as it says there, right? (It is not well shown here but the building i live in is oriented NS. That site http://webtrak.bksv.com/pdx worked right for me since i first started looking until a few month ago. Map is clickable.
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| Screenshot, webrak, Mountain Park, OR, Sat 12 Jan 2013 04:38:40 PM PST |
Fall on Tualatin River
Clickable!
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| Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, Sherwood, OR, 2012-11-15 |
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| Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, Sherwood, OR, 2012-11-15 |
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| Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, Sherwood, OR, 2012-11-15 |
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| Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, Sherwood, OR, 2012-11-15 |
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| Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, Sherwood, OR, 2012-11-15 |
JR Ewing and Ceauşescu
For many years it was the only thing we were waiting to see on TVs in Romania. Saturday, at 8 or 9 PM. I think it was for a decade or so. Didn't have color. I mean there was no broadcast for color TV until 1983 and receivers until much later
Pamela and Sue Ellen were the prototypes for any male's subconscious dream. Bobby, the gentleman and JR, the tough guy. And the drunk. Larry Hagman, may God forgive him might have given a dreamy sense to many of my conationals' pre-revolutionary cirrhosises.
And yes, it is true. Dreams sometimes can be stronger than reality as a sexy woman can be more attractive than a real beautiful one. (I'm seeing all the time sexy women and poses on the internet and on TV that are sexier than sex itself.)
Why it was allowed? Now i hear Ceauşescu was a fan. He was projecting the episodes obsessively in a private cinema. But now we all also know how much a weak mind can be influenced by his own advisers and trusted entourage.
But not only that. Every singer and type of movie was imitated by different officially professional artists in Romania, and this for not to say mocked.
If it might have contributed to the demise of the communist regime in there? I'd say definitely yes. If it was not the main cause, it was a very important factor. What we knew of the west behind the iron curtain? Anything we saw on TV. But with a twist. Since most of the characters in the soap were rich, we didn't quite realize that it could not have been us and we were all fantasizing. The result can be seen even today as every man with a college degree in Romania, a bit of understanding of English when liberally drinking thinks himself rich.
But that's not all. I have a shred of suspicion that JR's face is a geometrical average between Jimmy Carter's and Bill Clinton's. I see lately less and less conspiracy theories about subliminal messages and stuff. Don't let them die because those theories might be our only hope. If we have not already succumbed to the economic crisis and dare not think any more.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
AGFA. CCD vs CMOS
My compact camera just broke. I say just broke but in reality it
slowly died for a few years now. I dropped it too many times, it was all
bumped at edges and the lens lid wouldn't close anymore except if i
hit it strongly. Now it refuses to focus anymore no matter what. Goodbye
Coolpix L18! It was one of the best spent 100 dollars!
I needed badly a small camera to fit in my pocket and still make quality pictures when i couldn't take the big DSLR with me (Sony DSLR300 that by the way has a 2/3 CCD sensor).
And started looking around. And a brand popped on the screen. An old aquiantance. In the 70s at the Children's Club in Câmpulung Suceava we used to have 16 mm film cameras that where using the AGFA brand films. They were also the magnetic tapes for recorders. And i looked in the wikipedia and saw that there is still such a brand, as a holding company, still in Germany. Most of the cameras in US today are Japanese. Never saw a compact camera brand from Germany until now.
So i ordered at Amazon an AGFAPHOTO Digital PRECISA 1430 for 75 bucks. At AGFA site it is 59,95 €. THEN i downloaded the manual and looked at the specs.
Many of the spec are smilar or slightly below competition at that price.
But a few things caught my eyes. 7 elements lens. Live Histogram. CCD sensor. Artificial Intelligence Metering (wow, what can that be ? LOL).
I keep saying for years now that CCD sensor always seemed better to me. Since there is not any on pixels processing, the signal is sent outside the sensor area for processing, the signal capturing area of the pixel is bigger than at CMOS because it's not used for other components but just for light capturing. Don't know exactly but probably twice bigger. So it captures more light and there is less noise in the output signal. Probably the equivalent CMOS sensors would be twice bigger as area. According to this theory a good CCD 2/3 sensor could give better quality pictures than a full frame CMOS but that's my opinion of course. On CCD there is also more signal uniformity because of not processing each pixel on its own different components. There are more arguments here, you can read them in the site framed at the bottom. Until i get it, without even having it on my hand i dare recommend this to all. I don't know yet if they could improve color depth as well on any compact but i will come back with that.
For my Romanian friends, i see there it is not available yet in 14 MP but there is in 12. Who needs those megapixels anyway?
"In a CCD sensor, every pixel's charge is transferred through a very limited number of output nodes (often just one) to be converted to voltage, buffered, and sent off-chip as an analog signal. All of the pixel can be devoted to light capture, and the output's uniformity (a key factor in image quality) is high. In a CMOS sensor, each pixel has its own charge-to-voltage conversion, and the sensor often also includes amplifiers, noise-correction, and digitization circuits, so that the chip outputs digital bits. These other functions increase the design complexity and reduce the area available for light capture."
Got it today 10-05. QED or this is why they say 1 picture=1000 words.
Directly
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OXKFe7QkBNk/UL_nZjCYnwI/AAAAAAAABOM/YY2oSIkBJHs/s1600/APDC0035.JPG
I needed badly a small camera to fit in my pocket and still make quality pictures when i couldn't take the big DSLR with me (Sony DSLR300 that by the way has a 2/3 CCD sensor).
And started looking around. And a brand popped on the screen. An old aquiantance. In the 70s at the Children's Club in Câmpulung Suceava we used to have 16 mm film cameras that where using the AGFA brand films. They were also the magnetic tapes for recorders. And i looked in the wikipedia and saw that there is still such a brand, as a holding company, still in Germany. Most of the cameras in US today are Japanese. Never saw a compact camera brand from Germany until now.
So i ordered at Amazon an AGFAPHOTO Digital PRECISA 1430 for 75 bucks. At AGFA site it is 59,95 €. THEN i downloaded the manual and looked at the specs.
Many of the spec are smilar or slightly below competition at that price.
But a few things caught my eyes. 7 elements lens. Live Histogram. CCD sensor. Artificial Intelligence Metering (wow, what can that be ? LOL).
I keep saying for years now that CCD sensor always seemed better to me. Since there is not any on pixels processing, the signal is sent outside the sensor area for processing, the signal capturing area of the pixel is bigger than at CMOS because it's not used for other components but just for light capturing. Don't know exactly but probably twice bigger. So it captures more light and there is less noise in the output signal. Probably the equivalent CMOS sensors would be twice bigger as area. According to this theory a good CCD 2/3 sensor could give better quality pictures than a full frame CMOS but that's my opinion of course. On CCD there is also more signal uniformity because of not processing each pixel on its own different components. There are more arguments here, you can read them in the site framed at the bottom. Until i get it, without even having it on my hand i dare recommend this to all. I don't know yet if they could improve color depth as well on any compact but i will come back with that.
For my Romanian friends, i see there it is not available yet in 14 MP but there is in 12. Who needs those megapixels anyway?
"In a CCD sensor, every pixel's charge is transferred through a very limited number of output nodes (often just one) to be converted to voltage, buffered, and sent off-chip as an analog signal. All of the pixel can be devoted to light capture, and the output's uniformity (a key factor in image quality) is high. In a CMOS sensor, each pixel has its own charge-to-voltage conversion, and the sensor often also includes amplifiers, noise-correction, and digitization circuits, so that the chip outputs digital bits. These other functions increase the design complexity and reduce the area available for light capture."
Got it today 10-05. QED or this is why they say 1 picture=1000 words.
 |
| From kitchen window, Dec.1 2012. clickable! (try middle click) |
Directly
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OXKFe7QkBNk/UL_nZjCYnwI/AAAAAAAABOM/YY2oSIkBJHs/s1600/APDC0035.JPG