S. Evan Townsend's Blog, page 31

Counting Four Items

The other day I was counting the pills I take every morning to make sure I hadn't forgotten any. I take sixteen, including the non-prescription supplements (I know, that's a lot). So I put them in four piles of four. Why? Because four is the highest number I can count without counting one, two, three, four, five... In other words, I can look at four or less items, and know how many they are. I can't do that with five or more. Even if it's five. My brain won't look at it and say "four plus one."

I once, many years ago, said this to a co-worker and she looked at me as if I were crazy. So I never again brought it up,  until now. See how much I trust you people!

Maybe other people can count more. I don't know. Can you?

I've hidden my shame for over thirty-five years, now. Can you count more than four without counting? Let me know in the comments below.

My First Car

My first car was a candy apple red 1965 Ford Mustang. It was plastic. But it was, I could tell even at my young age, high quality plastic. It might have looked a lot like the one in the picture.

I've had a lot of cars such as it over the years. Lots of Hot Wheels. I had a blue Jeep pickup that I still have. I don't know what happened to the white horse trailer or the horses that came with it.

I also built a lot of cars out of Legos. S. Evan Townsend original designs. I tended to put jet engines (red Legos) on them.
The Blue Jeep Pickup
But toys were my first introduction to cars. And, if you've read this blog, you know I like cars. I totally understand why Jay Leno owns so many cars (286 according to Google). There are so many cool cars with different personalities and different capabilities. If I were rich enougj, I would have 286 cars, probably.

At one time I owned seven cars (long story). Now I own only two. And of those seven cars, only four were cool, the rest were my son's cars and I didn't buy them "cool" cars.

How do you feel about cars? Did you have any cool toy cars as a kid? Let me know in the comments below.

Confirmation

The EquationI saw somewhere that CuriosityStream had a sale going, a full year for only $12. I thought that was a bargain so I signed up. I've watched three things, so far. One on Venus where I'm debating having a scene in my current work in progress, one on quantum mechanics, and one on the Cassini probe called Cassini, the Grand Finale. That show talked about Saturn's moon, Enceladus which has cryovolcanoes. They mentioned how fast the material (water, mostly) is ejected from the moon. It leaves the volcanoes at 1,200 mph. And that  number sounded familiar.

A little over six years ago, I blogged about Io's volcanoes and how fast the material that comes out of them is exiting the volcanoes.

Io is one of the moons of Jupiter.

Using the gravity of Io and how high the plumes go, I calculated (using the equation above) that the material must exit the volcanoes at 1,075 meters per second (or 1.075 km/s) to reach the altitude they do (as high as 200 miles over the surface of the moon). And, according to Wikipedia, the correct figure is 1 km/s. Or 2,236 miles per hour. That's pretty fast. Faster even than Enceladus.

But what I was glad about, what that my calculations six years ago were mostly confirmed. The source Wikipedia used might have rounded down to one significant figure and if I do that, I get the same answer (1 km/s).

Flag Day

It's Flag Day in the U.S. Not a well-known holiday, but it is an excuse to use my flag picture:

The Eyes Have It.

LilyEyes amaze me.

For example, my son's cat's eyes. Her name is Lily and sometimes I look at her eyes and just marvel what an amazing creation eyes are. The cornea is the most stunning part. It's living tissue yet it's completely transparent. (Well, except in my case because I'm developing cataracts.) Lily will turn her head and I can see through her cornea. I wish I had a picture of that.

And I recently visited my son and his wife. But I was really there to see my grandson. And he has amazing blue eyes. They remind me of the eyes I had when I was younger, before the blue started to fade. (He also has red hair, like his grandfather, so he's my favorite grandchild.)(He's my only grandchild, so
Beautiful Eyesfar).

Or when I meet a person I'll look into their eyes and that seems to make them more real and human to me. They say eyes are the window to the soul. But I think you can tell a lot from people's eyes. They might be bright and happy or sad. Or dead-looking like a doll's eyes. I have seen that, but not often. But the eyes are one of the first things I notice about a person.

According to this website, an eye can transmit 100 million bits of information a second.  That's about as fast as my fiber optic internet connection. But eyes are organic, not electronic. So I think that's pretty amazing.

As I said, eyes amaze me. How do you feel about eyes? Let me know in the comments below.

Ford v Ferrari

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I am about to make a proclamation: Ford v Ferrari is the second best movie about car racing ever (the best is, of course, 1966's Grand Prix).

Ford v Ferrari puts you in the driver's seat of powerful, fast, and ultimately deadly cars. I regret now not seeing it in the theater because I'm sure on the large screen with a movie theater's sound it would have blown me away. On my television screen with my 5.1 surround sound, it blew me away.

I don't know how historically accurate the film is. Part of the story I already knew about how Ford wanted to beat Ferrari at the 24 hour race at Le Mans in France. They didn't do it the first time in 1965, but they did in 1966. The car they used was the Ford GT40 (the modern Ford GT is a tribute to that car).

The drama in the movie comes from trying to build a car to win at Le Mans and the corporate interference of FoMoCo. The last half hour of the film is pretty much the 1966 race at Le Mans. Somehow with sound and visuals, the director puts you in the car feeling all the tension, noise, speed, danger, and exhilaration of racing.

My only beef with the film is that there are lots of scenes of feet on car pedals (brake, gas, clutch) during shifts but never is there a heel and toe downshift (see the first moments of Grand Prix to know what that is) even during the downshifts.

And the movie isn't only about cars, It's about the personalities of Carroll Shelby and driver Ken Miles (played to perfection by Christian Bale) and how they faced the risk-adverse corporate types at Ford.

And even today you can buy a Mustang Shelby Cobra GT500 from Ford in honor of Carroll Shelby.

I rarely give a movie five stars on Netflix. I did this one.

Note: I'm reviewing this films so late because Netflix didn't send it to me for at least 12 weeks after it came out on Blu-Ray even though it was at the top of my queue the entire time. I watched it last night.

People!

Today I went to Starbucks for coffee. Unlike before the COVID-19 lock down, I didn't stay long. But I did spend a few moments chatting with the employees. And I'm amazed and how much difference that has made in my overall mood.

Now I'm an introvert. A strong introvert. So you'd think I'd take the lock down in stride. But, no, I got stressed and depressed and had little desire to read. I did manage to write (including the first draft of a short novel). My wife would go through the drive-through to get our coffee and I wouldn't go with her because I was afraid of being exposed to COVID-19.

But now I'm less afraid and our local Starbucks had gone to a "grab and go" format where you can go in, order your drink, and leave. So this gives me a chance to interact with other people. And I'm amazed how that's improved my mood. The other day the manager and I were trading Star Wars jokes while I was waiting for my coffee (What is the internal temperature of a Tauntaun? Luke warm!).

So, it goes to show that human interaction is necessary and good, even for introverts such as me.

Have you had problems with your mood during the lock down? Has interacting with people helped? Let me know in the comments.

FTL

Einstein tells us we can't go faster than the speed of light which is 299,792,458 meters per second in SI units. That's over 670 million miles per hour.

We can't even, with foreseeable technology, go close to the speed of light. To propel a spacecraft the size of a small airliner at only one-tenth the speed of light requires as much energy as the US now produces in more than a hundred years. To go two-tenths the speed of light, would require 400 years of energy production. To go four-tenths the speed of light, would require 1,600 years of energy production. Each time you double the speed you quadruple the energy requirement. As you approach the speed of light, the energy required approaches infinity.
In Newtonian physics, this is because kinetic energy increases as the square of the velocity per this formula:

And at one-tenth the speed of light, it would require 44 years (about) to reach the nearest star (although for people on the ship would the time would 43.78 years due to time dilation caused by relativity). That is the Alpha Centauri star system. And there's no reason to think there are inhabitable planets in that star system nor alien life.
This is a conundrum for science fiction writers such as myself. In order to have our heroes and heroines have adventures on other planets and in other star systems, we need faster than light (FTL) travel.
In my novel Rock Killer , there is no FTL and the entire novel takes place in our solar system.
In my novel Forces , the humans don't have FTL but the aliens (some of which are evil) do.
But in my Treasures of Space series ( Treasure of the Black Hole , Treasure of the Pirate Planet , and Treasure of the Rogue Moon ), there is FTL travel. So we meet lots of alien species, go to lots of planets, and have a lot of fun. I stole "hyperspace" from other authors (and Star Wars). But coming up with an original FTL system is hard. In Forces, the aliens move interdimensionally and can travel between star systems in a moment. 
So science fiction writers need FTL. Or they will be pretty much stuck in the solar system.
Larry Niven in his Known Space series of books and stories, had humans using slower than light bussard ram jets to colonize space. But it took a loooong time. (Then they were sold the secret to the "hypercore" by an alien species.) 
But FTL is a mainstay of science fiction. And we're going to have to deal with that until and unless someone invents an FTL drive. Either that or you're stuck in the solar system or taking a long long time to get anywhere.

Curvy Roads

I like curvy roads. As long as they aren't too curvy. Just curvy enough to present a challenge to drive them fast, not so tight of curves you have to take them at 25 mph.

Where I live there aren't a lot of curvy roads. The land is pretty flat so the roads tend to be straight. Now straight roads have their uses (speed runs) and it was one such road where I got my Corvette up to 165 mph and my Audi up to 130 mph.  But curves are a challenge; a fun challenge.

Back when I drove on the racetrack, it was curvy and it was always a challenge to take the fastest path, or "line," through each corner. On public roads you can't do that unless you have clear sight lines and can see down the road because you don't want to hit an oncoming car head on as you drift into their lane.

So it's, in a way, even more challenging on public roads. There's a place in western Montana where Interstate 90 gets curvy and it is fun to drive. And the speed limit was 75 last I drove it. It might be 80 now. Too bad I don't have an excuse to go to Montana.

It takes knowing your car to drive a curvy road. You need to know its limits so you don't exceed them. And if you're not sure, go slower then speed up. Approach the limit from the bottom. I learned that on the race track.

Curves are so much more fun than straights (unless you're doing triple digits) and I love driving them. How do you feel about curvy roads? Enjoy them or hate them. Let me know in the comments below.

I Can't Stand 55

As of today I've been in lock down for 55 days. That's almost two months. I haven't been anywhere other than my house and in my car. Last Saturday I did put gas in my car. That's the only time I've been outside the house or the car for 55 days.

I'm sleeping a lot lately. I'm wondering if it's depression/boredom. If I don't sleep 12 hours, I sleep for six. That might be anxiety (although I'm not as worried about dying as I was at the beginning of this).

I did manage to write the first draft of a short novel and start the first draft of a second one. So I have been productive. I've also done freelance work.

Yes, I'm a homebody and an introvert. But I would love to go to a restaurant or sit in Starbucks and people watch. Or drive to Spokane and have Korean food. And I'm a bit of a rebel. When I'm told I can't do something, that makes me want to do it more.

I live in Washington State and our governor is taking his own sweet time letting things open up. He has a four-stage plan but says stage one will last "at least" three weeks.

I also desperately need a haircut.

How are you handling the lock down? Or has your state opened up? Let me know in the comments.