Cat Powered Space Flight

 

Hershey is a dear soul, if you were to embrace that creatures besides human beings possess souls. To avoid lurking nit-pick readers out there disclaiming my discussion even before it leaves the launch pad, let me rephrase my homily to, Hershey has a pleasant disposition; then, all of that in order to add my addendum; until she has to travel in a cat carrier to the vet. On such occasions we are gifted with the joy of hearing her protest the entire trip there and back; to the tune of 96 per leg of the trip, and yes I counted. So I checked the mileage and found the Vet clinic is 3.51 miles from our house, or 7.02 miles round trip. Divided by 192 meows, that comes to 27.35 meows a mile. It was noted that no amount of assurances dissuaded poor little Hershey from that tempo. She was upset with our taking control, and her auto-pilot-mewer was letting us know about it. It was then that it dawned on me. Such an incessancy of noise could be used for the forces of good rather than just tolerated as evil upon my ears. How about using a cat for inter-planetary space travel?

  It’s been discussed in scientific circles that light and sound waves behave pretty much the same in space. In our earthly atmosphere the two main differences between sound waves and light waves is in velocity. Sound waves travel through air at the speed of approximately 1,100 feet per second; light waves travel through air and empty space at a speed of approximately 186,000 miles per second, so yeah, light is faster. The second difference is that sound is composed of longitudinal waves (alternate compressions and expansions of matter) while light is composed of transverse waves in an electromagnetic field. Although both are forms of wave motion, sound requires a solid, liquid, or gaseous medium; meaning for this discussion space is a vacuum, and since sound needs a medium to propagate, ( air, water, something material) it couldn’t be used in space as we know sound; so let me do a slight of hand and accept what we call sound is electromagnetic waves so we can return to the notion that in space, they’d behave pretty much like light.

  Just asking ‘what is light energy’ opens up to a flood of other questions with trying to narrow down the context of the question. In photometry, luminous energy is the perceived energy of light. It can also be defined as the electromagnetic radiation of visible light. Since light itself is energy, another definition is relevant: light is nature’s way of transferring energy through space. Light exerts a physical pressure on objects in its path. Just as the electromagnetic energy of a cat’s meow. This is explained by the particle nature in which photons strike and transfer their momentum. electromagnetic pressure is equal to the power of the light beam divided by the speed of light. The effect of light pressure is negligible for everyday objects. For example, you can lift a coin with laser pointer, but it would take 1 billion of them to do it. But electromagnetic pressure can cause asteroids to spin faster by working on them like wind pushing a windmill. So we can gather up a herd of cats…I know cats don’t travel in herds, but what do you call a large number of cats? Get them all jazzed up in cages on your nifty spacecraft from Walmart, attach microphones taped near the front of the cages and then broadcast their mewing behind your box-top rocket as thrusters into space and presto….Alpha Centauri here we come.

  Pressure makes me think of desperate things. Because I know I’d volunteer Hershey to any experiment along these lines after a short trip to the vet; let the chips fall where they may.

Living Metaphor

Having the wing-span of almost 3 feet, the ivory-billed woodpecker was a beauty that once thrived in the hardwood forest of the Southern U.S. Native Americans believed the bird’s ivory bill had magical powers.  They used it as currency and made it into crowns worn by the great warriors.  Sadly, the species has been thought extinct since 1944, when the last of its kind disappeared.  But a month ago, conservationist announced a great reversal of fortunes; several ivory-bills have recently been spotted in the Arkansas woods.  The metaphor for events unfolding in your own life might be.

Magic you thought was gone forever ~ returns.

Give Me Some Good News

  Often as not, many jobs are obtained by people you had worked for in the past and developed a friendship.  Such was the case with a Lieutenant Colonel I worked for in the Army.  We had been the not-so-enviable few whose task it was to execute a plan we didn’t write; we couldn’t make others follow; but were ultimately the culprits when things went wrong; the short version is referred to as being the whipping boys. 

  Whipping boy is derived from a practice in the 15^th and 16^th century Europe for monarchies because the idea of divine right of kings stated that Kings were appointed by God; implying that no one but the king was worthy to punish the king’s son for mischievous behavior.  Since the king was rarely around to punish his son when necessary, tutors to the young prince found it extremely difficult to enforce rules or learning.  

Contrary to myth, whipping boys were not street urchins rounded up at the local village.  They were generally of high status, and were educated with the prince from birth.  Because the prince and whipping boy grew up together they usually formed a strong emotional bond, especially since the prince usually did not have playmates as other children would have.  The strong bond between the whipping boy and the prince increased the effectiveness of using the whipping boy as a form of punishment for the prince.  The idea being, the prince seeing his friend beaten for his own transgressions would urge the prince to behave better.  But in our case, we were not so lucky; so it was more a camaraderie forged by shared suffering; the type trench warfare develops life long pals.

 So my Colonel friend from the trenches asked if I were interested in fleshing out a training and operations contract helping to train security personnel in a yet-to-be-named-middle-eastern-country; secrecy is paramount in such negotiations. The good part is, contracts of this type are very lucrative for short periods of time.  The down side being they were also volatile and unpredictable.  I was recently told that the undisclosed country just had a coup and that negotiations were back to initial stages.  My friend and I agreed we lost interest in any employment situation where the boss might suddenly be ‘liberated’ from this worldly plane; as is the custom of that region of the world, so goes his assistants and helpers along with him too.  Then he mentioned another contract was coming available, but was in Somalia.  I crunched my eyebrows and  said, “So-malia…geeh, that’s really the wild west, not sure I’d want my bones bleaching on that frontier”  He said, “You know, I was thinking the same thing myself.  I’m glad you said that because now I don’t have to question if I had suddenly lost my nerve, Thanks Al”

Anyway, that’s my tale for the day, besides giving out a bit of humor with my personal good news.

  In Fostoria, Ohio, thieves broke in and carried off a safe in the office of local organization that serves the poor, (Fostoria Bureau of Concern).  Director Susan Simpkins said that not only was the safe empty but the bureau had decided to junk it awhile back and was looking for someone to haul it away.