Daily Archives: January 8, 2009

… So I Rewired It …

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Part of every trip home involves attacking the “to-do” list of things my mom can’t take care of by herself. She has several wonderful neighbors who do some more immediate things like plow and shovel her out when it snows (she mows their lawn in nicer weather on her riding mower), but other tasks can wait until one of the children visit. Wrangling the artificial tree from and back to the basement, lugging things to the attic, etc. are normal November/December/January chores.

But there were three bigger jobs. One neighbor has a very large generator that was put to use during the recent ice storm; our street only lost power briefly, but the houses behind us were on the wrong side of a fallen tree and were without power, and he supplied them with enough to run the heat and other basics. To facilitate hookup for the next power outage, he decided to shuffle some breakers in our house so he could backfeed through some outlets in the garage. So I helped a little with that.

The second job was to extend the recently-installed sump pump drain further away from the house; the original placement was on the high-elevation front side of the house, and only about 5′ away. The ground had become saturated and all of the water being dumped was just filtering back in to the basement. So I got to go down to the HO E DEPOT (the “M” was being replaced) and get some PVC pipe and run the drain line off to the side of the house, about 20′ away, and an area that will drain down the hill. There was snow on the ground, so I couldn’t do a proper job and bury the pipe, a task that will have to wait until better weather.

The last job was repairing the ancient pinball machine in the basement game room. It was a relic when we got it, about 35 years ago — relays and gears and a mechanical score display, which had gone out of vogue when digital displays and electronics came out. It hadn’t been looked at since my dad died, some 12 years ago, but hadn’t seen much use for a few years after that, until my nieces got old enough to want to play. By that time my mom had re-done some flooring upstairs and installed the old carpet in the game room, and it was some time later that we noticed that the key that opens the machine was missing, and was probably sitting on the floor, under the carpet and all of the junk laying on top. So, no access to the guts of the machine, until my mom had someone in to drill out the lock this past fall.
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Just Checking

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Possible Abnormality In Fundamental Building Block Of Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity

Physicists at Indiana University have developed a promising new way to identify a possible abnormality in a fundamental building block of Einstein’s theory of relativity known as “Lorentz invariance.” If confirmed, the abnormality would disprove the basic tenet that the laws of physics remain the same for any two objects traveling at a constant speed or rotated relative to one another.
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The new violations change the gravitational properties of objects depending on their motion and composition. Objects on the Earth are always moving differently in different seasons because the Earth revolves around the Sun, so apples could fall faster in some seasons than others. Also, different objects like apples and oranges may fall differently.

I find it amusing that there are a bunch of relativity cranks who claim that relativity is treated as dogma. The reality is that it isn’t all that hard to find scientists devising tests of relativity of various sorts, whether it’s testing the predictions of GR or checking for anomalies such as this.

Of course, thus far whenever someone has devised a clever test like this, we’ve found that relativity is correct.