It has been two years since I have posted and will endeavor to post more frequently. It has been two months since Snowball passed from this world, on a quiet Saturday morning. While his passing was untimely and unexpected, he will be remembered as one of my most favorite pets. He could be a royal pain in the butt and his fur was often less than clean, but he cleaned up well and he consistently knew when I returned home and would wait at the door for me.

Snowball is usually the first person to greet me every evening when I get home. When my keys enter the lock, he runs to the door and when the door opens, he reaches up to me, like a small child, to be picked up and held.

When Snowball was but a 4-week-old kitten, he raced into our house like a little white lightning bolt and hid beneath the obligatory stereo cabinet of doom and destruction. All I saw when I opened the door to go to work was this white flash. I closed the door, walked over, knelt down and peered beneath the stereo cabinet. These two large yellow eyes were staring back at me. Amused, I stood, walked back to the door, and told my wife, standing in the kitchen, "Honey, we have a new cat." and went off to work.

When I got home that night, my wife had the cutest little white furball in the palm of her hand. She had run off to the store and bought kitten formula and a bottle. His little ears were still closed. Two days later he was listless and not eating. We ran him to the vet's office. the vet told us he had a respitory infection, likely due to the lack of mother's milk, and would be dead within the next 24 hours. He said we could try oral and nasal antibiotics and antibiotic eye drops but likely it was a waste of time. We took the antibiotics and made a pact, my wife and I, to do whatever we could to keep this little guy alive. We both had executive-level jobs and work was just going to have deal with us bringing in this little ball of fur. Every hour of the day and night we had to give him drops in his ears, eyes and nose and give him oral antibiotics every 4 hours. We got two slings, one for my wife and one for me, as he couldn't regulate his own body temperature and we had to keep him warm. We slept with a heating pad between us for him to sleep on. We had two alarm clocks set to make sure he got his meds on time. There were some complaints from some folks at work about bringing an animal into the office that were quickly quenched when the complainers were told by other employees about the Herculian effort we were giving to keep this little guy alive. For 8 weeks we kept up this effort. Our reward for this is coming home to a creature who always comes for affection, for comfort, for warmth and for companionship.

Perhaps I am anthropomorphizing a bit by giving a cat these human attributes, but Snowball demonstrates more humanity than many people I see on the street, walking near my office or home. While I cannot attribute love to him as I do not believe cats (or any other non-sentient being) can give or receive love, he does seem compassionate, as I, too, have compassion for him. And yet, perhaps it is in the nature of cats (and dogs, too) to be sensitive to the emotions of humans around them and do what is instinctual when presented with certain emotive responses. I am fairly certain Snowball knows it is me when I come home. He does not exhibit the reaching-up to my wife when she comes home. When my wife is at home by herself, the cats will come to her call and will sleep on her lap if permitted or next to her or near her when her lap is off limits, but they do not pester her or talk to her when I am not home. When I am home, the cats seem to become more active, more animated and much, MUCH more talkative - like children when Daddy comes home.

Rokenbok Rokenbok is an advanced, radio-controlled environment of building, sharing and learning. While not quite particle physics or astronavigation, it is both fun and flexible. This latest construct occurred in my lesser stairwell. The bottom of the stained-glass window (another of my hobbies) is about 9 feet. The top of the window is at 12 feet. The ceiling is at 14 feet. The tallest structure is both the base structure as well as an elevator shaft for the radio-controlled elevator. The elevator and roadway allows radio-controlled vehicles to get from downstairs to upstairs and vice versa. The structure between the elevator shaft and the opposite wall is merely seismic support as I live in earthquake country. There are more pictures to come, as this is only the beginning of this construction effort.

Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation

In 1936 van Stockum solved the Einstein equations for the gravitational field of a rapidly rotating cylinder of infinite length. It is shown that such a field violates causality, in the sense that it allows a closed timelike line to connect any two events in spacetime. This suggests that a finite rotating cylinder would also act as a time machine.

A Tipler Cylinder is a theoretical method of time travel that could conceivably work within current understanding of physics, construction of the device notwithstanding.

Frank J. Tipler suggested in 1974 that a sufficiently-long cylinder with the mass of several neutron stars could be constructed, and then induced to spin along its longitudinal axis. As the spin approaches the speed of light, the cylinder should create a frame-dragging effect and warp space and time in its locality. A spaceship traveling in the direction of the spin or against it in a certain path will travel through time along a Closed Timelike Curve, similar to effects theoretically caused by Kerr-Newman objects.

Similar devices had been proposed before Tipler's, however, notably by Kornel Lanczos in 1924 and W.J. van Stockum in 1936.

Some physicists argue that since Tipler Cylinders allow Closed Timelike Curves they violate Roger Penrose's Cosmic censorship hypothesis as naked singularities would be visible. Others argue that since causality is not built into Einstein's field equation, these regions may actually be able to exist (see also Godel's Universe).

A limitation of the Tipler Cylinder is that it is only possible to travel to times (and places) in which the cylinder already exists. Thus, one could not travel backwards further than the date that the cylinder was brought "online", nor forward past a date that it was destroyed (assuming such destruction is even possible). This could explain why we've not seen any time travelers yet, but can possibly expect some traffic once a cylinder is running.

Though Tipler's paper originally suggested that the cylinder might have to be of infinite length, recent calculations show that it would still work even if it were "only" a few thousand kilometers long.

Things to do to perceive your place in the universe: Go to a high elevation where the nightly illumination of mankind does not obscure the sky and view the small portion of the galaxy in which we live. Go to Sequoia and King's Canyon National Parks located in California, USA and experience trees older than any western civilization.