Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Happy Pi Day, Einstein’s Birthday and Britannica

First off, Happy Pi Day!  3.14.12   the value of Pi = 3.14.

Secondly, as near as anyone can tell today maybe Albert Einstein’s Birthday, because he might have been born on 3.14.1879. 

Did anybody hear about how the Encyclopedia Britannica is going to stop being available in the printed form?

I have a set of these fine books from the early 1990’s.  My wife is constantly on me to throw them out and I staunchly refuse.  I keep saying my children can throw them out when I am dead and gone.  I grew up with using partial used sets of two different series of encyclopedias.  We lived in the country and a trip to the library was over twenty miles.  If we went to town it was for more important things than to look something up or waste time in a library.  My folks did the best they could and bought and stocked our family library as well as they could.

Whether my boys ever actually use the encyclopedias or not, we will have the books for their use and reference in case they need them.  I take pride in just owning a set of these fine books, which is the relative collection of all of man’s knowledge up until the time they were printed.  Britannica has been printed for 244 years meaning it is older than the United States of America.

If God forbid, some tragic disaster happened which would interrupt the normal ebb and flow of our current specialized society and in turn through time the lights went out because the power grids went down, where would we be?  In the United States where most cities still rely on coal burning power plants to provide our electrical power at best they maintain a month to a month and a half of coal for the plants to produce power.  Which means if an event happens globally, some disaster, which upsets the natural order of activities for three to four months the lights will go out?

When the lights go out we will have no computers, once the batteries die the laptops will quit, our phones will die and then shit will go downhill fast.  Just like researching for this post, it is generally assumed that Einstein’s birthday is today.  How do we know for sure?  If we didn’t have computers, where would you go look for the information?  If we lost all the computer records, how would we know anything?  This is a problem mankind is creating for itself in the future.  As we stop teaching cursive writing, what happens in a few generations when somebody wants to actually read the original Declaration of Independence?  They will not be able to because it is written in cursive writing!  When there are no real books, no printing presses, no film for cameras, and the lights go out – We will be catapulted into the dark ages.

Those who can create power, to look up the records, recreate the technology from our past that we outgrew, will be those in power.  Those who know about the old ways of doing things will survive and those who don’t will be forced to deal, work or die.

I came from a generation before cell phones, computers, VCR’s, computer games, microwave ovens.  I can exist without any of these items, I know this, because we did.  My remember hearing about how my grandparents would sit around and listen to the radio for news and entertainment, homework and school studies meant books, pencils and sitting at a table actually working at learning something.  I am not so vain and naive to think nothing could ever happen that would destroy things and change things forever.  I have studied history and the countless times change has come to the world threw a single man or groups ambitious designs and power lusting to control the masses of the world.  Or the times that nature or mother Earth has shivered and coughed and destroyed continents as if mankind were just a flea on a dog.

I love my kindle and the fact that the books I have written are E-books and self-published.  I will never abandon my real books, albeit my library is already diminishing from what it would have been just over the past few years.  The trade off is I carry most of my library with me all the time now, and I read two to three times as much as I used to, using the better technology to its maximum potential.  I will never get rid of my set of Encyclopedia Britannica, EVER!  If and when I get a room dedicated to being my office/study and get to remain home and write full time those encyclopedias will join my collection of books on the book cases which will line the walls of the room.

In order to help me achieve this or just out of curiosity of what I might have written so far besides this collection of blog posts, please check out the following.

Whisper   a guy and a girl, a ship that accidentally travels through time, it’s a love story, so I have been told.






No Rules Of Engagement     NOT A YA BOOK!






Both books available for 99 cents.  Those of you from Europe checking out my blog be the first to purchase a book on Amazon DE, FR, ES, or IT, and leave me comment on this blog as to who you are and where you are from and I will dedicate a blog post to your honor.  Please only buy it if you intend to read it.  They are both Science Fiction and both have to do with time travel.

I am so pleased I figured out something to write a post about, I was so afraid instead of Happy Pi Day it was going to be Apology to Nicholas Sparks Day, but NOT!!!!


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