Of Wise Men, Gold and Googols

I have way too much useless information in my head, here being but two examples.

1. Imagine a box 51 feet tall, 51 feet wide and 51 feet deep...all of the gold ever mined thoughout history would fit into that box. Now imagine that the Three Wise Men had invested one dollar at 6% interest, and one of their heirs is now going to cash out the proceeds of the investment. (I know, I know there were no dollars then, but bear with me.) At $600 per ounce, how much of that gold could they buy?

The size of the piece of gold, if shaped into a sphere, with the sphere centered on the sun, would extend to the orbit of Pluto. If you were to put the earth on that sphere, its size would be comparable to the size of a house on the earth's surface.

This is mind-boggling, and when I first heard this story many years ago, I was skeptical. Then I did the math. It's true.

2. A googol is a number, Specifically, it is 10 raised to the 100th power. To write out that number, you would write a "1" followed by 100 zeros. A googolplex is 10 to the googol power. To write that number out, you would write a "1" followed by a googol of zeros.

Suppose you wanted to write out that googolplex. How big a piece of paper would you need?

The paper needed to write the number would not fit into the known universe.

Things like this will give you a headache if you think about them long enough, so just move on to another blog now...

The Day I Lost Respect For Authority

I was the first kid in my family to go to kindergarten. The first six kids went directly to the Catholic school for first grade, but I was five years old when someone decided that kids should start school at 5 years old instead of 6, so off I went to the public school.

All went well in kindergarten. To this day, I think I was the teacher's pet. I was the only kid who knew that a pound of coal weighs the same as a pound of feathers, and I was also the only kid to realize that Mrs. Friedt had a first name.

But that was kindergarten. Off I went again, this time to the Immaculate Conception School, where I served an eight year sentence. Well, the first four years were okay...I started out as a straight-A student, and when Father Bishop came in to read report cards, I was never worried about being embarrassed by my grades. But then came the fifth grade.

Sister Mary Karen was the teacher. We were in science class when one of the kids asked why it was warmer in the summer than in the winter. Sister Mary Karen explained that it was because the earth is closer to the sun in the summer than in the winter.

I knew better.

I raised my hand, and when she called on me, I explained that the sun is actually closer to the earth in the winter (in the northern hemisphere) than in summer, and that it was the tilt of the earth's axis that gives us more direct sunlight in the summer. She looked at me and said -- in so many words -- you are full of bullshit.

So, being the wise-guy, stubborn German kid that I was, I said, well how do you explain summer in the southern hemisphere? Is the sun closer to them in their summer, when it's winter here?

She didn't take too kindly to my way of explaining this, so I went home that night and pulled out a science book that explained all, complete with a drawing of the earth (relative to the sun) at different times of the year. I took the book to school the next day.

In science class the next day, I raised my hand and told Sister Mary Karen that I had a book that would answer the question that had been asked the day before. She looked at the drawings, read a bit of the text, and shook her head. "The book is wrong," she said.

I must have realized at that moment how Galileo and those poor kids who were raised in the USSR must have felt every day. Here was the truth, but my teacher ...MY TEACHER...denied it. I guess she was even more German and stubborn than me, but truth will eventually prevail, as those kids in the USSR found out. I don't think Galileo lived long enough to get his revenge.

That was the day I lost respect for authority. Might does not make right, and I learned that day that it was possible for me to know more than some people in authority. And I paid dearly for that lesson throughout the remainder of my sentence...I mean, the remaining three years of my education...at ICS.

This is an apple...

...with a story. Click on the picture to take a good look before reading on.

On April 23, 1985, we brought Dad home to the Golden Hill Cemetery. It was a beautiful spring day, made more so by the millions of apple blossoms that bloomed that day. It wasn't unusual for the apple trees to be in blossom so early, but this seemed to be an unusually large blossom. And it was fitting.

The following winter was bitterly cold. On one of those cold days -- it was below zero -- I walked up the hill to the cemetery with my camera. Dad's tombstone had not been laid yet, and the cemetery was a very barren looking place. I spent some time walking among the apple trees, when I saw this apple. It was frozen solid and covered with a thin layer of ice. And it was a blossom the day we buried Dad.

Ready, aim...

Fire.

This story starts out when I was four years old.

We all had chores when we were growing up, and my brother Butch had the chore of taking the trash out to the barrel and burning it. I would tag along becase I was fascinated by fire. I noticed that when he lit the fire, he would light Kleenex or newspaper to get it started.

I wanted to learn how fire worked. I convinced myself that if I could just take some Kleenex and matches into the barn, I'd be able to figure out this mysterious thing. So that's what I did.

I sat on the floor of the barn, laid the Kleenex on the floor, and started lighting matches. I was mesmerized by the spreading of the flame, and I kept looking at it, hoping that somehow it would reveal its secrets. What I failed to plan for was the fire spreading to the straw that was also on the floor.

I looked toward the wall of the south stable, and the flames were already licking the bottom of the wall. I ran outside to get the water hose, and as I sprayed water on the flames, they seemed to jump under the wall to the other side. So I went into the stable and sprayed from that side of the wall. The flames, naturally, jumped back to the other side.

At about that time, my sister Toni happened to be looking out the dining room window and told Mom that the barn was on fire. Mom ran out and promptly put the fire out. She gave me a look that I will never forget, and said she couldn't decide whether to spank me or to send me to bed without any supper. So she did both.

That was the first of many fires that I either started or encouraged. My brother Thom was a master at starting fires, and we used to dump gasoline on the ground and light it, imagining that hell would look something like that.

My day of reckoning came when I was a sophomore in high school. I stayed home from school one fall day, pretending I was sick. Late that morning, I decided to make something to eat, so I put a pan of oil on the stove to make some french fries. Then I went into the living room and nodded off.

I awoke to a crackling noise, and I assumed that Thom was sneaking into the house to see what I was up to. He had been in the shop all morning grading and packing apples. Imagine my surprise when I walked out of the living room and saw billows of smoke coming from the kitchen.

The flames were far too high and hot for me to do much. There was no fire extinguisher in the house, so I ran outside and started yelling for someone to come help. Fortunately, the neighbor across the road had a fire extinguisher, and he put the fire out. But the damage was done. Mom's new kitchen was a total loss, and the entire downstairs had smoke damage. The flames had been so hot that the drapes in the dining room melted.

A reporter from the local paper came out and took pictures of our burnt out kitchen, and one of those pictures made it into the Bellevue Gazette the following day. Mom was not amused.

It didn't take long for my friends at school to start with the arson jokes. Even my history teacher got into the act. We were studying the French Revolution, and he noted that it was good thing for Marie Antoinette that I wasn't locked up in the Bastille, because I would have burned my way out.

But all is well that ends well, and Mom was able to have her new kitchen replaced with a newer kitchen, and I learned never to leave a pan of boiling oil unattended.