Preshrunk Ponderings and Rumpled Rememberings

All Rights Reserved © 2001 by Matthew Thomas Slattery, III

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Permission to use photograph from negative 37178-c of Cat.#378123-

Earthenware whistling bottle from Chanchan, Libertad, Peru (CBS-OPPS Permission Number 80-9-305) given by the U.S. National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

Bubble Chamber photographs were given to the author by photographer-researcher Manfred Pyka. The author was, in effect, one of the many physicist and technician co-photographers who participated in this photographic data-gathering in the pit several stories below street level at the Enrico Fermi Institute in 1960.

Use of the author’s EastWest Journal article Whistling Bottles and its drawing derived from the author’s sketch was approved by its successor magazine Natural Health.

ISBN: 0-595-16349-1

ISBN: 978-1-469-72842-1 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

FRONTISPIECE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

SRO

GETTING AROUND

JOBS JOBS JOBS

TEACHING AND LEARNING

Labs and Ideas

LABS AND IDEAS

WHISTLING BOTTLES

COMET-CAUSED COLLAPSE OF THIRD MILLENNIUM BC CIVILIZATIONS?

EVALUATION AND EXPERIENCE

TEACHING ENGLISH AS DESKTOP PUBLISHING

THIS OLD HOUSE

FRONTISPIECE 

PRESHRUNK PONDERINGS & RUMPLED REMEMBERINGS was originally set up as a desktop-published book and printed-out on an Emerson personal computer and printer at 396 Oak Cliff Drive, Bay Village, Ohio in October 1993. The book was printed on xerox machines at local copy shops, and the cover was cardstock or coverstock, depending of availability in these. The perfect-binding was done with commercial padding compound.

Frontispiece: Chicago Liquid Hydrogen Bubble Chamber, Circe, during Manfred Pyka experiment, 1960.

In the photo you see pi-mesons from the Chicago cyclotron entering the bubble chamber. They decay into mu-mesons, which in turn decay into electrons, the large spirals in the photo. The nuclear particles are curved and wind into spirals due to a 12,500 Gauss magnetic field surrounding the bubble chamber. Another bubble chamber photograph is in the book.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Frontispiece: pi-mesons decay into mu-mesons and then decay into electrons Figure 1: a single pi-meson decays into a mu-meson and then decays into an electron.

Figure 2: science and nonsense, interesting pattern, but but meaningless graph

Figure 3: drawing to show a typical whistling bottle. Figure 4: how a whistling bottle makes drinking water Figure 5: complex whistling bottle at the Smithsonian.

PREFACE 

AUTHOR’S PREFACE, OCTOBER 1993

All but two of these essays were written in the heady thoughtful atmosphere during or shortly after the 1992 elections. I had intended another on health care, but fortunately for all of us, the administration has taken the lead in solving the massive national bungle. Unlike the problems pondered in my essays, it has come to the forefront of national political awareness, and at this point, I can add little that has not already been said.

The last two essays were dug out of a pile of old ones. They effectively frame my brief college teaching years and illuminate my essay on education.

It was my good fortune to be born into this time and place: North America before World War Two. I grew up during that awful humanmade catastrophe but was spared from the ugliness and destruction that overtook Europe and Asia. Just as I was growing into realistic self-awareness, the great terrible global war came to an end amid revelations of unprecedented mass murder and the horrifying nuclear destruction of two cities, warnings of the future should we lose control of it.

I was fortunate enough to slip by just a few years too young to be drafted into the Korean War, and when I was finally drafted, I slipped in and out of Southeast Asia before the Vietnam misadventure heated up into a full-scale war.

Indirectly as a result of my military experience in Asia, I married a wonderful Asian young woman, and we both had the good fortune to live at the edge of Golden Gate Park during the Summer of Love of the hippie phenomenon. It also brought us into the great unparalleled political phenomenon of the Anti-War Protest here and in Asia. At the height of the protest and partly due to its pressures, I regrettably got a divorce and have spent the last two decades a solitary soul, but that is another story.

Throughout most of my life, jobs were plentiful enough that one could go to distant parts of the country and find one to make some kind of a living. Food, clothing, and shelter were relatively inexpensive, and a person who had and valued wisdom could explore the world, learn from it, and accomplish a few satisfying things without having to expend all human energies on mere life support. The terrible population explosion of the last quarter century has cheapened each human individual and thus bitten so deeply into these human freedoms.

A poor but clever person could find the minimal means for time to read and study, resources to travel and explore the strange world of this time, and interesting jobs close to the cutting edge of the future. I either sought these out or accidentally drifted into them. With few regrets, I inventively utilized the given my time offered. With pleasure that accompanied remembering having done so, I composed these ponderings, rememberings, and maybe thought provoking implications of possible futures.

Tom Slattery

Bay Village, Ohio

10/10/1993

ADDED TO PREFACE, OCTOBER 2000

The poorly conceived and badly bungled health care effort by the Clinton administration turned out to be a massive disappointment. The country has gone without a badly needed and all-inclusive national health care for eight more years.

In addition, the joint Democratic-Republican welfare reform appeared to work only because the economy has been robust, partly due to good economic policy, partly due to good luck on a natural economic cycle. When the economy begins to collapse, as it eventually must, this safety net—largely put in place by decades of court decisions because legislators were afraid to touch it, or were anxious to appear anti-welfare—has been virtually eradicated by legislation. What will be there when something is immediately needed?

Something interesting has happened in the 2000 presidential campaign. Global Warming has become a political issue. Whatever its cause, there is no question that global warming is real. And no matter what its cause, the only thing the we humans have any control over to reverse it or at least help to mitigate it is global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions generated by industry and transportation. The Arctic Ocean Ice Cap is melting. It has lost nearly half of thickness in the last forty to fifty years. One can easily extrapolate that it will shrink to zero thickness in another forty to fifty years.

When the ice cover is gone, the Arctic Ocean will change from its present solar-reflective surface to a solar-absorbing surface. The ocean will warm and perhaps eventually remain open all year. If that happens, we may have a sudden new Ice Age. That is because ultra-cold and extremely dry Arctic air will literally suck up moisture from the comparatively warm open water, instantly freeze it into snow and ice particles, and deposit it exactly where the several previous Ice Age continental glaciers are known to have been. Evidence from frozen whole animals in Siberia—with meat good enough to eat after 35,000 years—is that the last Ice Age came on very suddenly, quick froze these animals, and kept them frozen for 35 millennia. Can the present hodgepodge or world governments handle a sudden need for relocation of a large percentage of the world’s six billion population to glacier-free zones? One can easily guess that they cannot. What plans are in place? One can easily guess that there are none.

Tom Slattery

Bay Village, Ohio Friday,

October 13, 2000

SRO 

Bad though it was, it was not the hopelessness of homelessness. It was a room, and there was a toilet and shower down the hall. It was, however, another time. Things changed.

It was 1973, and I was getting divorced. The single room occupancy hotel was the only option, but at least it was there as an option.

And over several years, until 1980, I lived in a series of old SRO hotels, if only because they were there.

All I needed in the depression and disillusion of the dissolution were a couple pieces of furniture, a bed, and four walls around me, and after a time I realized that is all we all really need. Though we magnify these to the extreme limits of comfort and security when we have resources, when it comes down to it, we need four walls to secure the minimum clothing and possessions necessary for civilized living and for the privacy and security necessary to healthy sleep.

The only reason that I was not totally homeless and out on the streets was that these SRO hotels were numerous and offered very cheap rooms—even more numerous in San Francisco than in other American cities. This was mostly due to a fluke in history. Projected requirements for temporary housing for visitors to the world’s fair of 1915 had brought on a hotel building boom, and when it was over there remained a glut of rooms for decades. By the 1970s, only a few of these old hotels had been torn down. The numerous ones that still remained made living in the downtown area of the city possible for many borderline poor and elderly people. This, in turn, helped to keep downtown San Francisco, more than other cities, alive with people long after rush hour traffic zipped suburban office people out to their bedroom communities in the evenings.

All SROs were not equal. Some were fleabags. Some were flophouses. Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko, in a 1993 article probing the roots of homelessness, lumped them all together as flophouses. The general tone of his article was good. It hit a nail on the head about causes of the massive American problem of homelessness. But he was wrong about the function of SRO hotels and about the backgrounds and personalities of most SRO hotel residents.

Some SROs were moderately expensive. Most housed mainly respectable, but poor, elderly people. Only a marginal few were genuine skid row flophouses.

Virtually all balanced their books by renting out to genuine transient hotel guests, tourists, business people, military people in transit, and others on a daily hotel room rental basis at rates competitive with better-class hotels and motels. While this rental for regular one-night and short-term hotel stays to a minor extent encouraged prostitution due to a proximity to lucrative downtown clientele, the world’s most ancient profession was virtually always underground and discouraged. Overt prostitution was bad for the regular hotel business and always drew constant complaints from the large populations of permanent residents. It was, in that way, largely self-policed and rarely, given the density of population in SROs, a genuine police problem.

SROs were primarily for inexpensive full-time living in the downtown areas by single people with limited resources, retired people on small fixed incomes, people with minimum-wage incomes, handicapped people with social security incomes, long-term underemployed and temporarily out-of-work people existing on savings, welfare, or unemployment compensation until more work became available, and short-term migrant employees that make the lower brackets of the economy work. That the numerous SRO hotels in downtown San Francisco were generally at least seventy-five

percent occupied attests to a massive social need for such housing in normal urban communities.

Unlike both public and nonprofit private sector residences—with special requirements such as minimum age, alcoholic of drug program eligibility, religious affiliation, welfare system dependency, or other supervised living arrangements—the numerous privately-owned profit-making old hotels in all large American cities were open to all who walked in and could pay the low monthly rent. It gave poor people a degree of freedom, mobility, and self-respect. No agencies took profiles for databases. No one supervised movements of residents. No one had to admit for the record to a human failing or submit to a religious recruitment.

Few problems ever grew out of this exercise in freedom and anonymity because those who walked in and rented rooms sought and needed this kind of living arrangement and behaved themselves because of their needs. Moreover, the very nature of this close-quarters hotel living created a context and sense of community to people who may, more than others, have needed it. For all the density of population in close quarters, shared corridors and facilities, thin sound-transmitting walls, and stresses related to poverty, there may have been fewer police problems per capita than in suburban residential settings.

Temporary guests usually became residents at lower monthly rental rates after a stay of several weeks. By then they had either sorted out their lives or they had not. Sorting out their lives sometimes meant facing realities that required lengthy stays in small Spartanly-furnished rooms above noisy downtown streets.

But it was not all that undesirable. There was usually a complex system prioritizing values, conveniences, necessities, and resources that turned transient hotel guests into permanent residents. Writers, poets, artists, and varieties of downtown philosophers abounded in the small Spartan rooms that met their minimal worldly needs and suited their cerebral and aesthetic lifestyles. Many of the SRO rooms were lined with books to the ceilings. Many, in those days before personal computers, had typewriters on small desks squeezed into tight corners. The hotel dwellers only asked for minimal living space in which to think their thoughts, communicate them to others, and read and ponder what others had thought and written. Many considered the living arrangement ideal and lived on for decades that way.

Like in many cities, downtown living in San Francisco had its wonderful conveniences. The main library was within walking distance. Small grocery (and liquor) stores stayed open late into the night, sometimes all night. Varieties of wonderful and inexpensive restaurants stayed open late into the night, sometimes all day and all night.

The public transportation system provided cheap rapid access to all of the downtown and all of the city as well. By BART subway or AC Transit bus, intellectual Berkeley was only a few stops away twelve miles across the Bay. The bridge-subsidized Golden Gate buses offered cheap rides from the Transbay Terminal north to wine-tasting country beyond Santa Rosa. The Greyhound and the SP stations could take one south to Palo Alto, Stanford, and the high-tech area that was becoming Silicon Valley. The Transbay Terminal and Greyhound Bus Stations were within easy reach