KS&L 405 Compassion Fatigue by Tina Erwin

       A bridges collapse, trains collide, planes crash, there is an earthquake, a tidal wave, a hurricane, a bus crash, a person goes crazy and kills many people and the list of calamities continues. Then there are friends and family members who develop cancer, a terrible illness, a debilitating fall, a car accident, someone’s child has leukemia. People are dying in a war somewhere. 22 military people commit suicide a day.

       It is difficult to remember a time in history when there have been so many constant demands on our compassionate hearts. How can we hope to offer constant solace, endless care and the volume of prayers required to send help to all who so desperately need it?

       I know I am not alone in feeling the emotional and spiritual weight of so much tremendous need.

       At some point, it becomes important to recognize that conceivably the best you can do is to send healing to the world every day.

       Many people do something as simple as say The Lord’s Prayer and send the wonderful energy of this prayer to the whole world, to all of nature for the benefit of everyone and everything. Perhaps it is the energy of these and other powerful prayers that keep most of going day to day.

       We do not have to know all the people we are praying for nor do we know whom to thank for the prayers that benefit each of us. Suffice it to say that without prayer we would probably descend into barbarism.

       If you make a practice, a spiritual practice of sending whatever modest prayers you can say and send them to the entire world, and then let go you can do tremendous service.    Perhaps that is the best that any of us can do in a world of often staggering grief. We are often left in disbelief at the sadly carved paths that occur daily into the emotion soul for so many people. Conceivably prayers are the way stations along the way for all of us so that this journey of healing isn’t so difficult.

       This isn’t a very glamorous plan is it, saying a prayer every day? It feels like you’re trying to empty the Pacific with a teaspoon doesn’t it? But what if we all try this? What if we all do this, every single day, 365 days a year?

       Maybe, just maybe, we can change the world.

Temporal Cloak Erases Data from History by Zeeya Merali

Dear Friends,

 I found this article fascinating and daunting. See what you think. Tina

Temporal cloak erases data from history

Technique that hides rapid data streams could provide ultra-secure communications.

• Zeeya Merali

05 June 2013

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Light waves, shown evolving in time in this simulation, create a cloaking effect at the middle where the light intensity goes to zero.

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If you’ve ever wanted to edit an event from your history, then help may soon be at hand. Electrical engineers have used lasers to create a cloak that can hide communications in a 'time hole', so that it seems as if they were never sent. The method, published today in Nature¹, is the first that can cloak data streams sent at the rapid rates typically seen in telecommunications systems. It opens the door to ultra-secure transmission schemes, and may also provide a way to better shield information from noise corruption.

In 2010, Martin McCall, an optical physicist at Imperial College London, and his colleagues proposed² that it may be possible to create temporal cloaks that carve out short windows in time during which operations can be carried out unnoticed. Their work built on the principles behind invisibility cloaks, which hide objects in space by channelling light rays around them. When viewed from a distance, the light appears to have travelled along a straight line, without having hit any intervening object.
Similarly, McCall and colleagues suggested that by pulling light waves apart in time, and then compressing them back together, it should be possible to create 'time pockets' in which to cloak events. In theory, this could enable “a whole new level of security” for data transmission along optical fibres, says Joseph Lukens, an electrical engineer at Purdue University in Indiana, and lead author of the latest study. “It doesn't just prevent eavesdroppers from reading your data — they wouldn’t even know there was any data there to hack.”

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Last year, a team led by Alexander Gaeta, an optical physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, built the first working temporal cloak by manipulating laser pulses³. But the time windows opened up too rarely to be able to hide data coming in at telecommunication rates.

Splitting light

To speed up the cloaking rate, Lukens and his colleagues exploited a wave phenomenon that was first discovered by British inventor Henry Fox Talbot in 1836. When a light wave passes through a series of parallel slits called a diffraction grating, it splits apart. The rays emanating from the slits combine on the other side to create an intricate interference pattern of peaks and troughs. Talbot discovered that this pattern repeats at regular intervals, creating what is now known as a Talbot carpet. There is also a temporal version of this effect in which you manipulate light over time to generate regular periods with zero light intensity, says Lukens. Data can be then be hidden in these holes in time.  

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• Optical physics: How to hide in time
• Leap forward for invisibility cloaks
• Purdue University ultrafast optics group

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Lukens' team created its Talbot carpet in time by passing laser light through a 'phase modulator', a waveguide that also had an oscillating electrical voltage applied to it. As the voltage varied, the speed at which the light travelled through the waveguide was altered, splitting the light into its constituent frequencies and knocking these out of step. As predicted, at regular time intervals, the separate frequencies recombined destructively to generate time holes. Lukens’ team then used a second round of phase modulation to compress the energy further, expanding the duration of the time windows to 36 picoseconds (or 36 trillionths of a second).
The researchers tested the cloak to see if it was operating correctly by inserting a separate encoded data stream into the fibre during the time windows. They then applied two more rounds of phase modulation — to “undo the damage of the first two rounds”, says Lukens — decompressing the energy again and then combining the separated frequencies back into one. They confirmed that a user downstream would pick up the original laser signal alone, as though it had never been disturbed. The cloak successfully hid data added at a rate of 12.7 gigabits per second.

Disappearing act

Unfortunately, the current set-up may be a little too good at hiding things. “We erased the data-adding event entirely from history, so there’s no way that data could be sent as a useful message to anyone, even a genuine recipient,” says Lukens. However, McCall is impressed with the team’s effort and believes that future modifications will allow them, or others, to send secret messages successfully. He credits Lukens' team for significantly boosting the cloak’s efficiency. “This brings temporal cloaks within reach of practical applications,” says McCall.
Ironically, the first application of temporal cloaks may not be to hide data, but to help them to be read more accurately. The team has shown that splitting and recombining light waves in time creates increased periods in which the main data stream can be made immune to corruption by inserted data. “This could be useful to cut down crosstalk when multiple data streams share the same fibre,” says Lukens.
Gaeta agrees that the primary use for cloaking will probably be for innocent, mundane purposes. “People always imagine doing something illicit when they hear ‘cloaking’,” he says. “But these ways for manipulating light will probably be used to make current non-secret communication techniques more sophisticated.”

Nature

doi:10.1038/nature.2013.13141

References

1. Lukens, J. M., Leaird, D. E. & Weiner, A. M. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12224 (2013).
   
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2. McCall, M. W., Favaro, A., Kinsler, P. & Boardman, A. J. Opt. 13, 024003 (2011).
   
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3. Fridman, M., Farsi, A., Okawachi, Y. & Gaeta, A. L. Nature 481, 62–65 (2012).
   
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   • ChemPort
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KS&L 404 The Perspective of Height by Tina Erwin

http://tinaerwin.com/blog/

              I'm five feet one inch tall. I've been this tall or short, depending on your perspective, since I was in the 5th grade. ‘Vertically challenged,’ that's what I've been called. When I was in the Navy I was the ‘duty midget.’

            We are the height we are physically and karmically. Everyone around me, except my baby granddaughters are taller than I am. My children exceeded my height when they each reached the 5th grade. I've been looking up to them ever since, in both the physical and the respectful sense, they are great kids. The standing joke in our family is that I always note that in the next life I will surely be taller!

            So the other day I was in Nordstrom's Rack trying on shoes. They have great shoes there, including some of the most, shall we say interesting, shoes I have ever seen. So because I was with my sister and niece, we decided to have some fun and they steadied me as I tried on shoes that were 7" tall. Instantly I was 5' 8" tall. Wow! I thought, so this is what it's like to be this tall all the time. It's amazing what this perspective offers. I could see the tops of the shelves, I could see over counters, I could see things in a way I had never seen them before. 

            But I couldn't walk very far in those shoes and I had to take them off. I felt almost as if I was in slow motion as I stepped out of them, as I came down from 5'8" to 5'1" tall.

            The world looks different from a different height perspective. We live our lives at the height we are meant to be. Men inherently know this. They don't routinely wear 'high' heals. Men pretty much accept their height and how men relate to other men is based to a huge degree on each man's height. Consider that the United States has never had a 'short' president. Even Franklin Roosevelt who spent most of his life in a wheel chair had himself propped up in official photographs so that he appeared from the perspective of great height. That sense of 'stature' is what people look to. Literally we all want an official leader we can respect. The shortest American President was James Madison at 5'4" but then President Madison didn't have today's very visual press to deal with on a daily basis. There has not been a short American President in the last 100 years.

            How we each view life is, to an amazing degree, predicated on our height. Men who are tall are universally pretty happy with their height. Not so women. Our social structure, the one created by movies and books is designed so that men are about 2 - 4 inches taller than their female companions. This is so that the woman can look up to her man with those batting eyelashes and reach her arms up around his neck. They guy looks like the big, strong hero. That is the stereotype. If the guy is too tall or the woman too short, it’s just awkward looking – for all visual media. Visual media, to be appealing, has to be emotionally balanced and over tall or over short will not appear balanced.

            Women have begun to come to terms with who they are over the years and more and more tall women are finding comfort in being tall. There are lots of tall women who marry really short guys and have long successful marriages. At some point, height doesn’t matter any more. Normal is only what works for each couple.

            Back to being temporarily tall: for a precious few moments I was 5’8” and it is amazing to see so much more, fewer barriers, a longer view. Perhaps I have to ask myself why I am this height. All genetics aside, everything about each of us is a karmic element in our long path of spiritual evolution. Could it be that this is a more approachable height? Could it be that this height offers me the opportunity to approach various situations very differently? One of my Navy friends is a gorgeous tall blond. When she walked into the room, she commanded the room and that’s pretty easy to do if you are 5’8” wearing a 2” heal. I don’t wear heals well so when the ‘duty midget’ walked in, something else had to be present within me to ‘command’ the room. Maybe that was the lesson, one my tall friend didn’t need to learn: how do you use your height to command attention in an appropriate way?

            So for drill, if you are a tall person reading this ask yourself how you relate to very short men and women. Size matters but the ultimate question is how does it matter for you?

           

KS&L 403 My Navy Cooking Disaster! Part 2 by Tina Erwin

KS&L 403 My Navy Cooking Disaster! PART 2

       All right, the appetizer is out, beverages are ready, guests are arriving for our supposedly lovely dinner party. We’ve done our best to remove the powerful cat smell and we are actually dressed and ready – although I’m not quite sure how we did that.

         Our guests, our friends, co-workers are all sitting around chatting and trying to enjoy the clam dip but not really. The dip was more soup than colloidal. The dip dripped off the crackers on to the rug and lovely clothes. Instead of using a carrot or chip to scoup it up, you needed a spoon. It became utterly unusable. Sigh. . .

         Not to worry, they’ll surely forget about this dippy disaster, after the wonderful meal I prepared. I slip back into the kitchen to check on things. I had put the rice on 10 minutes ago. It takes 20 minutes for this wild rice to cook and there beside the pot was the ‘wild’ part of the rice, which takes the longest to cook! How could I have forgotten that? I toss it in anyway, hoping that somehow it will cook extra fast.

         Then, I peak at the Beef Stroganoff: oh my God what has happened to this main dish? It smells divine but it looks like mush! It is not recognizable as stroganoff. It looks like the sour cream, instead of making this creamy sauce actually curdled in the pot. I’m now out of options.

         I return to mingle. 15 minutes later I slip back into the kitchen and prepare to serve. Everyone is seated. I’m using my best china. Troy is so proud of me. Little does he know that, well, this will be a memorable dinner but not like we had hoped.

         We all begin to eat. The broccoli is actually a gorgeous green and is delicious with the lemon butter, but I left probably too much of the stem on because the Executive Officer’s wife informs me that she only eats ‘florets’, not the tough stem. I’m mortified.

         The Engineer looks at the mess that is the stroganoff on his plate and sighs and says that he’s just sure that this will taste good no matter how it looks.

         Troy bites into semi-crunchy rice and tries to put on a non-embarrassed face, but he’s a mariner, not an actor and he looks absolutely baffled as to why his brain tells him that rice should be soft but his teeth are crunching on something.

         The rolls were okay, not burned, not undercooked. But you can’t hang a meal on rolls.

         That’s it: the main course is finally over! Hopefully I’ll wow them with my super delicious lemon meringue pie. So I clear the plates and head to the kitchen to begin the dessert part of the meal.

         I opened the refrigerator to pull the pie out and there it is, the final, friggen disaster!  I don’t make this pie often. I thought it would be delicious cold. I had no idea that when you put lemon meringue pie in the fridge, that really bad things happen. My once glorious, golden singed meringue is now deflated and has separated from the lemon pie filling and the entire filling has separated from the now semi-soggy homemade pie shell.

         I took it out and sat it on the counter and just stared at it.

         And then I started to laugh. I’m just sure that since this is the last visual food disaster, the evening cannot get any worse, so might as well find some humor in the whole evening.

         So, I make a very big deal out of showing them the pie and how bad it looks. I have to serve the pie in bowls instead of dessert plates because it is now pure lemony-meringuey mush. The navigator assures me that even though this pie looks like a train wreck, he’s just sure it will be delicious. And it was wonderful. I got the taste right but not the structure.

         And everyone else starts to laugh too. Then I share with them the chain of disasters of the entire evening starting with the cat. It helps them to understand why our place was so cold when they arrived.

         I have had probably thousands of dinner parties in a joint 20-year career with my husband and in the 20 years since we retired, but I don’t remember any of them. This is my most memorable dinner event because of the disaster cascade.

         I learned so much from that night. Sometimes adversity is the very best teacher, even when we are struggling with it at the time. Hopefully we can all look back with a sense of humor and remember how we felt and how, in the huge scheme of things, it really wasn’t that important, or disastrous. Difficulties are placed in our path so that we can see just how really clever we can become in a tough situation. Oh, and I never made that pie again. Whew! Learned that lesson!