Black and White Television

Remember the Peacock?

I don't know how many of you folks out there remember when all we had were black and white televisions to watch. While I did grow up with relatives having color TVs, and remember going over to my uncle's house to watch the weird colors on his television, we didn't get one ourselves. As I recall, everyone had red skin on my uncle's TV. However, even though the colors were off, we still found it fascinating watching football games in RCA Color. I remember being curios to think about what the real colors looked like live. We would make educated guesses based on what we knew something actually looked like, and then comparing the tint of that color to some other object being displayed on the television at the time and determining that that was the real color.

I'm not sure why it took our family so long to get a color television, (maybe it was the cost of the early TV sets, maybe because the early color television were viewed as not being a very good quality, maybe it was viewed by my Dad as a waste of time watching TV altogether - and he was mostly right) but I had grown up on black and white TV until my twenties. Then, watching all the old shows in color was like watching them for the first time.

I also remember how often these television with tubes in them would break down. It seemed that every couple of years we had to call in the TV repairman to fix our black and white set. Sometimes the repairman would have to take our TV back to his shop to fix it on the bench. During some of those repair times, the guy would loan our family a TV to watch while he fixed ours. I remember thinking that the loaner TV was actually better than the one we owned. Wow, that was interesting period of time. Now, most of the time, when our television breaks, we throw it away and buy a new one. Times certainly have changed.

In Times Gone By

Growing Up In Eldora, Pennsylvania seems like two lifetimes ago. The world has changed so fast that keeping up with it is much like running on a tread mill. If you stop, you get pushed off the back side.

But, sometimes it is best to just stand on the sidelines and remember times gone by.

One of those times gone by.

I went back to visit a couple of months ago and things seem to have stood still in time. The buildings in the town of Donora, PA which is just a short hop from Eldora, are all still there, however they are simply standing still. I got a kick out of visiting the old US Post Office, which still has the old post office mail boxes which seem to be antiques, where my Dad would take the daily trip to pickup our mail. The postal workers got a big kick out of my excitement of taking pictures of the inside of the place.

Donora use to be a huge US Steel mill town, but now it is simply a shell of years gone by. Now, the area needs a kick in the rear to get going again. Who knows, maybe someday the area will see a resurgence in life to places gone by.

Today Vs Yesterday Vs Tomorrow

I remember when my parents said that things are moving so fast as compared to when they were children. Now, we say the same things to our children.

But, I think time really is moving faster now than even a second ago, at least to my internal clock. Time is a dimension. And, it is not a constant as some have said.

Ever feel like time moves very quickly and sometimes very slowly? Like how the hours fly by when you're hanging out with a close friend, or how seconds drag on endlessly when you're stuck in traffic on a hot day? But you can't actually speed time up or slow it down—it always flows at the same rate, right?

Albert Einstein didn't think so. His idea was that, theoretically, the closer we come to traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), the more time would appear to slow down for us from the perspective of someone who, in relation to us, was not moving. He called the slowing of time due to motion time dilation.

NOVA | Einstein's Big Idea | Time Traveler | PBS

Now that we discussed Time, what about the speed of light? Is the speed of light speeding up or slowing down. Don't fall into the trap thinking that the speed of light is a constant.

Speed of light slowing down after all?

Famous physicist makes headlines

by Carl Wieland

9 August 2002

Headlines in several newspapers around the world have publicized a paper in Nature by a team of scientists (including the famous physicist Paul Davies) who (according to these reports) claim that 'light has been slowing down since the creation of the universe'.

Light that travels faster than the speed of light
From Science Blog

Light A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has successfully demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to control the speed of light – both slowing it down and speeding it up – in an optical fiber, using off-the-shelf instrumentation in normal environmental conditions. Their results, to be published in the August 22 issue of Applied Physics Letters, could have implications that range from optical computing to the fiber-optic telecommunications industry.

Now if those two articles don't get you thinking about what you thought was a constant, the following will throw you backwards altogether.

Light's Most Exotic Trick Yet: So Fast it Goes ... Backwards?

In the past few years, scientists have found ways to make light go both faster and slower than its usual speed limit, but now researchers at the University of Rochester have published a paper today in Science on how they've gone one step further: pushing light into reverse. As if to defy common sense, the backward-moving pulse of light travels faster than light.

Confused? You're not alone.

If you are interested in reading more about light that travels faster or slower, click the Science Blog, light that travels faster search link.

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The Simple Life Pictures

These images came from the original MyBlogsky.com blogging website. MyBlogsky.com is now no more. I never did find out the actual story about MyBlogsky.com. Read about The MyBlogsky Story.