Goertz Thoughts

Nowadays, it's so easy to find music. You can just google any song (although it's probably better to use Spotify, YouTube Music, or another service. It can avoid some tricky copyright issues). However, it was not always so. Spotify didn't come to the US until 2011. Let me share with you some of the ways that I listened to music throughout my life. Older media: Vinyl records are making a comeback recently. I listened to them because they were cheap (I don't care about audio fidelity; I can't hear a difference). We also had some old 8 tracks laying around. Lots of John Denver and Peter, Paul, and Mary . My mom was a little young to be a hippie, but she liked their music. Tapes: Tapes were great: cheap (you would sometimes get them for free in Happy Meals), lightweight, portable, and most cars had a tape deck that you could play them in. You could also listen to them while exercising, thanks to Walkman . One cool feature was the ability to make mixtapes. Using a tape...

When I was growing up, Sunday Mass was different. Not necessarily wrong (except in some instances), but definitely not what you are used to. I'm not talking about pre-conciliar Latin Mass (I'm not that old). I grew up in the 80s and 90s. During that time, the church in the US was still experimenting with new forms of liturgy. Architecture I went to St. William growing up. It's not the St. William that you know. For one thing, it was about a half mile further down McNeil Road. For another, it didn't look like a Catholic Church. It was built in 1981, if I remember correctly Inside, it was also weird. Here's a series of pictures from Christmas/Easter over several years. See if you can spot what's missing. Nice hat, mom! Did you (not) see it? There's no crucifix! I guess that was "too depressing"? (There was usually a cross, off to the side, but no corpus) Life Teen Mass These days, a Life Teen mass usually just means a Sunday evening Mass with rock mu...

 I love maps. I think that I always have.  Here are some of my favorites. Birdseye maps like this one of Austin used to be popular in the late 1800s. The Gallery of Maps in the Vatican Museums is one of my favorite spots. And of course, Middle Earth But the maps that you are used to (like the ones on Google), those are relatively new inventions. When I was growing up, everyone used to have huge road atlases in the trunks of their cars for road trips. Maybe some of you still have them, but I removed mine almost 20 years ago. Major cities had zoomed in insets to show local roads. You would have to plan out trips ahead of time and hope that there wasn't bad traffic. If there was, you could pull over, get the atlas out of your trunk, and plan a new route. I remember doing this in Tennessee once when moving Mrs. Goertz's sister down to Texas for college. A step up from atlases was GPS devices (they weren't always in phones). GPS was originally developed for military purposes a...

I'm planning to start a series regarding things about how much the world has changed. It has changed so quickly that some of you might not even be aware of how things used to work. First up, home phones. They are not like cellphones at all. Not even like this old one. These were cool though. Indestructible. And you could play Snake. Now, I'm too young to remember  party lines  where multiple homes shared the same telephone line, but my home growing up had only one line for multiple phones (this was the most common situation). We had a phone in the kitchen, living room (this rotary phone is now part of the Savio theater prop collection), and my parents' bedroom. What this means is a call coming into the house would ring on all three phones. Two people might pick up the phone at the same time. Not only that, it meant that you had no guarantee of privacy, as someone could in theory be listening in from another room. Not ideal if you have a girlfriend and are trying to have a p...

This post is written in part to fulfill my promise to Maya that I would watch Treasure Planet  before she graduated. It was either this or Dead Poet's Society. I thought I had seen this movie before, but it must have been too long ago because a lot of it seemed unfamiliar (not too unfamiliar as I've read Treasure Island , seen the live action Disney movie, and Muppet Treasure Island ). Here are a few things that I thought about it: It's very artistic. The mix of traditional and CGI is well done (not as jarring as Fox's Titan AE  from two years previous) This movie is fantasy, not science fiction. So, I'm not going to say "Space doesn't work that way!" except for one comment. Solar sails don't work that way! Solar sailing  is a fascinating process, but it relies on the pressure of photons. It leads to very slow acceleration over a long period of time. The surface area of the sails needs to be much bigger than that depicted. Every species seems uniqu...

You're familiar with the trolley problem, right?   (Here's a different take from The Good Place .  Trigger warning: copious fake blood) Here's a variation that came up in astronomy class the other day. It didn't start off as a traditional trolley problem. We were discussing government spending. We're pretty sure that a dinosaur killing sized asteroid is not currently heading towards us due to projects such as ATLAS . We could be even more sure if more money was given to build telescopes. However, any funds given to telescopes is less given to other causes (say for example orphans). Both protecting the Earth from asteroids and helping children are good things. We cannot fully solve either problem no matter how much money we throw at them. So, in this case the question comes down to how much is too much?  To keep it simple, let's pretend these are the only two funding issues. If we miss seeing a massive asteroid in time, it could  kill everyone on Earth. On the ot...