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What if Time Really Exists?
The Foundational Questions Institute is sponsoring an essay competition on “The Nature of Time.” Needless to say, I’m in. It’s as if they said: “Here, you keep talking about this stuff you are always talking about anyway, except that we will hold out the possibility of substantial cash prizes for doing so.” Hard to resist. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
The deadline for submitting an entry is December 1, so there’s still plenty of time (if you will), for anyone out there who is interested and looking for something to do over Thanksgiving. They are asking for essays under 5000 words, on any of various aspects of the nature of time, pitched “between the level of Scientific American and a review article in Science or Nature.” That last part turns out to be the difficult one — you’re allowed to invoke some technical concepts, and in fact the essay might seem a little thin if you kept it strictly popular, but hopefully it should be accessible to a large range of non-experts. Most entries seem to include a few judicious equations while doing their best to tell a story in words.
All of the entries are put online here, and each comes with its own discussion forum where readers can leave comments. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us A departure from the usual protocols of scientific communication, but that’s a good thing. (Inevitably there is a great deal of chaff along with the wheat among the submitted essays, but that’s the price you pay.) What is more, in addition to a judging by a jury of experts, there is also a community vote, which comes with its own prizes. So feel free to drop by and vote for mine if you like — or vote for someone else’s if you think it’s better. There’s some good stuff there.http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
time-flies-clock-10-11-2006.gifMy essay is called “What if Time Really Exists?” A lot of people who think about time tend to emerge from their contemplations and declare that time is just an illusion, or (in modern guise) some sort of semi-classical approximation. And that might very well be true. But it also might not be true; from our experiences with duality in string theory, we have explicit examples of models of quantum gravity which are equivalent to conventional quantum-mechanical systems obeying the time-dependent Schrödinger equation with the time parameter right there where Schrödinger put it.
And from that humble beginning — maybe ordinary quantum mechanics is right, and there exists a formulation of the theory of everything that takes the form of a time-independent Hamiltonian acting on a time-dependent quantum state defined in some Hilbert space — you can actually reach some sweeping conclusions. The fulcrum, of course, is the observed arrow of time in our local universe. When thinking about the low-entropy conditions near the Big Bang, we tend to get caught up in the fact that the Bang is a singularity, forming a boundary to spacetime in classical general relativity. But classical general relativity is not right, and it’s perfectly plausible (although far from inevitable) that there was something before the Bang. If the universe really did come into existence out of nothing 14 billion years ago, we can at least imagine that there was something special about that event, and there is some deep reason for the entropy to have been so low. But if the ordinary rules of quantum mechanics are obeyed, there is no such thing as the “beginning of time”; the Big Bang would just be a transitional stage, for which our current theories don’t provide an adequate spacetime interpretation. In that case, the observed arrow of time in our local universe has to arise dynamically according to the laws of physics governing the evolution of a wave function for all eternity.
Interestingly, that has important implications. If the quantum state evolves in a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, it evolves ergodically through a torus of phases, and will exhibit all of the usual problems of Boltzmann brains and the like (as Dyson, Kleban, and Susskind have emphasized). So, at the very least, the Hilbert space (under these assumptions) must be infinite-dimensional. In fact you can go a bit farther than that, and argue that the spectrum of energy eigenvalues must be arbitrarily closely spaced — there must be at least one accumulation point.http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
Sexy, I know. The remarkable thing is that you can say anything at all about the Hilbert space of the universe just by making a few simple assumptions and observing that eggs always turn into omelets, never the other way around. Turning it into a respectable cosmological model with an explicit spacetime interpretation is, admittedly, more work, and all we have at the moment are some very speculative ideas. But in the course of the essay I got to name-check Parmenides, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Augustine, and Nietzsche, so overall it was well worth the effort.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
personality
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Preliminary data suggest that deceitful, violent men diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder have a reduced amount of gray matter in the brain's prefrontal cortex. Some type of prefrontal deficit may underlie this controversial disorder, asserts a team led by psychologist Adrian Raine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com
Magnetic resonance imaging revealed these brain-tissue deficits in 21 men with antisocial personality disorder, compared with no such deficits in 26 men addicted to alcohol or illicit drugs, 21 men with other mental disorders, and 34 men with no psychiatric disorders.
If the finding holds up, prefrontal deficits may turn out to be either a cause or a result of antisocial personality disorder, the scientists say in the February Archives of General Psychiatry. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com
Magnetic resonance imaging revealed these brain-tissue deficits in 21 men with antisocial personality disorder, compared with no such deficits in 26 men addicted to alcohol or illicit drugs, 21 men with other mental disorders, and 34 men with no psychiatric disorders.
If the finding holds up, prefrontal deficits may turn out to be either a cause or a result of antisocial personality disorder, the scientists say in the February Archives of General Psychiatry. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
results 993.res.662 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
After a fire rages through a forest, what’s left is charcoal, which can remain in the soil for centuries, even millennia. Scientists hoping to capitalize on this persistence and sequester carbon by burying charred wood may be disappointed: Apparently, charcoal in forest soil stimulates microbial activity that accelerates carbon loss from organic material covering the forest floor.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Although scientists have long known that charcoal isn’t biologically inert, its effect on organic matter in soil is poorly understood, says David A. Wardle, a soil ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå. To address the dearth of information, Wardle and his colleagues conducted field experiments in the forests of northern Sweden.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Wardle’s team buried small mesh bags that had one of three fillings: charcoal, carbon-rich humus or a half-and-half mix of charcoal and humus. The charcoal was burnt wood from crowberry, the most common shrub found at the Swedish forest sites, and the humus was collected from those sites as well. The researchers left the bags at three types of sites: one in a mature, 450-year-old forest, one in a forest that had recently experienced a fire and one in a forest halfway to maturity. They recovered the bags one, two, four and 10 years later.
After 10 years, each bag of charcoal, on average, still weighed the same, but more than 26 percent of the mass in the bags containing only humus was missing, presumably organic matter that had been lost via decomposition. Using those data, the team expected the charcoal-humus mix to have lost about 13 percent of its mass in 10 years, says Wardle. Instead, about 23 percent of the mass in those bags disappeared, he and his colleagues report in the May 2 Science. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang
Analyses of the samples revealed a higher rate of microbial activity in the charcoal-humus mixtures than in humus alone, says Wardle. It wasn’t clear whether that activity accelerated the rate of decomposition or generated water-soluble substances that later leached from the bags. In particular, says Wardle, tiny fungi like to feed on the organic compounds that charcoal absorbs and concentrates.
The new report “provides really important findings,” says Tom DeLuca, a forest ecologist with The Wilderness Society in Bozeman, Mont. Most previous studies of charcoal’s effects on ecosystem processes have lasted only weeks or months, he notes. Insights about how charcoal alters decomposition rates in soil are particularly timely, he adds, because some scientists have suggested that burying large amounts of charcoal could be an effective way to sequester carbon.
The new results are particularly significant because boreal forests — those found at high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, like those in Sweden — hold about 703 billion metric tons of carbon, says David U. Hooper, an ecosystem ecologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Moreover, about 89 percent of that carbon sits in the soil, not the plants themselves.
Thus, he notes, a boreal forest fire would deliver a “triple whammy” of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Besides the effect described by Wardle and his colleagues, combustion of the trees and material lining the forest floor releases a large pulse of the greenhouse gas. Finally, he notes, charcoal left in the wake of a fire tends to darken the ground. That causes the ground to absorb more sunlight and warm considerably, thereby boosting long-term rates of decomposition and carbon dioxide production. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Although scientists have long known that charcoal isn’t biologically inert, its effect on organic matter in soil is poorly understood, says David A. Wardle, a soil ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå. To address the dearth of information, Wardle and his colleagues conducted field experiments in the forests of northern Sweden.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Wardle’s team buried small mesh bags that had one of three fillings: charcoal, carbon-rich humus or a half-and-half mix of charcoal and humus. The charcoal was burnt wood from crowberry, the most common shrub found at the Swedish forest sites, and the humus was collected from those sites as well. The researchers left the bags at three types of sites: one in a mature, 450-year-old forest, one in a forest that had recently experienced a fire and one in a forest halfway to maturity. They recovered the bags one, two, four and 10 years later.
After 10 years, each bag of charcoal, on average, still weighed the same, but more than 26 percent of the mass in the bags containing only humus was missing, presumably organic matter that had been lost via decomposition. Using those data, the team expected the charcoal-humus mix to have lost about 13 percent of its mass in 10 years, says Wardle. Instead, about 23 percent of the mass in those bags disappeared, he and his colleagues report in the May 2 Science. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang
Analyses of the samples revealed a higher rate of microbial activity in the charcoal-humus mixtures than in humus alone, says Wardle. It wasn’t clear whether that activity accelerated the rate of decomposition or generated water-soluble substances that later leached from the bags. In particular, says Wardle, tiny fungi like to feed on the organic compounds that charcoal absorbs and concentrates.
The new report “provides really important findings,” says Tom DeLuca, a forest ecologist with The Wilderness Society in Bozeman, Mont. Most previous studies of charcoal’s effects on ecosystem processes have lasted only weeks or months, he notes. Insights about how charcoal alters decomposition rates in soil are particularly timely, he adds, because some scientists have suggested that burying large amounts of charcoal could be an effective way to sequester carbon.
The new results are particularly significant because boreal forests — those found at high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, like those in Sweden — hold about 703 billion metric tons of carbon, says David U. Hooper, an ecosystem ecologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Moreover, about 89 percent of that carbon sits in the soil, not the plants themselves.
Thus, he notes, a boreal forest fire would deliver a “triple whammy” of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Besides the effect described by Wardle and his colleagues, combustion of the trees and material lining the forest floor releases a large pulse of the greenhouse gas. Finally, he notes, charcoal left in the wake of a fire tends to darken the ground. That causes the ground to absorb more sunlight and warm considerably, thereby boosting long-term rates of decomposition and carbon dioxide production. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Sunday, November 2, 2008
robots 65.rob.3 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
1 “Robot” comes from the Czech word robota, meaning “drudgery,” and first appeared in the 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The drama ends badly when the machines rise up and kill their creators, leaving a sole lonely survivor. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
2 They say it was an accident. The first known case of robot homicide occurred in 1981, when a robotic arm crushed a Japanese Kawasaki factory worker.
3 More than a million industrial robots are now in use, nearly half of them in Japan.
4 Archytas of Tarentum, a pal of Plato’s, built a mechanical bird driven by a jet of steam or compressed air—arguably history’s first robot—in the fifth century B.C.
5 Leonardo da Vinci drew up plans for an armored humanoid machine in 1495. Engineer Mark Rosheim has created a functional miniature version for NASA to help colonize Mars.
6 Slow but steady: The real Mars robots, Spirit and Opportunity, have logged 10.5 miles trudging across the Red Planet for more than three years. The unstoppable droids were built to last 90 days.
7 The United States’ military corps of 4,000 robots includes reconnaissance Talon bots that scout for roadside bombs in Iraq and PackBots that poked around for Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Afghanistan. Apparently without much success.
8 PackBot’s manufacturer, iRobot, has also sold more than 2 million Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, with the same environment-sensing technology.
robot-2-150.jpgrobot-3-150.jpg
9 Low tech vs. high tech: Taliban fighters in Afghanistan have reportedly used ladders to flip over and disable the U.S. military robots sent to scout out their caves.
10 Elektro, the world’s first humanoid robot, debuted in 1939. Built by Westinghouse, the seven-foot-tall walking machine “spoke” more than 700 words stored on 78-rpm records to simulate conversation.
11 Life is tough in Tinseltown: Elektro later appeared in the 1960 B movie Sex Kittens Go to College.
12 R2-D2 is the only character that appears unchanged (by aging, say, or a funky black outfit) in all six Star Wars movies.
13 R2’s dark secret: It was played by actor Kenny Baker, who by the end was mostly given the boot and replaced by CGI.
14 Chris Melhuish of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory created robots that use bacteria-filled fuel cells to produce electricity from rotten apples and dead flies. The goal: robots that forage for their own food. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
15 Mini Me: Australian researchers are trying to build a microrobot that would mimic the swim stroke used by E. coli bacteria. It would be injected into a patient so it could take a biopsy from the inside.
16 Cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick calls himself the world’s first cyborg, with computer chips implanted in his left arm. He can remotely operate doors, an artificial hand, and an electronic wheelchair.
17 Winebot, built by Japan’s NEC System Technologies and Mie University, can ID scads of different wines, cheeses, and hors d’oeuvres . . . up to a point. It recently mistook a reporter’s hand for prosciutto.
18 MIT’s Media Lab is trying to make robots personal, developing RoCo—a computer with a monitor for a head and neck—and Leonardo, a sort of super-Furby designed to respond to emotional cues.
19 No strings attached! Robotics expert Henrik Christensen predicts humans will be having sex with robots within four years. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
20 Hans Moravec, founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, predicts that robots will emerge as their own species by 2040. “They could replace us in every essential task and, in principle, operate our society increasingly well without us,” he concludes, oddly cheery.
2 They say it was an accident. The first known case of robot homicide occurred in 1981, when a robotic arm crushed a Japanese Kawasaki factory worker.
3 More than a million industrial robots are now in use, nearly half of them in Japan.
4 Archytas of Tarentum, a pal of Plato’s, built a mechanical bird driven by a jet of steam or compressed air—arguably history’s first robot—in the fifth century B.C.
5 Leonardo da Vinci drew up plans for an armored humanoid machine in 1495. Engineer Mark Rosheim has created a functional miniature version for NASA to help colonize Mars.
6 Slow but steady: The real Mars robots, Spirit and Opportunity, have logged 10.5 miles trudging across the Red Planet for more than three years. The unstoppable droids were built to last 90 days.
7 The United States’ military corps of 4,000 robots includes reconnaissance Talon bots that scout for roadside bombs in Iraq and PackBots that poked around for Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Afghanistan. Apparently without much success.
8 PackBot’s manufacturer, iRobot, has also sold more than 2 million Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, with the same environment-sensing technology.
robot-2-150.jpgrobot-3-150.jpg
9 Low tech vs. high tech: Taliban fighters in Afghanistan have reportedly used ladders to flip over and disable the U.S. military robots sent to scout out their caves.
10 Elektro, the world’s first humanoid robot, debuted in 1939. Built by Westinghouse, the seven-foot-tall walking machine “spoke” more than 700 words stored on 78-rpm records to simulate conversation.
11 Life is tough in Tinseltown: Elektro later appeared in the 1960 B movie Sex Kittens Go to College.
12 R2-D2 is the only character that appears unchanged (by aging, say, or a funky black outfit) in all six Star Wars movies.
13 R2’s dark secret: It was played by actor Kenny Baker, who by the end was mostly given the boot and replaced by CGI.
14 Chris Melhuish of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory created robots that use bacteria-filled fuel cells to produce electricity from rotten apples and dead flies. The goal: robots that forage for their own food. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
15 Mini Me: Australian researchers are trying to build a microrobot that would mimic the swim stroke used by E. coli bacteria. It would be injected into a patient so it could take a biopsy from the inside.
16 Cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick calls himself the world’s first cyborg, with computer chips implanted in his left arm. He can remotely operate doors, an artificial hand, and an electronic wheelchair.
17 Winebot, built by Japan’s NEC System Technologies and Mie University, can ID scads of different wines, cheeses, and hors d’oeuvres . . . up to a point. It recently mistook a reporter’s hand for prosciutto.
18 MIT’s Media Lab is trying to make robots personal, developing RoCo—a computer with a monitor for a head and neck—and Leonardo, a sort of super-Furby designed to respond to emotional cues.
19 No strings attached! Robotics expert Henrik Christensen predicts humans will be having sex with robots within four years. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
20 Hans Moravec, founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, predicts that robots will emerge as their own species by 2040. “They could replace us in every essential task and, in principle, operate our society increasingly well without us,” he concludes, oddly cheery.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
ape Louis J. Sheehan
Human beings and nonhuman apes inhabit neighboring branches on the tree of life, but there are differences. Humans have less hair and perpetually enlarged mammary glands, and unlike other apes, we sweat a lot. In 1960, to explain these differences, marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy posited a water-dependent species that preceded human beings. Hardy pointed out that only aquatic mammals like walruses and hippopotamuses have naked skin and subcutaneous fat—human traits not shared by other apes.
Hardy’s “aquatic apes” were not giant beasts living like Aquaman; rather, the species that eventually became Homo sapiens waded in and out of water and learned to swim and dive. This exposure to water, according to the theory, led to the development of human traits like walking upright.
A version of this hypothesis has been around since Greeks theorized that all living things came from the sea, but it gained the most popularity in 1972, when Elaine Morgan, an award-winning Welsh television writer, advocated for it in her book The Descent of Woman. She continued to champion the hypothesis in later books, including The Aquatic Ape.
But the aquatic ape hypothesis never got much support from the scientific community. Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at Lehman College in New York, says the hypothesis is more an exercise in comparative anatomy than a theory supported by data.
Hardy’s “aquatic apes” were not giant beasts living like Aquaman; rather, the species that eventually became Homo sapiens waded in and out of water and learned to swim and dive. This exposure to water, according to the theory, led to the development of human traits like walking upright.
A version of this hypothesis has been around since Greeks theorized that all living things came from the sea, but it gained the most popularity in 1972, when Elaine Morgan, an award-winning Welsh television writer, advocated for it in her book The Descent of Woman. She continued to champion the hypothesis in later books, including The Aquatic Ape.
But the aquatic ape hypothesis never got much support from the scientific community. Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at Lehman College in New York, says the hypothesis is more an exercise in comparative anatomy than a theory supported by data.
zodiac63.zod.3 Louis J. Sheehan
DNA tests being conducted by the FBI could soon reveal whether a former Seguin resident led a ghastly double life.
Two Seguin women awaiting the result say they wouldn’t be surprised if they confirmed that Jack Tarrance, who lived in a Seguin mobile home park in the 1990s, had also been San Francsco’s feared “Zodiac” killer of the late 1960s.
Authorities do not have a full DNA profile of the man who shot or stabbed at least seven people in the Bay Area — killing five — and sent notes to newspapers describing his dark deeds.
In 2000, Tarrance’s stepson, Dennis Kaufman, saw a documentary about the Zodiac slayings and aspects of the killer’s profile as portrayed in the piece seemed to fit the man who’d come into his mother’s life in 1970. The “Zodiac” killer was familiar with electronics and with codes — Tarrance was a Ham radio enthusiast — and used the codes in some of his letters, which described his deeds and in one case told of other killings he claimed to have committed.
Kaufman realized the killer sounded very familiar — and began wondering about his stepfather.
At first, Kaufman said he set out to convince himself Tarrance wasn’t the killer. But the more he looked, the more parallels he found.
Tarrance moved his family very regularly. He’d only stayed in Seguin a few years, near the end of his mother’s life, who died in a Seguin nursing home in 1997 and is buried in Lockhart.
Kaufman could demonstrate that his stepfather was familiar with the areas where the attacks took place.
On his Internet Web site, Kaufman displays examples of the handwriting of Tarrance and the “Zodiac,” and they look very similar.
Like “Zodiac,” Kaufman said, Tarrance would later claim other killings, and even expressed concern at one point that his stepson would put him in prison.
In his late years, Tarrance publicly disavowed being “Zodiac,” even though Kaufman has recordings that might suggest otherwise.
Kaufman, who was five years old when his mother married Tarrance, says he attended 30 different schools while growing up.
A Seguin woman who has known Tarrance for 32 years says he regularly moved between Texas, the California bay area and the Pacific northwest.
The woman, in her 70s, was one of two Seguin residents who gave interviews to the Seguin Gazette Enterprise on condition their names and addresses not appear in the newspaper because of their concerns about interest in the case — and about who might be interested.
“I’ve already been stalked,” she said, referring to a recent incident in which she called police because of a prowler on her property.
She said Tarrance moved here with his wife, Nora, and son, Charlie, in about 1990.
He lived on Social Security and not much else and was not gainfully employed when he came to Seguin — as he usually wasn’t.
“I think he moved here so they could eat at my house,” she said. “They’d come over every day about 3:30 p.m. and play dominoes — and of course, they’d stay for dinner.”
The woman said her husband had never trusted Tarrance and always told her to never allow him in the house if he wasn’t home.
But she was never worried, she said, because she knew Tarrance and the rest of his family loved her and always had.
“I knew him for 32 years,” she said. “He told me once he absolutely would have killed anybody in any place if they’d ever hurt me. He absolutely thought I’d hung the moon.”
That wasn’t necessarily a mutual feeling, though.
“He’s a thief. I always knew Jack was capable of anything, and he holds no surprises for me,” she said. “In fact, if he ever looked at anything of value in my house, I’d put it away.”
The last time he visited, in 2004 just two years before his death, the woman said she believed Tarrance took ornaments from her Christmas tree — and a Hallmark holiday train piece from a shelf.
While less than completely enamoured with Tarrance, she said in reflecting back over the years, he had made statements that offered some tantalizing hints about his past.
“I believe Jack is fully capable of (the killings) because he’s made some statements that don’t make me doubt it at all,” she said.
One example: one time he asked her how many people she’d seen die — which she believed was an odd question to ask a woman — and she said two, her mother and her first husband.
“He said, ‘I’ve seen so many people die, I lost count a long time ago,’” she recalled.
The FBI agents who visited just more than a week ago to collect the DNA sample told her the test results could come in about six weeks. She said she looked forward to finding out.
“They said they’d let me know, and depending on the results they’d know what questions they’d want to ask,” she said.
The second Seguin woman is related to the first, but asked that her name, the precise relationship and her address be left out of this story to protect her identity, as well.
“A lot of strange people are interested in this case,” she said.
She found out about her possible “Zodiac” connection after Kaufman called Seguin looking for someone who could provide the DNA sample.
Like the first woman, she said she was initially shocked to learn that a man she believed she’d known for years could be a serial killer.
“(She) called me and said, ‘Dennis says Jack’s the Zodiac killer,” the resident recalled. “I said, ‘No way!’ She said, ‘Google it.’ I read the information and said, ‘Yes, he must be. But he doesn’t seem like the type.’”
On reflection, though, she wasn’t so sure. Tarrance was no Santa Claus, either, she said.
He was a country boy who came from a tough, bad family out of North Texas, she said, and it likely shaped his personality, and made a point of saying that Tarrance was related to her only by marriage.
“My blood isn’t like that,” she said.
For about two years in the 1980s, the woman said, she and Tarrance had homes on the same lot in Austin — and both worked in service stations for the same oil company. She managed one, and he worked the night shift at another one nearby.
“He was very, very smart, but he never wanted to be a manager even though they would ask him,” she said. “He liked the graveyard shift. He was definitely a loner. He was the kind who stayed up all night and would sleep all day.”
She never knew Tarrance to have friends.
“You only saw him with family,” she said.
She said it was plain, in hindsight, that he had a dark side.
One time, she fought off a robber at her service station, telling him he’d have to shoot her before she’d give him access to the company safe, and she was struck later that day, she said, when she told Tarrance about the robbery.
“He told me, ‘It’s a good thing it wasn’t me — I’d have shot him on the spot.’”
Tarrance almost always carried a gun, and on the rare occasions he didn’t, the woman said, he always carried a big, ugly knife.
“It was big enough to definitely gut you,” she said.
He even recommended she carry one — and gave her a brief course in its correct use that makes her shudder today.
“He told me if I’d ever got in a fight to get them in the stomach and rip upwards,” she recalled. “Always stick it in and rip up — you don’t have the strength it would take to rip down.”
It never occurred to her then, she said, to ask, “How many times have you done this yourself?”
“I’m glad I never made him mad,” the woman said.
Was former Seguin resident Jack Tarrance California’s infamous “Zodiac” killer? His stepson, Dennis Kaufman says he believes he was — an assertion that has raised considerable controversy on the Internet. Kaufman makes his case at
http://thezodiackiller.digitalzones.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan
Two Seguin women awaiting the result say they wouldn’t be surprised if they confirmed that Jack Tarrance, who lived in a Seguin mobile home park in the 1990s, had also been San Francsco’s feared “Zodiac” killer of the late 1960s.
Authorities do not have a full DNA profile of the man who shot or stabbed at least seven people in the Bay Area — killing five — and sent notes to newspapers describing his dark deeds.
In 2000, Tarrance’s stepson, Dennis Kaufman, saw a documentary about the Zodiac slayings and aspects of the killer’s profile as portrayed in the piece seemed to fit the man who’d come into his mother’s life in 1970. The “Zodiac” killer was familiar with electronics and with codes — Tarrance was a Ham radio enthusiast — and used the codes in some of his letters, which described his deeds and in one case told of other killings he claimed to have committed.
Kaufman realized the killer sounded very familiar — and began wondering about his stepfather.
At first, Kaufman said he set out to convince himself Tarrance wasn’t the killer. But the more he looked, the more parallels he found.
Tarrance moved his family very regularly. He’d only stayed in Seguin a few years, near the end of his mother’s life, who died in a Seguin nursing home in 1997 and is buried in Lockhart.
Kaufman could demonstrate that his stepfather was familiar with the areas where the attacks took place.
On his Internet Web site, Kaufman displays examples of the handwriting of Tarrance and the “Zodiac,” and they look very similar.
Like “Zodiac,” Kaufman said, Tarrance would later claim other killings, and even expressed concern at one point that his stepson would put him in prison.
In his late years, Tarrance publicly disavowed being “Zodiac,” even though Kaufman has recordings that might suggest otherwise.
Kaufman, who was five years old when his mother married Tarrance, says he attended 30 different schools while growing up.
A Seguin woman who has known Tarrance for 32 years says he regularly moved between Texas, the California bay area and the Pacific northwest.
The woman, in her 70s, was one of two Seguin residents who gave interviews to the Seguin Gazette Enterprise on condition their names and addresses not appear in the newspaper because of their concerns about interest in the case — and about who might be interested.
“I’ve already been stalked,” she said, referring to a recent incident in which she called police because of a prowler on her property.
She said Tarrance moved here with his wife, Nora, and son, Charlie, in about 1990.
He lived on Social Security and not much else and was not gainfully employed when he came to Seguin — as he usually wasn’t.
“I think he moved here so they could eat at my house,” she said. “They’d come over every day about 3:30 p.m. and play dominoes — and of course, they’d stay for dinner.”
The woman said her husband had never trusted Tarrance and always told her to never allow him in the house if he wasn’t home.
But she was never worried, she said, because she knew Tarrance and the rest of his family loved her and always had.
“I knew him for 32 years,” she said. “He told me once he absolutely would have killed anybody in any place if they’d ever hurt me. He absolutely thought I’d hung the moon.”
That wasn’t necessarily a mutual feeling, though.
“He’s a thief. I always knew Jack was capable of anything, and he holds no surprises for me,” she said. “In fact, if he ever looked at anything of value in my house, I’d put it away.”
The last time he visited, in 2004 just two years before his death, the woman said she believed Tarrance took ornaments from her Christmas tree — and a Hallmark holiday train piece from a shelf.
While less than completely enamoured with Tarrance, she said in reflecting back over the years, he had made statements that offered some tantalizing hints about his past.
“I believe Jack is fully capable of (the killings) because he’s made some statements that don’t make me doubt it at all,” she said.
One example: one time he asked her how many people she’d seen die — which she believed was an odd question to ask a woman — and she said two, her mother and her first husband.
“He said, ‘I’ve seen so many people die, I lost count a long time ago,’” she recalled.
The FBI agents who visited just more than a week ago to collect the DNA sample told her the test results could come in about six weeks. She said she looked forward to finding out.
“They said they’d let me know, and depending on the results they’d know what questions they’d want to ask,” she said.
The second Seguin woman is related to the first, but asked that her name, the precise relationship and her address be left out of this story to protect her identity, as well.
“A lot of strange people are interested in this case,” she said.
She found out about her possible “Zodiac” connection after Kaufman called Seguin looking for someone who could provide the DNA sample.
Like the first woman, she said she was initially shocked to learn that a man she believed she’d known for years could be a serial killer.
“(She) called me and said, ‘Dennis says Jack’s the Zodiac killer,” the resident recalled. “I said, ‘No way!’ She said, ‘Google it.’ I read the information and said, ‘Yes, he must be. But he doesn’t seem like the type.’”
On reflection, though, she wasn’t so sure. Tarrance was no Santa Claus, either, she said.
He was a country boy who came from a tough, bad family out of North Texas, she said, and it likely shaped his personality, and made a point of saying that Tarrance was related to her only by marriage.
“My blood isn’t like that,” she said.
For about two years in the 1980s, the woman said, she and Tarrance had homes on the same lot in Austin — and both worked in service stations for the same oil company. She managed one, and he worked the night shift at another one nearby.
“He was very, very smart, but he never wanted to be a manager even though they would ask him,” she said. “He liked the graveyard shift. He was definitely a loner. He was the kind who stayed up all night and would sleep all day.”
She never knew Tarrance to have friends.
“You only saw him with family,” she said.
She said it was plain, in hindsight, that he had a dark side.
One time, she fought off a robber at her service station, telling him he’d have to shoot her before she’d give him access to the company safe, and she was struck later that day, she said, when she told Tarrance about the robbery.
“He told me, ‘It’s a good thing it wasn’t me — I’d have shot him on the spot.’”
Tarrance almost always carried a gun, and on the rare occasions he didn’t, the woman said, he always carried a big, ugly knife.
“It was big enough to definitely gut you,” she said.
He even recommended she carry one — and gave her a brief course in its correct use that makes her shudder today.
“He told me if I’d ever got in a fight to get them in the stomach and rip upwards,” she recalled. “Always stick it in and rip up — you don’t have the strength it would take to rip down.”
It never occurred to her then, she said, to ask, “How many times have you done this yourself?”
“I’m glad I never made him mad,” the woman said.
Was former Seguin resident Jack Tarrance California’s infamous “Zodiac” killer? His stepson, Dennis Kaufman says he believes he was — an assertion that has raised considerable controversy on the Internet. Kaufman makes his case at
http://thezodiackiller.digitalzones.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan
obese 993.obe.43 Louis J. Sheehan
1. Child-safety seat manufacturers are starting to make bigger models after a recent study showed that over 250,000 U.S. children age 6 and under are too fat to use them.
2. According to a study by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, nearly half the 4,000 people responding to an online survey about obesity said they would give up a year of their life rather than be fat.
3. Between 15 percent and 30 percent also said they would rather walk away from their marriage, give up the possibility of having children, be depressed, or become alcoholic rather than be obese.
4. Five percent and 4 percent, respectively, said they would rather lose a limb or be blind than be overweight.
5. From 1991 to 2000, the average weight of Americans increased by 8.5 pounds.
6. In 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration increased its estimate of the weight of the average male from 170 to 184 pounds.
7. Airlines spent $275 million on 350 million additional gallons of fuel in 2000 to compensate for the additional weight of their passengers. Now we know why the peanuts are no longer free!
8. Stand by your man: More than a decade ago, Manuel Uribe, now weighing 1,200 pounds (the equivalent of five baby elephants) and bedridden for the past five years, was abandoned by his wife because she was frightened by his increasing size.
9. Virgin Atlantic paid Barbara Hewson from Wales the equivalent of US$24,100 in 2002 as compensation after she was squashed by an obese person sitting next to her on a transatlantic flight. Barbara suffered a blood clot in her chest, torn leg muscles, and acute sciatica and was bedridden for a month.
10. Duke University Medical Center found that women and men who lost 10 percent of their total body weight reported a significant improvement in their sexual quality of life.
11. Obesity ranks second among preventable causes of death. Tobacco use is number one.
12. According to the Department of Veteran Affairs, of the 7.5 million veterans who receive their health benefits from the agency, more than 70 percent are overweight and 20 percent have diabetes, which may lead to blindness, amputations, and kidney and heart problems.
13. Two years ago, the Hardee's fast-food chain introduced the 1,420-calorie 107-fat-gram "Monster Thickburger." It contains two 1/3-pound slabs of Angus beef, four strips of bacon, three slices of cheese, and mayonnaise on a buttered sesame-seed bun.
14. Mississippi is the home of the mud pie, Cajun fried pecans, sweet potato crunch, fried shrimp, and catfish. Mississippi is also home to the country's fattest people—more than 25 percent of adult Mississippians are obese. Coincidence?
15. Recent studies have shown that obesity can cause you to lose sleep.
16. On the other hand, a lack of sleep may result in obesity.
17. It's a vicious cycle.
18. Never forget your past: Aborigines and the Pima indians of Arizona developed obesity, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension after transitioning to a Western lifestyle.
19. If the entire morbidly obese population of the U.S. lived in one state, it would be the 12th highest-populated state, with more people than Virginia. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com/
20. A 2003 study reported that 21 percent of all New York City elementary students from all income levels are obese.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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