Saturday, October 17, 2020

DEATH of IVAN ILYICH

My father Walter F. Bucknum saw on his deathbed, in a state between life and death, what he could never see during his entire lifetime...that his son Michael was a good human being and a moral person who cared about things in life and might one day do something important...I could tell this on my father's deathbed in Saint Mary's Hospital in Langhorne, PA as I stood there with my sister Susan holding his hands and trying to get him to awaken from his sleep state...where all the while he lay there trying to reawaken and talk to us, while all the time he was asleep tears were streaming down his face. This all took place in late March, 2006..And then he died and there was a funeral mass at Saint Bede's Church in Holland, PA and then a burial in Newtown, PA. 

Sunday, October 4, 2020

PASCAL UNIT

You might be surprised to learn who are some of the people who don't even know, and are unaware, of what the pressure unit Pa is in m-k-s units. In fact a pascal expressed in m-k-s units is a kg divided by a meter and by the square of the time unit seconds. This very odd and counterintuitive situation is what caused Bridgman to devise his own units of pressure as kilograms divided by meters squared. If you read Bridgman at all you will know about this. Bridgman's pressure unit was never adopted by anyone else because know one understood it. The occurrence of time in the pascal unit is very strange and does not appear to make any sense I believe...but we are stuck with it.