the Big Bang

 

I am monitoring a biology class this week, and today's assignment included a number of questions about the Big Bang.

Here is the opening paragraph:

"Around 13.7 billion years ago, everything in the entire universe was condensed in an  infinitesimally small singularity, a point of infinite denseness and heat. Suddenly, an expansion began, ballooning our universe outwards faster than the speed of light. This was a period of cosmic inflation that lasted mere fractions of a second. After the first second of the early universe, the temperature of everything was insanely hot, at about 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit. The cosmos now contained a vast array of fundamental particles such as neutrons, electrons, and protons - the raw materials that would become the building blocks for everything that exists today"

The man who discovered the Big Bang was a Catholic priest named Georges Lemaitre.

If you could diagram what it looked like, it would resemble the picture below

A 2017 Gallup creationism survey found that 38 percent of adults in the United States held the view that "God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years" when asked for their views on the origin and development of human beings, which Gallup noted was the lowest level in 35 years. It was suggested that the level of support could be lower when poll results are adjusted after comparison with other polls with questions that more specifically account for uncertainty and ambivalence.^] Gallup found that, when asking a similar question in 2019, 40 percent of US adults held the view that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so".

Among the biggest young Earth creationist organizations are Answers in Genesis, Institute for Creation Research, and Creation Ministries International.

In the group that believe that the early is less than 10,000 years old, there are some who believe it was created in six days as we know them, because that was it says in Genesis.

30% of the American population believes that the Bible is literally true. The articles below will demonstrate why that is nonsense:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2013/04/noahs-ark-and-othe-rfairy-tales.html

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2010/09/bible-told-me-so.html

Neil deGrasse Tyson (US: /dəˈɡræs/ də-GRASS or UK: /dəˈɡrɑːs/ də-GRAHSS; born October 5, 1958) is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Tyson studied at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Columbia University. From 1991 to 1994, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. In 1994, he joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist and the Princeton faculty as a visiting research scientist and lecturer. In 1996, he became director of the planetarium and oversaw its $210 million reconstruction project, which was completed in 2000. Since 1996, he has been the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson

Tyson's most famous quote about science is this:

"Science is still true, even if you don't believe in it:"

There is certainly a place for religion in our society, but when it starts dictating public policy, it is a dangerous thing, and the recent controversy about frozen embryos in Alabama is just the latest example. Both the current speaker of the House and the Supreme Court justice in Alabama are evangelical Christians, a group that overwhelmingly supports Donald Trump, who is officially the worst president in our country's history.

Here's my final thought:

When in doubt - trust the science.

what does your email address say about you?

 

About a month ago, I decided it was time to update the family histories for both the Brennan and Stenson side of my family.

Although I had printed material for both sides, the fact that it could not be easily updated made me decide that the histories needed to be in electronic form, so I published a couple of articles, and invited my cousins to send whatever updates they could - a process that is still ongoing.

I set up a Hotmail account sometime just before the millennium, and set up a Gmail account once I discovered that my employer (The Autobarn of Evanston) blocked hotmail from getting through. However, they did not black Gmail, so I set  up an account with them around 2006. About that time, I discovered blogging - which requires a Gmail account. 

Hotmail was started in 1996, and was purchased by Microsoft in 1997. In 2012, it was updated, and the name was changed to outlook.com, but messages sent to and from hotmail still worked.

Gmail, which is owned by Google, was started in 2004, but the history of email goes back a lot further - to 1971.

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, a recent graduate of MIT, was looking for interesting problems to solve. He was hired to help build ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet, and during his first year on the job he came up with a simple yet ingenious way to send messages between networked computers. He created an address system that put a user’s login name in front of the @ symbol and the computer hostname on the other side. Although the first successful test message traveled just 10 feet between computers, it became a technological milestone.

Tomlinson, who died in 2016, could never remember exactly what was in that first message, but in interviews he speculated that it was “something like QWERTYUIOP” — the top row of letters on an English-language keyboard.

What I like about hotmail  is that you can set up folders for a variety of topics. I probably have about 50, but some of them are dormant. As near as I can tell, the oldest correspondence goes back to 2004, when I was sending out emails from a cyber cafe in China. I pay Microsoft $1.05 every month to store things in the cloud, but I have no idea how to access the information.

A few days ago, I published an article about Skype, which is what we used for video calls before the advent of Zoom. In the same article, I also mentioned AOL, which used to be the most popular domain name. Although it still exists, it is nowhere near as popular as either outlook.com or Gmail. At least one of my cousins still has an AOL account.

Does it matter what provider you use for your email? In some cases, yes.

https://www.poynter.org/tech-tools/2021/not-so-hotmail-what-your-vintage-email-address-says-to-potential-employers-2/

The article above goes into more detail, but here are a few key points:

Sree Sreenivasan, a strategist with an accomplished digital resume, ignited a fierce debate on LinkedIn in January when he suggested that an email address that ends in @hotmail.com might be grounds for tossing out a job application.

“When you see a resume with a Hotmail address, what do you do?” he wrote. “Treat ’em same as others? Reject ’em right away? Some other response?”

Responses ranged from annoyed (“That would be the same as poking fun at a 15-year-old Toyota that is rust-free and still runs like new. It works, it does its job, and it’s mine. Get over it.”) to outraged (“If my email doesn’t get me the job, then I didn’t want it to begin with!”) to pointedly bombastic (“While you are on it you should track them, find them and put a bullet in their heads. That would teach them.”).

The furor demonstrated that not only are people using one of the world’s oldest webmail services, they’re zealous fans of accounts that some have been using for decades.

But does a Hotmail domain actually matter to job recruiters? What about other long-standing email services, like AOL or Yahoo or Outlook? Recruiters, hiring managers, lawyers and human resources experts we spoke to largely agree that it’s unwise for businesses to discard a job application because of a vintage email domain.

But it still might be time to consider a switch to something fresher.

Hotmail launched in 1996 as one of the first public webmail services. Originally stylized as HoTMaiL to highlight its web-based existence (HTML provides the building blocks for most web pages) and because mixing cases was inexplicably popular at the time, Hotmail offered everything that ISP-based email did not. Most notably, while its contemporaries were tied to a specific device, users could access Hotmail from any computer all over the world.

Around the same time that Yahoo acquired its main competitor, Four11 RocketMail, Hotmail went to Microsoft and underwent a series of rebranding campaigns: MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail and, finally, Outlook.com.

When Microsoft began encouraging Hotmail users to switch to Outlook in 2012, they used language like “upgrade” and referred to Outlook as “modern email.” It made Hotmail, already an ancient brand in Internet years at 16 years old, seem completely archaic.

That legacy is why some may see Hotmail holdouts in 2018 as people who lack technological knowledge.

Gmail was created by a Google employee named Buchheit in 2005 

https://workspace.google.com/blog/productivity-collaboration/celebrating-50-years-of-email

More than 30 years after Tomlinson’s breakthrough, a Google engineer named Paul Buchheit conducted his own experiments with email. In a 2005 blog post, Buchheit described the problem he was trying to solve: 

“My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble…I couldn't always get to my email because it was stuck on one computer, and web interfaces were unbearably clunky. And I had spam. A lot of it. With Gmail I got the opportunity to change email — to build something that would work for me, not against me.”

Buchheit created Gmail as a browser-based email program that allowed users to easily search their own messages. He wasn’t sure if it was going to be for everyone, but when he released a beta to fellow Googlers they were fans of its search and storage capabilities. And when Gmail launched on April 1, 2004 with lightning fast email search and a storage limit of 1 GB—500 times more than prevailing inboxes of the time—a lot of people thought it was an April Fool’s Day hoax.

Gmail is now part of Google Workspace, the integrated solution that spans Docs, Slides, Sheets, Meet, Chat, and more—and that’s home to more than 3 billion global users. Google Workspace is where people connect, create, and collaborate at work, at home, in the classroom, and everywhere in between.

Paul Buchheit wasn’t the only person getting a lot of spam in his inbox back in the early 2000s, and the issue of unwanted messages—from spam to phishing attempts and malware—has grown worse over time. On any given day, Google Workspace now prevents more than 100 million harmful emails from reaching Gmail users.

“Our machine learning models have evolved to understand and filter new threats, and we continue to block more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching our users,” said Neil Kumaran, Senior Product Manager, Counter-Abuse Technology.

Creating a secure-by-design approach to email that respects the privacy of individuals has been a core principle for Gmail for years, yet our product designers continue to push safeguards to new levels. For example, Google Workspace recently announced support for the Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) in Gmail, which allows organizations to validate the ownership of their logos as part of authenticating email messages. BIMI provides email recipients and email security systems increased confidence in the source of emails, and enables senders to provide their audience with a more immersive experience.

Cyber security is a big business today, and cyber security professionals can easily earn more than $100,000 a year. The computer that I bought more than 5 years ago came loaded with McAfee software, but I still had to bring it to the Geek Squad at Best Buy to have it updated. I also had to buy a new hard drive less than a year ago.

Despite all the precautions large companies take, malware can still get through. About a year ago, the computer system at the Tucson Unified School district was hacked, which led the security team to institute even stricter protections, which includes a secondary verification process after you have put in your password. 

Most of us spend a little time each day either reading or sending email, but there IS one form of communication that will never go out of style, and that is the United States Postal Service.

Although volume continues to drop, it is not stopping any time soon.

The USPS processes both domestic and international mail, which can range from postcards, letters, and packages to periodicals and large parcels. According to the USPS, its network of over 35,000 post offices, branches, and stations processes an average of 622 million pieces of mail each day. This number includes an estimated 545 million pieces of domestic mail and 77 million pieces of international mail. The USPS also handles an average of 4. 9 billion pieces of First-Class Mail every day.

Beyond Christmas cards, most of us do not mail many letters, so it is time to do another experiment, by sending out some postcards .

It will be fun to see the results.

https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/

Skype

 

When Sharon and I and Kelly moved to Arizona in the fall of 2011, Brian stayed in Chicago. In addition to the fact had a well-paying job at a real estate management company, he was also dating a delightful woman named Ejiro, who happened to be a doctor. Roughly a year later, they came to the realization that a long-term relationship was not viable, so Brian decided to take the Amtrak train from Chicago to Flagstaff, and he arrived in the Grand Canyon state in July of 2013.

By the time he arrived, Kelly and Chris had recently moved from Flagstaff to Tucson so that Kelly could more easily get the prerequisite courses she needed for her nursing degree. Brian shortly thereafter moved to Tucson, and lived with Kelly and Chris briefly until he could find his own place.

“Plenty of Fish” paired him with a woman in Tucson where he lived for a brief period of time, but he moved out when she went full crazy. Fortunately, he met Kim not long after that, and that relationship eventually led to a marriage and a couple of very cute children.

Shortly after we moved to Flagstaff, we discovered Skype, which allowed us to have video conferences with Brian in Chicago.

 Skype has existed longer than most of us realize – and it is still in operation today, although it had changed ownership a few times since its founding in 2005.

Skype (/skaɪp/) is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, debit-based calls to landline and mobile telephones (over traditional telephone networks), and other features. It is available on various desktop, mobile, and video game console platforms.

Skype was created by Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis, and four Estonian developers, and first released in August 2003. In September 2005, eBay acquired it for $2.6 billion. In September 2009, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board bought 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay, valuing the business at $2.92 billion. In May 2011, Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion and used it to replace their Windows Live Messenger. As of 2011, most of the development team and 44% of all the division's employees were in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia.

Skype originally featured a hybrid peer-to-peer and client–server system. It became entirely powered by Microsoft-operated supernodes in May 2012;^[in 2017, it changed from a peer-to-peer service to a centralized Azure-based service. As of February 2023, it was used by 36 million people each day.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype 

Skype’s popularity has been hurt by Apple’s I-Phone, which was first released in 2007, Microsoft’s own messaging app and Zoom.

The I-Phone has a FaceTime feature, which permits video conferencing, a feature that the Android phone did not have until recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

FaceTime was added to the I-phone is 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaceTime

Zoom was introduced in April of 2011, and its use exploded during the coronavirus epidemic. Annual revenue is more than $4 billion a year, and its success have made founder Eric Yuan a very rich man, with an estimated net worth of more than $16 billion, a very impressive figure for a man who did not speak English when he moved to California in 1997, but it took 9 tries for him to obtain a visa.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Video_Communications

Although Skype’s founding nearly 20 years ago seems like ancient history, consider the fate of a company that is even older.

AOL (originally known as America Online) had its origins in 1985, nearly 40 years ago.

AOL was one of the early pioneers of the Internet in the 1990s and was (at one point) the most recognized brand on the web in the United States. AOL once provided a dial-up internet service to millions of Americans and pioneered instant messaging and chat rooms with AOL Instant Messanger (AIM). In 1998, AOL purchased Netscape for US$4.2 billion. By 2000, AOL was providing internet service to over 20 million consumers, dominating the market of internet service providers (ISPs). In 2001, at the height of its popularity, it purchased the media conglomerate Time Warner in the largest merger in U.S. history. AOL rapidly shrank thereafter, partly due to the decline of dial-up and rise of broadband. AOL was eventually spun off from Time Warner in 2009, with Tim Armstrong appointed the new CEO. Under his leadership, the company invested in media brands and advertising technologies.

On June 23, 2015, AOL was acquired by Verizon Communications for $4.4 billion. On May 3, 2021, Verizon announced it would sell Yahoo and AOL to private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion. On September 1, 2021, AOL became part of the new Yahoo! Inc.

Do you remember this greeting?

 

(2) AOL Dial Up Internet Connection Sound + You've Got Mail (America Online) 90's - YouTube

 

I have not had an AOL account for many years, but I know a few people who still have theirs. I now rely on Microsoft’s hormail.com and Google’s Gmail for my electronic mail needs.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL

For videoconferencing, ZOOM has been a great tool. Not only did it allow me to teach classes remotely in 2020, I also use it to contact with my old neighbor in China on a fairly regular basis, and I have used it to connect to family picnics in Minnesota. It also happens to be how Brian and Kim got married, since the justice of the peace was in downtown Tucson, and they were in a hotel in Oro Valley.

 

Technology is constantly changing, so it’s important to try to stay as current as you can.  

 

 

 

 

Brennan family history

 

 

Roots: The Saga of an American Family is a 1976 novel written by Alex Haley. It tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent, sold into slavery in Africa, and transported to North America; it follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the United States down to Haley. The release of the novel, combined with its hugely popular television adaptation, Roots (1977), led to a cultural sensation in the United States. The novel spent forty-six weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List, including twenty-two weeks at number one. The last seven chapters of the novel were later adapted in the form of a second miniseries, Roots: The Next Generations (1979). It stimulated interest in African American genealogy and an appreciation for African American history.

The book was originally described as "fiction", yet it sold in the non-fiction section of bookstores. Haley spent the last chapter of the book describing his research in archives and libraries to support his family's oral tradition with written records.

The series generated an increased interest in genealogy. Although Ancestry.com can provide some help, both the Mormons and the Irish historical society can be of assistance also.

I have Irish roots on both my dad’s side and my mom’s, and I have a fair amount of information already, but I need to dig deeper to get more information on the Brennan side.

 I explored the roots of the Brennan side of our history on September2, 2015. Included in that story are more stories, which makes them a story within a story.

You can find the overall story at the link below:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2015/09/roots.html

 If you dig a bit deeper, you can find articles related to one main topic. For example, there are stories that focus on Larry Brennan:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2015/12/ (my dad was a farmer)

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2021/05/my-dad-mail-carrier.html (mail carrier

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2018/10/ (Larry’s last day)

 https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2009/06/leader-of-band.html (Larry the patriarch)

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2012/02/ghost-of-larry-brennan.html (Larry the ghost) 

A little know fact is that my mom has an unusual connection to the sparrows of Capistrano:

 https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-mother-bird.html

 

Despite all the time that we spend gathered with our cousins, there are some things that you don’t know about me:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2018/06/honest-john-rest-of-story.html

 

Mark’s brother Tom (my namesake) DID go to Alaska during the Alaskan gold rush, and I had always been under the impression that he had been killed by a falling tree. I just learned that his actual cause of death was scurvy. His story can be found below:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2010/08/tom-brennan-in-yukon.html 

Our cousin Michael was able to find a picture of Tom’s grave in Dawson, Alaska.

 

 

My paternal grandparents are Mark Brennan (born 8/20/873) and Josephine Harris (born on 3/2/1877), and both were born in Washington County, Minnesota.

Mark’s parents were Patrick Brennan and Bridget Snee. They were born in County Sligo, Ireland.

Bridget Snee’s brother Pat married Winnie Stenson, who is Martin Stenson’s aunt. As a result, my parents on both sides were related long before Larry and Mae got married on 9/2/1946.

Josephine's parents were George Harris and Alice White. George was born in Pennsylvania in 1824, and Alice was bon 11/27/1843 in Galena, Illinois.

The marriage of Mark and Josephine produced 8 children (Marie, Agnes, Alice, Josephine, Clement, Laurence, Dorothy, and Marjorie.)

Josephine died in 1920, and Mark died in the summer of 1929, just a few months before the start of the Great Depression. As a result, the operation of the Brennan farm became the responsibility of Laurence (age 20) and Clement (age 18)

Marie married Ed Bloomstrand, and they settled in Hastings.

They had 3 children (Edward, Steven, and Frances).

Edward perished on Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945. Steven married Mary, and Frances married Don Badger, and they had 5 children (Leslie, Kathy, ….

*********************************************************

Alice never married, and eventually moved to St. Paul, where she worked for many years at the Midway Bank.

 Agnes also never married. She lived in a small apartment in Hastings for many years. She worked at Smead Manufacturing Company until she was well into her 80’s. Like most of her generation, Agnes was very frugal, and she also did not trust the stock market. As a result, she left an estate valued at slightly under $400,000.to her nieces and nephews – and most of the money was in passbook savings accounts. She also had roughly $100,000 in IDS stock, and a LOT of savings bonds.

Agnes was born on 10/25/02, and she died on 9/28/96 in Prescott, Wisconsin. She was 93 years old.

*********************************************

Josephine married George Olson, and they had 6 children (Susan, Mark, Peter, Jenny, Christopher and Char. For many years, George and Josephine hosted the Brennan family picnic at their farm in Afton, Minnesota. During the summer months, they ran a resort on Paul Lake.

Mark (12/8/47 - 8/30/20) is the cousin closest to me in age. Like me, he was an avid biker, and the best tribute that anyone could say about him is captured in the video from the Schoeneberger Funeral Home:

https://www.schoenebergerfuneralhome.com/obituaries/mark-olson

Susan married Jim Mack. When George and Josephine finally got too old to host the annual reunion, the site shifted to the home of Jim and Susan, but it also was held at a few other places.

 Clement married Miriam Jeans, and they had one child, a daughter named Jean (3/15/43 – 9/8/21).

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2015/12/my-dad-was-farmer.html

Although Clement was a farmer, he loved to write stories, and produced BOXES of stories over the years. The boxes eventually found their way into Jean’s garage in Las Vegas, but they eventually got passed on to some of our cousins.

Jean married Dave Zimmer, and they had 1 child, a daughter named Beth and a son. After their divorce, she married Michael Riley, and they had two children (Eric and Michael). Jean died in Las Vegas on 9/8/21).

 

Dorothy married Ed Farley, who was a farmer. They had two daughters,  Lois and Ruth.

 Laurence joined the Army in the early months of the war in 1942, but Clement (due to draft exemptions for farmers) remained on the farm until 1966, when he sold the farm in 1966 and moved to Forest Lake.

Larry married Mae Stenson (10/23/13 - 3/19/98) on 9/2/46.

During WWII, Mae lived in San Diego and worked at Consolidated Industries, which made airplanes. When the war ended, she traveled back to Minnesota on the train. A few days  earlier, Larry took a train from Dover, Delaware, and arrived in St. Paul, Minnesota at almost exactly the same time as Mae's train from California. A little more than a year later, they got married at Guardian Angels church in Hastings.

Their marriage produced two children, Tom (8/28/47) and Mary (4/12/50). 

Tom married Sharon Lennartson on 10/6/72, and they had two children, Brian (9/6/76) and Kelly (11/16/79). Both are married. Brian and Kim are parents to Alexander and Saoirse and Kelly and Chris are parents to Cody, our grand dog).

Like many of his generation, Larry Brennan was frugal. He saved most of the money he made while in the army, which allowed him to pay $5000 cash for his first house at 958 McLean. After the birth of their second child, in April of 1950. they knew they needed a large house, so paid $12,000 for 2059 Third Street, where Larry lived the last 44 years of his life. Since he hated  debt, he paid off the 20 year mortgage in 8 years. 

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2015/09/

Laurence decided he wanted a change from farming after the war, so he went to work for Cudahy Packing company in St. Paul Park, where he worked until the plant shut down in 1954. For a short time thereafter, he worked the night shift at Zinsmaster Baking Company.

Harry William Zinsmaster and R. F. Smith founded the Zinsmaster-Smith Bread Co. in Duluth in 1913. Zinsmaster bought out Smith in 1918, and the company expanded to include locations in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Hibbing and Superior.

During daytime hours, Laurence studied to become a mail carrier, a job that he started in 1955, and retired from there in 1976

When he joined the post office, he also joined the postal union.

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2022/02/

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2021/05/my-dad-mail-carrier.html

In 1971, Laurence and Mae celebrated their 25^th anniversary by taking a trip to Ireland, where they met with Luke and Mary Stenson, who were distant relatives of Mae. When my family and I traveled there in 1999, we also met with Luke and Mary, who still had a copy of the group picture she had taken in 1971.

For most of his life, Larry was in good health - but it all came of and end in 1994.

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2018/10/it-was-dark-and-stormy-night.html

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2012/02/ghost-of-larry-brennan.html

Marjorie marred Don Lundequam, and they had 5 children (Donald, Michael, Joseph, Paul and Mary Beth). Michael and Linda had 6 sons, which led to 12 grandchildren.

Don (5/19/48 – 6/5/70) joined the Army in 1970, and became a warrant officer – and a Huey pilot. He perished when his helicopter was shot down. He had been “in country” for only about 90 days.

 

https://www.virtualwall.org/dl/LundequamDJ01a.htm

I'm a firm believer that it is important to know our past, due to the fact that it help guide us into the future. Part of our joint past is the Brennan clan from long ago, and the family crest can be seen below: