31. My favorite number.

Okay, let's talk about the weather first. It is cold. But, it has been considerably colder in Louisville. This morning's low was around 5 degrees. I've mentioned before the big snow of January 16-17, 1994 (a record up to that point of 17 inches, tying the record set on the same days in 1978). Three days after that snowfall marked the coldest temperature ever recorded in Louisville, 22 degrees below zero. It was 36 below over in Shelbyville. So, today's five degrees above zero seems warm. Today marks the anniversary of the biggest snowfall ever in Louisville, one of 22 inches. It didn't have the lasting effects of the 1978 and 1994 snowfalls because it warmed up faster, and there was no ice involved. This year, I don't think we've had 22 centimeters fall yet, although there was some white stuff blowing around last night around 10:00 pm. The snowy weather coupled with Super Bowl partiers out after the game could have made driving difficult.

Today is one of those dates that because of the way we record things makes for an interesting number, being 02/05/07, where 2 + 5 = 7. Its a small thing, but I still noticed it. I remember the morning of April 5 in 2006, waiting for 1:23 am to pass. Combined with the date, it would read 1:23 04/05/06, at least the way we write it here. In Cuba and South America, among other places, I'm sure someone was waiting on May 4th for the same reason. Another small thing but noticeable. With regard to calendar dates, I'm living in a charmed era. How many people will get to live through a palindromic year? I did in 1991. Then I did it again in 2002. There won't be another one until 2112. I doubt I will be here then. Everyone knows the rule for leap years - if the year is divisible by four, then it is a leap year. But the rule doesn't apply in years ending in 00 unless the first two digits of the year is divisible by four, such as 20. The century years 1700, 1800, and 1900 did not have leap years under the rule. But 2000 did, and I lived through it. That was an easy task after all the hoop-la two months earlier over Y2K. Remember that? I've always found it curious that both me and my brother were born on dates whose numbers are prime, 23 and 17 respectively. We are also both born in a month whose number is a square, me being 9 (3*3) and Kevin being 1 (1*1).

There is a system of beliefs called numerology. I've mentioned it in an earlier post. I've always been fascinated by the discussion of numerology, of calendars, and other mathematical relationships in our cultures. I may have written before of my belief that everything there is can be reduced to a number of some sort. Then, knowing what those numbers are and their relationships to each other, a specific and unique number could and can be applied to everything there is, all those things which have been created since God struck the original match causing the Big Bang, as discussed yesterday.

Among the things we already use numbers for are waves and specifically wavelengths. I've had a theory all my life about sound waves. I learned very early about the doppler effect of sound, the noices emanating from a fire engine siren or the old rotating fire alarm that was located on the old Okolona Fire House when it was still located on Blue Lick Road. I played little league baseball in the Okolona Little League, whose fields at the time were the remnants of the Shirley Neblett farm at the corner of Preston Highway and Blue Lick Road. My first year in the minor-minor league, we played on a field that is now occupied by the McDonald's just off that corner to the south. Later a Kroger was built as part of the Southwinds Shopping Center. Later, the entire little league was relocated to new fields and facilities on the back side of Southern High School, about one mile south of the original location and a new Home Depot was built on the former little league and women's club site. Mr. Neblett (whose son Bill was a friend a mine who passed away just a few weeks ago, and whose twin grandsons, also friends of mine, Mark and Neil, were born on the day President Kennedy was assasinated), gave part of his farm for the little league, another part for the Okolona Women's Club, and yet another part for the Okolona Fire House. Of the three entities, only the firehouse building remains, serving now as a senior citizens community center called the Wilderness Road Club, in honor of Preston Highway being the western terminus of the Wilderness Road which plays such a large part in Kentucky's history, entering the state at the opposite end, through the Cumberland Gap, made famous by George Caleb Bingham's oil on canvass painting in 1851 known as "Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap." But, I digress - but someday I will write about the Wilderness Road as it meandered through northern Bullitt and southern Jefferson County, from Bullitt's Lick west of present day Shepherdsville, to the Fish Pool Plantation near what is now Cooper Memorial Church, where it branched, one branch going to Buechel along the present day [Old] Shepherdsville Road, while the other one went north along the Preston Street Corduroy Road to the area called Poplar Level on the Clark family farm (near George Rogers Clark Park), and then to the Falls of the Ohio, closing in on present day Portland along what is now 26th Street.

Playing baseball at the little league, games were interrupted whenever the fire alarm sounded. The alarm was a yellow box with four speakers mounted on top of a red pole. It sat out just beyond the fence in the first base line of the minor league field. When it sounded, it rotated, calling the volunteers in from the proverbial four corners of the Okolona District, to go and fight the fires. (This was in the days before cell phones, pagers, and PDAs. Heck, some people didn't even have home phones). As the alarm rotated, the noise coming from it waxed and waned as the speakers went past. The alarm would sound for three minutes, which is an eternity if you are eight years old standing in right field, with very little to do anyway. But, the ebb and flow of the sound left an impression on me about soundwaves. Very little in pure science has ever really caught my attention, but due to an interest in history and politics, this did.

Historical events are often put to paper after the actual occurence, somtimes long afterwards. But even when there are eyewitnesses making the recording, there are likely to be differing accounts of what actually happened. Only with the advent of wax recordings, then later tape recorders and 8mm film, and progressing through to pictures on cell phones and instantaneous you-tube viewing has history become so easy to properly record. Now imagine if you could invent a device that could hear sound waves, much as your ear does. Hearing aids are just such an invention. They pick up a sound and magnify it so that one can hear it better. We've all experienced hearing a train bell in the distance, or the noise from Thunder Over Louisville, even when we are a mile or two away. When I was a kid out on South Park Road, we would often hear the practice bombs exploding at Fort Knox, some fifteen to twenty miles to the southwest. We know that sound, like light, travels at a given velocity. We've been taught that the light we see from the sun isn't instant, but has travelled over time. The same is true for sound. Sound travels over time, and as time goes by, the height of the sound waves becomes increasingly shorter - but there is still a wave, an up and down motion as the sound travels out into space.

In my theory, which I absolutely believe to be true, each and every sound ever made, is still out there travelling as waves in heights in an ever decreasing fashion. If a receiver could be invented that could pick up these diminished sound waves, we could hear the voices of the past, as their words are still out their bouncing around. We could hear President Lincoln's actual allegedly high-pitched delivery of the Gettysburg Address in 1863, or Napoleon Bonaparte's Farewell to the Old Guard in 1814, or President Washington's Farewell Address in 1794. If we fine-tuned the receiver, perhaps we could find Queen Elizabeth I in 1588 addressing her troops at Tilbury, or the Sermon on the Mount delivered by Jesus Christ around 30, or even further back the Apology of Socrates, 400 years before the birth of Christ. Those waves are there and the true recording of history is to be found when those waves are found and the sounds recreated.

And all of these things are based in numbers. Everyone has a favorite number. Mine is 31. This is post number 31.