[baudrunner]

I have printed the short intro to Alexander Mayer's lectures, saved the first lecture and read most of it. I find it lucid and insightful. It has even cleaned up bits of the clutter of some those unresolved matters in the recesses of my brain that have been patiently awaiting more input, such as that concerning the status of the Voyager and Pioneer missions. It is also a beautiful work, and worthy of the 18 megabytes of hard disk space that I have allocated it to.

I have some comments about the anomolous inconsistencies concerning expectations of GR, with respect to GPS accuracy. This is especially relevant to my experience because I have the ability to study the numbers that GPS data provides me, which I read from the computer in the taxi which provides my current source of income. In addition to the six decimal place precision of latitude and longitude I am also provided with the number that represents the number of satellites which contribute to that information at any given time, and which changes constantly. In that each satellite represents a unique vector contributing relative velocity and relative direction to the base line calculations one can imagine the complexity involved in the accumulation of data triangulated from all those sources and subsequently analysed mathematically to provide me with the information that supposedly determines my position to within a few feet. Well, I can tell you that it does not do this with the accuracy that it would in the ideal world and I suspect that that is why many GPS guided missiles used in Desert Storm would no doubt have missed their mark altogether had their intelligence not been supplemented by optical recognition technology, of that I am certain. That is not to belittle the GPS technology in the least because I am certain that its application is of more than sufficient accuracy to find lost souls and save lives, not to mention dispatch the closest taxicab to the location of its next fare, once that feature is implemented in our particular system. Let it not go unsaid that we currently do indeed have the capability, just not the application as yet.

Apart from the fact that the complexities of determining actual ground position are highly challenging anyway and the fact that corrections are made to the onboard clocks of all those satellites to compensate for the weaker gravity where they are located and also their velocity there must be additional surmountable factors which contribute to the anomalies which the experts have been puzzling over concerning discrepency between the predicted and the actual and they involve not just the means used to decipher the information, in spite of the fact that we do not live in a Euclidian Universe where Heisenberg is not constantly looking over our shoulders, and in order to determine with absolute precision one's place on this curved surface we cannot afford to overlook any and all contributing variables leading to the successful outcome of that exercise. Once we have resolved all of the outstanding issues that will allow us to derive the correct numbers we will no doubt have inadvertently met a major milestone in the development of the TOE as well, for it obviously requires a deeper understanding of the nature of reality than the scientific community now has.