Aging: Going the distance like Voyager 1, Termination Shock, and crossing the heliopause boundary into interstellar space and other adventures

If The Legend of Bagger Vance and the game of golf can be considered a metaphor for life, and it, along with such golf movies as Tin Cup and Seven Days in Utopia, surely can be, then perhaps the venerable Voyager 1 space probe can be considered as being somewhat analogous to aging.

On Sept. 5, 1977, the Voyager 1 space probe launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket. A 12-inch gold-plated copper disc stored aboard the probe contains greetings in 60 languages, samples of music from different cultures and eras, and natural and man-made sounds from Earth. They also contain electronic information that an advanced technological civilization could convert into diagrams and photographs.

Voyager 1’s primary mission was completed 12 years later in 1989 when it completed its planned close flybys of the Jupiter and Saturn planetary systems. Its extended Voyager Interstellar Mission objective is to extend the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) exploration of the solar system beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets to the outer limits of the Sun’s sphere of influence, and possibly beyond.

In August 2012, Voyager 1 flew beyond Termination Shock, the point where the solar wind becomes slower than the speed of sound, and crossing the heliopause boundary, and finally entering interstellar space, making it the first human-made object to explore this new territory. Its Mission Elapsed Time is now 45 years, seven months, and 22 days.

The existential point of Voyager 1 is it keeps on going. Aging is similar to that. In some ways, you move beyond the playbook but keep, by the grace of God, and genes, on going. That can be both liberating and terrifying. In a post last July (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2022/07/05/character-courage-redemption-and-some-thoughts-on-aging-gracefully-aging-well-hint-mellow-isnt-just-for-coffee-and-gratitude-really-is-an-attitude/), I wrote about aging gracefully, aging well.

“My own thoughts on aging gracefully, aging well, might be summarized thusly: Be mellow, be grateful,” I wrote two days before I knew I was going to have a cystoscopy for kidney stones at Health Sciences Centre (HSC) in Winnipeg. Perhaps it was meant as much as a 48-hour countdown clock pep talk to myself as anything. Because after the cystoscopy most of the grace I felt for the remainder of the day was fentanyl-fueled by my merciful urology surgeon, who discharged me from day surgery with an admonition to my medical escort that I not be allowed to sign any legal documents or venture into a casino for at least 24 hours. He also cautioned my medical escort that my memory would be on a five-minute fentanyl-inspired repeating question loop for the rest of the day. All in all, I’d say, doc was pretty close to the mark. On the good side, I sat obediently on a curb outside HSC in the wonderful, warm Winnipeg July sunshine, while Jeanette retrieved the vehicle from a nearby parkade. And I did this even though a beckoning lunch-hour hot dog cart was mere feet away. Later, minutes before closing time, we made our first trip together to the Polo Park shopping centre since long before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Jeanette says I raced along both the lower and upper levels of the mall at record race walking speed, compared to my often spine-challenged limp.

On the not-so-good side, I asked detailed questions of my medical escort about my urology procedure on the HSC elevator down to the ground floor. When I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting, I helpfully suggested that perhaps the answers I was receiving were not adequate. Once we arrived at Grand Medicine Health Sciences Pharmacy to get a couple of prescriptions filled, I had a pleasant, albeit apparently rather loud, telephone conversation with an agent of Manitoba Blue Cross  about the summer status of my plan coverage. Later, we had a lovely dinner with Jeanette’s son, Robin, and his wife, Chelsie, on the patio of Damecca Lounge on Madison Street in Winnipeg. As the meal ended, I wandered inside without a word to anyone, leaving them to assume that I had just had to use the washroom, but instead I picked up the tab (good) but only initially inadvertently left a $0.26 tip for our more-than-competent waiter on the point-of-sale terminal he had handed to me (bad). Fortunately, I realized my faux pas (perhaps the look on his face?), and fortuitously had some paper fiat currency in my wallet to hand over also. Needless to say, I didn’t visit any casinos.

As it turned out, the summer would be much more difficult than the initial July 7 trip. Between the end of July and mid-September, I would be make six trips the Emergency Department of Thompson General Hospital – more than my previous combined total in 15 years of living in Thompson – as well as making two more road trips to Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre for more related day surgeries on July 20 and Sept. 16. In that short space of time, I had gone from being triaged as a patient to be seen sooner-than-later to the top of the provincial urology surgery list.

My trusty medical escort assures me that my loud and repeated use of the f-word all down the corridor, as I painfully walked back to our hotel room at 6 a.m. Saturday morning Sept. 17 at the Quality Inn & Suites on Pembina Highway, would have sufficed to have me tossing the guest out if I had been working the the front of desk of my own Quality Inn & Suites Thompson. The same could no doubt be attested to by three older ladies whom I shared an observation room with overnight at HSC in the preceding hours. One told a nurse making her rounds “the gentleman seems to be in quite a bit of pain,” as I stood beside my bed all night, as it was the most comfortable position of a bad lot of choices. The nurse replied, “We’ll be giving him something for the pain in a minute,” saying it with a tone suggesting a bit of silence would be a bonus for everyone, along with pain relief. 

By the end of September, I would feel fine. 

In the Knights of Columbus, our fraternal Latin motto is “tempus fugit, memento mori,” which translates in English to “time flies, remember death.” If I’m tempted to think myself above some tedious task, I usually catch myself and instead think something to the effect of,  “Thank God that I am still blessed with the physical ability and and cognitive skills to perform  do it.”

The late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, who died in January 2022, at the age of 95, had many useful things to say over many decades of teaching on mindfulness and seemingly ordinary and mundane tasks. And while I may not know many of today’s stars who make up what passes for celebrity culture in the present zeitgeist, I am not apparently a complete Luddite, as I am activating a JK hand-me-down digital iPhone 7 Apple smartphone, after about a 15-year hiatus from my old classic black Motorola 120c analog cell phone (which went through a full wash-and-dry cycle once, maybe twice, in a side pocket of some green khaki cargo shorts.)

I haven’t subscribed to 81-year-old Moses Znaimer’s Zoomer magazine yet, but it is only April and the year is still young.

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From Antipope Hippolytus to Saint Hippolytus: Today marks the memorial of the first antipope and the only antipope to eventually become a canonized saint

For years now, Jeanette as had a really cool mobile app (cool that is to an eccentric at times and eclectic at all times Catholic history nerd like me) for her Apple iPhone called Saint of the Day, which is a product of Franciscan Media in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was started by the Franciscan Friars in 1893 with St. Anthony Messenger magazine.

Back around about 2010 or 2011 probably when I convinced Jeanette, an Anglican, to purchase the app for $2.99, or something like that at the time, I assured her it would be a worthwhile investment. This was at a time when free apps were starting to flood the market (the first generation iPhones had been introduced by Apple in the American market only several years earlier on June 29, 2007, and Jeanette purchased an iPhone 4 in June 2010, the same month they were released.)

Jeanette noted it was easy for me, the Catholic, to say, as it wasn’t my $2.99 being shelled out, as I didn’t even have a smartphone. At the risk of digressing – I do now, namely Jeanette’s old iPhone4, which would have been her new one back then – but it is not connected to my MTS telephone or Shaw Internet network providers now, so I can’t use it to listen to Saint of the Day, but I do use the old smartphone some, mainly for its camera and calculator applications, less frequently as a voice recorder, and rarely as a Big Ben alarm chime wake-up.

In any event, digression aside, I think history as proved that at least on this occasion, I spent someone else’s money well, and the Saint of the Day app, upgraded at least once over the last six years, if not more often, and has proven itself to be a sound $2.99 investment.

The Saint of the Day for Aug. 13 is Saint Hippolytus, the only person to make the journey from being an antipope to canonized saint.

Antipopes are pretenders to the Chair of Peter, who set themselves up in opposition to the legitimately canonically elected pontiff, frequently exercising pontifical functions in defiance of the legitimate occupant heading the Holy See. Sound pretty straight forward? No so much. Take Pope Gregory XII, who resigned at the request of the Council of Constance on July 4, 1415 to help end the Great Western Schism, and until Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI announced his resignation Feb. 11, 2013, had been the last pope to resign some 600 years ago. The schism had actually begun some 37 years earlier in 1378, and over the course of the next three and more decades, saw two papal claimants, and later three, vying for supremacy over the medieval church in a papal dance that stretched from Avignon in France to Rome in Italy, and eventually saw the not only Pope Gregory XII resign, but also two papal impostors, the contenders,  Antipope Benedict XIII and Antipope John XXIII (not to be confused, of course, with St. John XXIII, who was pope from 1958 to 1963), paving the way for Pope Martin V in 1417, the first pope in almost 40 years to be able to command the allegiance of the whole Latin Church.

Cardinal Joseph Hergenröther, the first cardinal-prefect of the Vatican Archives, has enumerated a total of 30 antipopes between Antipope Hippolytus in 217 and Antipope Felix V, whose regnal name was Amadeus of Savoy, and was the last of the papal schismatics, whose pretension to the Chair of Peter ended in 1449. Hippolytus was a brilliant theologian and is considered a Church Father. He wrote treatises against several of the heresies afflicting the Church in the late second and early third centuries – most of them Trinitarian or Christological – “as early Christians sometimes struggled to discern the correct terminology to apply to the apostolic teaching that Jesus was true God and true man,” notes Steve Weidenkopf, a lecturer of church history at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College in Alexandria, Virginia, in the bog Catholic Answers (http://www.catholic.com/blog/steve-weidenkopf/the-antipope-who-became-a-saint).

In particular, Hippolytus was frustrated by Pope Zephyrinus’ slowness to “make a quick and authoritative decision concerning the heresy known as Modalism,” Weidenkopf writes. Modalism, known also as Monarchianism and Sabellianism, blurred the distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, positing that these were just different modes of one divine person. To a Modalist, God the Father appeared on earth in the mode of Jesus Christ, God the Son. When Pope Callistus I succeeded Pope Zephyrinus in 217 and showed no more inclination than his predecessor in dispatching the Modalism heresy, Hippolytus was so angered he claimed Callistus was unworthy of the office due to his checkered past, when as a young slave, some believed, he had embezzled his master’s money, Hippolytus gathered a group of followers who elected him pope. In so doing Hippolytus, opened the door to the concept of the antipope, which reached its height during the Great Western Schism of 14th century. As for Modalism, it would eventually be declared a heresy by Pope St. Dionysius circa 262.

Hippolytus’ schism lasted for 19 years, Weidenkopf says, “and through three pontificates. “As a rigorist who did not believe that serious sinners should be re-admitted to communion in the Church,” Hippolytus also refused to accept the more-merciful approach of Pope Callistus I and his successors.

However, when Maximinus Thrax, also known as Maximinus I, became Roman Emperor in 235, he resumed persecution of Christians, particularly clergy, and both Antipope Hippolytus, and Pope Pontian, who had also been elected in 230, were arrested and sent to the mines on the island of Sardinia.

Amidst the suffering and hardship of the mines, Hippolytus renounced his schism and papal claim and was reconciled to the Church by Pontian.

Both men later succumbed to the harsh conditions, and their remains were transported for burial in Rome, where they were recognized as martyrs and saints of the Church.

And if you happened to guess today is also the memorial of Saint Pontian, you guessed right.

So the Roman Catholic Church’s Saint of the Day for Aug. 13 is actually saints plural: Saints Pontian and Hippolytus.

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Des Moines Register and PBS’ Frontline use Virtual Reality (VR) in news stories as journalism moves beyond Augmented Reality (AR) to fully ‘immersive’ storytelling

A year ago, I posted a piece here on newspapers beginning to embrace Augmented Reality (AR), technology making use of the camera and sensor in your smartphone or tablet to add layers of digital information – videos, photos, and sounds – directly on top of items in your newspaper.

Vancouver-based GVIC Communications Corp., which operates as the Glacier Media Group and owns the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News here in Northern Manitoba, launched Augmented Reality for editorial and advertisements throughout its Lower Mainland media properties in British Columbia in February 2013, teaming up with Dutch businessman Quintin Schevernels’ innovative Layar application, which can be downloaded on your iOS or Android smartphone or tablet. The Winnipeg Free Press also launched its own Augmented Reality (AR) in September 2014 with Blippar, a British first image-recognition smartphone app.

Revisiting the scene a year later, journalism is moving beyond Augmented Reality (AR) and finally to true immersive or Virtual Reality (VR), a tantalizing dream of sci-fi aficionados since the 1950s at least. Remember Virtual Reality (VR), the computer-simulated environment that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world or imagined worlds? Sure you do. Or at least one derivation of it known as simulated reality, as long your virtual memory goes back as far as Sept. 28, 1987 and “Encounter at Farpoint,” the pilot episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation, written by D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry, and the first appearance of the Holographic Environment Simulator, better known simply as the “holodeck.”

Data, who was fond of Sherlock Holmes, loved it and in later episodes would often play the 221B Baker Street detective in holodeck programs, often accompanied by Geordi La Forge in the role of Dr. Watson. Prior to the late 24th century, Federation starships were not equipped with holodecks. In 2151, the Starfleet vessel Enterprise NX-01 encountered a vessel belonging to an alien race known as Xyrillians, who had advanced holographic technology in the form of a holographic chamber similar to the holodeck, which Starfleet developed two centuries later. A holo-chamber was also later installed aboard a Klingon battle cruiser, given to the Klingons by the Xyrillians in exchange for their lives.

Here in the 21st century, most current virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or through special stereoscopic displays, but some simulations include additional sensory information, such as sound through speakers or headphones.

Some advanced, haptic systems now include tactile information, generally known as force feedback, in medical and gaming applications. As for the origin of the term “virtual reality,” it can be traced back to the French playwright, poet, actor, and director Antonin Artaud and his 1938 book The Theatre and Its Double, where he described theatre as “la réalité virtuelle.”

While newspapers have added a lot of bells and whistles to our various online “platforms” in recent years, they’re not quite at the Holographic Environment Simulator or holodeck reality. Yet. But consider this. In its first Virtual Reality documentary last May, PBS’ Frontline, in an 11-minute immersive effort by filmmaker Dan Edge, took its viewers to the spot under a tree in West Africa, believed to be where the world’s most recent Ebola virus outbreak began in late 2013. The film launched on Google Cardboard, a virtual-reality system that requires an Android smartphone and a simple cardboard viewer. The hand-held box holds a smartphone before the viewer’s eyes. An app presents 360-degree environments, explored as viewers move eyes and heads to explore their surroundings. Frontline collaborated with Secret Location and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University to produce Ebola Outbreak.

Meanwhile,in Santa Monica, California, Nonny de la Peña and her company Emblematic Group are working on a Virtual Reality project for the Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix car race in which not only one, but two “players can experience what it’s like to be in the pit crew and race each other.

De la Peña’s been dubbed the “godmother of Virtual Reality.” She began her journalism career in print and was a correspondent for Newsweek in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but left the news magazine because it didn’t allow her to use the visuals she imagined for a story. For a time, she worked as a documentary filmmaker.

She discovered Virtual Reality through a pair of VR goggles during a trip to Barcelona. “Once I saw that experience, I couldn’t put people out there again,” she told Andreana Young, an editorial assistant at Editor & Publisher magazine, for an Oct. 1 story. “I want to bring them inside the story.” de la Peña said.

Her first Virtual Reality project, called “Hunger in Los Angeles,” illustrated what it’s like to go hungry in Los Angeles, and premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

She worked on the project with Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift headset. Last year, Luckey sold his Virtual Reality platform to Facebook for $2 billion.

Young put on a pair of Emblematic’s VR goggles for her story for a scene from Kiya, a collaborative story between Emblematic Group and Al-Jazeera America. “I stood near a woman on the phone with 911, who was telling the operator her sister, Kiya, was inside the house with her ex-boyfriend. He wouldn’t let her leave and he had a gun,” Young wrote.

“I was able to turn 360-degrees … observing the neighborhood around me. The scene changed, and I was suddenly standing inside the house where Kiya was being held hostage by her ex-boyfriend. I searched the home with my eyes; when I turned around images of baby furniture and a “Family Forever” decal hanging on the wall struck me as I listened to Kiya’s sisters begging her to leave with them.”

Kiya relied heavily on real-life audio recordings obtained from the scene, including 911 calls, and cellphone audio and video recordings and recordings from interviews that provided accounts of what took place.

Virtual Reality creates what developers call a “duality of presence” allowing the viewer to feel like they’re right there in the story, and that can have a greater impact than simply watching video or reading words on a page.

Devices such as Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear VR have created opportunities for anyone with a smartphone to experience Virtual Reality. By placing a phone with a downloaded VR app onto the front of the device, viewers can watch Virtual Reality content right on their smartphone. On Amazon.com, a Google Cardboard kit costs less than $20. Even a 360-degree Ricoh Theta camera can be purchased for $400.

In September 2014, the Des Moines Register was one of the first newspapers to incorporate Virtual Reality into one of their news stories with its “Harvest of Change” project illustrating the life of today’s American farmer using satellite map imagery, photographs of the farm, the Unity 3D gaming engine, 360-degree video, coders and game designers.

The Associated Press recently announced a new Virtual Reality project called “The Suite Life,” an immersive experience through the Samsung Gear VR headset in which viewers can explore luxury hotel suites.

You can also follow me on Twitter at:https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Newspapers turn to Augmented Reality (AR)

Remember Virtual Reality (VR), the computer-simulated environment that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world or imagined worlds? Sure you do. Or at least one derivation of it known as simulated reality, as long your virtual memory goes back as far as Sept. 28, 1987 and “Encounter at Farpoint,” the pilot episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation, written by D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry, and the first appearance of the Holographic Environment Simulator, better known simply as the “holodeck.”

Data, who was fond of Sherlock Holmes, loved it and in later episodes would often play the 221B Baker Street detective in holodeck programs, often accompanied by Geordi La Forge in the role of Dr. Watson. Prior to the late 24th century, Federation starships were not equipped with holodecks. In 2151, the Starfleet vessel Enterprise NX-01 encountered a vessel belonging to an alien race known as Xyrillians, who had advanced holographic technology in the form of a holographic chamber similar to the holodeck, which Starfleet developed two centuries later. A holo-chamber was also later installed aboard a Klingon battle cruiser, given to the Klingons by the Xyrillians in exchange for their lives.

Here in the 21st century, most current virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or through special stereoscopic displays, but some simulations include additional sensory information, such as sound through speakers or headphones.

Some advanced, haptic systems now include tactile information, generally known as force feedback, in medical and gaming applications. As for the origin of the term “virtual reality,” it can be traced back to the French playwright, poet, actor, and director Antonin Artaud and his 1938 book The Theatre and Its Double, where he described theatre as “la réalité virtuelle.”

While newspapers have added a lot of bells and whistles to our various online “platforms” in recent years, they’re not quite at the Holographic Environment Simulator or holodeck reality. Yet. But they do have something new now called Augmented Reality (AR). And it’s not science fiction. The technology makes use of the camera and sensor in your smartphone or tablet to add layers of digital information – videos, photos, and sounds – directly on top of items in your newspaper.

Vancouver-based GVIC Communications Corp., which operates as the Glacier Media Group and owns the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News here in Northern Manitoba, launched Augmented Reality for editorial and advertisements throughout its Lower Mainland media properties in British Columbia in February 2013, year, teaming up with Dutch businessman Quintin Schevernels’ innovative Layar application, which can be downloaded on your iOS or Android smartphone or tablet. The Winnipeg Free Press also launched its own Augmented Reality (AR) last September with Blippar, a British first image-recognition smartphone app.

“Western Canada’s  largest local media company is pleased to announce the enterprise wide launch of augmented reality throughout its Lower Mainland, British Columbia properties,” Glacier said on Feb. 7, 2013, adding it was the “First company worldwide to build augmented reality into its digital sales platform.”

Layar, with over 35 million downloads worldwide, is the world’s most downloaded AR app, and continues to grow at an average of almost a million downloads per month. It operates as image recognition software invisibly tagging images, logos and icons with codes to allow the augmented reality components to appear instantly on a reader’s smartphone or tablet while scanning the AR content.

The Toronto Star and Bermuda Sun are among other publishers and newspaper using Layar.

Rather than a Quick Response Code (QR) matrix barcode in print, Layar provides the ability to link to multiple assets; watch video/listen to audio/share the content on social networks and even buy a product – right from the page, eliminating the gap between print and digital.

Maybe we won’t have to wait until the late 24th century after all for the Holographic Environment Simulator.