middle names and the speed of light

I’m trying to remember if I used ain’t, when I was a kid, and I can’t. Don’t think I did. Seems more like a rural thing to me. Seems odd, that it was held in such disrepute, while isn’t was perfectly respectable. It’s got an odd construction though, probably should have been something like amn’t. Well that looks funny, and a little hard to pronounce. Probably something like that became ain’t. Some wiki research later.

Sawyer sounds a lot more rigid than Tonti. I don’t recall that they gave us such grief over nicknames, especially mild ones like John/Jack. I understand something like Ken, Kenny, and Kenneth, a nice simple rule, cut off the last syllable, add a y, but why does James become Jim? There is a scene in The Right Stuff where the PR guys are talking to Gus Grissom, and they don’t like the sound of his first name, which they are thinking that doesn’t sound quite proper, and maybe he has a more respectable middle name that they could use. so they ask him what is his middle name and he tells them Ivan, so they say nevermind. 

Now that I think of it why do we have middle names? And Catholics, they add a fourth name, a Christian name I think. They were generally kind of a strange formal name, and we prots enjoyed teasing them about it.

if both of those stars, A, twenty thousand light years away, and B, ten thousand years away were to wink out, we would see B disappear first, and then ten thousand years later A. Whoever says it doesn’t is mistaken.

I knew I shouldn’t have used that word appears. It has a kind of secondary meaning something along the lines of it looks like, but it really isn’t. That’s not the meaning I wanted. It goes something like that locomotive and flashlight thing, only let’s use spaceships. Spaceship A, blasts off towards the sun at half the speed of light, and spaceship B blasts off away from the sun at half the speed of light. But to both of them the light from the sun is traveling at the same speed towards them, I used to think of this as an argument against the idea that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, because aren’t they both traveling at the speed of light away from each other?

Well no, mostly because they are both experiencing time differently. Even though time seems perfectly normal to each spaceship captain, when he looks at the other captain, that captain appears to be moving very slowly, and since speed is distance/time, when you twiddle with time you can equalize things out. I’m pretty sure it’s something like that, but the further I go explaining it the less sure I am of what I am talking about.

I just went through the transition form daylight to standard, and I believe I weathered through it pretty well, but ask me too many questions and I am twiddling with my fingers.