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Thomas Jay Chester's Website |
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Thomas Jay Chester's Website |
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"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind" -- Lord Kelvin (see full quote). This is not true for everything of course:
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
(supposedly from a plaque placed on the wall by Albert Einstein)but it definitely could be more widely applied...
Many of my webpages have moved to a new site. See Table of Contents for all of Tom Chester's webpages. That page tells you which pages are still only active here.
Main Webpages Each major site has an update log that gives a list of changes versus date. The update log may be found further up the directory structure for sites not in the highest-level directory.
Personal data identifying which Tom Chester you have reached, since there are several of us with the same name.
I try to answer every personal email sent to me, but there are two reasons why I might have failed to respond to yours:
- Your message might be deeply buried in my Inbox or my "To-do" email file, or
- My reply to you might have failed due to an invalid return address.
- You might have sent me an email from ~20:18 16 November through 17 November 1999, when email messages to me were lost due to a system crash at IPAC. Please resend any emails you sent during that time!
Hence if you do not get a reply from me, please first check your return address. If I screw up and your email gets lost in my inbox, please email me again.
I receive about 2,000 emails per month, and it long ago became impossible for me to actually deal with every one, despite the intent to do so. A gentle reminder from you will bring your request back to the top of the queue (last in, first out, at least sometimes) for a while, and the overwhelming guilt on my part might stimulate action on your email rather than someone else's...
My bookmark file. Warning: over 150 KB!
My work webpage.
Hiking Information, with my trip logs
- Fallbrook area hikes
- Grand Canyon hikes
- San Gabriel Mountain hikes I have done with trip logs, as well as a complete table of the Trails of the Angeles Hikes, sorted by mileage or number.
Biking Information
- Bicycle Rides in Fallbrook, Bonsall, Rainbow, Temecula, and Oceanside, California, that I have done, along with descriptions and elevation profiles. The elevation profile is also given for the 1995 and 1996 Guacamole Grande.
Financial Advice
- Table of Contents
- Financial Advice for My Son (and JPL/CIT Employees) was written in 1989 to give my son all that I learned about investing after I researched the subject. I added some specific information for JPL and Caltech employees. Since I wrote that up, I acquired another son and will have to update the title when I update the rest of it! Thus please be aware that some specifics given in that document are therefore dated. The general advice is certainly still correct, since these principles haven't changed for decades.
- Expected Return of the S&P 500 stocks over the next 5-30 years. This is very current information about the negative expected return from stocks in the next decade, due to the current high levels of large capitalization stocks.
My Collection of Facts
Over the years, I have collected some interesting facts from my reading material. Here are some examples from the Table of Contents:
- The rate at which various problems and diseases afflict humans.
- Income Information
- Salary Information by Occupation.
Some Calculations That I Have Done and Data That I Have Gathered
Being a scientist, I have naturally attempted to put numbers on various phenomena around me. Here are some examples from the Table of Contents:
- When should you stay off the L.A. freeways in order to avoid heavy traffic? See the average L.A. traffic versus time, for all of L.A. freeways and for each direction of each freeway separately, to find out.
- How fast do the search engines actually get updated?
- When should you really stay out of the sun or use protection on a given day in the year?
- Here are some statistics on the growth of the number of files Scott and I have placed online, as well as the growth rate in the number of accesses to those files. The plots show the increased number of accesses resulting from a listing in Yahoo!
Information about Fallbrook, CA
The main page contains links to pages with all the Fallbrook information Scott and I could find on the web, as well as home prices, weather, etc.
Science-By-Mail
Science by Mail is run by the Boston Museum of Science, and stimulates interest in science among 4th through 9th graders byThe scientist match-up is the most important part of the program, providing contact with a real live scientist.
- producing packages on different topics, such as Flying Machines, Sports Science, etc. that teach the science of each topic, and
- matching each group up with a scientist to work with the students.
In Spring 1997, one of my groups produced a great Indiana Jones Funhouse as the "Big Challenge" for the unit "Simple Machines", which was so well-done that it deserved some webspace.
The Full Quote By Lord Kelvin
This quote is often misquoted on the web. I thank David Willey for pointing this out to me. Here is the full quote:
"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the state of science."
William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, Popular Lectures and Addresses [1891-1894], in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, Fourteenth Edition, 1968, p. 723a.
Copyright © 1996-2004 by Tom Chester.
Permission is freely granted to reproduce any or all of this page as long as credit is given to me at this source:
http://sd.znet.com/~schester/tchester/index.html
Comments and feedback: Tom Chester
Last update: 4 January 2004.
