What I Did Last Week
By Paul VanRaden
In 2025,
HR@opm.gov required me (and all other US government employees) to report each Monday
what I did the previous week and I continued reporting after retiring. I
schedule what to do in future weeks and then transfer what I got done into this
report. The current page will be updated again in 2026 each Sunday, usually by
noon eastern U.S. time. Make it a favorite and click the reload button every 7
days. This page, similar pages, and the weekly reports I posted in 2025 are now
stored in:
Solutions To Personal Problems
February 15, 2026
During the 7 days of February 9-15,
I:
Continued refining the code to
simulate nuclear orbits. Numerical stability is a problem with repeated
recalculation of positions accounting for the new position of all other
orbiting bodies. Even with double precision for all variables, rounding errors
accumulate after several rotations of recomputing at each degree of rotation or
smaller intervals. The starting positions are always symmetrical, equally
spaced, with identical speeds and angles but become asymmetrical across orbits
due to rounding. Instead, the correct orbit can be verified after only 120
degrees of the inner orbit and negative 60 degrees of the outer orbit with
opposite spin if the 4 bodies (protons and neutrons) line up again with the
same speeds and angles of direction that should recur every 60 degrees of the
outer orbit. NASA already has shown that harmonic orbits spinning in the same direction
are stable and self-correct back to harmony after small disturbances of any
body. Harmonic orbits with opposite spins may also be stable or even more
stable. For example, noise canceling headphones generate a pattern of negative pressure
waves to match and cancel the positive pressure waves detected. My search for
stable starting speeds and directions has used only trial and error, but due to
rounding errors I may need to derive exact formulas for those using methods (such
as arcsine) that I last used in 1979 college calculus, but I threw that textbook
away last May before moving to Florida. The helium orbits are not easy to simulate
but I am getting better at them.
Filed my
Federal and my final Maryland part-year income tax returns. Of the $32,000 federal
tax withheld, $7,000 should be refunded, so sometimes it pays to file early. I needed
several extra hours to read the rules for all my changes that happened in 2025,
but the extra calculations were not complex. The state of Florida does not tax income
but gets most of their income from property tax, such as $3,400 per year on our
house recently purchased for $369,000. Avoiding Maryland’s 8% state plus county
income tax in one benefit of retiring here.
Watched an excellent 26-minute video Why the Rich Don’t Pay Taxes and 14-minute video The “Borrow Until You Die” strategy
the IRS does NOT want you to know. U.S. tax law now almost ensures that the rich will get richer and the
poor get poorer. Rich people give large campaign donations to and become
friends with politicians who then reward the rich with tax breaks. People can
now insert cash directly into the crypto wallet of the U.S. president to get
even better treatment. Life is excellent for the rich, while our government uses
tax dollars it gets from us middle-income people to deport poorer people back
to the poorest places to make their lives much worse. Deportation is a horrible
way for our government to spend our taxes.
Added 25 more early pictures of
Elexys, Samira, and Angel into the online displays including a sonogram of Elexys from May 1999 a month before she was
born. The back of that picture said “Hi Grandma” just like the “Hi Grandpa”
sonogram I got from Angel last month.
Rode with Angel and Cesar to Miami
for their gender reveal party with his family, Charlee, and 3 grandkids also
here. I gave them the baby pictures that Cheryl had from decades ago. Previous
generations learned the gender when the baby was born. My mom Katie wrote this gender reveal and
family planning poem after her final delivery in 1962: “We’re as proud as we can be, with
number 6 of our family. Since we don’t plan for any more, we’re glad this guy
has evened the score – 3 girls, 3 boys.”
February 8, 2026
During the 7 days of February 2-8,
I:
Wrote a computer program to examine
orbits in the nucleus of atoms. A few years ago I started with SAS language to
compute and graph the moon’s path around the sun for calendar research and to show that pretty sounding harmonic music frequencies also look pretty when graphed. To
make nuclear orbit calculations more efficient and portable, I converted the SAS
code and expanded it to 210 lines of Fortran code (including 70 comment lines)
after generalizing it for any number of objects in any number of orbits, but
the results and code are not ready to share yet.
Received and added a third review to
my nuclear orbit theory page. Since last week 20 people clicked on it, which already seems more
popular than the Copernicus theory of planetary orbits was during his whole
life. I wrote to a planetary scientist at NASA in Greenbelt, MD and a student
who proved that a figure 8 orbit with 3 bodies could be stable, but I have not
heard from them yet.
Made a printable pdf of my Supreme Court poem and mailed it to the Supreme Court for a cost of one 78-cent postage
stamp, asking the mailroom employee to give 1 copy to each of the 9 Justices.
No Justice may ever see my poem, but mailing a hard copy into their building
could raise that chance from near 0 up to 0.1%. They now let our president
break almost any law, national or international. If this has badly affected you
or your country, mail them a letter or a poem and ask the Justices to enforce
U.S. laws again.
Learned that the U.S. government decided not to pay the $2.2 billion it owes to the United Nations for
2025 and 2026. I paid 16% ($28,964) of my salary as federal income tax, and the
U.N. got just 0.01% ($23) of my salary in 2022 when U.S. paid its dues. Each
nation pays just 0.00002 of its gross domestic product. The U.S. economy
generated $27 trillion or 22% of the world’s gross income so the U.S.
government should pay 22% of the $3 billion U.N. budget. If the U.S. refuses to
pay its membership dues, the U.N. in New York should expel the diplomats from Washington. Then
Trump could not veto their plans and later take credit for doing the same thing. The U.N. now seems as useless as
the League of Nations was when it closed in 1946. It should be replaced with a democratic United Earth instead of a Board of Peace fully chosen and controlled by a chairman for life. What could go wrong?
The same things that went wrong when Trump let Elon Musk ruin the U.S.
government so that billionaires could rule the world.
Found another ~120 old family photos
in a plastic bag, sorted those by person, time, and subject, converted about 80
of Charlee to electronic, and added those to her powerpoint picture display. Many other photos are yet to
process.
February 1, 2026
During the 7 days of January
26-February 1, I:
Discovered that the atomic nucleus is
made of paired harmonic orbits of opposite spin in helium and all larger atoms.
The innermost orbit takes exactly half the time as the second orbit. Larger
elements have outer orbits in that same x-y plane also in harmony with the
first two. “Protons” and “neutrons” are really the same thing, analogous to a
binary star pair, and pass each other at 6 equidistant points per orbit, making
the orbits hexagon shaped around the nucleus’s empty center. Numbers of bodies
in each nuclear orbit explain the periodic table of elements. Atoms bond
together as molecules by sharing electron orbits that hold 2 nucleuses at a
stable distance. One electron has a linear up-down orbit thru the central hole
in the nucleus. This model of nuclear orbits is much more sensible than quantum
mechanics theory and explains the chemical bonds among elements such as carbon,
nitrogen, oxygen, and even DNA. Seeing the orbits and shapes is easier than
reading about them. You can now see the orbits within each nucleus at:
Explained the slides above on nuclear
orbits to my brother and 3 sisters at our weekly meeting and got comments back
from external 2 reviewers. Notes generated by AI from our family Zoom meeting
and the comments from reviewers are posted here.
Watched Richard Feynman’s 1973
lecture Story of Particle Physics. I was 90% sure that the paired harmonic orbits of opposite spin really
explain the nucleus before watching his lecture. At minute 7:17 my jaw dropped
and I became 99.99% sure that the orbital math is correct because his 1973
photo of a nucleus showed the paired orbital rings with hexagon shape that
matched the theory and graphs that I had drawn by hand a few days earlier. But
I still wonder why scientists in particle physics never bothered to derive
those simple nuclear orbits that explain the pretty picture of the orbits that
Feynman showed in 1973.
Remembered the 1981 song Too Much Time On My Hands by STYX: “I’ve got nothing to do and
all day to do it. I can solve all the world’s problems without even trying.”
World problems can be solved, but it takes many hours of work. I work harder
now than I did while fully employed and getting paid for 40-hour weeks but
working many hours of unpaid overtime and using only a small fraction of my
vacation time. In retirement, I now average about 70 hours per week because
working on new topics is more fun, and I waste fewer hours fighting with
anonymous reviewers. This week’s research on nuclear orbits is correct and very
useful, but I might not find a journal to publish it or even a physics
conference that will add it to their program. Nicolaus Copernicus had that same problem for 30 years after correctly proving that the
earth orbits the sun.
Went to a Rock and Roll concert /
laser light show only 5 km (3 miles) away. The stage and the excellent band FireFly were under a full moon with Neptune
shining brightly a few degrees away to the south, just as Copernicus and
Newton’s math had predicted. A 49-second video of my grand finale drum roll
using colorful, lighted drumsticks is posted here.
January 25, 2026
During the 7 days of January 19-25,
I:
Watched lecture Understanding Gravity by Richard
Feynman recorded in about 1962 and then read the 180 short pages of Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein in 1920. Most of
that book was easier to understand than I expected until Einstein applied his
math to cosmology. He rejected an infinite universe because gravity’s pull becomes infinite from all directions if nothing stops
it. If gravity is a push from all directions except where partially blocked by
masses such as earth or the sun, that push gets slightly weaker after traveling
thru many masses and does not become infinite. Since 2002 I believe that
gravity is a difference in push instead of a pull and since 1984 I believe in
the infinite universe. Those ideas both still make sense after studying Feynman’s and
Einstein’s well-explained research. I added their references and more text into
my 2024 updated explanation of the direction of gravity. Those topics are not so important.
When you step on the scales, your weight will be the same whether the earth
pulls you down, the sky pushes you down, or space curves you down. And I will
not visit the whole universe whether it is large or is infinite.
Spent many hours on nuclear physics
and a new theory of why snowflakes have 6 sides and why many molecules have hexagon shapes. I plan to reveal that theory
in future weeks.
Calculated progress in milk yield due
to better genes or better management in two ways after discussions with Mike
Vandehaar. Means of milk yield per lactation were 14,209 pounds for cows born
in 1970 and 26,328 in 2020. The published genetic progress is 9,119 pounds and
implies 75% of progress was genetic, calculated as 9,119 / (26,328 – 14,209).
But the genetic evaluation math includes variance adjustments. Those “predict”
that today's genetic differences would be only 66% as large in the 1970 environment.
Thus, cows with modern genes might have given only 20,228 if milked in 1970,
calculated as 14,209 + 9,119 * 0.66. That implies only 50% of the progress was
genetic, calculated as 9,119 * 0.66 / (26,328 – 14,209). Higher means can
increase variance, causing better genes and better management to combine with
some multiplicative rather than simply additive effects on cow productivity.
Also on the topic of cows, I sent comments on a nice paper about redefining
fertility traits to my previous employee Jason Graham, consulted with my
previous research leader John Cole about selection index updates, and commented
on data collection for the two new calf health traits.
Watched 27-minute video How are Microchips Made? CPU
Manufacturing Process Steps. For anyone who computes, this video explains how computer designs have
increased chip speeds so quickly. They are evolving faster than human brains.
Cesar and I both agreed that watching this video was very good for our brains.
Got an eye exam and ordered new
lenses for my reading and distance glasses. For about 20 years, both eyes had
stable sphere measurements near -1.75 but my right eye worsened to -2.50 in 2023, -5.25 in 2024,
and then cataract surgery in 2025. The artificial lens is working fine, as
expected, but my left eye worsened from -3.00 in 2025 to -4.00 in 2026 so it
may need surgery soon also.
January 18, 2026
During the 7 days of January 12-18,
I:
Filled the gap years 2001-2011 that
were missing in my Annual Report file. I may have emailed Annual Reports in
those years, but AOL deleted my “Sent” mail before 2012. I had paper copies
from 1994-2000 when I mailed my reports and found the 2005 report in a sister’s
reply. To list events in the gap years, I used my annual planning calendars on
paper that I have saved since 1988 and my records of Angel’s activities but
labeled those as Summaries since they do not show what I was thinking about at
the time. Remembering our past events is fun and may help us predict our
futures better.
Updated my daughter Angel’s life
story with the latest 3 years of events and started documenting events for the
baby she is expecting. That could give us 3 generations of fully documented
lives. “Undocumented” people are being deported even if they act like model
citizens and contribute much to our communities. People who are documented to
be from places where nobody would want to live are forced to return there. Many
American citizens have become evil people following an evil leader, as in 1938
when German citizens followed their leader. But the Germans only wanted
Austria, Czechoslovakia, and half of Poland, and never officially claimed “This is Our Hemisphere.” Babies with documents proving they were born in the USA are no longer
safe here because the President ended the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship and the
Supreme Court will decide this spring if they agree. Many things to document
these days.
Added to my picture
biography photos of me at the United Nations building and the Statue of Liberty in
1994, at the Berlin Wall in 2014, and the piece of the Berlin Wall that I
carried with me for 20 years. The final slide of my 2014 Interbull / ICAR talk in Berlin quoted Ronald Reagan’s
famous “Tear Down This Wall” speech but instead I showed our Texas-Mexico
border. You can believe in immigration and international law even if the U.S.
government now hates those ideas.
Watched documentary Why is there no B# or E# note on the
piano? directly connected to my music and keyboard research which was more
advanced in 2002 than youtube videos are in 2026. In
October, my Experiments with Standard Piano audio did not play when accidentally
posted in .pdf but it plays now in .pptx or .mp4 formats. Files in .mp4 allow
autoplay instead of controlling the slide advance manually and are now posted
at Music and Math in Harmony.
Finally hiked the full nature trail
that begins a mile away from our house and walked 8.4 miles (13 km) to see what
our neighborhood looked like before houses were built. A few circular clearings
in the forest had grown some trees again, as if settlers tried to farm some land but then gave up. The only other
hikers were a group of 3 ladies with 4 dogs, 1 biker pedaling with his dog, and
1 motorized biker pulling a sled with deer hunting equipment and his tree
stand. Very peaceful day, except possibly for the deer.
January 11, 2026
During the 7 days of January 5-11,
I:
Heard that daughter Angel and
son-in-law Cesar are expecting a baby! An online app predicted Angel’s due date
of August 17, and we joked that the doctor probably uses the same app, but
their prediction based on ultrasound measurement of fetal length is August 24. For cows we predict
due dates very accurately using 25.4 million gestation length records, 152 million insemination records, and DNA genotypes of both parents.
Gestation length (duration) has 44% heritability in cows and 25% in humans because exact conception dates are known for most cows but not for most
humans.
Noticed that when we reported Angel’s
news to my sisters and brother, Zoom’s Artificial Intelligence got confused
because Angel shared my camera and microphone to announce her news. The AI
notes for our weekly meeting generated these sentences: “Paul shared his excitement about his first
ultrasound appointment on Friday, revealing he is 6 weeks pregnant… Paul shared
that he is experiencing fatigue as a symptom of his pregnancy, and discussed
his diet changes to support the health of his unborn child… The group discussed
Paul's experience with an AI-generated book gift from his wife, Angel…”
Zoom’s disclaimer said “AI can make mistakes. Review for accuracy. Please rate
the accuracy of this summary” and then asked for feedback. So, I explained the
facts of life to AI.
Read my 241-page biography book that
AI generated as a Christmas present from Angel. Reading it took about 8 hours
while taking notes on the content and quality of the text. The book was
interesting but did not use other information about me available on the
internet. AI had trouble keeping track of
family relationships and trouble with timelines, but a few of its best
sentences seemed better than any similar sentences I could find on the
internet. I added a more detailed summary of its problems and benefits in the
Artificial Intelligence section of Thinking, Computing, and Improving Both.
Noticed that MS Copilot AI can get confused by Trump. After
visiting New York City, I asked Copilot: “Is the UN building or Trump Tower NYC
taller?” and it replied “Trump
Tower. Trump Tower in NYC is taller than the United Nations building. Trump
Tower stands at 664 feet (202 meters), while the United Nations building
is 861 feet (262 meters) tall.” But 861 feet is the height of Trump World
Tower across the street from the 510 feet (155 meters) United Nations building built in 1952. Trump World Tower is 72 stories tall, but the top floor
is numbered floor 90. The penthouse suite in Trump Tower is on the top 3 floors 57-58 that are numbered 67-68. It occupies 11,000
square feet (1,000 m2), but Trump lied and officially claimed it was 30,000 square feet to get better bank loans and then
lost his resulting business fraud case. Copilot probably gave the wrong height because both buildings are at
United Nations Plaza. The purpose of Trump’s World Tower built in 2001 was to
prove that he can physically overshadow the UN and international law. He now
can veto the UN, veto US congress bills, commit any crime on Government time, and pardon any criminal who breaks Federal laws for him. What could go
wrong? Long ago, the whole world was united, speaking the same language, until
a developer built a tall tower in Babel and got the whole world confused (Genesis 11:1-9, Holy Bible). Copilot gets confused by Trump’s towers, but I do
not.
Gave my Supreme Court poem its own page. I wrote and posted it while still working for Donald Trump
but made it less searchable, and that explains the mystery of why I hid it in Holiday History. But I have no fear this year of
getting fired while retired.
January 4, 2026
During the 7 days of December 29,
2025-January 4, 2026, I:
Moved my
weekly reports from 2025 to a new location (see link above or below) and
restarted this What I Did Last Week page to only include news reported in 2026.
Emailed my
2025 Annual Report to
family on December 31 wishing them a happy 2026. Several of my relatives have
mailed me their annual greetings and stories for many years. I save their paper
reports and got to use those in 2023 when visiting my niece Andrea. Her kids took
turns reading the 15 holiday reports my sister Judy sent from 1988-2002 plus a
few letters that Andrea had signed and sent me as a child. The kids had not
heard or seen their Mom’s and her sisters’ and her parents’ life stories
before. In 2024 my sister Miriam also reread the letters and reports she had
sent me since 1986. In those days we often wrote letters without making copies
whereas typed letters and reports now usually get stored. My annual reports
going back to 1994 now include my 2025 news in:
Summarized
my website’s visits, visitors, most popular reports, and costs in 2025,
compared those to previous years, and described how and why I manage my own
pages instead of posting on social media sites. I added suggestions from
Hossein Jorjani into my draft report. In 2025, many more people (12,791)
visited my web pages and they viewed 34,747 reports in total, 3.7 times more
than in 2024. Further statistics and advice on managing websites from 27 years
of experience are posted in:
Reorganized
my main pages to display fewer items, fixed some broken links, and added some
files that the awstats web management software
reported missing.
Celebrated the new year with Angel and Cesar at a party and
fireworks that also celebrated 25 years since this very pretty, peaceful
retirement community Solivita first opened. This planned community
took 23 years to build the ~4,000 houses including our house which is 10 years
old. A similar sized development Westview one mile away opened 2 years ago and those houses are being built very
rapidly. I watch them build every week while biking on their brand-new streets.
Both communities were previously pine forests, not farmland. More news from
Angel and Cesar next week.
The previous reports from 2025 telling what I did each week
are now stored at: