I will tell you a personal story first. Then we will come to the point.
This story goes back many years.
I was 8 years old then. My younger brother was 4. A beautiful, adorable child. Very smart, very intelligent!
But there was a problem. When he set his mind on something, you could not take his attention away. Sometimes, you may try to tell him something, but it went in one ear and out the other. He never hurt anybody, or insulted anybody. He just loved to live in his own world; mostly oblivious to the things around him, when he was in that mood. The problem was that everybody expected him to be a normal child. He wasn't. He remembered everything, every small detail, and he would recite a conversation word-for-word, including when it happened and who said what.
His photographic memory awed everyone who noticed it. We had a fairly large family, and that gave us some comfort in choosing who we wanted to talk to. Most of the family members talked to almost everyone else, but when it came to my little brother, they were a little aloof.
My dad was a doctor, a very well-respected, towering figure - over 6 feet tall with a commanding presence. When he talked, everyone listened. He always told us what we were supposed to do, and we all listened. If we didn't do what he wanted, the consequences were severe - a good whacking with a stick. I, being the older among the siblings, was a frequent recipient of this discipline. Unfortunately, my kid brother received this treatment for no other reason than he was not paying attention to my dad. When this happened, he would cry uncontrollably. We would go behind the house and I would give him a hug and would console him. I would tell him that it would not happen again, knowing full well that that was not true.
The worst thing was that nobody in our family dared say anything against my dad. Everybody was afraid to challenge him. So, this went on and on.
We lived in a small village. Most of our relatives lived nearby. Among them was my uncle, who was especially fond of me and my brother. He lived only a mile and a half away from our house.
One day, I was visiting him and we had just finished the dinner and we were sitting outside. It was getting dark. My uncle was telling me and my cousin a funny story when we suddenly herd a shrill cry - something that chilled my blood. My uncle suddenly stopped, told me and my cousin to go inside the house and stay there. He took his bike and sped away.
He came back a couple of hours later. We were almost falling asleep. He told me that I would be staying there that night and told my aunt to make a bed for me.
My cousin and I tried to go to sleep, but that ear-piercing scream kept on coming back in our memory and kept us awake for a while. All along, we heard my uncle and my aunt whispering something for a long time. Then I heard my aunt say "Oh My God!" and then the whisper got quieter and quieter until we fell asleep.
Next morning when my uncle took me home, he knocked on the door, and when my mother opened the door, he just said "Good Morning", led me into the house, and then left, without saying anything.
By a strange coincidence, from that day onwards, my dad did not hit anyone. He would get angry, but then say something and just walk away. Our nightmare started easing off.
Many years passed. My brother was a grown up guy by now, had followed into my footsteps, got a degree in Physics, and then went even further, with a Master's degree in Physics. He became a scientist and received a lot of acclaim in his field. Always a top-notch student, always a high academic achiever and very focused on his research. He always had that very special place for me in his heart, but not for many of our family members, and very little for our parents.
It was almost thirty years after that night with that scary scream. I was visiting my uncle. It was after dinner and we were sitting outside, talking. It was getting darker, and then that memory suddenly came back. I asked my uncle about what happened that night. He paused for a long while. My aunt had heard our conversation while she was bring in some lemonade, and she said, "Go ahead, tell him. He is a grown up man now, and he can handle it".
Then my uncle told me the whole story. When he heard the scream, he had suspected something was wrong. His hunch was right. That scream had come from our house. When he reached there, he found my father hitting my brother for not listening to him. My mother was just standing there, scared and crying. My uncle grabbed my father's hand and said " You better stop this right now, otherwise you will have to deal with me , and I will NOT be easy on you! God will never forgive you for your sin. What did this poor child do to you that you are about to kill him? This better stop, and stop RIGHT NOW!" Then he turned to my mother and said "If this animal ever touches this child or anybody else, call me right away. I will make sure he does not live a moment longer". He then turned to my father and said, "You better apologize to your son and your wife right now, or else I will make sure everybody in town knows about this. You are guilty now and will be guilty forever in my mind and in front of God". My father muttered something and walked away. My mother said, "Thank you for saving my child and me. I will never forget this. God will always bless you for this".
My uncle stayed there for a while, but didn't say much.
On the way home, he was thinking why anyone as intelligent and successful as my father would act like a demon and hurt an innocent child. Guilty, indeed, he thought, guilty for failing to understand that some children are different and God made them that way!
My brother had Autism.
Very few people knew it then, and even now, very few people understand it. Instead of trying to understand more about this disorder, we expect these God's children who happen to be autistic to behave normally and within the framework of logic- something they are incapable of doing. And we keep on punishing them for NOT BEING NORMAL.
We are guilty as charged, and we have absolutely no defense against it, because we choose NOT TO LEARN ABOUT AUTISM, (AND ASPERGER'S SYNDROME, ANOTHER VERSION OF IT). We just keep on pumping up drugs like Ritalin and Adderall into our unsuspecting children, pushing them further down this abyss of hopelessness.
GUILTY AS CHARGED, INDEED!
************************************************************************************
Over the past 40 years, millions of children have been added to this exponentially growing epidemic. Latest medical research has identified mercury as the main culprit for this epidemic. People motivated by the seriousness of this ailment affecting their children have started forming groups that support techniques such as chelation that have helped their children get out of the vicious clutches of this monster.
We as a society have to wake up to the immenseness of this problem and start demanding answers and treatments. The consequences of neglecting it are enormous!
I am giving some useful links that can help my readers find answers. I invite them to go even further and search the web to get answers more pertinent to their needs. The more we know, the better prepared we are to deal with this calamity.
I wish hope and success to those amongst us who are facing this monster.
Peace and Blessings!
**************************************
Some links:
http://www.upi.com/Consumer_Health_Daily/Reports/2007/04/27/ped_med_alternative_autism_treatments/
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=67953
(Mercury as the main cause)
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Dreams : What Do They Mean.
For years and years, I wondered about dreams.
What are they?
Where do they come from?
Why do some of them keep repeating time after time?
Why do they sometimes look so real and vivid that we almost feel as if we are living in them?
Is there any meaning to them?
Are they trying to tell us something, some kind of warning, message or some prediction of future events?
Being a creature of science, I wanted to know the answers to all of these questions, and maybe some more. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not go very far. I heard some clairvoyant souls bring some spiritual discussions and some para-normal theories into play; some used dreams as a link to the past, present or future events; some used it as a window into the past life and some other equally dubious concepts.
In short, these explanations made interesting stimulants for cocktail-party conversations, including the usual "My Dream Is Better Than Yours" or "My Dream Is Scarier Than Yours" challenges! Nothing of substance, of course! The third-party experiences and validations were also the staple of such discussions. Alcohol and good food seemed to fuel these episodes, and combined with the insatiable human curiosity, it took the conversations in different directions.
If you tried to distill it into something useful and meaningful, you came up with nothing more than vaporware.
So it went on, until I started studying computers during my college years in early seventies. At that time, I started to understand that computers came in two flavors: analog and digital. Analog computers took in data in a continuous, unbroken fashion, and required considerable amount of storage space to store, retrieve and manipulate it, while the digital computers broke the data into 1's and 0's, thereby making it easy to store, retrieve and manipulate it. My professor explained that analog data was like a live musical concert, or like an ocean wave where the motion was continuous and unbroken - in other words, the events we see in real everyday life in a continuous form, like a sine wave. The digital form was like a motion that we saw with a strobe.
That got me thinking. It seemed that all real events seemed analog, while the digital events were analog events chopped up into small chunks, linear and simple - 1's and 0's. It seemed that all of our senses gave us real, analog data that was continuous.
I wondered what happened to the enormous amounts of analog data that we were collecting throughout our waking moments. It must be somewhere, I figured, because we could always remember the events of past in vivid details, with the appropriate sensory connections. We remembered our visits to our grandmother, and could remember in detail her voice, the delicious smell of her home-cooked meals and the taste and flavor of her heavenly cookies and the sensation of swinging on the tire swings. We remembered our first dates, the first cry of our babies right after they were born. So, all of this information was neatly filed somewhere in our brain, easily accessed at the first hint of a connection. The massive storage space needed for such data and such an elegant, responsive and efficient system of retrieval of the information meant only one thing. It was probably stored in some digital form to make it available for fast, efficient and accurate retrieval.
While all these conjectures were going through my mind over a period of time, I had a chance to meet one of my friends who worked in a bank. During our conversation, I asked him a question that always perplexed me: why did banks keep such short hours, and fewer working days (remember, this was in early seventies!). He explained that all the transactions that took place during the course of a business day took at least twice as much time to sort through, match and post all the transactions accurately. He called it a "back-room" operation.
Can there be a similar process going on in our brain, where all this massive information coming in must be sorted, posted and filed neatly and accurately so that it can be available quickly, I wondered.
Over the next six months or so, I was always thinking about the meaning of all of this, when one night, while I was sleeping, I suddenly woke up around 2 am and started putting all these pieces together in my mind. It was as if I found out a missing piece of a puzzle, and I was so excited, I could not go to sleep and had to make sense of it all.
One of the first thought that hit me was that during the day when we are awake, we are constantly taking in live data, leaving very little time to analyze it, sort it and file it away, because the "fight or flight" instinct kept us on the alert all the time and the survival instinct took precedence over everything else. I thought the most logical thing for our brain to do was to wait until we went to sleep, when, because of the safety and comfort of our environment, only a small portion of our brain was monitoring events on a reflexive mode. This seemed like the ideal time for the brain to do the "back-room operation" of sorting through the massive analog data collected during our waking hours, convert it into digital form, and index it, label it and file it with a suitable tag, so that it will be easy to retrieve.
Then came the interesting question. How does it relate to the data already in files? When I started thinking about it, I pretended that I was a "back-room" clerk, and started visualizing the kinds of situations I would face. One of the first thing that hit me was, what if the teller made a wrong entry? I would have to put it aside for a later time, when everything else was taken care of and I had more time to look at it and check it out, and if I couldn't sort it out, seek some help. When I finished all my filing, and this wrong entry was still there, that would stay on the clipboard for someone higher up to sort out. In the flash of an inspiration, I thought that this is what we could be seeing as dreams-things that could not relate to anything else in the past, and had no logical place to go to.
The question of recurring dreams could be explained in this way. If over several nights, there is no valid connection to other data, this wrong entry will keep on popping up, until, at some future, predetermined point, this data would go into a "round file" and get lost!
Also, that would explain some of the dreams as the result of this analog-to-digital conversion, where the data just would not fit into the format.
(There is a lot more to it that has developed in my thought process over the years, but that could very well be the subject of another blog!)
So I propose this as my hypothesis of dreams, and now I leave it open to discussion, hoping that someone, somewhere , may find something useful, meaningful and beneficial in understanding this mystery that has kept us awake at night, tossing and turning and trying to make some sense of it!
***********************************************************************
Response to the comments:
What are they?
Where do they come from?
Why do some of them keep repeating time after time?
Why do they sometimes look so real and vivid that we almost feel as if we are living in them?
Is there any meaning to them?
Are they trying to tell us something, some kind of warning, message or some prediction of future events?
Being a creature of science, I wanted to know the answers to all of these questions, and maybe some more. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not go very far. I heard some clairvoyant souls bring some spiritual discussions and some para-normal theories into play; some used dreams as a link to the past, present or future events; some used it as a window into the past life and some other equally dubious concepts.
In short, these explanations made interesting stimulants for cocktail-party conversations, including the usual "My Dream Is Better Than Yours" or "My Dream Is Scarier Than Yours" challenges! Nothing of substance, of course! The third-party experiences and validations were also the staple of such discussions. Alcohol and good food seemed to fuel these episodes, and combined with the insatiable human curiosity, it took the conversations in different directions.
If you tried to distill it into something useful and meaningful, you came up with nothing more than vaporware.
So it went on, until I started studying computers during my college years in early seventies. At that time, I started to understand that computers came in two flavors: analog and digital. Analog computers took in data in a continuous, unbroken fashion, and required considerable amount of storage space to store, retrieve and manipulate it, while the digital computers broke the data into 1's and 0's, thereby making it easy to store, retrieve and manipulate it. My professor explained that analog data was like a live musical concert, or like an ocean wave where the motion was continuous and unbroken - in other words, the events we see in real everyday life in a continuous form, like a sine wave. The digital form was like a motion that we saw with a strobe.
That got me thinking. It seemed that all real events seemed analog, while the digital events were analog events chopped up into small chunks, linear and simple - 1's and 0's. It seemed that all of our senses gave us real, analog data that was continuous.
I wondered what happened to the enormous amounts of analog data that we were collecting throughout our waking moments. It must be somewhere, I figured, because we could always remember the events of past in vivid details, with the appropriate sensory connections. We remembered our visits to our grandmother, and could remember in detail her voice, the delicious smell of her home-cooked meals and the taste and flavor of her heavenly cookies and the sensation of swinging on the tire swings. We remembered our first dates, the first cry of our babies right after they were born. So, all of this information was neatly filed somewhere in our brain, easily accessed at the first hint of a connection. The massive storage space needed for such data and such an elegant, responsive and efficient system of retrieval of the information meant only one thing. It was probably stored in some digital form to make it available for fast, efficient and accurate retrieval.
While all these conjectures were going through my mind over a period of time, I had a chance to meet one of my friends who worked in a bank. During our conversation, I asked him a question that always perplexed me: why did banks keep such short hours, and fewer working days (remember, this was in early seventies!). He explained that all the transactions that took place during the course of a business day took at least twice as much time to sort through, match and post all the transactions accurately. He called it a "back-room" operation.
Can there be a similar process going on in our brain, where all this massive information coming in must be sorted, posted and filed neatly and accurately so that it can be available quickly, I wondered.
Over the next six months or so, I was always thinking about the meaning of all of this, when one night, while I was sleeping, I suddenly woke up around 2 am and started putting all these pieces together in my mind. It was as if I found out a missing piece of a puzzle, and I was so excited, I could not go to sleep and had to make sense of it all.
One of the first thought that hit me was that during the day when we are awake, we are constantly taking in live data, leaving very little time to analyze it, sort it and file it away, because the "fight or flight" instinct kept us on the alert all the time and the survival instinct took precedence over everything else. I thought the most logical thing for our brain to do was to wait until we went to sleep, when, because of the safety and comfort of our environment, only a small portion of our brain was monitoring events on a reflexive mode. This seemed like the ideal time for the brain to do the "back-room operation" of sorting through the massive analog data collected during our waking hours, convert it into digital form, and index it, label it and file it with a suitable tag, so that it will be easy to retrieve.
Then came the interesting question. How does it relate to the data already in files? When I started thinking about it, I pretended that I was a "back-room" clerk, and started visualizing the kinds of situations I would face. One of the first thing that hit me was, what if the teller made a wrong entry? I would have to put it aside for a later time, when everything else was taken care of and I had more time to look at it and check it out, and if I couldn't sort it out, seek some help. When I finished all my filing, and this wrong entry was still there, that would stay on the clipboard for someone higher up to sort out. In the flash of an inspiration, I thought that this is what we could be seeing as dreams-things that could not relate to anything else in the past, and had no logical place to go to.
The question of recurring dreams could be explained in this way. If over several nights, there is no valid connection to other data, this wrong entry will keep on popping up, until, at some future, predetermined point, this data would go into a "round file" and get lost!
Also, that would explain some of the dreams as the result of this analog-to-digital conversion, where the data just would not fit into the format.
(There is a lot more to it that has developed in my thought process over the years, but that could very well be the subject of another blog!)
So I propose this as my hypothesis of dreams, and now I leave it open to discussion, hoping that someone, somewhere , may find something useful, meaningful and beneficial in understanding this mystery that has kept us awake at night, tossing and turning and trying to make some sense of it!
***********************************************************************
Response to the comments:
I really appreciate your thoughts, observations and references related to this blog.
I am planning to publish part two of this blog soon, after my material is ready.
In the meanwhile, I would like to address the thoughts and comments of the responders who were kind enough to share them here:
1: jorge, thank you for your comment. I will be expanding on the thoughts expressed in this blog, and also adding some interesting observations and concepts in the next blog.
2. robertinseattle, it is interesting to read about your experience. There will be one aspect about dreams that I will be writing about in my next blog regarding events and pace of the day.
3. victhestick, you make a very interesting observation!
4. alla, thanks for the information about Hypnosis Institute.
5. damjamjar: Thank you for the link.
One of the most dangerous thing about expressing your thoughts in an uncharted area is the possibility of an accusation of plagiarism. To keep out of these troubled waters, I have been practicing the habit of expressing my new ideas and concepts to a group of people. If anything, some of them remember the discussion and the time-frame.
I this particular case, I expressed my thoughts and hypothesis to a group of my wife's relatives on the Christmas Eve in 1975, when there was a lively discussion on this subject. About 5 of the people attending the event said they understood what this meant and shared their own stories and surmised how their dreams could be explained in the way I was proposing.
I am extremely pleased to read about the experiments at the Rockefeller Institute that were the subject of the article in the Discover Magazine in 1992, because it seems to validate my hypothesis.
Thank you very much for the link.
6. aem, the questions you raised are very interesting and provocative!
I will try to address them in one of my future blogs.
Keep reading and participating! That is what make this blog interesting!
Peace and Blessings!
Saturday, April 7, 2007
What Can We Do about the High Cost of Gasoline?
The price of gasoline is going up higher and higher every day. It is taking a larger bite out of our budget. Some folks have to make serious compromises with their food and healthcare budgets just to keep on driving that car/SUV/Old Jalopy!
Is there relief in sight?
All signs indicate that there is none.
The best we can do is to cut down on our driving, try to combine chores so that we make fewer trips and generally be very conscious of every mile we drive so that we do not waste gas.
Even when all of these steps are taken, there is still that sticker shock when we see the pump showing astronomical numbers when we fill up. Companies like ExxonMobil are making sinful profits and some of their CEO's are taking half a BILLION dollars in paychecks while rest of us average Joe's are suffering! This is an economic calamity that is hitting every pocketbook!
When I got exasperated with this and talked to my mechanic Bob about this, he suggested something that sounded almost like an old wives' tale!
He suggested that I put 6 ounces of Marvel Mystery Oil in the gas tank every time I filled the tank. he said that it would give me better gas mileage and help the engine run smoother and extend its life.
Being a skeptic about such claims, I took his advice with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, I decided to try it. The worst that can happen, I figured, would be a few dollars down the drain; on the other hand, if it works, it may be good for my car and my wallet, too!
Now, at this point, I must put a disclaimer. I have no financial connection whatsoever with Marvel Mystery oil, nor do I own any stock in this company or have a gainful employment with them. Neither does anyone in my family.
After I put the first 6 ounces in the tank when I filled up, I forgot all about it until I went for another fill-up. Being a finicky record keeper, I keep a meticulous record of the miles I get per tankful of gas on all of my 4 cars. At the time of fill-up, I noticed that my car got 60 extra miles for the tank of gas. I thought that my driving habits got better, there was less head wind, I probably inflated the tires just right, etc. etc. I figured another tankful would even the things out. But next tankful gave me similar results. Then I tried it in my other cars, one after another.
The results were the same - an average of 60 to 65 extra miles for the tankful. The cars seemed to run a lot smoother, too! I picked up a couple of quart bottles at Advance Auto Parts at less than $4 each!
Things were getting interesting! For about 65 cents worth of Marvel Mystery oil, I was getting 60 to 65 extra miles. You just couldn't beat that!
Being a Physicist, I had to know the reason why this was happening. So I started digging deeper to understand this. What I found out made a lot of sense.
Inside a car engine, a tight-fitting piston moves inside the cylinder. This piston has 3 sets of compression rings that prevent the combustion gases from escaping into the crankcase ( the tank that holds the engine oil). During the movement of the piston, the area of the cylinder near the top, between the top and bottom rings, does not get much lubrication. This causes friction, and therefore loss of energy. Translated, it means that we waste gas. Apparently, the Marvel Mystery Oil lubricates this portion of the cylinder, reducing the friction. This means that there is less wastage of gas, therefore better mileage! It also cleans the valve seats, reducing carbon build-up, and improves the compression in the cylinders, therefore helping burn the gas more efficiently.
When I admitted my skepticism and eventual acceptance of this additive to Bob, my mechanic (who also happens to be my friend), he just shrugged his shoulders and said that I should trust his judgment!
Ever since, I have been preaching the virtues to Marvel Mystery Oil to everybody I know, and they are getting similar results.
I felt I should share this experience with my friends on this blogosphere, with the hope that they can benefit from this and save money in this brutal gasoline warfare.
I found out something more about this company that makes it. This product has been on the market since 1923 - that is 84 years! - and THEY HAVEN'T CHANGED ANYTHING!
That says something about good old American ingenuity!
P.S. Some additional information:
All 4 cars were fuel injected, however the information on the bottle says that it works equally well with carbureted engines, too.
All 4 cars had high mileage, from 75,000 to 130,000 miles.
The information on the bottle gives specifics regarding warranties.
________________________________________________________________
RESPONSE TO COMMENTS POSTED HERE:
Thank you, folks, for your comments!
Joe, I would like to mention something regarding the 4 cars I have. When there are four drivers in the family, all four going in different directions on different schedules, and long distances, there is little choice I have! To make the best of situation, I try to save my money by using Marvel. It has worked very well for me, and saved quite a few bucks.
Chris, Marvel can be used in crank case as well, which I occasionally do to clean the crank case, crankshaft bearings etc. and to open the oil passages that seem to get clogged with gunk. It also helps quieting the rocker arms and lifters. I do not know about the compatibility of Marvel with synthetics, because I do not use synthetics in my cars. However, I will give you a link that you can go to, to find answer to this and other questions that you and others here may have regarding Marvel. I can only talk about my own experience.
http://www.marvelmysteryoil.com/
One interesting thing I found out from this website is the guy who invented Marvel Mystery Oil was the one who invented Marvel carburetor which was used in a majority of cars in the post WWI era!
nascarbum, I would like to reiterate my disclaimer. I have no connection whatsoever with Marvel, neither does anyone in my family. I do not accept payments from companies to promote their products. This gives me the freedom to speak my mind and be objective about what I say and write.
Jim, I appreciate your comment. I cannot ask you to believe in anything. That is your choice. However, if you want to benefit from my experience, you are welcome to do it. That was the sole purpose of this blog. I hate to pay those outrageous prices for gas, and I believe a majority of people do, too!
Manoli, Because I do not own a diesel vehicle, I cannot say. However, if you follow the link above, you may find that information.
http://www.marvelmysteryoil.com/
richnauer, dan, kevin and frank, I took the same attitude the first time I used Marvel. It worked for me, and I hope it works for you, too.
roger, I have not seen any fouled plugs in my cars. I believe the fuel injection system and computer management of the gas and air mixture, combined with very precise control of ignition timing may all have worked together to prevent it.
I like your idea of buying ExxonMobil stock. With the money I am saving, I may be able to afford a few shares!
Andy's idea of riding a bike is really good. It can help both ways, and will also make us feel a lot better about ourselves!
Thanks for your sharing your thoughts here.
-Searchbeam.
Is there relief in sight?
All signs indicate that there is none.
The best we can do is to cut down on our driving, try to combine chores so that we make fewer trips and generally be very conscious of every mile we drive so that we do not waste gas.
Even when all of these steps are taken, there is still that sticker shock when we see the pump showing astronomical numbers when we fill up. Companies like ExxonMobil are making sinful profits and some of their CEO's are taking half a BILLION dollars in paychecks while rest of us average Joe's are suffering! This is an economic calamity that is hitting every pocketbook!
When I got exasperated with this and talked to my mechanic Bob about this, he suggested something that sounded almost like an old wives' tale!
He suggested that I put 6 ounces of Marvel Mystery Oil in the gas tank every time I filled the tank. he said that it would give me better gas mileage and help the engine run smoother and extend its life.
Being a skeptic about such claims, I took his advice with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, I decided to try it. The worst that can happen, I figured, would be a few dollars down the drain; on the other hand, if it works, it may be good for my car and my wallet, too!
Now, at this point, I must put a disclaimer. I have no financial connection whatsoever with Marvel Mystery oil, nor do I own any stock in this company or have a gainful employment with them. Neither does anyone in my family.
After I put the first 6 ounces in the tank when I filled up, I forgot all about it until I went for another fill-up. Being a finicky record keeper, I keep a meticulous record of the miles I get per tankful of gas on all of my 4 cars. At the time of fill-up, I noticed that my car got 60 extra miles for the tank of gas. I thought that my driving habits got better, there was less head wind, I probably inflated the tires just right, etc. etc. I figured another tankful would even the things out. But next tankful gave me similar results. Then I tried it in my other cars, one after another.
The results were the same - an average of 60 to 65 extra miles for the tankful. The cars seemed to run a lot smoother, too! I picked up a couple of quart bottles at Advance Auto Parts at less than $4 each!
Things were getting interesting! For about 65 cents worth of Marvel Mystery oil, I was getting 60 to 65 extra miles. You just couldn't beat that!
Being a Physicist, I had to know the reason why this was happening. So I started digging deeper to understand this. What I found out made a lot of sense.
Inside a car engine, a tight-fitting piston moves inside the cylinder. This piston has 3 sets of compression rings that prevent the combustion gases from escaping into the crankcase ( the tank that holds the engine oil). During the movement of the piston, the area of the cylinder near the top, between the top and bottom rings, does not get much lubrication. This causes friction, and therefore loss of energy. Translated, it means that we waste gas. Apparently, the Marvel Mystery Oil lubricates this portion of the cylinder, reducing the friction. This means that there is less wastage of gas, therefore better mileage! It also cleans the valve seats, reducing carbon build-up, and improves the compression in the cylinders, therefore helping burn the gas more efficiently.
When I admitted my skepticism and eventual acceptance of this additive to Bob, my mechanic (who also happens to be my friend), he just shrugged his shoulders and said that I should trust his judgment!
Ever since, I have been preaching the virtues to Marvel Mystery Oil to everybody I know, and they are getting similar results.
I felt I should share this experience with my friends on this blogosphere, with the hope that they can benefit from this and save money in this brutal gasoline warfare.
I found out something more about this company that makes it. This product has been on the market since 1923 - that is 84 years! - and THEY HAVEN'T CHANGED ANYTHING!
That says something about good old American ingenuity!
P.S. Some additional information:
All 4 cars were fuel injected, however the information on the bottle says that it works equally well with carbureted engines, too.
All 4 cars had high mileage, from 75,000 to 130,000 miles.
The information on the bottle gives specifics regarding warranties.
________________________________________________________________
RESPONSE TO COMMENTS POSTED HERE:
Thank you, folks, for your comments!
Joe, I would like to mention something regarding the 4 cars I have. When there are four drivers in the family, all four going in different directions on different schedules, and long distances, there is little choice I have! To make the best of situation, I try to save my money by using Marvel. It has worked very well for me, and saved quite a few bucks.
Chris, Marvel can be used in crank case as well, which I occasionally do to clean the crank case, crankshaft bearings etc. and to open the oil passages that seem to get clogged with gunk. It also helps quieting the rocker arms and lifters. I do not know about the compatibility of Marvel with synthetics, because I do not use synthetics in my cars. However, I will give you a link that you can go to, to find answer to this and other questions that you and others here may have regarding Marvel. I can only talk about my own experience.
http://www.marvelmysteryoil.com/
One interesting thing I found out from this website is the guy who invented Marvel Mystery Oil was the one who invented Marvel carburetor which was used in a majority of cars in the post WWI era!
nascarbum, I would like to reiterate my disclaimer. I have no connection whatsoever with Marvel, neither does anyone in my family. I do not accept payments from companies to promote their products. This gives me the freedom to speak my mind and be objective about what I say and write.
Jim, I appreciate your comment. I cannot ask you to believe in anything. That is your choice. However, if you want to benefit from my experience, you are welcome to do it. That was the sole purpose of this blog. I hate to pay those outrageous prices for gas, and I believe a majority of people do, too!
Manoli, Because I do not own a diesel vehicle, I cannot say. However, if you follow the link above, you may find that information.
http://www.marvelmysteryoil.com/
richnauer, dan, kevin and frank, I took the same attitude the first time I used Marvel. It worked for me, and I hope it works for you, too.
roger, I have not seen any fouled plugs in my cars. I believe the fuel injection system and computer management of the gas and air mixture, combined with very precise control of ignition timing may all have worked together to prevent it.
I like your idea of buying ExxonMobil stock. With the money I am saving, I may be able to afford a few shares!
Andy's idea of riding a bike is really good. It can help both ways, and will also make us feel a lot better about ourselves!
Thanks for your sharing your thoughts here.
-Searchbeam.
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