Skip to main content

Visit a Masonic Lodge!

I’ve written about National Treasure: Book of Secrets and its connections to Freemasonry for my last several posts. The rich history of the Masonic fraternity and it’s interconnectedness to the formation of the United States of America make it a fun topic to explore.

You should also consider exploring Masonic lodges in the real world! These buildings and the organizations that inhabit them can be breathtaking. I’ve never been to a lodge that wasn’t happy to show an interested person around. Below are a few lodges that I’m familiar with.

The Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: This building is incredible! There are seven different lodge rooms and each one is more awe-inspiring and opulent than the next. There is a web based tour of the building at: Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania Tour . The link will land you on a page that has links to all the lodge rooms. The rest of the tour is worth taking as well. But, if you're anywhere near Philadelphia, a tour of this building is worth adding to your travel plans.











Onion Creek Lodge #220 in Austin, TX: I'm partial to this lodge! It's where I was raised and I'm a Past Master of the lodge. The lodge was originally constructed in the late 1800s. The frontier history surrounding the lodge is very interesting. It served as an elementary school and several of the local churches shared its meeting hall on alternating Sundays. The lodge is ope every Monday and Thursday night. Drop by and talk to the guys. Ask about the ghost that lives on the second floor. Even better, ask them about the money they raise every year to help support Pleasant Hill Elementary down the road. The modern day elementary school is the same school that used to reside in the lodge building. The lodge has provided everything from reading programs to holiday gifts for the kids there. This year, they raised more than $1800 for holiday gifts. More than 40 kids had holiday gifts that wouldn't have otherwise.




The Grand Lodge of Scotland in Edinburgh, Scotland: The interior of this building is incredible! In contrast to the exteriors of American lodge buildings, this lodge is hard to spot from the outside if you don't know the address. There has been so much interest in the lodge building lately that they have set up two tours per day ever week day.

Mountain View De Anza Lodge #194 in Mountain View, CA: The members of this lodge are a great bunch of guys! They're very interested in Masonic history and Masonic research. The lodge is in downtown Mountain View near the walking district. They meet every Tuesday at 7:00 PM.







Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments on this topic:

Popular posts from this blog

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:
Post a Comment
Read more

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain
10 comments
Read more

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1.  While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero.  This is typically explained in the following way.  While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare.  That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2].  Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector.  Its operation is in concept very sim
Post a Comment
Read more