One problem with being a secret society is that rumors spread about what really goes on behind closed doors. The Free and Accepted Masons -- known for the square, compass and letter G logo on their windows, signs and jewelry -- shared the truth -- and many secrets -- during a recent tour of their lodge.

Installation of Officers at Dunes Masonic Lodge #741 in Portage, IN.

Erik Burkhart, outgoing worshipful master of the Dunes Lodge in Portage, granted The Times access to dispel myths and educate the public about Masons. He was joined by Mike Stedman, worshipful master of the Glen Park Lodge in Valparaiso.

"What Masons do is take good men and try to make them better," Stedman said.

"You have to believe in God to be a Mason."

Through the years, members have been accused of devil worship and of physically or mentally hazing new members, but local lodge leaders say such talk is "bogus," "comical" and "gobbledygook."

Burkhart said the time Masons spend together is focused on self improvement, fellowship and doing good in the community. The list of charitable causes -- including financially supporting hospital care, assisted living and help for dyslexia -- is lengthy.

Stedman said the Masons are just like any fraternity -- and secret handshakes, signs and passwords are part of that. Burkhart said the advent of the Internet means there are few secrets (although much of the information online is inaccurate, he says). Still, individual Masons take seriously their oath to protect their secrets.

Burkhart did share the meaning of the Mason's logo. He said the G stands for both geometry and God. The square and compass represent the keeping of men within precise standards of morality and excellence.

In the Dunes Lodge meeting room, which features an altar surrounded by padded benches and special chairs for leaders, there are two stones, a rough one and a smooth one. The stones represent the creating of polished building materials in ancient times and the making of polished men today.

Stedman said he belongs because of "the camaraderie between men and to make yourself a better man."

Stan Mills said belonging to the Dunes Lodge has made him a better man, and he'd like to see others turn away from television and computers to seek knowledge and friendship.

Stan Mills, new worshipful master of Dunes Lodge No. 741 Free and Accepted Masons, was seated last month during the fraternal organization's 50th annual installation of officers at the Masonic Temple in Portage. Mills is serving as lodge leader this year.

"If they did, it would enlighten their life," Mills said.

The men gather for monthly meetings and to socialize. They also have fraternal rituals and ceremonies.

The list of Masons throughout time includes George Washington, Paul Revere and John Hancock. Today, a person needs only to be a male at least 18 years of age with no felonies. And they must be recommended by an investigative committee of Masons. If accepted, a man must spend about three months undergoing three degrees of education.

Once the education is complete, members can become further active in groups such as the Shriners and York Rite of Freemasonry.

In the past, Masons were not allowed to approach people they thought might make excellent Masons. They had to be approached before sharing information about the Masons. Now, they not only share the Mason message, they recently had open houses in the region -- something they say was a first in this area.

Stedman said television and Internet portrayals of Masons often are inaccurate.

Stedman and Burkhart said the Masons are growing, with 280 members in the Dunes Lodge, 150 in the Glen Park Lodge and, statewide, more than 17,000 men in 420 lodges. The average age of members, which once was 55, is now in the low 40s, Burkhart said.

Understanding Computers - Part 1 of 5

To understand computers, we must first understand the technical terms so we can understand what we are talking about. So, let's begin by learning some of the common terms and what they mean.

· bit: Claude E. Shannon first used the word bit in a 1948 paper. Shannon's bit is short for binary digit (or possibly binary digit).

· booting or bootstrapping: The term booting or bootstrapping a computer is used to refer to turning on or starting the computer.

· Bug: A fault in a computer program which prevents it from working correctly. The term is often (but erroneously) credited to Grace Hopper. In 1946, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she traced an error in the Harvard Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book.

· byte: The term was coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer. It was coined by mutating the word bite so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. A byte usually is a grouping of 8 bits, but technically refers to the smallest addressable unit of memory.

· Cookie : A packet of information that travels between a browser and the web server. The term was coined by web browser programmer Lou Montulli after the term "magic cookies" used by Unix programmers.

· CPU: The letters stand for Central Processing Unit, a term that's been used since computers filled whole rooms. Strictly speaking, the CPU is the chip, or processor, that runs programs — i.e., it's the part that makes things happen. The term has morphed in the PC era to refer to the part of a personal computer that contains most of its components. On a desktop PC, that would be the tower into which your monitor, keyboard, mouse and printer connect.

· Google : Search engine on the web. The name started as an exaggerated boast about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros..

· Hard drive: Also called the hard disk, fixed disk or sometimes just storage. When you install a program on your computer or save a document created with that program, it's where the files are saved. Users often mistakenly refer to the hard drive as memory — it's not.

· Hotmail: free email service, now part of MSN. Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters "HTML" — the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing. · ICQ : An instant messaging service. ICQ is not an initialism. It is a play on the phrase "I seek you" (similar to CQ in ham radio usage). · Apple Macintosh: Mac computer system from Apple Computer. From McIntosh, a popular type of apple. Jef Raskin, a computer scientist, is credited with this naming. · Memory: Sometimes called Random Access Memory or RAM, memory is where information is held while the processor works with it. For example, when you start your word processor and then open a document, software that makes up the word processor and the words you're writing or changing are held in the computer's memory.

· Modem: Connects you to the Internet, usually through your telephone or cable line. The modem may be connected in turn to a single computer, or to a network by way of a router.

· Motherboard: It's also known as the mainboard. It's the circuit board inside your computer's case that everything else plugs into.

· Mozilla: A web browser and successor to Netscape Communicator.When Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, created a browser to replace the Mosaic browser, it was internally named Mozilla (Mosaic-Killer, Godzilla). When Netscape's Navigator source code was made open source, Mozilla was the internal name for the open source version. · Nerd: A colloquial term for a computer person, especially an obsessive, singularly focused one. Earlier spelling of the term is "Nurd" and the original spelling is "Knurd", but the pronunciation has remained the same. · Network adapter: Here's the part that connects your computer to a network, or the Internet. It might connect via a cable (usually a technology known as Ethernet) or wirelessly (usually Wi-Fi).

· Radio button: A GUI widget used for making selections.Radio buttons got their name from the preset buttons in radio receivers. When one used to select preset stations on a radio receiver physically instead of electronically, depressing one preset button would pop out whichever other button happened to be pushed in. · Router: This device acts like a traffic cop for information flowing through a computer network, as well as to and from the Internet. It routes the information to the proper computer on the network, hence the name. A router may support a wired or wireless connection, or both types.

· RSS: Stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it's an easy way to have the content from a Web site come to you when it's updated. You can read RSS feeds in your Web browser; in a Web app, such as Google Reader; or in a software program, such as FeedDemon or NetNewsWire.

· Shareware: Coined by Bob Wallace to describe his word processor PC-Write in early 1983. Prior to this Jim Knopf (also known as Jim Button) and Andrew Fluegelman called their distributed software "user supported software" and "freeware" respectively, but it was Wallace's terminology that stuck. · Social network: An Internet-based service that lets people find, connect to and interact with each other. This is usually done through a Web browser — Facebook, for example — but a different software program may also be used, such as Tweet Deck, for use with Twitter.

· Spam:Video adapter: Also known as a video card or graphics adapter, this is the part that generates the image you see on your monitor.

· Trojan Horse: A malicious program that is disguised as legitimate software. · Virus: A piece of program code that spreads by making copies of itself. The term virus was first used in print by Fred Cohen in his 1984 paper "Experiments with Computer Viruses", where he credits Len Adleman with coining it. A computer virus's basic function is to insert its own executable code into that of other existing executable files, literally making it the electronic equivalent to the biological virus, the basic function of which is to insert its genetic information into that of the invaded cell, forcing the cell to reproduce the virus. · Worm: a self-replicating program, similar to a virus. The name 'worm' was taken from a 1970s science fiction novel by John Brunner entitled The Shockwave Rider. The book describes programs known as "tapeworms" which spread through a network for the purpose of deleting data. Researchers writing an early paper on experiments in distributed computing noted the similarities between their software and the program described by Brunner, and adopted that name. · Web app: A program that runs in your browser, as opposed to one that is stored on your hard drive and runs on your computer. For example, Google's Gmail is considered a Web app; Microsoft's Outlook is a program that runs on your computer.

· Web browser: A Web browser — such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera — is software that lets you view pages on the Web. It can also view other parts of the Internet, such as FTP sites (for downloading and uploading files).

· World Wide Web: The Web is a collection of documents, contained in computers on the Internet, that can display text, pictures, video and play audio. The Web is not the Internet, but rather a subset of it.

· WYSIWYG: Describes a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. Acronym for What You See Is What You Get, the phrase was originated by a newsletter published by Arlene and Jose Ramos, called WYSIWYG. It was created for the emerging Pre-Press industry going electronic in the late 1970s.

· Yahoo! : internet portal and web directory. Yahoo!'s history site says the name is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle", but some remember that in its early days (mid-1990s), when Yahoo! lived on a server called akebono.stanford.edu, it was glossed as "Yet Another Hierarchical Object Organizer." The word "Yahoo!" was originally invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver's Travels. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.

· Zip : A file format now also used as a verb to mean compress

Now that you know what things are called, next month we will start seeing how all these parts interact, to make a computer work.

1. Pneumonia and influenza  
2. Tuberculosis  
3. Diarrhea 
4. Heart disease
5. Stroke

Only 14 percent of the homes had a bathtub.
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.
Most women only washed their hair  once a month and used Borax or egg yolks for shampoo.

There were only 8,000 cars and only 144 miles of paved roads.
The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
 Fuel for the car was sold in drug stores only 

The average wage in 1909 was 22 cents per hour.
The average worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.
Two out of every 10 adults couldn't read or write and
 Only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.

Sugar cost four cents a pound.
Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.
Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.

Canada passed a law that prohibited poor people from entering into their country for any reason.
The American flag had 45 stars.
The population of  Las Vegas, Nevada, was only 30.
The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower!
Eighteen percent of households had at least one full-time servant or domestic help.
There were about 230 reported murders in the entire U.S.A.! 

Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and iced tea hadn't been invented yet.
Neither had Band Aids, torn up rags were used for bandaging.
There was no tape. Things were tied with ribbons, rags or twine.
Glue was a mixture of flour and water mixed into a goo and it worked.
There was no toilet paper. They used leaves, small twigs rolled like a Q-tip, corn cobs or printed paper like a sales catalog, or washed out rags and hung them in the sun for that purpose.
There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.

Try to imagine what the changes will be like in the next 100 years. 
IT STAGGERS THE MIND

Mary MacKillop, 1869 Born 15 January 1842

The man who proved to be MacKillop's saviour in her hour of need - offering free accommodation to her and other nuns when they were ordered out of their convent - was a Jewish ex-convict who had moved to South Australia after serving time in NSW for house-breaking.

The man, Emanuel Solomon, was also instrumental in the young colony in establishing Freemasonry. There is a long history of antagonism between that movement and the Catholic Church.

Yesterday, one of Solomon's great-great-grandsons, John Johnston from Blackheath, said the decision to offer the nuns two of his properties was in character for his ancestor.

''The driving force with him was charity,'' Mr. Johnston said. ''He was a man who spent his money and he set up so many charitable things in his time … Perhaps he was making up for past misdemeanors.''

He said the ''great irony of the story'' was the man who helped the Catholic nun was a leading member of the Australian Jewish community and a prime mover in setting up Freemasonry.

Mr. Solomon was born in London in 1800 and was sentenced to seven years' transportation to NSW in 1817.

Records show he was hardly a model prisoner and was flogged at least three times, including one set of 50 lashes for having an iron pick in his possession.

When he was finally freed, he set up a business with his brother, Vaiban, who had also been transported for theft.

Eventually, Emanuel moved to South Australia where he and Vaiban enjoyed considerable success shipping goods between the two colonies.

Mr Solomon achieved prominence in South Australia, setting up the first purpose-built theatre on the mainland, and serving in both the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council. But the state, which had never accepted convicts directly from England, did not offer emancipists a warm welcome.

Mr. Solomon overcame the problem by simply never mentioning his background.

Mr. Johnston said Mr. Solomon had also helped the nuns with housing in 1869, two years before the excommunication.

The act of kindness was referred to by MacKillop herself, archives of the Sisters of St Joseph reveal.

''The convent being too small for so many, a house in Rosetta Terrace was kindly lent … by the Hon. E. Solomon,'' she wrote.

''The kindness shown by the Jewish community has been remarkable, but then St Joseph was a Jew.''