xxmikexx

This being NYC, when I get to my desk at 9AM I'm arriving a full hour before most other people. And we'll all leave an hour early too, at 4PM, because that's the way things work around here in the Big Apple. The coffee I brought up from Starbucks smells really good. I'll just set it down on my desk here while I sit down in my chair and ... ... That's odd, from here on the 85th floor I can see all the way uptown and into Connecticut ... ... And I can see a big airplane out there ... and I've never seen one there before -- not up around Yankee Stadium -- not a big one headed south, not at such a low altitude. Oh well. ... I'll just read the newspaper while I'm having my coffee ... Story about the Mets ... Another one about civil war in Afghanistan. ... Something about a scandal involving an intern in the mayor's office ... Something ... ... ... Something catches my eye and I look up. It's really odd. That airplane looks exactly like an airliner, and it looks like it's coming down right about where Fifth Avenue would be. Wait till I tell the kids about this one. Half a mile to the west and it would be flying directly toward me. Oh well, I'll just watch. You don't get to see something like this very often. Wait. Wait a minute. Something's wrong. Something's terribly wrong. The airliner is making all kinds of crazy manuevers ... ... And now it really is heading right toward me ... ... And I can hear the engines ... ... And I can see the pilot's face for a moment, but only very briefly because the enormous nose of the aircraft is blocking my view of him and the nose is fifty feet away and the bow wave is blowing the windows in and I'm being riddled with glass shrapnel and here comes the nose and it's going to

It's only the 10th, but while driving back from Safeway the urge -- the need -- the demand that I write, and write today, struck with high impact. I was furious that day in 2001, fighting mad -- so mad that I called the Israeli Embassy in San Francisco to offer my services in any capacity they might see fit. But I couldn't get through. Their switchboard was jammed, and by the next day I had calmed down a little. I suddenly understood what the attack on Pearl Harbor had meant to the people of the USA of that time. I'm fighting mad today, all over again, even though today is only 9/10 and not 9/11. It had taken six of these seven years for the nightmares to stop. Are they now going to start again? Is that why I have to write about this stuff? So I won't have to dream about it? xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Yes ... There it is ... Right on time and 3,000 feet below lower than we are. Hell's Gate, the junction of the East River and the Harlem River, just as in the simulator. I'll roll the aircraft into a gentle descending left turn. After all, I don't want to upset the passengers any more than they're already upset. We still have 25 miles and four minutes to go. Let's not give them any ideas ... There we are, lined up on Fifth Avenue. I don't know anything about New York, but in the sim I was easily able to identify Central Park off in the distance to the southwest, and Fifth Avenue runs right along its eastern edge. Passing a sports stadium I continue my descent, now tracking straight down Fifth. But I'm going to level off at 1500 feet before I reach the Empire State building so I can't possibly hit it -- because that's not the plan for the day. ... ... There it is, the big antenna mast on top of the building. Here it comes, there it goes, just below me off the right wing. Get the nose down now, way down, because I have to get down to 700 feet before I can do the will of ... ... No. No time for that now ... As I near Union Square I pull the nose up sharply to stop my descent. I can hear the shrieks of the passengers as they experience a G-force that is supposed to be felt only in roller coasters, not in airliners. But I don't care about them. Actually, I do care. I don't want them to panic but I do want them to suffer. Because they deserve it. They all deserve it. The people in the North Tower, the people in the South Tower, they all deserve it. So do the people in the Pentagon, and in the White House. Full power now, jam the throttles all the way forward as we pass the next-to-last waypoint, the arch at the north entrance to Washington Square Park. Even from the cockpit I can hear the terrible whine of the turbines as the blades go supersonic. What must the children and college students in the park be thinking? Have they ever seen anything like this before? Will they now acknowledge the righteous might of ... ... No. No time for that now either. There is only time to wrack the aircraft around in a tight right turn and then to roll it steeply left again, pulling it around the AT&T headquarters building, the final waypoint, in a climbing left turn that takes me directly to the North Tower exactly as we planned, my nose at the level of the 85th floor, aimed upwards, my wings steeply banked so as to involve as many floors as possible in the fires of vengeance that will now cons

I will do that, Luis. As you've already sensed, this is exactly a story about making a comeback. I wasn't going to say so but this is the kind of comeback that is within everybody's power to make happen.

Hi Luis, Glad you made it down here. With you having set an example, I'm now going to have to finish this piece about the Z Store. :) See above.

Thanks to the TV program "American Chopper", and others like it, I know what an English Wheel is. I think that in another life I would have been happy as a machinist. The idea of sculpting metal with high precision has a strange appeal to me.

Luis, I thought I knew music but I've never heard lando. In fact, I had to look it up -- Afro-Peruvian, sounds wonderful. I'll look around YouTube to see if I can find any.

Luis, What a remarkable toy. I would have died to have it because like you I was aviation minded even as a kid. (But I go back further than you -- I was born in 1944 and I remember when Orville Wright died, in 1948.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I know what you mean about the sound of a Viscount. During the late 50s we lived near La Guardia airport in NYC, right under the curving approach path to runway 31, I believe it is. Anyway, the aircraft on this curving approach came right over our apartment building, maybe 700? 800? feet feet up. When Capitol Airways started operating Viscounts, the shrill screech of the engines always got me very excited. My bedroom window faced the airport, which was perhaps 3-4 miles away. I could follow the aircraft almost all the way to touchdown, when a bunch of buildings would intervene. But after that I would see the tips of the vertical stabilizers as the aircraft completed their rollouts.

P.S. While I praise Denny's corporate, I can't praise the local franchisee. I never heard a word from them. What the local franchisee doesn't understand is that people talk, just as I'm doing now and just as I will whenever the opportunity arises for me to express my opinion about the unit in question. But that's fine, we've switched our business to the cafe I was talking about, the Westwood Inn, a family restaurant that serves delicious fresh-cooked meals at prices lower than Denny's, many of whose entrees are flash-frozen meals that get microwaved in the kitchen. By the way, I was eating at that Denny's the morning that a new manager walked in, announced that the franchise had just changed hands, that he was in charge, but that nobody was going to be let go. That was a lie, in my opinion. What he should have said was what in my opinion was the truth: "I don't want you all leaving the restaurant unstaffed on short notice so I'll tell you that your jobs are safe. However, I don't mean this. What I really mean is that I want you to continue to work while I decide whether to keep you on or kick your ungrateful butt out the door. If the latter, I want you to continue to work until your replacement has been interviewed, hired and has walked into the restaurant." I would say that there was 50% turnover in the morning shift between that day and the day a month or so later of the screaming kid incident. One of the departed waitresses now works at the Westwood Inn. She doesn't remember me because my wife and I didn't usually sit in her section. But I remember her, and she's giving the same great customer service at the Westwood Inn that she did at Denny's. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Anyway, those of you who live in the Denver area, if you ever find yourself out in Lakewood, be sure to stop at the Westwood Inn, southwest corner of 6th and Wadsworth, exactly where the eastbound off-ramp exits onto Wadsworth. Tell 'em Mike sent you.

N2056, You write really well, thanks for posting. (And now I understand your avatar.) Question: Your dad elected to make out of sheet metal parts that might otherwise be fiberglass -- what's the benefit?

Now I got to see the other side of the business -- the quiet time after Christmas. By now, to run the Villa store we only needed a small number of people, and I was asked to transfer to Big John's store, where even a non-seasonal employee had quit due to exhaustion. So ... In two months I had gone from knowing nothing about the business to being asked to work full time in what I later came to realize was the highest-grossing Radio Shack store between Saint Louis (800 miles to the east) and Salt Lake City (700 miles to the west). During this quiet time I began working at still other stores. I never said no, and whenever Big John would call me at home to ask if I would once again go over to some other store, my answer was the same as always: "Whatever the district needs, John. I'll be there." I even did what many other employees refused to do which was to cover the store at the intersection of 6th and Federal, the high-crime neighborhood at the heart of the main Hispanic section west of Denver. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Aside: Somebody had to work this store, and it was either the manager or me. The manager, who went by the name Ski (Polish), explained that the store had never been robbed during his tenure, which was about 1.5 years by the time I met him. His secret? Treat his customers with dignity. This was a poor neighborhood. People didn't have a lot of money to spend, and quite understandably they were very sensitive to being ripped off, especially by Gringos. Word very soon got around that Ski treated everybody fairly, and that if you bought something from him and it didn't work out, you could bring it back to the store and get a refund even though the normal return privilege period might have expired. So ... Nobody in his right mind was going to rob Ski or his store -- the people of the neighborhood would have exacted swift vigilante justice on their own without involving the police. Similarly, Ski put the word out that nobody was to mess with me either, because if I was in the store but Ski was not, I spoke for Ski and would give the people the same good customer service that Ski did. No wonder I felt comfortable in that neighborhood. People knew my face, and they knew my car. I was left alone which was all that I asked. By the way, Ski's results for his first year of operating 6th & Federal were a 40% increase in sales over the year before, all because a) he was a decent man who worked for a living just like everybody else, and because b) he understood the vital role that his store played in the life of the community. Where else could people get a cheap radio? Where else could they borrow an R/C car to cheer up the life of a sick kid who had to stay home alone because his single mom, who couldn't afford day care, had to go to work? All Ski did was Do The Right Thing, and the people of the community buried him with so much business that he sometimes had to borrow me from Big John. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Most of the times I worked there it was because Ski needed to take off to do personal business. (Unavoidable difficulties in his personal life.) It was either bring me in or close the store. If my coming there happened early in the morning the store would be quiet, but I was never bored. I simply did what I did at every satellite store when I found myself betrween customers -- I put out replacement price tags that I made myself out of index cards. Sometimes the original tags had simply disappeared. Sometimes, in the heat of battle, they had never been put up to begin with. (Prices changed once a year, but they all changed at the same time, so putting up the new price tags -- potentially 7,000 of them in principle -- was something that only big stores like Southwest Plaza tried to stay on top of.) But there was no point in trying to track down authentic price tags because NObody at any store ever knew where they had gotten to. (They were usually thrown out by lazy employees who didn't want to do the repricing work.) So I would see an item that wasn't priced, look it up in the catalog, create a price tag using index card, pocket knife and pen, and then mount my self-made price tag. I would make the tags up in batches of five or so and then mount them in batches. With each batch taking about ten minutes, I could reprice about thirty items an hour. Do this for 3-4 hours every day for a week and we're talking about 100+ repricings, a significant issue since I always concentrated on the items with high sales volume. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Soon I was not only helping open Southwest Plaza, I was made a "keyholder", which meant that I was trusted enough to unlock the store before the arrival of other employees. And on days when I happened to be working second shift there, sometimes I was given another in a series of lessons about how to close a store, which is a much more complex process than opening one. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx One evening an incident occurred that made me realize I had "arrived". Working by ourselves, Big John and I had finished counting the cash register drawers, and I had finished composing the bank deposit. "Okay" he said, tossing me the store keys. "I'm going home now and I want YOU to make the bank deposit." He showed me how to conceal the deposit bag in the small of my back, tucked into the waist of my pants, covered by my shirt. This was crucial because the day's funds were not covered by insurance while in transit between the store and an outside bank night depository drop. So if an armed robber came into the store and cleaned out all the cash registers, that was covered by insurance. But if I were robbed on the way to the bank that would be too bad -- Radio Shack would assume that I had actually stolen the money and I would be fired immediately even though robbery was hard to prove and I probably would not be prosecuted. Anyway, I knew where the night depository drop for Big John's store was -- it was right there in the Southwest Plaza mall. So John went home, I made the deposit, and then I went home feeling very pleased at the progress I was making. As it happens, Big John and I never participated in a store closing together again. Given his experienced assistant manager Little John, and given my training, there was no need for Big John to stick around once the stoor doors had been closed for the night on any night that I was working. Big John set up the schedules in such a way that either he and Little John would be on duty at 10PM, or Little John and i would be on duty. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx So now I was qualified to both open and close stores, and this was around the end of January as I recall. Now and then during January I had been called upon to work one of Big John's other satellite stores about five miles away, the little store on Coal Mine Road. Other people called this store simply "Coal Mine". I called it "The Train Wreck".

After closing our Golden Midi Music And Software business I spent 1.5 years in an unsuccessful search for a well-paying high tech job. It finally dawned on me that being 40++, and having been an entrepreneur, I had become an Untouchable. I moped around our remotely located property for another few months till the cold weather of late Fall set in and it was no longer fun to go for walks with my favorite cat. It was actually the cat who took ME for walks, the same route every time. She would get about fifty feet ahead of me, then wait for me to catch up, then walk another fifty feet, and so on, periodically turning her head to make sure I was following her. (When she died a year later I was absolutely devastated.) Came the day when I made a fateful decision. I was out of the computer industry. Now I would go into retailing, and I would go as far as I could, as fast as I could. It being early November, I assumed that with the approach of the Christmas selling season there would never be a better time to break in. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I drove twenty miles to the largest Radio Shack store in the Metro Denver area, the flagship store of the local district, located inside the large Southwest Plaza shopping mall. I asked to speak with the manager. Why? "Please tell him that I want a job." He's not here. "Fine, I'll wait." I killed two hours during which time I wandered throughout the store, seeing it for the first time not simply as a customer but also as someone who might actually end up working there at Southwest Plaza. The manager finally came back from his errand, led me to a table at a fast food restaurant, and asked me a few questions. I answered them, giving him a 25-word summary of why I wanted to get into retailing. "Okay" he finally said. "Do you have a Social Security card?" I explained that it had been lost. "Get another one and then come back and see me." He asked me to do something else as well, I don't remember what. The replacement SS card came about ten days later. My having already done whatever the other thing was, I took myself back to Southwest Plaza and had another sit-down with Big John, as I later would learn he was called. "Fine" he said. "Now I want you to go down to the district office and fill out some paperwork", whereupon he immediately got up and returned to the store before I had a chance to ask him where the office in question was. It didn't take long to find out, and by three hours later I had filled out the papers and returned to Big John's store. He sat me down for the third time. "I'm sorry about the runaround" he said "But I needed to see what your work ethic is like. You're hired, but you can't work here. You'll be working at Villa Italia. Tell Pete Bulmer that I sent you." I didn't know at the time that Southwest Plaza had satellite stores, that in effect those stores reported to the flagship store, and that Big John effectively was the manager of a district within an even bigger district. Rather, I felt that I had been sentenced to Siberia, especially because the Villa Italia store was even further from home and was located in a shopping mall whose clientelle had deteriorated to the point that there was actually a police station located within it. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Pete put me to work immediately, putting stock out on the retail shelves and piers, and in the stockroom. Cardboard boxes of random stuff arrived daily and, for a few days, it was my job to get everything unpacked and put away. At first, in the interests of saving time I had to go to Pete and ask where things should go. (The other employees were scornful and I tried not to have to ask them.) But gradually the store layout began to clarify in my mind, and after about a week I more or less knew where event the tiniest items were likely to be located. All the while the Christmas shopping traffic in the store was building. You could see the increase from one day to the next, and things were starting to get a little hectic. I realized that my playing stock put-away was actually good training for what I could see was the coming battle. As I became more efficient at restocking the store I began to have time to work with customers. Actually, I had worked with my first customer on the day I started at Villa. Somebody walked up to me, asked me a question, and I did my best to answer it. The customer then walked away for whatever reason, and the assistant manager approached me. "That's my customer" he said. "And I don't want you talking to my customers." xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Rick (that was his name) and I became friends, but not at first. The significance of the "my customer" business was that regardless of what the customer bought, and regardless of which salesperson closed the sale, credit for the sale was supposed to go to the "owner" of the customer, which meant that either a) he got to ring it up under his log-in name, or b) the other salespeople were to log in as him and ring it up for him. This was important because Radio Shack employees made minimum wage and were limited to working 35 hours per week so that there wouldn't be any overtime (or benefits). So sales people had a strong incentive to sell as much as they could as fast as they could in order to "make commission" -- in order to sell more than the weekly thresshold amount required to begin earning commissions for that week. Well, I never made commission. Not once. I hadn't come for the minimum wage job, I had come to get noticed by store and district management. I simply gave the best customer service I could, having decided that either a) Radio Shack would appreciate this and reward me in way other than commissions, or b) I would leave and find some other retailing home. And I was in fact rewarded. As the shopping crowds continued to build it became necessary to hire additional seasonal help. (I was seasonal.) But sometimes there were delays in the hiring process. At other times people would start but not be able to take the job and quit. So as the Christmas sales volume expanded, Pete began asking me to work extra shifts (I always said yes) and frequently extra days (I always said yes). xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Because I always said yes, two things happened: First, I started working a lot of overtime -- at time-and-a-half. So most weeks my take-home pay was 50-100% above 35-hours-at-minimum wage. (Story resumes at this point per Luis' request.) The second thing that happened was that I was now getting requests from Big John to work extra shifts at his flagship store in Southwest Plaza. You must realize the importance here. This said something about how much I had learned because Big John's store did a sales volume five times that of the next biggest store, which was Pete's store in Villa Italia, my home base. Yet Southwest Plaza ran with a very small staff, only three people more than Villa, sometimes two. So for Big John to ask that I come down to his store meant that I was already viewed as a skilled Radio Shack employee -- someone who was capable of standing the pace at the Southwest Plaza store, even though I had only been with Radio Shack for a little more than a month. Mind you, this wasn't because I possessed any special retailing skills (I don't), it was simply because I had been determined to learn as much as I could as fast as I could, my work showed it, and I began to get noticed just as I had hoped would happen. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Anyway, Thanksgiving came and went, and by two weeks before Christmas every store was always full of customers. I often started mornings at Villa Italia and then, in mid-afternoon, would go down to Southwest Plaza to finish out their business day. So except for the time required to travel between stores (20 minutes) I was on the job (and on my feet) from 9AM (by then I was helping to open the Villa store) till 10 PM, when Big John began his close. (I wasn't yet trusted to help with store closings. If I had been, I'd have been working till 11 PM.) By a week before Christmas I was doing this every day, seven days a week. It was baptism by fire, a crash course in high volume retailing, a test -- and I was passing the test simply because I never said no and always worked my butt off. By a couple of days before Christmas two of the other seasonal people quit from Pete's store. They simply didn't show up for work, presumably because they couldn't take the pressure any more. Anyway, that bolted me to Pete's store. We (the district, I was already beginning to think that way) -- we needed me to be at Pete's store 100% of the time .... ... Because the store was jam-packed with customers and the sales volume was very very high. People were buying anything and everything -- and they continued to buy right up till 10PM on Christmas Eve when we closed the doors with a sigh of relief. (Even then people were pounding on the doors demanding to be let in, but the policy of the shopping mall management was that all stores had to close their doors at 10PM, period end of discussion.) So we all went home to our families, our girlfriends, our pets, depending on how lucky we had been in life. But it wasn't over yet because we only got Christmas morning off. The store re-opened at 1 PM -- not to sell anything but rather to deal with the flood of merchandise being returned by customers who had bought stuff in the last few days simply to have things to put under their Christmas trees -- but who couldn't afford to do without refunds for that very same merchandise. That flood went on till well into the evening. The next morning we opened Pete's store as usual -- and everything was finally quiet. There had been perhaps twenty seasonal employees taken on across the district, which encompassed six or eight stores, I don't recall the exact number. Only one of these people was invited to stay on with Radio Shack as a full-time employee. That person was me, and I had d*** well earned it.

If you edit or plan to edit .air files, to avoid certain seemingly mysterious error messages you should read the following article ... [Link Expired]

I'm ba-a-a-a-ck. I wish I shared your love of good literature, and of philosophy, but I’m unable. In fact, with a very few exceptions I gave up reading fiction forty years ago, and the only branch of philosophy I consider to have any merit is epistemology. But I still want to discuss these things with you because a) you’re so enthusiastic about them, and because b) I might learn something. I loved the Woody Allen line you quoted. As for War And Peace, as a kid I studied Russian for several years and finally reached the point where I was able to tackle that famous work. Regrettably, by 4-5 pages into it I was bored to tears. I could appreciate the quality of his writing in terms of crafting sentence clauses but, Sherm, Tolstoy’s data rate is so low, and his sentences so long, that it makes me want to scream. J He’s just as turgid in Russian as he is in English. Your quotation about the gears and wheels is a perfect example of what I’m talking about, and it makes me react the way Woody Allen did – “This passage is about troop mobilization.” xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I agree with you that we are under no obligation to read a book cover to cover just because we started to read it. I also agree that you can judge a book by the first couple of chapters. In fact, in my experience, if a book is well written you will know that from the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter. My son is the well-known science fiction author Wil McCarthy. (Now turned high tech entrepreneur.) He once asked me to review a draft manuscript, something I never did again because he wouldn’t take editorial advice from me. He had an opening scene that was good but the first paragraph beat around the bush, explaining in detail how the main character was nervous that the police were about and watching him. I suggested to Wil that he precede that paragraph with the single very short sentence “Doug smelled cop.” He declined my advice which was too bad – the sentence was a grabber, and it would have set the reader up for the rest of the paragraph, which in turn would have set the reader up for the first chapter, and for the rest of the novel. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx A similar thing occurs with pop music. A vital role played by music industry agents is to shield the record companies from the non-stop avalanche of music that would like to come in over their collective transom from would-be new acts. But the agents themselves are overworked in that capacity, so they do the following: They listen to the first few bars of a recording. If the very beginning grabs them they continue to listen. But if the first few bars are not grabbers - - if the musician doesn’t know enough about the music business to lead with his best work - - the recording will be tossed into the circular file. What’s the justification? Because radio listeners will react the same way. You have to get the listener’s attention immediately because, as the old saying goes, you only have one chance to make a first impression.

Correctamundo.

Sherm, I'll reply in some detail sometime tomorrow, but in the meantime there is in fact a way to edit blog posts. If you look in the lower right corner of the post window you'll see the yellow image of a pencil. Click on it and you'll be able to rexaiiiiiiiiiir alll thss typos.

Well, with my getting serious about the game, and with minoring in physics plus having become a computer programmer, I was doodling one day in some class or other when it occured to me that a simulation of pool could be written. I had no actual plans to write such a thing but I did want to sketch out the key design issues. Now ... You're talking to a serious nerd here, a guy who figures stuff out just because he's interested. For example, the topic of orbiting satellites prompted me to come up with a formula that would give some idea of the distance that a satellite could see as a function of orbit altitude. I could derive it here again but why bother? Anyway, this tendency to pose questions to myself and then answer them led me to solve the following problem. Any pool player knows that if we ignore the effects of friction, and/or if the cue ball is struck hard enough, the cue ball and the object ball it strikes will emerge from the collision travelling on paths that form a right angle. Why a right angle? It's the secret to making side shots, and to leaving yourself good position, but what's really at work here? xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I don't recall the derivation, and honestly it's not very important to me, but the implications of the derivation were enormous. It turns out that, given that both momentum and kinetic energy are conserved in a collision, and given that the cue ball and object ball are of the same weight and diameter, Newton's laws REQUIRE that the post-collision paths of the two balls form a right angle. It was this flash of insight (probably reached during a History Of Art class :) ) that made me realize how important conservation laws are. They COMPEL the outcomes of a wide variety of phenomena. (to be continued when I'm good and ready, and not before)

My bit about surface tension caused me to mention physics conservation laws. (In the title of this blog, kindly append an "s" to the word "Law".) I want now to say more on that subject. It will also, remarkably, be an opportunity for me to wax poetic about the joys of Julian's, the NYC pool hall at which the movie "The Huster" SHOULD have been shot. While I was at NYU my best friend was a guy named Karl Erb. Karl's father was an aeronautical engineer who had designed the nose gear of the YB-47 flying wing prototype. That impressed the heck out of me though it meant nothing to Karl, who had a less than zero interest in aviation. No, Karl was interested only in physics ... ... And in the game of pool, pocket billiards to you UK/continent people, which he taught me to play in the NYU student center. I didn't play all that well -- typical runs of 5-6 balls, but Karl wasn't bad, on the order of 10 balls per run. Nevertheless, one thing led to another and I ended up having a pool cue custom-made for me at a shop down on Radio Row, later to be the site of the Twin Towers. It was a standard unscrews-in-the-middle top-of-the-line cue but I had them add weights and position them till it was just the way I wanted -- heavier than most players are comfortable with by about four ounces, but so perfectly balanced that I could shoot with my right thumb and index finger closed into an O so I would be able not to grip the cue the way so many players do. The added weights gave the cue a lot of momentum, helping me with straight follow-through, which was one of my weak points. Karl and I played straight pool. No eightball. No nineball. Just as we each preferred straight poker, another story for another day. But as conservative as we were about pool, we were thrilled the day the legendary Willy Mosconi came to the student center to put on an exhibition. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mosconi did his incredible trick shot show, a small portion of which you see in The Hustler, passed off as normal pool playing. Well, it's not. Hardly anybody can do a masse (pr. "mass-ay") shot the way Mosconi could, making the cue ball leap over an object ball and then come back toward the shooter, knocking the object ball into the pocket in front of which the shooter is standing. No, when most people tried something like that they would simply tear the billiard cloth. As a result, essentially every pool hall that plans to make a profit forbids masse shots. Sometimes, as part of his exhibition, Mosconi would play an entire game by himself, against the clock. That is, he would break and then run rack after rack till he had reached 125 balls. Sometimes he would miss, and maybe most of the time he would miss a single shot, or perhaps two, but to a first approximation Mosconi was one of a small number -- a very small number -- of players who could do that. Mosconi was so good that his face was known to all pool players, and he would no longer be able to get a game for money, not that he needed it. He made a very good living traveling around the USA putting on his exhibitions. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Our show took place early in the afternoon. Everybody who cared at all about pool, about 25-30 of us, cut all our classes and attended. Karl and I, and everybody else, watched in awe as Mosconi did his thing. Then, at the point in the show where he would normally wrap the exhibition by putting on his run-nine-racks-AQAP demo, he did something very unusual. He offered to play the best player in the house provided that he, Mosconi, would be allowed to break. He didn't say so but most likely he was thinking along the lines of "My opponent will miss at some point. When he does I'll run 125 balls and that will be the end of him." So Mosconi broke ... And his opponent began to shoot. Mosconi probably didn't know it but the opposition was the New York State collegiate straight pool champion. I don't remember his name so let's just call him Dave. Dave did something very unusual for him -- he missed his third or so shot. This must have gotten Mosconi's sympathy because a rack or two later Mosconi missed a shot that clearly he could have made while asleep on his feet. He probably thought he was making it a fair and interesting game. However ... Dave proceeded to run the table. And then he ran another rack. And another. And another. And when he reached 125, the game was over and Dave had defeated the great Willy Mosconi in a fair fight. Mosconi, ever the gentleman, complimented Dave on his excellent shot-making skills, and most especially Dave's skill in leaving himself in good position to shoot the next ball. You see, an experienced player will size up the table after the break and in a matter of ten or twenty seconds will forumulate a plan for running the table. He will know which ball he will sink first, leaving him in position to sink the second ball, and so on. This was what was so remarkable about Mosconi's run-125-balls demonstration. Somebody would rack the balls for him, then he would break, and then he would simply start shooting -- he didn't need to evaluate the whole table, he would do that on the fly. He was such a good shotmaker that he would soon be in an optimal position to run the rest of the rack. During each rack he FLEW around the table, making a shot perhaps every five or so seconds. This meant that he would run a 15-ball rack in about a minute and a half. Allow a minute to get the next rack set up and he would be playing at the rate of 15 balls every 2-3 minutes, an astonishing accomplishment. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Karl and I got married at roughly the same time, and we ended up living in the same apartment building on East 13th Street, right next door to what a few years later would become the world-famous Electric Circus discotheque, among the first clubs of its kind. Just a couple of blocks from where we lived was Julian's Billiards on 14th Street. I don't recall the name of the pool hall where The Hustler was shot but it was at Broadway and 89th or thereabouts, an out-of-the-way location. They chose itfor theatrical purposes because, judging by the movie, it was small and clubby. (I never played there.) In contrast, Julian's was the Big Time, known far and wide. When players from elsewhere in the country wanted to make their mark they came to Julian's. I suspect that the only reason The Huster wasn't made there is because Julian's was HUGE and would have made the characters seem insiginificant. Julian's had actual staggered rising bench seats from which onlookers could watch the action, like the bleachers at a baseball field, except here the stands were quite close to the first row of tables, like the seating in a teaching hospital classroom, though straight rather than curved. (I seem to recall three rows of tables in all, each containing about ten tables. As I said, HUGE.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Karl and I would often meet at Julian's after classes. Sometimes we would even cut classes to be there. Sometimes our wives would let us out for the evening so we could go there. Yet we didn't play there very often because it was embarassing for pikers like us to do so. No, we came to watch and to learn. If we played there at all it would be in the morning while all the real players were still asleep. And what a treat it was to watch. Not only were there terrific players, ones who could have eaten Mosconi for breakfast, there were genuine movie-type characters ... Because people who play pool for a living, or for whom pool is the dominant factor in their lives, are just as colorful as chess players. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx But wait! you ask. What on earth does this stuff have to do with conservation laws in physics?

FOJ, I will precede all this with a :D so that you know I don't mean to tick you or anyone else off. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx What can I say? Masters in chem as an undergrad, minors in physics, biochem and mathematics. I didn't expect anybody but me to read that article. I mean, who but a nerd would give a flying copulation about surface tension? I'm writing whatever I feel like, for reasons that are not clear even to me. Maybe I'm starting some kind of wacko magazine. Maybe I'm starting a vanity publisher book. I don't know ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx As for the lift business, in the immortal words of Galileo, "Still, it moves." Every theory of lift must end in accelerating air in the downward direction, period end of discussion. Nobody will ever convince me that Newton's laws are somehow suspended when it comes to aerodynamics. That's the beauty of conservation laws and dimensional analysis. They allow you to say that thus-and-such must repeat must be the way <whatever> is happening, because any other scenario would be a violation of the laws of physics as we know them.

sky, Obviously we shed our skins and let the water grab what we slough off.

Today I had a chance to see, close up, a yellowjacket swoop down and then hover to get a drink from the waters of our condo development's swimming pool. Unfortunately it made the mistake of doing it into a trough between shallow waves, resulting in its failing to rise as fast as the side of an approaching swell was rising. Then the creature was no longer hovering but instead was in the water, trapped by surface tension. Surface tension is also responsible for the beautiful sheen on the gentle waves in the swimming pool -- the water appears to have a tight-fitting skin. And indeed it does, again due to surface tension. The surface of the water is quite literally attracted to the body of water beneath. With no counteracting attractive force from the air above, a thin region of high viscosity is formed -- and the yellowjacket is pulled down into the water and trapped there. What's the source of this force? It has to do with the fact that a molecule of water is polar -- weakly charged positively at the oxygen end, weakly charged negatively at the two hydrogens that bend away from the oxygen like a deeply curved banana. This polar effect is not the ionic bonds between the hydrogens and the oxygen -- the net charge across the molecule is precisely zero and therefore cannot by itself be a source of attraction between water molecules. (The zero net charge issue is another story for another day) Rather, what we are talking about here is the distribution of the net charge -- a greater than nominal electron density around the hydrogens, a less than nominal electron density around the oxygen. So while the oxygen does in fact become weakly positive, the hydrogens actually become less positive than nominal. There is a small but computable and measurable tendency for the hydrogens of water molecule A to stick to the oxygen of water molecule B. And now for a not-so-obvious fact: To a chemist (I was trained as one), water is a neutral aqueous solution of solvated protons. The protons have a tendency to drift away from their parent oxygens and stick briefly to a different oxygen. Because protons are positively charged, this phenomenon causes the approaching proton to tend to pull electrons away from the receiving oxygen and toward the proton. The result is a proton surrounded (solvated) by a very weak cloud of negative electric charge, and an oxygen ion that has had its negative charge reduced slightly. This causes a bias in the distribution of the electric charges, resulting in a net attractive force between what we think of as ionically bound molecules of water. But at the surface there is nothing to counter the net attractive force between the water molecules immediately beneath the surface -- and the skin of surface tension forms. Anything sticking down in this skin -- like the dangling legs of the unfortunate yellowjacket -- will be attracted to the underlying water, dragging the creature down into the water with such force that it is unable to escape, its struggles serving only to get itself wet, deepening its plight. The yellowjacket's only way out of the situation is for a force majeure -- my hand -- to sweep it out of the pool and onto the adjacent concrete, where the water will evaporate, once again allowing the creature to fly. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The example just cited is one of three categories of force known collectively as Van der Waals forces, named after a Dutch scientist who identified two of the three categories. Van der Waals forces are residual forces, far far weaker than the parent forces giving rise to them ... and what we call the strong nuclear force is actually the equivalent of Van der Waals attraction between quarks, resulting in a tendency of neutrons and protons to stick together even though there is no ionic bond between them. This should give you some idea of the strength of the quantum chromodynamic force between quarks -- unbelievably strong, far far stronger than the unbelievably strong nuclear force they give rise to. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Footnote: Not only is there no ionic bond between the protons and neutrons of a nucleus, the protons are repelling one another very strongly because they are all positively charged. You can get an idea of the strength of the electric force as follows: Place a piece of paper on the floor. Now run a comb through your hair a few times and hold it just above the paper. The comb will then lift the paper, that small amount of charge overcoming the gravitational pull of the entire earth. And now imagine the strong nuclear force, as relatively more powerful than the electric force as the electric force is than gravity.

I can think of another product that should never be bought used. It's put on like a glove. But it might go well with a used matress, I suppose. (Can I say these things on TV?)

None of us was born knowing FS. And as we learn stuff and perhaps become apparent experts, we should all recognize that a) every one of us has gaps in his knowledge, and b) most of what we know about FS has come from the collective wisdom of the forums. Thus there is nothing for arrogant active forum people to be arrogant about. To a first approximation most of them have invented nothing and have created nothing. Their arrogance is the way they deal with their own feelings of inadequacy, or so it seems to me. They are nothing more than schoolyard bullies. Anyway, I know a lot about operating system theory, and about simulated IFR operations in the FS world, and I know more than I thought about FS flight dyamics engineering, and much more than I thought about how to code panels. I understand how complex propeller engines work and what the controls for them do ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ... But I know nothing about scenery. I know nothing about the creation of aircraft 3D models. I know nothing about weather utilities. I know nothing about AI aircraft. I know nothing about making FS videos (though I do know something about making attractive screenshots). And on and on and on. In fact, even though I am one of the most prolific posters on this site, and even though I seem to be fairly effective at answering questions, in terms of reputation it's all an illusion. What i DON'T know about FS greatly exceeds what I do know about it, and the questions i CAN'T answer greatly outnumber the ones I can. So to compensate I generally get involved only in response to questions regarding areas that I do in fact know something about. I push to the edges of my knowledge, but I try always to be aware of the limits of my knowledge and behave accordingly, an important aspect of which is calling in consultants in the form of expert members whose specialized skill sets I'm familiar with. Usually I don't know what they know (though I learn from them), which is the whole point of yelling for help when a discussion gets me in over my head. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Don't get me wrong -- I have an ego as big as all outdoors -- but I've been involved in computer software, hardware and firmware, and in engineering management, and marketing, and sales, and customer support ... er ... down bad grammar! Down! What I'm trying to say is, I've been around the block so many times that I recognize my REAL skill lies in separating the Technical Solid Citizens from the BS Artists. I'm a subject matter expert (SME) only in a small number of areas. However, I have a general purpose brain and very quickly learn enough about a new subject to see who is and isn't a SME in that area. In fairly short order I'm able to identify the speakers of bafflegab -- which often annoys them to no end because I don't hesitate to call them out. And I go further than that. What it has become clear to me that someone is in fact a SME, in subsequent posts I try to make it plain to the readership that the person in question is a Solid Citizen whose word is to be listened to very carefully. That way the less knowledgable people in the readership will have some idea of whom to believe in the event of the kinds of endless he-said-she-said debates that do tend to crop up in the forums. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Yet all is not for the best in this best of all possible worlds -- because my memory is spotty these days and getting worse. Yesterday, for example, I explained to a poster how it was most unlikely that FSX aircraft would be runnable in the environment of the next version of FS, which will be based on a whole new general purpose simulation platform unrelated to the FS of today. This is spite of the fact that I knew better -- but had forgotten -- that the product manager himself had said that anything built for FSX that conformed to the latest rev of the SDK would be guaranteed to run in the upcoming new environment. When this kind of thing happens I look like a fool but I 'fess up anyway. I do this because we want the readership to see the best information available, and part of that information is stating publicly that I've changed my position so that it coincides with that of the person who called ME out. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx In the end, if you're going to take the initiative in the FS community and help people, or educate them, or give them confidence in themselves, you must be prepared to be wrong in public sometimes. Sometimes it's better to give a newcomer an answer that might turn out to be incorrect just in order to make him realize that his request for help was timely heard. Someone more knowledgable will come along soon or later and in the end more good is done than harm. It's like a surgeon having his track record reviewed by his surgeon peers -- too few deaths means that he is not being agressive enough. (Not being agressive enough means that some people died unnecessarily because the surgeon unreasonably didn't want to chance operating on them.) So ... There is such a thing as an optimum death rate in surgery, and there is such a thing as an optimum embarassment rate in trying to be a community resource.

It's fine to stray provided we don't get too deep into politics that can offend. Now ... There's a difference between knowing where to look and knowing where to drill. That's what's meant by "proven reserves" -- an oil field mapped out as to lateral and vertical extent, along with a plan for extracting the oil affordably. Again, without getting into politics, we have been within fifty years of running out of oil for the past 150 years. This again is the concept of "proven reserves" at work. We don't bother to prove the reserves at a longer time horizon than a human working lifetime because we know that they're someplace, we just don't know today exactly where those places are, though we have a rough idea as you pointed out. An exception is the timber industry, which has to plant for 50-100 years in the future or nobody will have trees to harvest.

Thanks for the chuckle, sky but yes, in a short term way a long time ago, that was the concern. An oil company can stay in business with happy custoemrs only if it expands its proven reserves at a rate greater than the projected consumption rates of the future. So that was why the pressure was on. Field geologist productivity was being impared by my software compared to what it could have been if the software had been running correctly, or if it had the new features they needed, or whatever the issue was. We're talking BIG money here. If the issues with my software had, say, cost Shell the equivalent of an entire day of field exploration in the Permian Basin, that would easily have been several million dollars measured in 1965 value, and tens of millions if measured in today's dollars. That's a big responsibility for a 21 year old kid to be carrying. That's why I needed to stay, work my butt off, and get the job done ASAP.

I tried twice to learn to ride but couldn't do it. I simply could not coordinate my hands and feet well enough to be safe. So unless a motorcycle had automatic transmission :) I would be afraid to try it out. Also, if I managed to lay a machine like yours on its side, I would have to call AAA to get going again -- there is no way I'd be able to get it upright again. (And I would need some kind of mask so people would not know who they were laughing at.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx But speaking of 300,000 miles, my Crown Victoria station wagon, one of the last real cars to be made in the USA, passed that mark about two years ago and is still going strong. The only major items that it's needed are a rebuilt transmission and a new set of injectors. Of course it's a Ford, not that I intend to start a fight or anything. :)