Posts

Showing posts from 2017

Graduation

Image
Cornell Arts Quad "It's up to you to save the world.  Our generation messed up." said an older person to no one in particular. I graduated in 1982 with a degree in Chemistry.  As is tradition at Cornell, there were no hired inspirational speakers.  The send-off was given -- more appropriately, I think -- by the then university president Frank H.T. Rhodes.   The economy was in rough shape, but President Rhodes nevertheless emphasized the importance of setting great goals and finding meaning in service and leadership. I found a portion of his speech in the NY Times .  My graduating class had 4,200 students, and President Rhodes was a distant figure.  Yet, we were separated by one degree. One summer, I had a job at Uris Library doing general inventory, cataloging, and shelving.  I learned this library was steward to a very special collection: all the issues, from number one with Marilyn Monroe on the cover, to the present, of Playboy Magazine.  I got the plumb as

On The Internet, No One Knows You’re A Targ

Image
A recent project had me fitting my Mazda3 with a cloaking device.  The  goal was just to learn, as speeding without being seen is arguably more dangerous than speeding while visible. Here is a photo sequence of the cloaking device in action.  There was absolutely no photoshop trickery! Photo 1: Mazda3 Photo 2: So'wI' chu'  (Engage cloaking device) Photo 3: Qapla'! (Success!) The most difficult part of this project wasn’t the installation, although I did need special tools, including a phase coil resonator.  Nor was it the additional power requirements; I simply advanced the engine’s spark timing and switched from regular gasoline to premium.  No, the difficult part was locating the parts.  eBay and Craigslist were dead ends.  Inquiries on various car forums went unanswered.  And I sniffed around several junkyards to no avail.  The last junkyard search ended like all the others — in  failure — but it led me to a near