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A Wreck of an Airplane

The C-47 Skytrain banked sharply left and the runway came into view, a slash in the thick evergreens. Cresting the top of the ridge, the pilot pulled the power back on the twin engines and set the flaps at twen... Read More...

On Maxwell, The Natural Philosopher

James Clerk Maxwell was a man of prodigious and singular gifts, of insight, curiosity and determination. The equations, developed one hundred and fifty years ago, describe the link between the classical and qua... Read More...
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Al’s Notebook

I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them. To discover anything new, one has to be ready to be fooled, as sometimes the experiment fools the experimenter One, too, must be ready to be surprised and... Read More...
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Millibels in the Wind

Voiceless it cries, Wingless flutters, Toothless bites, Mouthless mutters. Radiometers are cool. Some are so cool they are cryogenically cool. They have to be really cool to do what they do. This is especia... Read More...

A Wreck of a Story

When I was a kid and found out that my dad was an ‘engineer,’ the vision of him driving a train popped into my head for the word engineer was firmly associated with the word locomotive. It was a few years u... Read More...
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Keep Looking

Rufus set up the stepladder outside the trauma room so I could climb up and take a look above the panels in the drop ceiling. For the past few days we’d been looking for the source of interference to the electr... Read More...

Smoking or Non-smoking?

In the Summer of 2000 I booked some burn time at a small environmental lab in south Dallas. The facility was not exactly state-of-the-art, but the price was right: $300 a burn. It sure beat paying about $4,000 a burn at an NRTL at the time. For 300 bucks, you got the chamber, a methane line burner connected by a hose to a big tank of methane gas, and a technician who would manually operate the whole thing from an adjoining isolated room. A fire extinguisher was always ready “just in case”.