In the bible it says "When the eye is sound the whole body is sound." I wear glasses of the polyfocal type. Unreliability, Numeric Control and the Concept of Buick In my youngest years my father got his paycheck from the President of the school board directly by walking over to his veterinary office across from the high school. This old veterinarian owned a Buick straight eight which I later heard he would warm up in winter by placing a cement block on the gas pedal and going back in the house to finish breakfast. When I was in high school and approaching graduation I happened one winter to be passing a car on a road between snow heaped high in banks by the county graders. As I pulled beside the car my car suddenly began to miss andmake a popping sound through the intake. Worse yet a car had rounded the curve ahead and there was no longer room with these two factors to complete the pass. I was almost beyond the car I was passing but lacked power to finish. Dropping bak would have taken too long and requied somehow knowing exactly when to pull back into the other lane without hitting whatever unknown was behind him now. So I dove for the snowbank on the far side. With snow from the three to four foot high snowbank pouring over the hood and around the sides the car slowed dramatically and son I was able to reenter the now empty lanes of the road. The shaft was suddenly too short. Discipline demanded an answer. A couple of years passed and I was nearly ready to graduate from college. I had noticed an old heavy transmission converted to Ford torque tube in a friends garage. He said he thought it was a 1937 buick transmission. It had a big tall shaft sticking up for the floor shift. The next year had been column shift or "three-on'the-tree" as we now called it. I had broken several 1937-1939 Ford floor shift transmission and even one with 1948 gears and brass synchronizers in my Chevrolet powered 1948 Ford. I asked him how much he wanted for this oddity. He did not want to sell his mechanical art. It seemed to settle and issue in his soul. I persisted occasionally when I saw him in town. Finally he sold me the transmission and I ordered the other end of the problem from Warshawsky's in Chicago. Soon a brand new Chevrolet to early Ford adapter in cast aluminum arrived to replace the one centrifuged out by ball bearing from a drag strip falure of the input shaft bearing. with it in a separate box was a fine piece of workmanship-an early Ford to early Buick adapter. It was no plate with bolt holes to match but a complete bellhousing with the correct two ends. Perhaps I had one ace in this. I had gotten a "disciple". The local TV installation repariman had replaced the failed International engine in his pickup with a Buick V-8 and made his own plate adapter. There is no mechanical reasoning that cannot be conveyed in a conversation and I had seen the installation and even ridden in it. When I put the parts together with the wooden pilot bearing alignment tool also included I felt rewarded. I started the engine and let it idle then put it in gear. It did not drive the transmission. Huh! So I got under and figured out that the little bellhousing was too deep. The input shaft did not reach. I summoned my roomates from the Engineering Mechanics Laboratory and after some consultation we concluded that a few passes throuhg the Bridgeport milling machine would leave enough meat to conclude this faux pas. That was solved until one day I had to push my friends Ford six up an incline to get it started. My clutch was slipping disastrously!! How could that be? It was a 3000 pound pressure Weber with steel face against a Velvetouch sintered iron springless disk and a plasma sprayed bronze on aluminum Shieffer flywheel. The answer was soon seen on the ground. The front bearing of the Buick transmission was leaking oil onto the clutch. We tried sevral fixes from replacing the leather seal to macining a place for two leather seals and concluded the engine turned the wrong way and somehow the gears were pumping oil faster than the slinger could exclude. So I had to remove that assembly and install a 1963 Corvette Borg warner aluminum case 4-speed with 2.20:1 low gear. Everything here was stock and the driveshaft was even long enough to a 1955 Chevrolet open rear. I did not split the wishbone but only removed the bottom of the x-frame and made it removeable with bolts instead of rivets. You would think this would conclude the arrangement with Bucik. He was an inventor and a scotsman. In a little more than a year I was In California and proceeding down Lakewood Boulevard checking to see if the guards had openned the gate into the overflow executive lot. I glanced left over the center fence saw the gate was not openned and then as I looked ahead saw the traffic was halted in my lane not moving with the green light. The secretaries apparantly had not chosen to proceed forward into the regular lot and were going to wait for the closed gate to be openned by someone later. I was suddenly too long. The sinter iron brakes on my 1966 Chevelle SS-396 soon had the extra wide U.S. Royal red stripe tires howling in protest. I considered a jog to the right but something prevented it though there was no car there nor behind me. I had to stop in my own lane and that proved to be not quite enough. I bumped a Volswagen hard enough to bend it's bumper down but not hard enough to move it. The front of my car was bent but moveable. I got to meet the Director of BioMedical's daughter and we exchanged insurance facts. This then led to my second Buick adapter. In 1973 just before the Yom Kippur War I decided that the engine in my 1967 chevrolet truck had to come out. I had dropped a crescent wrench and nicked a radiator tube. Instead of getting it repaired I had used Bar's Leaks. Gradually the lack of Prestone had caused the Welch core plugs in the block to rust out from the aggressive saline water of California. The engine had given 120,000 miles of service and did not burn oil but was always underpowered for even a pickup when loaded with motorcycles on the route through the mountains to Palmdale, Lancaster and Mojave. I had had a bad incident with the SS-396 in Mexico when the Pemex spark knocked when passing a car with four passengers so I wanted a more docile yet powerful engine. A Riviera or Wildcat engine seemed right. I had the mild tune of small exhausts and a four barrel carburetor and 430 instead of merely 396 cubic inches. It was two years newer and had better smog controls by being a mid-price engine. I had a tough search for an adapter though since no Buick cars of 1969 had stick shift and I had a wide ratio truck four speed. I researched a bit and found some Skylark 400 cubic inch cars had been fitted with four speeds for drag racing in NHRA. I ordered a stock flywheel and pilot bearing for one of those which was similar. At Reath Automotive I found a listing for an adapter in the catalog but the clerk did not want to sell it. Putting engines in odd combinations was forbidden by the Air Resources board and EPA. It could have been a big fine like $50,000.00 or such. We decided to try the manufacturer. He was a local concern Striped Assed Ape Performance Engineering SAAPE. He thouhg he could do it and was proud to show off his new numerically controlled tools. The adapter would be machined to one ten thousands tolerance. I decided to buy it. When I openned the supposedly Chrysler New Process transmission to rebuild it what did my eyes behold but a synchronizer almost identical to the one in the 1937 of some yeares yore. It had a broken cage and no synchronizer for low gear as produced. Here it was living in a four speed case. I had some difficulty fitting bolts to the transmission mounting flanges in one position as the clearance was just too tight for a hex bolt. I found the requisite allen recessed head bolts at Fasteners Incorporated and proceeded. Proceeded to crack the adapter!! The shaft was too long!! Good Grief!! Machined to exacting precision tolerances by NC machines the fit had never been checked on a real installation and was about 1/2 inch off. I was dejected. How could this happen twice? I would never be suckered like this again. Meanwhile I packed up my pride in a grease rag and took it to a heliarc shop to repair the crack then to a machine shop to remve the excess weld bead. I had one important transaction to undertake. I located Henry's axles a machine shop that shortened rear axle shafts to create narrowed dragster rear ends. I had seen a Lincoln transmission shaft that had been cut and welded to shorten it to fit into a 1948 Continental break cleanly. I needed it cut resplined and the pilot reestablished. This was a really big and expensive job for an indeendent firm. He was busy with all sorts of production jobs now. Finally after two months I had my shaft. End of story I suppose. It gives you some idea why I am so singular in ranting about accuracy vs. precision and ultimately choosing something today I would call "magic." I have been down the road of pilots who home and navigators who extrapolate and fix and even EWO's who tune. Somewhere in there I found that the ordinary thing called an error budget can get you in jail for "working with error." I guess that is why I like nudes and they like me.

A nude can be simple or complex. When you get too good of a deal a lemon is still a possibility, though a diamond in the rough can still be found swimming in Union Lake.

Craps, phone numbers, SAMs and short term memory
Some researchers in Cambridge, Massechsetts came up with the concep that the short term memory can only hold seven items. They can be blocks and have a complex solution in language but there is a limit which for some forms seemed to be sixten but was later shown to be batches of seven. This would not be very important to me if I had not met some people who had just lost the AWACS proposal where Mitre,Corp was a consultant. I had just worked on a losing proposal where a Redeye missile was later proposed as a cheaper alternative. The Soviet version had a designator of SA-7. This led to a situation where I found I was unable to talk in person but only on a wire where the conversation was metered as to cost and maybe monitored as well. I could not formulate problems using short term memory and had to search out items in the library and other ready made forms until I had exceeded the depth of modern technology. It was several years before I came up with a concept for living normally. I thought about how a feed and grain office makes bills and I elplicitly began to look at what happens when you use both hands in an access mode. These are both strongman things and they can result in errors, lapses and injury, including cropping things. What I wanted was a very complete range of responses to load. think in terms of loading a truck at the freight office with one hundred pound bags of cement or fertilizer and then going in to the office to write up the bill for the merchandise and anthe associated tax. It is done all the time and has some relation to carpenters marking stock for cutting. The time of short term memory may expire in both cases. The number of items may exceed the seven boundary. What kinds of things I tried were I bought the smallest rubber stamp pad and changeable date stamp. I thought of it in my mind as the Tiffany date stamp since you have to touch the pad with the nose of the stap about as hard as the touch of a birds wing to avoid filling the stamp with ink and making blotches of worthless value. I had met something Southern Bell called dimension in an engineering environment where Buckingham's pi theorem and non-dimensional variables was the way to make matches. This of course was a conflict between a toll road and a freeway. Numbers as man uses them for weights and forces are all dimensioned and there is more than one system worldwide. Sometimes numbers are non-dimensional though. Here is an example from our freight office. Take 16 bags of Arcadian 12-12-12 fertilizer and load it into a station wagon and come in and write up the transaction and receice the payment. We have at first only four numbers. this should be easy if the walk to the car is not to far. Sixteen is just a count as we pick them up one at a time, hoist them onto our shoulders and carry them out and lower them onto the tail gate and slide them into the station wagon body. If we count them in our mind we will be able to remember that easy right? The researchers say we would lose count at 7 and have to go out and count them in the station wagon after and take that one thought as a sum back in memory to write it down on the bill. If the walk is not to ar we will succeed. Other wise we will have to get the bill and take it out to the station wagon and write the number down out there sort of messy on top of the sacks for backing. Now the 12-12-12 refers to percentages of nitrogen, ammonia and potash in the fertilizer. There is no dimension to this only the pure number converted to a percentage of the total contents of the bag from a ratio. Clever readers will note that 64 percent of the bag is then just inert. This is to give a product that will not burn certain crops. Picking the right numbers here is a job for the agricultural extension agent or the fertilizer company's representative and will not concern us. Now we have the bags loaded and wrtiten down and all that is left is to add the prices and the tax and come up with a total to be received. So we enter say $3.54 for each bag and... wait we could just multiply the 16 x $3.54 to get a subtotal sort of like some do with the @ form. Then with maybe $.04 per dollar sales tax on fertilizer as a non-food item we would be able to get our total. There was a time when I could do this in my head but I have lost it. I would do it like 16 x $3.00 is 48 and $0.50 x 16 is $8.00 so already we have $56.00 and only 16 x $.04 to do for the subtotal. That is $0.64 so all together we have $56.64 subtotal. Now our problem is to get $0.04 times that to add to it. For some reason I want to add $113.28 and $113.28 as $56.64 plus $56.64 twice and then divide by 100 to get the tax. That is $1.13 (28) and the (28) is less than (50) so drop it. BOOM! one bag hits the dusty rough wood floor. Now we have $56.64 and $1.13 to add and I get $57.77. Now I wonder why if I wanted to do all sevens, why did I do one five? That may be handedness which our wrench turning behavior can work out. Now most of the wrench turning does not involve numbers for force but does require a touch to find the hole and align the bolt or the nut and to make certain it is tight but not too tight. Some how the architechture of tools allows this to work out by size shape and how the hand uses leverage. But then we get into an overhead situation where the right hand just cannot reach the bolt or nut and put a hand on it with the body in any availabe space. this means the tool must go in the opposite hand and the wrench turning and hole finding and alignment tasks happen on that side. Here is where seven come in to bang us good. If we go throuhg say four things like pick up the tool, pickup the socket. put the socket on the wrench and then reach for the bolt and we find that acces is denied we have only three movements left to use the other hand before we must start over in short term memory. Swap the tool in hands, reach up, apply a force adaquate to fre the bolt without breaking it loose so forcefully that the fingers smash into nearby forms is two and make the first ratchet movement is three. Our bolt is still in there and may need twenty or thirty rachets in a close space to be completely backed out. Then the hand must remove the tool either before completing and get a finger grasp to get the bolt fully loose without dropping it or keep the bolt in the tool and remove the two together. As you can see our seven is really challenged and when we put down the tool or the bolt we may forget where we put them and have to search later. OK enough muscle collar stuff. Now some nefarious on the SAM. Suppose someone told you it weighed 110 pounds with launcher and you speculated that when it saw something hot it growled like a Sidewinder. Could you find anyone who had one? You might search among ballet lifters for live ones. You might search for the truly agile among ice skaters in pairs competition. Then you would see it as just an overload on the fertilizer sack and say anyone could do it. Until you actually saw one used it would not seem dangerous no matter how hard someone tried to convince you of your imminent peril while riding on airplanes. Your range of experience in direct use of objects of that balance and weight would not include it. So to speak you would not have it's numbers. Even if someone told you you could get one at 921-4330 you would laugh as that was your girl friends number. Then you would be ready for the artist. With your short term memory closed as she is not there and you have no need for telephone numbers you would close that thing which was not AUTOVON anyway. It would be sad but soon you would get some funny colored fluorescent color crayons in the black area of Washington D.C. and draw pictures of snakes and other abstracts that came to your mind. Gradually you would learn that it was easy to access deep memory and draw things not seen in a long time. The familiar world of an agricultural town and a gas station would all unfold. Any place that threat or force was currency would be at your finger tips. It would be years but a day would come when you would buy seven sets of dice and fourteen decks of cards and begin playing the game of meatloaf. All you have to do is shufffle the cards and then put them back in correct order in each suit by number and the different decks by lace back and put them in the boxes with the jokers and other filler and back to back or face to face as the specific deck was. Then roll straight sevens on a leather sleeve and you are done playing meatloaf. Gradually you could learn to draw on notepaper while watching TV so that the sound and video gave a pace to your memory drives as you made the art of the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's. You could also learn to think with a weight in your hand by reading articles about metablolism chemistry in the Encyclopedia Britannica out loud outside sort of like the reader used to do in the cigar factories of Tampa years ago. You could even read the Wall Street Journal line by line including all the sales out loud. Just to see what you remembered and to give confidence in your own belief about what you remember. Three D modelling would be just down the road once again. Not line figures of single sequence this time but shades and almost photographic forms. You would find an odd fact. Weight numbers survive and other measures like time and speed and angle don't. When I say they don't survie I mean they don't define the number. If you decide to go 61 miles and hour in your car and want 61 to survive you must first maybe count out 61 cents. Now it is a weight in your hand. Unfortunately like short term memory it won't fit in your hand as all pennys as 61 has too much volume as well as no easy way to create seven piles to memorize. You can get sixty one pounds of rice if you really want to remember it but then the scales and the bags will throw you off as you measure it exactly to some accuracy. If you measure it later to some other accuracy the number will become ambiguous. So sixty-one pounds of rice may not be remembered as anything but a right of way violation compared to sixty-one pounds of flour or sand or salt where the finest division is smaller. You might even try to decide if you could count the grains of rice into piles like making five fence posts and crossing it and then filing a cup and cooking it and see if when counting to one million accurately you will complete the task or starve first.

As an example of memory feedback and what could result in an edit

cycle in a conventional writing and publishing arena I now after

reading a bit more of my book am triggered to write that the torques

on bolts I actually keep in my mind as fractions that represent the

bolt sizes. Thus common sense is 9/16". Less common is 3/4" and 13/16"

which are common GM and Ford lug wrench sizes. Chrysler uses left hand

bolts on the left so it is special. A sparkplug is typically 13/16 but

special neoprene insert wrenches were developed to prevent the

breaking of insulators in my early working life. Screws are different

and I don't know their sizes leading to putting groups of them in

common post office envelopes for safe keeping in my mind. Recessed

head screws or Allen bolts as they are sometimes called or even

internal wrenching bolts are quite a shock to the ordinary senses.

This could lead to metric sizes and a break down of the whole politcal

order of bolts as a 9/16" becomes almost a 14mm. Now 14mm and 14

pounds have a competition in the mind as to how tight to turn the bolt

by wrench presure and how much to lift a weight. This could require a

trip to the gym to at least get the 2-1/2 pound and 5 pound set from

1-1/4 pound up to 1340 pounds. Now the memory would have lots of

values and a sunset would gradate from yellow through yellow red to

red to almost blue violet purple to black. Wow! How do painters do it

with just a pallet of grounds and oils? I am not writing of what is

available but rather of the gradations of what is mixed where some

intellectual effort is requied to distinguish what is seen and what is

mixed into not just matching but multitudes of values to give nice

feather and blending effects. Different size brushes of course and

standing at an easel for hours require stamina and clarity of

selection under stress. I tried to paint off the TV screen to force

myself to make the decision quickly and accurately. The pictures

change rapidly resulting in lots of blank faces and abstractions of

what is remembered to an approximation for the last view or scene.

Gradually a predictive sense develops so you can tell when a camera

angle on a particular talk sho guest or host will be repeated and not

speculate but wait for the new information that refreshes the old.

Then you can se how video tape and movies would drive the short term

to the deficiency of the long term memory. The composition necessity

of talking on a telephone or in person would also be left out. As you

can see I have been writing about strength and force and integers and

now rational numbers (fractions). Many of my graphics programs use

only these two types. Ratios of very large numbers are used to create

very fine fracton distinctions. Through the years I have used reals

which IBM used to call floating point and even transcendentals which

have no special representation in the FORTRAN and PASCAL I have known

nor in the BASIC or C, C++ that I used later. These can require very

long word length and are avoided by the commercial people for machine

forms. Complex numbers can have some participation though the users

are few. Two dimensional forms predominate in the complex plane used

to map graphically the concept of an imaginary square root of one. I

have never really resolved how that goes with strength. Maybe it is

just how one makes his body an airfoil to the wind to keep moving or

to keep from being blown off a high place. the old fractional bolt

sizes then precisely define the short term memory overload. If we

choose 7/16 as our standard bolt hen in practice it is a dead soft

bolt in automobiles. The 9/16 which is more common has three marks of

a grade 5 bolt and can have the 5 marks of a SAE grade 6. these then

are the overloads of the memory which packages at 16 and actually has

only 7 partitions of storage. It also nicely goes to the phone at

3/4". What gets hard to explain is the 13/16 common use. Certainly the

division limit is 16 but what does 13 represent? Two trips to the poor

house would be a smart remark. One at seven and one at six to

crossover the wheel to get it aligned at the center is one thought.

The poor house being that great force needed to tighten such a bolt by

hand and thus the poverty of thouhgt that is possible at that exertion

when done as an overload of so many moves. slowly the concept of

exertion as the source of loss of memory is finding a competitor in

the memory stack size for teh foreground short term memory. Cartoons

with no background at all lead to art. The loss becomes a gain for the

humorist.

In working with drawings, Does the size of the brush determine the skill of the artist? Does drawing more lines add to the definition of a surface, or does the clutter detract from it. Impressionism tries to convey an image by representing the small with larger patches of animorphic color. Anime details out the figure of a young girl, not by keeping to cellular detail, but by suggestion. I have always failed in my attempts to render the dynamic human form by perfect engineering formulas, reaching a more successful end by a hint and dash of expression. I have colored poetry and song by allusion, a two hundred plus page work tossed in the trash because the gods demanding further and further detail could never be satisfied. A slow release fertilizer, one with a higher K will promote deeper root growth. Its really important to know this when you see bulldozers scalp the ground and leave grey or red clay and nothing more. The sterile clay needs the microflora to break it down. It needs the little burrows dug by annelids to aeriate the roots provide drainage. The clay needs organic material to provide acids which allow nitrogen to be fixed by the roots. Slow release, and yet they spray the lawns, with a high nitrogen,a quick green in aqueous solution.It run off into the lake so nudes can't swim with the fowl. Spring blooms and the smell of urea burns the eyes, the green lasts only for a moment until June burns it away with its dancing sun,that short term memory lost in the fog of years.

Now the Mars lander has prompted us that you can paint with just RF. The quasars that complement the stars with not an iota of light steer the great dishes of low noise amplification to scribe and brush out a space unseen yet assymetric. After finishing all my alphabet work and correlating the sets to private wrinkles I ventured to create a phonetic set for Ahmahric then to make a symbol set guided by the hand of fantasy. This set jumped quickly to the news when a car radio was turned on. Betwen poesy and prosey is there a reticle of set defnition that congregates the symbols to the eye to prompt vision of codes? Modern coding languages are so sparse when set on the page of a book. A few rocks or small craters on a barren landscape.

As the distant quasar radioed "Come on in and have a piece of PI". I looked at those rocks undisturbed by dust devils and wondered if the color correction chart was applied. A hundred million is dear for a post card I scan the dust and offer a wayward Pegasian a wrench. Though the ship is huge it noticed the datum and took time from its survey mission to consider life here as unintelligent. As the prime numbers continue to stream by I can only think about the branches in my palm. Too many. They suggest madness in their divergance.

One always wonders if people choose limits as integers just to imply countability. The phrase that comes to mind is "That does not square with the court." I picture a judge on the bench turning his head to hear one then the other party with his head/neck rotating 90 degrees. Then I notice noone is calculating e to more significant figures and wonder if e squared has anything to do with it.(7.389056099...) Sidelooking radars looking through vacuum do not get cuts on the noise of air but only discrete objects. (Sound is logarthmic(base e)in the ear.) The really odd thing then is the load factor limit of an F-4 "Phantom II" at the corner velocity 8.5 g is almost pi times e(8.539734223...). Wouldn't it be funny if binary was really powers of e truncated by squeezing in a probability vise and oblique images decompressed came out to be sound?

If someone has a complaint that can only be blamed on an inherent property of meat or the unity principle would it be a prime beef? If sound where not square then the steps breaking down a wave would be rounded and one could not climb to the height of the wave. There would be no such thing as surfing because the Diderot Principle would be fully applied. Since the court is still out on that theory it implies Neandrathal men still exist in the boardrooms and bar at the same time. No baffles would ever be needed when one stood afore the yellow line facing the screaming plume venting from a Phanthoms engine. Its quiet wake would be enough and we would all lie peaceful as the rpms peaked in silence. I think men have been truly blessed to understand the consequences of treading outside these natural laws.

I am pleased that I can finally name the ancient discovers of orthogonality for my youngest son. I made a great circle calculator for him and explained how the latitudes and longitudes worked when he was going to import some produce from Chili. Looking it up I nearly fell into the vacumm as I found it was the invention of the chronograph that finally squared the ear. Yet squareness goes back so far as to be an obvious method of travelling on an earth that like topsy just growed as it found itself on a round planet. It has been in my lifetime that cycles per second has become hertz and this amazing relation of waves has finally found a master.

Kinda reminds you of "Ball of Confusion", doesn't it?Yet when you decide the clock is working against you and the night grows short, Don't the New Age digital bits from the sky help you to ciq? The eyes grow weary and the tones just above the level of hearing lull one to dream...Don't forget to put the sleep timers on and in 30 minutes the television, too, will slip into a programmed slumber. Numbers from the sky producing sound and visions for the eye to put one to rest...Yes and this is our fie: to sleep, per chance to dream.

Is this a private conversation? I can't really speak in it. I just want to be reminded when someone else is. It's been three days. Maybe no one else is?

Heh heh heh...that fits you know the wu-li masters dance but not everyone understands the story. Orthogonality tends to rasp at the squareness of the ear but doesn't really round it. And the distance between the evoking pens is local. We refer to mutual experience and splenic vent our fie. The diversions of allusion are bane to realists tending to vex, for this I apologize.