Roger Rocket is a designer of paper cups at Paper America. During his free time, he likes to attend baseball games at Yankee Stadium. One day, while seated in the stands, he caught a fly ball. He took the baseball home and played catch with his friends Andy Cannon, Orlando Torpedo, and Mariano Missile. Unfortunately for Rocket, Cannon has a problem with accuracy. Cannon threw the ball over Rocket’s head and straight through a neighbor’s front window. The shattered glass ripped the lining off of the baseball. Instantly, Rocket conceived a more durable baseball with an exterior similar to that of a golf ball. Rocket worked for months on his invention in Missile’s garage. His new baseball was comprised of a titanium core, and a plastic shell having circular dimples and V‐shaped laces. Torpedo realized and told Rocket that Y‐shaped laces would enable baseball players to throw the ball faster. Cannon, an engineer in a radar gun laboratory, tested the velocity of the baseball with both V and Y‐shaped laces. To Cannon’s surprise, the baseball traveled 10 M.P.H. faster with the Y‐shaped laces. Rocket wanted patent protection for a baseball having a titanium core, and a plastic shell having circular dimples and Y‐shaped laces, so he approached Yogi Practitioner for assistance. Rocket has no obligation, contractual or otherwise, to assign his inventions to Paper America.
In accordance with proper Patent Office practice and procedure, who should execute the oath [i.e., who are the inventors]?
(A) Rocket
(B) Rocket and Torpedo
(C) Rocket and Cannon
(D) Rocket, Torpedo, and Cannon
(E) Rocket, Torpedo, Cannon, and Missile
The original version seems to be harder to find; you won't find it on Google in English, but rather just traces and an ominous "removed for copyright violation"
Henry: Yeah, that. Good thing you know how to manipulate the Internet. I never got the hang of it. You know what that news reminded me of?
Me: No, what Henry?
Henry: The inverted Marcus region.
Me: Remind me what the inverted Marcus region is.
[Henry moves to the white board, grumbling that people no longer use chalk & blackboards. He sketched three related figures, and then explained them in words]:
Henry: Rudy Marcus laid out three different scenarios for the reaction coordinate of a simple "downhill" reaction using intersecting parabolas to represent reactant and product. Parabolas have a long history in physics (think of pendulums, and they "track" the potential energy in molecules). In the first, notice that the "initial state" reactant parabola is slightly higher in energy than the "final state" product parabola; where they cross represents a moderately uphill barrier given by the distance, ΔG‡.
In the second (middle) scheme, the initial state (left) parabola is higher in energy while the final state parabola stays the same—follow? He got there by translating the left hand reactant parabola straight upwards and their intersection slides "down." The barrier to the more downhill reaction is now zero. See that?
Me: Yes!
Henry: Here is where Marcus was an absolute genius: if you keep on going as in the third scheme, the initial state parabola gets higher still—this is now a very downhill reaction—but notice that the barrier, ΔG‡, goes back up because the intersect climbs up the other side! This is the so-called "Marcus Inverted Region" and is utterly counter intuitive that a more downhill state should require more energy to reach. Boy, he really shook things up with that one!
Me: Fine, but how does that translate to the real world?
Henry: What? Didn't you read my other stuff?
Me: Here's what I think...I've been saying all along that uphill effort requires more energy than downhill effort, for example here. But suppose that we have something really severe like the Fiscal Cliff. Suppose that the fall is so downhill that we will actually face a higher hurdle to get down there than if it weren't so precipitous.
Bobby Fuller idolized fellow Texan Buddy Holly and The Crickets and it really shows in his covers of "Love's Made A Fool Of You" and "I Fought The Law And The Law Won."
Fuller died at age 23 under mysterious circumstances. Here is a YouTube video dramatizing some of the unresolved details. link
Lesser known was Fuller's involvement in surf music in the early 1960's. Here are three songs he wrote and recorded, all of which appear to contain the same guitar riff which culminated in its purest form in "Our Favorite Martian" recorded and released in 1964.
First there is "The Chase" which I have not been able to date, but I put it first because I suspect it came first:
"Stringer" was recorded in 1963; listen at the 57 second mark for the same basic riff:
Finally, the whole riff was purified and distilled into my favorite, er, "Our Favorite Martian" from 1964:
Bobby Fuller's death was so ignominious, and so unseemly (no matter the motives) that the public barely remembers him; and if they do look they see him as a link backwards to Buddy Holly; I think he deserved a bit more respect than that.
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Anniversaries mark the same place in the annular solar cycle. It's very ouroboros. Marking a new year is no less artificial and arbitrary than noting what makes a month a month or that "digital" is based on ten fingers. What's arbitrary is that that we chose January 1st instead of say March 1st.
43 years ago today, Jimi Hendrix played a series of shows at NYC's Fillmore East Theater in a power trio called the "Band of Gypsys." They hadn't performed together in public and this was sort of their unveiling. Note how Bill Graham introduced them: "...some old friends with a brand new name...a Band of Gypsys."
The Band of Gypsys more or less was just this set of shows—publicly at least. They were to play together just once more—later that month at the Garden where Jimi famously "lost it." After that, he broke with Buddy Miles and reassembled the Experience but kept his old friend Billy Cox on bass. They recorded a spring and summer of intense performances, but by September it was over—forever.
The call and response between Jimi and Buddy Miles in "Who Knows" is strikingly spiritual—imagine him doing that with Mitch Mitchell—not. Though it was already an established technique in American Blues with even deeper roots, it appeared anew and struck the same chord.
One more thing strikes me in that video: the way Hendrix flashes a brief smile through what must have been a painful time (1 min 9 sec). It's as if he realized the sheer joy of performing or perhaps he caught sight of an admirer. Elvis flashed a smile like that a few months before he too passed away: link
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Here is 30 minutes of the same show: link The version of "Machine Gun" in that show is the definitive one.
