Electric Father

My father called me yesterday from my parents' home in New Jersey. I could tell that he was very excited, and I soon found out why – just a short while before he called, he had been outside on their covered porch when lightning struck a big oak tree just 10 feet away!

He reports that chunks of smoking oak and a number of fried squirrels fell out of the sky all around him. His hair (he has a few tufts left) stood straight up, because he had acquired a high-voltage static electrical charge. He had no trouble hearing the sound; his normal hearing aids were unnecessary. I think he was still pumped up with adrenaline when he called..

I've been near lightning strokes several times in my life, but never as close as 10 feet – and that's one experience I'd be happy to never have! He was actually quite lucky that none of the current flowed through him or his clothing, as that could have badly injured or even killed him – ten feet is close enough that it could have jumped over to him if he was the path of low resistance. But he was dry, and standing on a dry wooden porch, while surrounded by wet (from the pouring rain) trees and ground, so the lightning naturally took other, lower resistance, paths to ground.

Tagged Again!

Simon tagged me on his blog, looking for eight random facts about me. The rules:

1) Post these rules before you give your facts.
2) List 8 random facts about yourself.
3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names (linking to them)
4) Leave them a comment on their blog letting them know they've been tagged!

Well, I can easily supply eight random facts about me (I'm a very random guy!) – but I don't know any other bloggers (aside from Simon!) well enough to tag them back, so I'll just ignore that part.

Eight random facts about me:

• I've been to quite a few places in the world. In the 1970s, while in the U.S. Navy, I visited dozens of countries around the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean – and a few out-of-the-way places like Iceland and Greenland as the Navy flew me around the world to catch my ship. In the 1990s and later, business travel took me to Europe (especially England, Germany, Estonia and Russia) many times, and to some other places as well.
  
  
• I know next-to-nothing about sports (to the point where I cannot reliably tell baseball, football, socker, and tennis apart – I do recognize golf, though). I care about them even less.
  
  
• I wasn't always a software engineer. My initial professional interest was radio. That morphed into digital electronics when I got interested in microcomputers as a hobby in the 1970s. I didn't really get totally focused on software until the mid 1980s – and I still keep my hand in on electronic design.
  
  
• I don't watch any broadcast television at all, and haven't for quite a few years. I watch only a few movies each year (and only at home; I haven't been to a theater for many years). The most modern modern pop music I've listened to was made in the early '80s (and most of it before the mid-'70s). As a consequence, much to the amusement of my friends, there's a vast swath of modern culture that I am completely ignorant of. Just to give you a sample: I've never watched an episode of Friends, The Simpsons, or 24.
  
  
• I read a lot, both online and books – and my reading is eclectic, to say the least. Right at the moment, I'm reading several books: a Martha Grimes English murder mystery, a Java programming book, a book about the effects of randomness on financial systems, and a book about engineering failures and their causes. When I was young (and extremely introverted, and fearful of basically the whole world), reading was my major form of escape – I thought of the county and high school librarians as close friends. I read hundreds of books in my high school years, and actually won an ad hoc award in high school because they'd never seen anyone read so much. All that practice reading built very strong reading skills and a love of reading that has never waned.
  
  
• I detest beer; always have. I've tried roughly a dozen various beers over the years, usually with a friend telling me “Even if you've hated every other beer you've tried, you'll love this one!” They all suck. This is a bit of a social issue with my German, Estonian, and Russian friends!
  
  
• I used to skydive (in the '70s); I've made over 400 jumps. Every time I see skydivers in the air, I'm tempted to start again. I was jumping just before ram-air parachutes (the rectangular ones that basically every jumper uses today) were common and safe. My parachute was a round, 27' diameter “Russian Para-Commander”, a slightly more maneuverable than usual model. It had lift-over-drag ratio of about 1.1:1, which means for every 10 feet you fell, you could travel 11 feet forward. By contrast, modern parachutes can have lift-over-drag ratios of 5:1 or even higher.
  
  
• I'm obsessed with knowing how things work, whether it is something in nature or something man-made. I suspect this is related to loving engineering. I spend a lot of time (and reading) satisfying my own curiosity on such things, generally with nothing actually useful learned. I'm actually quite uncomfortable using a piece of machinery if I don't know (at least in a general way) how it works.