She has our bags packed and our rental car is due to be picked up Tuesday at noon. We might go and eat crabs one more time before we leave, but at about 3AM Wednesday, we will drive to Miami and head for Houston, TX to resume the ride.
Our friends Felipe and Sharon Rios, were kind enough to have garaged our motorcycle and trailer for these last 6 weeks at their daughter's Houston home. That solved some potentially huge problems. We will be forever in their debt and hope we can show them some Floridian hospitality in the future.
Our, chiseled in Jello, travel plan looks like this: Houston to Rockdale, Texas to tour the Alcoa Aluminum Plant, see: http://factorytoursusa.com/TourDetails.asp?TourID=245&State=TX&Search=&CategoryID= Then we go through Arkansas to Branson, Missouri for a couple of days of entertainment. Then Tulsa, Oklahoma for the 31st Honda Wing Ding. http://www.wing-ding.org/ .
The Wing Ding is an annual event for owners of Honda Gold Wing Motorcycles. About 10,000 of us will invade the town like elder wild ones, marauding our way through the restaurants and ice cream parlours, looking like Marlin Brando's dignified parents. There will be hundreds of vendors, parades, custom bike shows, rides, and more. Three or four days will be enough before heading westward to Pikes Peak.
There will be fosils to dig in Green River Utah, bears to feed and pet in the Teatons and Yellowstone. We might get as far north as Glacier National Park before our nine days at Sturgis, South Dakota. http://www.buffalochip.com/
This will be the 69th year for the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. I think it is the largest event of this type in the world. Somewhere between 500,000 to 700,000 people will bring their bikes to the tiny town for 9 days of riding and rock concerts. We have reservations at the Buffalo Chip Campground where a who's who of rock and comedy stars will entertain us every night after our Black Hills rides every day. Flashing, a time honored tradition at events like this, will offer great photo opportunities whereby I can sharpen my photographic skills. Expect some R rated content on the blog my mid August.
We may need a rest after Sturgis, so we will ride, at a leasurly pace, the 2,200 miles home via Kentucky. We don't have any agenda there but it will be our 49th state. Hawaii, next March, allows us to cross all 50 off our bucket list.
So much for the riding plans. This week I have had good news and bad news on the personal front. First the bad news... Theresa's mother, Janie is in the hospital and faces a battery of tests ot evaluate her heart. She has been struggling lately with a miriad of problems and Theresa has flown to her Maryland home for many visits this year and last. We love her and hope things go better for her soon.
Now the good
news. For many years now, I've been thinking about how I think. Wondering why I am bent toward the technical and logical. Much credit goes to lifelong friend John Hite, who, as a gifted engineer, has also been my accidental teacher. However, the single most powerful hour of education in my life, I trace back to a High School chemistry class where Elaine Kilbourne led us through a class in deductive reasoning and the scientific method. I felt compelled
to write her a thank you letter when I was in my 50s and had become smart enough to appreciate her. For the last 10 or so years I've been looking for her, to say thanks. A recent change in my search engine put me on her trail and yesterday we made contact after 44 years! The thank you letter I wrote for her has evolved into a short essay which I'll add here to close this blog entry. I hope it expresses the depth of my gratitude for her.
On Becoming a Scientist
Thank you Mrs. Kilbourne. In my junior year of high school you gave me a gift, disguised as a chemistry class. That was the day I became a scientist. I don’t mean that I got a degree in a scientific discipline but it changed my way of thinking about things; I adopted the scientific method.
You came into the class with a shopping cart full of cardboard cigar boxes, taped shut, each with a number on the top. You knew what was inside but told us we would figure it out by deductive reasoning and the scientific method. It took you a few minutes to describe how we would make and record observations, postulate a hypothesis, and test our theory with experiments. I was handed box number 8 and started writing my observations.
There is a hard object in the box, it rattles when I shake it.
When I tilt the box, the object rolls making a flup, flup, flup, sound.
The object rolls when tilted in one direction but slides in the other.
I can tell by the way it rolls that the object appears to be a cylinder with one or more flat spots that cause the flupping sound.
It is slightly conical because when I tilt the box and cause it to roll, one side hits the opposite wall slightly before the other.
This was getting to be fun. I was actually excited by the long list of observations I was able to make, simply by manipulating the box.
I began to think it was a wooden clothespin. I noted my theory on the paper.
If it was a clothespin, I might be able to balance it on its flat head but not its round feet. I did many such experiments and all were consistent with my theory. I found I could paint a mental picture of the object by my manipulations, attempts at balancing, hefting, sliding, and shaking. I reasoned I would be able to calculate its diameter by counting the flups as it rolled across the bottom of the box. I should not be able to influence it with a magnet and if I had an x-ray machine, there would be more definitive experiments I could do. I thought of many experiments and did enough to satisfy myself that my theory was correct.
I felt good when you congratulated me for getting it right, but you didn’t have to say anything. I knew what was in the box. For the rest of that week, I was consumed in thought. I realized that I had believed many things without foundation, but now, I knew that these mysterious things could be known. I was elated that I finally had confidence in the periodic table of the elements, the DNA molecule, the innards of the atom, medicine, and countless other things that were simply a mystery to me before, now had a foundation; the Scientific Method! All of the prior knowledge earned by scientific research now had much more value to me. I could trust Mendeleyev, Darwin, Einstein, Franklin, Watson and Crick because I suddenly knew how they came to their findings. Knowing that such things could be known with a reasonable degree of certainty changed my way of thinking. It changed my life!
In the 44 years since that day I have paused many times to reflect on the value of your gift. It allows me to think with reason, and figure out the truth of things. The method you taught has served me well in all aspects of my life and now, at 62 years of age, I think of it as the best spent hour of my entire education. I am in your debt.
Thank you Mrs. Kilbourne.
Thank you Mrs. Kilbourne. In my junior year of high school you gave me a gift, disguised as a chemistry class. That was the day I became a scientist. I don’t mean that I got a degree in a scientific discipline but it changed my way of thinking about things; I adopted the scientific method.
You came into the class with a shopping cart full of cardboard cigar boxes, taped shut, each with a number on the top. You knew what was inside but told us we would figure it out by deductive reasoning and the scientific method. It took you a few minutes to describe how we would make and record observations, postulate a hypothesis, and test our theory with experiments. I was handed box number 8 and started writing my observations.
There is a hard object in the box, it rattles when I shake it.
When I tilt the box, the object rolls making a flup, flup, flup, sound.
The object rolls when tilted in one direction but slides in the other.
I can tell by the way it rolls that the object appears to be a cylinder with one or more flat spots that cause the flupping sound.
It is slightly conical because when I tilt the box and cause it to roll, one side hits the opposite wall slightly before the other.
This was getting to be fun. I was actually excited by the long list of observations I was able to make, simply by manipulating the box.
I began to think it was a wooden clothespin. I noted my theory on the paper.
If it was a clothespin, I might be able to balance it on its flat head but not its round feet. I did many such experiments and all were consistent with my theory. I found I could paint a mental picture of the object by my manipulations, attempts at balancing, hefting, sliding, and shaking. I reasoned I would be able to calculate its diameter by counting the flups as it rolled across the bottom of the box. I should not be able to influence it with a magnet and if I had an x-ray machine, there would be more definitive experiments I could do. I thought of many experiments and did enough to satisfy myself that my theory was correct.
I felt good when you congratulated me for getting it right, but you didn’t have to say anything. I knew what was in the box. For the rest of that week, I was consumed in thought. I realized that I had believed many things without foundation, but now, I knew that these mysterious things could be known. I was elated that I finally had confidence in the periodic table of the elements, the DNA molecule, the innards of the atom, medicine, and countless other things that were simply a mystery to me before, now had a foundation; the Scientific Method! All of the prior knowledge earned by scientific research now had much more value to me. I could trust Mendeleyev, Darwin, Einstein, Franklin, Watson and Crick because I suddenly knew how they came to their findings. Knowing that such things could be known with a reasonable degree of certainty changed my way of thinking. It changed my life!
In the 44 years since that day I have paused many times to reflect on the value of your gift. It allows me to think with reason, and figure out the truth of things. The method you taught has served me well in all aspects of my life and now, at 62 years of age, I think of it as the best spent hour of my entire education. I am in your debt.
Thank you Mrs. Kilbourne.
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