Akron Phy sics Club
Archive 1995
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Newsletter
Meeting Announcement: MONDAY, January 23, 1995 - TANGIER, 6:00 PM
Speaker for our first meeting of the new year will be:
Dr. Frank N. Kelley, Dean, College of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering, the University of Akron. Dean Kelley's topic will be
WHAT'S NEW IN POLYMER VALLEY?
Minutes, January 23, 1995
In attendance at our first meeting of the new year were Mark Dannis, Tom Dudek, Ron Eby, Dan Galehouse, Jack Gieck, Bob Hirst, John Liska, Leon Marker, Darrell Reneker, Jack Strang, Ernst von Meerwall, Don Wiff, and Charlie and Marty Wilson.
After noting the passing of our good friend, Bob Harrington, Chairman Charlie Wilson announced that our colleague, Ernst von Meerwall has been elected a Fellow in the American Physical Society -- which, of course, is only right, but we're pleased to note the Society's percipience. Treasurer Dan Galehouse advised that our fiscal situation remains healthy for the present, albeit minuscule. And Program Chairman Leon Marker revealed a number of excellent programs for the future, including the one announced above.
Our speaker, Dean Frank Kelley, [speaking on WHAT'S NEW IN POLYMER VALLEY?], first showed us the organiation of the University of Akron's College of Engineering and Polymer Science, treating us to slides picturing the College's three locations and their innards, e.g. the equipment available in the plastics processing technology course. The College, he explained, offers six levels of curricula at present, extending even to grade school courses that include polymer songs and polymer coloring books(!), with molecular modeling centers now on line with high schools in several communities. There will be 70-some graduate degrees bestowed this year, about 50-50 MSs and PhDs. A testimony to the international reputation of available programs, the majority of students are presently from countries other than the U.S.; there is a substantial component from the Far East.
We heard about some of the fruit born by of the Edison Polymer Innovation Corporation, including the technical transfer of products ranging from flat panel display components to the Joe Carter Tack Tube (successor to the pine tar rag batter's traditionally have used) -- and, just maybe, a covered pedestrian bridge of composite plastic in downtown Akron.
The polymer industry, Dean Kelley told us, is a $175 billion industry, including equipment manufacturers and other ancillary enterprises. The industry employs 100,000 in Ohio at some 2500 sites -- 45% in northeast Ohio.
But, putting our local expertise into perspective, our speaker pointed out that the reason companies locate in a given region is not the availability of polymer scientists and engineers (who are a pretty mobile bunch), but the availability of a competent work force. Which is reminiscent of the reason the tire industry grew in Akron when the city's well-established harvesting machinery business moved to Chicago -- leaving ancillary industries like McNeil (who made grain-cutting knives before it made calenders) and a competent but unemployed work force in its wake.
Entrepreneurs might take note. The URW could change its name!
And, finally, if you-all please [and with thanks for your nearly unanimous discipline in calling lately!]: Please CALL ME with either your RESERVATIONS OR REGRETS (867-2116) no later than Thursday afternoon, February 23rd, since I must call them in Friday morning.
Jack Gieck
Secretary
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Newsletter
Meeting Announcement: MONDAY, February 27, 1995 - TANGIER, 6:00 PM
Speaker for our February meeting will be:
Dr. Daniele Finotello, Professor of Physics, Kent State University.
Prof. Finotello's topic will be
SCIENCE NEAR ABSOLUTE ZERO
Minutes, February 27, 1995
**** Since both Secretary Jack Gieck and Chairman Charlie Wilson expect to be out of town during most of the two weeks prior to this meeting, PLEASE CALL LEON MARKER (688-3592) with either your RESERVATIONS OR REGRETS no later than THURSDAY afternoon, March 23, since Leon will need to call them in Friday morning.
---------Minutes of the February 27 Meeting of Akron Physics Club
In attendance to hear Prof. Dan Finotello of Kent State University speak on the topic, "Science Near Absolute Zero", were Aggie Aggarwal, Mark Dannis, Tom Dudek, Dan Galehouse, Bob Hirst, John Liska, Dan Livingston, Leon Marker, Jack Strang, Ernst von Meerwall, Don Wiff, and Charlie Wilson.................... Since Secretary Jack Gieck was in Florida (where his 97- year-old father had just died), this report of Prof. Finotello's presentation will be brief and not up to the traditional Gieck standards. Prof. Finotello showed us, via color TV and a VCR tape, the sorts of low temperature apparatus he has used, in Mexico City and Penn State and KSU, to work at liquid helium temperatures. (The extensive and expensive equipment paid for by the Mexican government in support of scientific research was surprising and impressive) He also showed us how liquid helium (He-4) changes dramatically in appearance as the temperature is slowly lowered through the Lambda-point transition at 2.17° K, going instantaneously from a turbulently boiling He-I (normal-liquid phase) to a completely quiescent He lI (superfluid phase, having an enormousincrease in thermal conductivity). Using an overhead projector and other visual aids, as well as the TV/VCR tape, he explained to us the thermal behavior of mixtures of He-3 and He- 4 (the two isotopes, whose physical properties as liquids are so very different) -- and lots of other good things, such as what happens to a small disk that is cooled to become suddenly superconducting while in a strong magnetic field. (it hovered in mid-air, and could be made to rotate with very little friction.) Etc.,etc. etc. Too bad Jack Gieck couldn't write it up for us all to enjoy all over again! Thanks for a very interesting lecture, Prof. Finotello.
Respectfully submitted,
Charlie Wilson, Substitute Secretary
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Newsletter
Meeting Announcement: MONDAY, March 27, 1995 - TANGIER, 6:00 PM
Speaker: Jim Beecher of Gencorp
Topic: "Study of Surfaces by ESCA"
ESCA, it is said, stands for Electron Scattering for Chemical Analysis. Leon Marker, our hard-working Program Chairman who induced Jim Beecher to give this talk, also reports that ESCA provided the means for detecting the corrosion problem at the brass-steel interface of the brass-plated steel fibers/cords which, some years ago, was responsible for the serious performance difficulties of a number of those much-publicized Firestone 500 tires. .................... Jim will discuss a number of current applications of ESCA in the research lab.
Minutes, March 27, 1995
In the absence of your secretary, leaping into the breach, stalwart Chairman Charlie once again has risen to the occasion to record the Minutes for March Meeting.
[Charlie Wilson’s Minutes were pasted in here – Sorry: NOT AVAILABLE in hard drive]
Speaker: Jim Beecher of Gencorp
Topic: "Study of Surfaces by ESCA"
ESCA, it is said, stands for Electron Scattering for Chemical Analysis. Leon Marker, our hard-working Program Chairman who induced Jim Beecher to give this talk, also reports that ESCA provided the means for detecting the corrosion problem at the brass-steel interface of the brass-plated steel fibers/cords which, some years ago, was responsible for the serious performance difficulties of a number of those much-publicized Firestone 500 tires. .................... Jim will discuss a number of current applications of ESCA in the research lab.
Then, back to the time-honored drill: Please CALL ME with either your RESERVATIONS OR REGRETS (867-2116) no later than Thursday afternoon, April 20, since I must call them in Friday morning.
Jack Gieck
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Newsletter
Meeting Announcement: MONDAY, April 24, 1995 - TANGIER, 6:00 PM
Speaker for our April meeting will be EDWARD QUINN, Section Manager, Digital Graphics Systems, Loral Defense Systems and Adjunct Professor at both Kent State University and Case Western University. He will enlighten us on:
NEURAL NETWORKS: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Minutes, April 24, 1995
In attendance at our April meeting were new member Jim Beecher, together with veterans Mark Dannis, Tom Dudek, Dan Galehouse, Alan Gent, Jack Gieck, Bob Hirst, Dan Livingston, Leon Marker, Pad Pillai, Irv Prettyman, Ernst von Meerwall, Don Wiff, and Charlie Wilson -- as well as two guests, Doug Sluis and Dave Lance. Treasurer Dan Galehouse advised that our club’s treasury remains a healthy $60 in the black as we hurtle toward the summer solstice.
Giving us lots more to think about than clever wiring diagrams in his discussion of NEURAL NETWORKS, our April speaker, physicist-mathematician-computer scientist Ed Quinn, began by examining man’s historic fascination with intelligent machines; e.g. in the 1951 film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and the continuing drive human beings seem to have to “move up the food chain of information processing.” They want to be consumers of the essence of information, Quinn said -- the meaning of data instead of raw data itself. This kind of motivation has led to greatly increased factory automation, the current trend to JIT (“just in time”) inventories [and the kind of the “information pyramid” technologies marketed companies like Allen Bradley, we presume]. Indeed, our speaker suggested that “the level of a society today is determined by its ability to process information.”
The history of neural technology, Quinn explained, began in 1943 with a paper called “The Logical Process of Thought,” only to be shot down by an infamous publication by Minsky and Papert, who declared the “perception concept” to be “impossible” -- thereby discouraging further development for decades.
Neural networking differs significantly from the conventional circuitry of today’s digital computers. Instead of sequential straightforward calculations, the signals must slosh cogitatively about momentarily before arriving at a conclusion., e.g. a pattern recognition. Ed Quinn’s neural network diagrams actually resemble the wiring of the brain, with its neuron cells extending dendrite filaments through axons into other neurons. The human brain, he explained, contains some 10 billion neurons, each with a half millisecond cycle time, thus achieving a capacity of some 20 billion instructions per second -- compared with a mere 10 million hertz for today’s faster PCs. But it does not follow that 2000 work stations are likely to duplicate the function of the human brain! The processing, our speaker explained, takes place in the connections. A human being, it follows, is a distributive processing system with extremely high computational capacity. [One does wonder about the memory function, though, with only 20 billion bits to work with. That’s only 2.5 billion bytes; and this relatively simple Macintosh hard drive has a seventh of that at 350 million -- and that’s expandable. . . Questions like this unfortunately occur after a stimulating talk like Ed’s.]
Our speaker showed us a number of relatively simple electrical imitations of cerebral circuitry, pointing out that multi-layer nets can now solve very complex problems. Three layers, he said, present enormous problem-solving potential, including involved topological problems, and even the famous traveling salesman puzzle. To be sure, such intelligent machines “know nothing of the problem they are trying to solve, but are slaves to their inputs and imposed rules of signal processing.” They do present considerable commercial potential in applications. Especially in combination with expert systems, these range from predicting securities performance to geographic terrain analysis to artificial hearing and speech synthesis. Ed Quinn’s talk revealed a new world for some of us.
Now, one last time this season: Please call me with either your RESERVATIONS OR REGRETS (867-2116) no later than Thursday afternoon, May 11, since I must call them in Friday morning.
Jack Gieck, Secretary
P.S.: A request from Chairman Charlie: Charlie Wilson would like to hear from volunteers willing to serve on next season’s Program Committee -- and he will be absolutely ecstatic if he hears from a volunteer who has a program he is willing to give. Please call him!
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Newsletter
Meeting Announcement: MONDAY, May 15, 1995 - TANGIER, 6:00 PM
As is apparent, our last meeting before our summer hiatus will be one week early in order to accommodate the schedule of our speaker, Dr. David Uhrich, Professor Emeritus of Kent State University’s Physics Department. Dr. Uhrich has embaced a second career [some of us really relate to guys like that!] as a forensic scientist and expert witness. He will speak on
THE PHYSICS OF ACCIDENT RECONSTRUCTION
Minutes, May 15, 1995
Our last meeting before the summer doldrums was attended by Mark Dannis, Tom Dudek (who furnished the requisite overhead once again; thanks, Tom), Dan Galehouse (who performed the thankless [until now; thanks, Dan] job of treasurer), Jack Gieck, Bob Hirst, Dan Livingston, Leon Marker, Pad Pillai, Irv Prettyman, Ernst von Meerwall, Jack Strang, and Charlie Wilson. To the delight of the membership:
Our speaker, Dr. David Uhrich, gave us a short course in how to transition from Professor Emeritus of Kent State University’s Physics Department to being a popular forensic scientist and expert witness on accident reconstruction using no more, he modestly claimed, than the sophomore physics many members of the club have taught— to wit, conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, force-mass-and-acceleration, together with related time considerations, etc. And there turned out to be more than meets the average sophomoric eye in the “etc.” His first example—of no less than 23 different variations of common accidents that our speaker laid upon us—illustrated the method. It was:
1. The relatively simple car-car skid, slide, or roll to final rest. What, most lawyers want to know, was the velocity at impact?
With empirical knowledge of the coefficient of friction of dragging a car on asphalt , one can equate the work done against frictional forces:
1/2 mv2 = µmgd (d being the measured distance of the skid); so
v2 = 2µgd / m
Other typical cases Dave cited included:
2. Car-car collision with pre-impact skids; calculate initial velocities, with consideration of the time from detection/recognition to braking (1.1-1.3 seconds).
3. Head-on collision; there are computer programs available for this case, including some “expert systems,” but many of these are based on 30 mph impacts with a concrete barrier. Not too cool a solution.
4. Skid to stop calculations of a tractor-trailer rig—which vehicles stop on something more than a dime; and some have no braking on the front axle!
5. Situations in which one needs to determine whether stopping distance is greater or less than visibility distance (esp. headlight beam vs. stopping distance).
6. Car turns left in front of another car and is struck from the side; calculate time the turner was in the other lane of traffic.
7. Airborne motorcycle flies from impact to rest (assuming a 45-degree launch trajectory to give the guy the benefit of the doubt—which, it would seem to follow, he would appreciate after the experience).
8. Car or truck runs off an embankment; calculate take-off speed.
9. Train-car impacts and the stopping distance of the train having a wheel/rail coefficient of friction of the order of 0.1 (equivalent to tires on ice!).
10. Post-mortem decisions on which car was left of center, or
11. Which direction was each car coming from?
12. Who was driving? (!)
13. Child dart-out case; pre-impact path of the child.
14. Car-bicycle accidents; was there time to avoid? Checking the
15. Pre-impact skid data.
16. Vehicle/horse (or cow!) collision.
17. Computation of night visibility vs. stopping distance.
18. Was vehicle going too fast for a given curve? (mv2/r) And related question:
19. Are critical side-slip scuffs visible?
20. The iffy calculation of impact speed from from visible damage; poles are the easiest.
21. The equally shaky calculation of impact speed from flight of a pedestrian (!) after impact. And, if he is still in a position to care:
22. Where did the pedestrian come from (right or left)?
23. Determination of impact speed from angular momentum.
Dave has given the talk before—often to lawyers who don’t always get the drift (no pun intended, of course). But our speaker’s lecture registered an impact on this audience. Sorry about that.
NOW THEN: Just to review the duties of the membership after this summer sabbatical: Please call me with either your RESERVATIONS OR REGRETS (867-2116) no later than Thursday afternoon, September 21, since I must call them in Friday morning. (There are four who never call. If the recipient is one, he is requested to withdraw from that undistinguised group [but not this one!].) Maybe it’s because he never reads this far— in which case we are wasting LaserWriter toner.
Jack Gieck
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Newsletter
Meeting Announcement: MONDAY, September 25, 1995 - TANGIER, 6:00 PM
Speaker for our first meeting of the new season(!) will be Prof. Jerry Potter of Kent State University’s Mathematics and Coumputer Science Department. Dr. Potter’s subject is:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Minutes, September 25, 1995
In attendance for our first meeting of the new season were Dan Galehouse, Jack Gieck, Bob Hirst, Leon Marker, Pad Pillai, Darrell Reneker, Jack Strang, Ernst von Meerwall, Don Wiff, and Charlie Wilson, a somewhat abbreviated cast of characters due to several personal schedule conflicts — further reduced, we regret to report, by Isabel Prettyman’s calling to say that, because of his health, Irv will no longer be able to join us; and Florence Liska’s advising that John was in a Cuyahoga Falls nursing home following a fall. I told Isabel we’ll miss Irv and extended our collective best.
Since then most of us have seen the enclosed obituary in the Beacon Journal, reporting that John Liska died on September 29th at age 91. A first class scientist who served as an innovative Assistant Director of Firestone Central Research Laboratories (typically, he made what may have been the first polyester tires more than three decades ago), John Liska was also a member of that rare breed, a true first class gentleman. Intellectually keen even in his ninth decade, John served as our club’s treasurer until two years ago. Those of us who had the privilege of working with him professionally (as well as the occasional good luck to run into him at a Tuesday Musical) know that he enriched our lives.
At our September meeting, Program Chairman Leon Marker, with a (doubly) able assist from Ernst von Meerwall, provided us with some Previews of Coming Attractions, including the promise of Prof. Neil Wells of Kent State’s Geology Department in November (he will return from Madagascar just in time to speak to us on Evolution!), Prof. Steven Cheng of UA’s Polymer Science Department in January (Polymer Coatings), and Prof. Avraam Isayev of UA’s Polymer Engineering Department (Techniques for Devulcanization). And/also, Selected Short Subjects, courtesy of the membership, as the year progresses.
(More:)
For our September program, Prof. Jerry Potter of Kent State University’s Mathematics and Computer Science Department treated us to a lecture on Artificial Intelligence — beginning in the 1950s with Turing’s classic theoretical test, often repeated in the real world these days, challenging a blind operator to guess whether he is communicating with a person behind the curtain [e.g. Frank Morgan as Oz] or a computer, and evolving over several decades into such practical applications as expert systems and neural nets.
Jerry escorted us through the flora of the discipline’s garden, including such species as:
Heuristic Search, which can take the form of an algorithm, guaranteed to give the best answer, but very slow — can take years!
Image Processing, eating millions of bytes per frame, with frames running by at 30 frames per second;
Image Enhancement, concentrating on a small area, performing functions like feature extraction, leading to the possibility of recognizing images;
Game Playing, two player, zero sum, beginning in the 1960s with tic-tac-toe, graduating to checkers a decade later and then to chess — with the ability to beat world class masters today. Most, it seems, are based on establishing a
Minimax Environment, i.e., “maximize my return, minimize yours.” Beginning with tic-tac-toe, these techniques produce multiple possible moves (and likely opponent moves), and then evaluate them — often assigning values to the alternatives. Surprisingly (and perhaps disappointingly to some of our number), advances in the state of the art seem to be related primarily to hardware development (rather than ever more ingenious algorithms or whatever); i.e., as computers have gotten orders of magnitude faster, it has become possible to evaluate many more moves without exhausting the patience (or the lifetime) of the opponent. And there seems to be a new “Alpha-Beta” approach capable of performing twice as many examinations as simple minimax that most serious chess players would probably rather not know about.
To recite the drill I failed to include last month (sorry about that, Jim): As usual, we will meet at Tangier (532 West Market) at 6:00 PM for a social [half] hour, with dinner at 6:30. PLEASE call in your reservation(s) OR REGRETS to me or my friendly answering machine (867-2116) by Thursday afternoon, October 19. And please don't forget to cancel if you must. The club gets charged for no-shows!
Jack Gieck
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Newsletter
Meeting Announcement: MONDAY, October 23, 1995 - TANGIER, 6:00 PM
Speaker for our October meeting will be Dr. Neil Mani, who recently joined Bridgestone/Firestone Tire Engineering. Dr. Mani will speak to us on his specialty:
VEHICLE DYNAMICS
Minutes, October 23, 1995
In attendance at our October meeting were Aggie Aggarwal, Mark and Doris Dannis, Tom Dudek, Dan Galehouse, Jack Gieck, Bob Hirst, Dan Livingston, Leon Marker, Darrell Reneker, Jack Strang, Ernst von Meerwall, and Don Wiff.
In club logistical matters, Treasurer Dan Galehouse reported that the treasury over which he stands guard currently amounts to $46.60.
Dr. Neel Mani [note corected spelling!], an alumnus of Gencorp who recently joined Bridgestone/ Firestone Tire Engineering spoke to us on Vehicle Dynamics. Recognizing the disparate backgrounds of our group, Neel reviewed some of the basics of his specialty before turning to some of its nuances. Included were:
Suspension, whose fundamental function is to provide ride comfort, but which is also an integral part of the vehicle’s performance in handling — especially during braking, turning, etc. Because of the parameters of human tolerance (e.g. bounce is more tolerable than pitch) suspension systems are often designed with anti-dive, anti-lift, and anti-squat characteristics. To these and other ends, our speaker explained, the natural frequency of front suspensions is nearly always a little less than that of the rear.
We learned some of the intricacies of anti-lock brakes, which actually permit 15 to 20% slippage for maximum performance; with the dictum, however, that the rear wheels must not lock under any conditions to avoid loss of control due to side-slip.
On the other hand, the very nature of the steering function involves some lateral slippage. To this end, our speaker taught us some of the fundamentals of steering geometry — clearly defining and dispelling the mists surrounding oversteer and understeer, and the dangerous transient response effects of oversteer under side wind conditions and in some other scary circumstances.
The spirited discussion which followed our speaker’s talk addressed such topics as vehicle rollover, differences in corner stiffness between radials and bias tires, the dangers associated with mixing radials and bias on the same vehicle, effects of ply steer, and problems associated with towing a trailer.
Now, then, one last time for 1995: PLEASE call in your RESERVATION(s) or REGRETS to me or my friendly answering machine (867-2116) by Thursday afternoon, November 23rd, [WHICH IS THANKSGIVING DAY, SO HOW ABOUT CALLING ME BY WEDNESDAY?] since I must call them in Friday morning. And please don't forget to cancel if you must. (The club gets charged for no-shows.) As usual, we will meet at Tangier (532 West Market) at 6:00 PM for a social [half] hour, with dinner at 6:30.
Jack Gieck
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Newsletter
Meeting Announcement: MONDAY, November 27, 1995 - TANGIER, 6:00 PM
Speaker for our last meeting for 1995 will be Dr. Phil Geil, recently of Case Western Reserve and the University of Illinois. He is currently visiting professor and Avery Morton lecturer at the University of Akron. A polymer physicist and electron microscopist, Dr. Geil will speak to us on the:
MORPHOLOGY OF LIQUID CRYSTALS
Minutes, November 27, 1995
In attendance at our last meeting way back there in 1995 (the Thanksgiving weekend cutting into our numbers a bit) were Mark Dannis, Tom Dudek, Dan Galehouse, Alan Gent, Jack Gieck, Bob Hirst, Leon Marker, Darrell Reneker, Jack Strang, Ernst von Meerwall, and Charlie Wilson.
Morphological colleague Darrell Reneker introduced our speaker, Dr. Phil Geil, recently of Case Western Reserve and the University of Illinois, currently visiting professor and Avery Morton lecturer at the University of Akron.
A specialist on crystallilne polymers, Dr. Geil’s topic for our group was Morphology of Polymers formed around Liquid Crystals.
Treating us to an abundance of 3-D scanning electron microscope slides of stunning resolution, together with slides of associated diffraction patterns, Phil showed us the differences in crystallization, for example, between chain folded and chain extended polymers. (Chain folded crystals bend at flexible points to stack themselves in vertically parallel arrays, forming films of consistent thickness [e.g. 100 Angstroms for polyethylene].)
We saw the effects of crystallization from solution, polymerization from melt (at a variety of temperatures and time intervals), crystallization under strain, random copolymerization, simultaneous crystallization-polymerization, and the remarkable process of making copolymer composites by growing whiskers of one polymer (a micron or two long), then sticking another polymer around it, down the whisker’s length like a shishkabob (less than a tenth of micron in diameter).
And we saw all this stuff — photographs of it in the real world! This observer was struck by how these polymer films can build themselves up in square pyramids (one of them 14 flights high, each flight 100 Angstroms thick) looking remarkably like the Mayan Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan — albeit [albethem?] a dozen orders of magnitude smaller. Other films (of the order of 2 microns thick) had surface patterns, “domain structures,” that presented a conglomeration of triangles and other geometric structures that your secretary thinks have the potential for a new art form!
Practical applications of all of the above as suggested by our speaker include the ability to grow liquid crystal discs and whiskers and other highly ordered structures, e.g. superlatices; also reactive fiber coatings, low temperature polymerization, whisker reinforcement, coatings and adhesives. Indeed, some of the coatings in Dr. Geil’s studies stuck so tightly to his glass slide that Phil got them off only by dissolving the glass in HF!
Sounding a little like the famous bumble bee’s view of aerodynamics, one of our speaker’s last statements sounds like it could be embraced as a motto:
“Semiflexible LCPs don’t know they are LCPs.”
And, once again, the boiler-plate: But important boiler-plate! Please call in your reservation(s) OR REGRETS to me or my friendly answering machine (867-2116) by Thursday afternoon, January 18. And please don't forget to cancel if you must. As usual, we will meet at Tangier (532 West Market) at 6:00 PM for a social [half] hour, with dinner at 6:30. See you there, we sincerely hope.
Jack Gieck