Good Guys

Aphrodite and I often exchange news stories about "the good guys". These are the people, companies, teams, etc. that make the world more livable simply by doing a little bit more than is absolutely necessary. You've seen the stories: athletes who spend time at children's hospitals, police officers who pay for the baby formula that a mother was trying to shoplift, companies who do things that they don't have to do, simply because it's the right thing.

I'm going to include occasional good guy stories, when they're sufficiently interesting/amusing/amazing, because they are part of the symmetry of the multiverse. For every Donald J. Trump, there is a Jill Nobody, who goes out of her way to make the world a less hateful, less bitter, less awful place.

Today's good guys are Topps, the baseball card and bubble gum company.

Back in 1957, they held a contest where kids who sent in a special card, plus three gum labels, and predictions for the scores of two baseball games to be played on 19 July 1957, could win a new baseball glove, if they got the scores right. The material mentioned had to be received by 11 July to be eligible. The company didn't specify the year, though.

Enter Darwin Day, age 65, whose brother died of cancer. Mr. Day, recognizing the inconvenience that his brother's family was going through as they dealt with a lifetime of flotsam and jetsam, decided to clean up his own mess before departing this mortal coil. Eventually, he found three binders of baseball cards from 1956, 1957, and 1958. Included among the cards was one of the special contest cards. Since he and his brother had enjoyed collecting the cards so much and since his brother was a practical joker, Mr. Day decided in his brother's honor to enter the contest.

Not surprisingly, picking the correct scores of 59-year-old baseball games was easy and Mr. Day sent the required materials to Topps.

Tony Jacobs, Vice President of Topps in charge of confectionery (not a bad job, if you can get it), received the package and being a stand-up guy who runs a stand-up company, decided to honor the terms of the contest as written.

Mr. Day is now the proud owner of a brand-new baseball glove and Topps and Mr. Jacobs have the honor of joining the ranks of the good guys.

This story is courtesy of the New York Times.

Old Age and Treachery

A while back, I read a nice little article written by a B-52 radar navigator. His plane and three others were attending one of the big training exercises. They had been flying for about a week under extremely severe restrictions — ingress at 15,000' from the West, egress at 18,000' to the North, no jammers, etc. Needless to say, the other participants were picking them out of the sky left and right.

On the night before the last exercise, which was to be a simulated nuclear attack, the bomber squadron commander walked into the office of the guy who was running the exercise and said that the BUFFs weren't going to fly the next day. Since his people weren't getting anything out of the exercise except for morale bruises, he didn't see the point in racking up airframe hours. After a heated debate, the exercise manager agreed that the bombers could fly their own attack the next day — no restrictions.

The author and the other radar navigators spent the whole night working out the attack plan.

The next day the B-52s came into the target region from four directions at altitudes ranging from 250 to 500 feet at full throttle with every electronic countermeasure cranked to eleven. They criss-crossed over the target at less than 200 feet altitude in what's called a lay-down attack, where the bombs are intended to soft-land to allow the bomber a chance to depart before special relativity is experimentally proven once again. The total time over target was less than two minutes and none of the SAM sites even got a lock on them. One defender fired a (simulated) missile, but it was during the egress phase, was a wild shot with no chance to hit, and left the firing plane directly over ground zero at the moment when the bombs would have gone off. An F-18 was "shot down" when he obliviously flew directly behind one of the bombers.

The author stated that they returned to base and had just begun the debriefing when the general in charge of the defense team literally kicked the door open and started screaming. The author went on to say that it was exactly like the scene from "The Dirty Dozen". The offended general was red-faced and ranting about how the bombers had cheated and about how their crews' mothers and fathers had never known each other's last names. All in all, a supremely satisfying moment, from the report.

Of interest is the fact that all of the fighter pilots were amazed by the abilities of the B-52s. The pilot who had been shot down had no idea that he was anywhere near the bomber, let alone in its tail cone. The pilot who had made the wild shot only noticed the plane because it was flying so low that the shadow was completely black against the ground.

As an aside, the sight of four B-52s coming in at full throttle from all different directions at 200 feet must have been pretty damn impressive, if not to say deafening. When we lived in Austin, there was an annual airshow at Bergstrom Air Force Base. Since it was an old SAC base, there were always a couple of B-52s, which were enormously popular for the amount of shade they produced. They would always make a low pass at about 500' and it was one of the highlights of the show to have your chest rumble.

What Makes Nascar the True American Sport

Okay, so your former boss has managed to screw you one last time, long after you've stopped working for him. Only Nascar gives you a microphone and lets you tell a national audience the following:

 "It's just disappointing that you've got somebody old like that's retiring -- should be retired the way he drives -- it's just ridiculous. I only hit him in Turn 1 when he cut across my nose, so I don't think there was any reason other than him just being bipolar and having anger issues. Google Tony Stewart. You'll see all kinds of things he's done. Look it up on YouTube and everything else. He's quite the guy."

By the way, just like at work, here's what your ex-boss left around the office:

Amazon's Algorithms Are Clear, Now

So, Amazon decided that my interests lay in Religion and Spirituality books, a topic of which the best that can be said is that my reading tends to the highly esoteric. If the recommended books had involved the various aboriginal religions, seventeenth-century religious schisms in Islam, or medieval Lithuanian paganism, I would have been impressed and might have perused the selection.

Instead, it consisted almost entirely of pop theology, Christian leadership, and "The Men Who Stare at Goats" (to quote the great Dave Barry: I am not making this up). Since I don't read these books (although I might read "The Men Who Stare at Goats", if I ever find the time), I couldn't begin to guess why Amazon decided to recommend them. Fortunately, I can click a link and find out:

Wow! Three Vonnegut novels, Huxley's classic, a novel of the Franklin Expedition of 1845, and Grant's Memoirs. If I saw these on your bookshelf, I'd come up with a very different list of suggestions. Something regarding the Elder Gods might be appropriate, or more likely, something from another shelf in the library. (I do actually own and have read all of these books, by the way.)

Amazon is also incorrect in that my hobby is not voyeurism. I live in a neighborhood filled with middle-aged bodies living middle-class lives. Frankly, my neighbors are neither attractive or interesting enough to justify peering through their windows, making this suggestion irrelevant:

Why Broken Symmetry?

Symmetry is one of the most fundamental concepts in science, philosophy, and art. In principle, it represents an ideal state of balance and potentiation, where possibilities remain open and equal. In reality, symmetry is elegant, but dull. I chose the name Broken Symmetry for my blog because it reflects a crossroads where my interests meet.

As a physicist, I know that symmetry is behind many of the most beautifully brilliant theories, but that nasty experimentalists have a habit of performing experiments that disclose cracks in these theories and that these violations of symmetry are the likely cause of the universe consisting of matter, rather than equal quantities of matter and antimatter, annihilating each other to nothing.

In chemistry, most organic molecules have chirality: that is to say, they are right-handed or left-handed. While most synthetic processes produce equal quantities of each, biological processes tend to be very specific, producing (and consuming) left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. As we search for life on other worlds, one tool that will be used is looking at these compounds to see if they show a preference for one hand or the other. If they do, it will be strong evidence of biological function.

As an artist, I know that symmetry is graceful and pleasing to the senses, but that asymmetry causes tension that makes art exciting and inspiring.

Something as common as a face may seem symmetric, but virtually no one's is. Psychologically, more symmetric faces are generally viewed as more attractive, but as these photos show, even when viewing a random person, the natural face appears more interesting than do either of the two faces created by mirroring one half onto the other:

Even a face generally considered to be beautiful looks strange and uninviting when made symmetric:

So this blog is all about the interesting and exciting world that comes when things are not in balance. When good and evil aren't equivalent, when truth and lies don't cancel out, and when you discover that two left gloves aren't the same as a pair.

I believe in balance. I'm just opposed to it. This is the place where chaos begins.

New Look

Well, I like it better.

The background image is mine. If you like it, let me know and I'll send you a copy at whatever resolution that you want.