The unit-conversion math is something I learned in high school chemistry. Mr. George Johnson (who won the Dow Chemical Catalyst Award winner (a very prestigious national award for high school chemistry teachers) a few years earlier) insisted we learn that. I never saw it in any of my other high school classes and never saw it in a math, science, or engineering class in college either. A very powerful tool. Mr. Johnson taught me most everything I know about chemistry. Chemistry in college was strictly a weed-out class designed to flunk as many students as possible. It would have and probably should have stopped me had I not had Mr. Johnson for high school chemistry. In this respect, I owe Mr. Johnson a huge debt.
He also taught us the importance of estimating something quickly. A quick estimate is often just as good as a detailed calculation. I've been in design reviews where some eager new grad is presenting his design. Some old fart eager to knock the poor kid down a notch will say something like "what about the power dissipation?" The kid'll get this horrified look on his face. He forgot about that. He reaches for his fancy laptop and starts to create an xcell spread sheet to calculate it and just as he's gettin' the thing booted, I'll say, "It's about three Watts. That sink is rated for five, so it'll be fine." Finally, the kid figures it all out and says, "It's 2.943 Watts." Yeah, what'd I say? About three Watts. How did I do it? I estimated! Had my estimate been "about five Watts," I'd have wanted to do all the math and know the exact number. But, had my estimate been about five Watts, I want a bigger heat sink just because. So I was off by 57 mWatts. My estimate was good enough and it was a lot faster.
Mr. Johnson taught us the fast disappearing art of logarithms by making us use slide rules. I'm not so old that calculators weren't readily available at the time. But Mr. Johnson confined us to those old slide rules and forces us to learn logs. Another fantastic tool for making fast estimates in your head. I've had young new-grads do designs for me and bring me the finished design with their MathCAD printouts in hand and I've looked at the circuit and said, "Wrong." And they've said, "No way. Look, I worked it all out on the computer. What's wrong?" "The gain of the amplifier is off by quite a bit." "How do you know?" "I can estimate it in my head. Go back and look at the formulas that you put in the computer." Sure enough. They'll come back explaining that they'd made a mistake setting up the computer. I've done this myself, but when I saw my output, I said, "That's way out of the ballpark." I don't know what the exact result should be. If I knew that, I wouldn't be using the computer. But, I have a gut guess of about what it should be and when the result I get is to far from that quickie estimate, I know something is wrong. It was Mr. Johnson who taught me that.
Finally, it was Mr. Johnson who taught me to say, "That's highly undesirable." He never got mad, never criticized. He just shook his head and said, "That's undesirable," or of it was really bad, "That's highly undesirable."
He had this sort of understated way of putting things. "Avoid spilling the concentrated acid on your hand as this can be painful." "If the chemicals in today's experiment are mixed in the wrong order, a toxic gas may result. Therefore, I suggest you work under the fume hood."
So, there you have it. My high school chemistry teacher, George Johnson. What relationship he has to balisongs is unclear.
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Chuck
Balisongs -- because it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing!
http://www.balisongcollector.com
