Friday, October 05, 2007

More interconnectedness, frat tires, Mhz mics, and C4

Recently I was in at an army base measuring various explosions, C4, and bullets fired from shells like these among others:

(Pic not taken on the base. That would have been illegal.).

While working in the gear tent, I decide to check the voltage of the marine batteries powering our equipment. I probed the batteries with the meter:

[Hmmm. 11.32 volts. A little low...] "Hey, Dr. Gabrielson, the batteries are down to-"

"11.32!" Someone yells.

"Yeah, how did you-" I poked my head out of the tent. 50 meters away some guys are measuring the distance of blast pencils from the suspended C4 sticks.

"This one is 11.32 meters from suspension point Chris."

If you have read my blog (thank you Andy・Woelke・Ben・Matt) any over the past couple years, you know that I love recording the things that happen in my life that are just too weird to be true... you know, like when you are working on homework and you realize your phone hasn't rung in hours, and you have a strange feeling that it's about to ring. And then it does. What are the chances of someone making a completely unrelated measurement, and coming up with the exact same answer as me at the exact same time, and shouting it right when I was about to say it?? The odds are smaller than winning the lottery. My professor even thought it was weird.

But it was just volts and meters. Completely meaningless.

I dunno. I see this sort of thing happen so often (why don't other people write this sort of thing down? I don't believe crazy things happen only to me. Is it that I'm the only one actively looking for them?) . It reminds me that everything is part of something bigger.

Which is good. For maybe the first time ever, a girl that I was really, really strongly attracted too, returned this. And how I met her, and the circumstances around it involve many strange stories of the type I'm talking about. It was too weird. Like something out of a movie, and you think: "This isn't too good to be true. This is too good to not be true."

But, she turned me down.

Of course there was a lot of complexity to the situation, and like someone just mentioned, a guy never thinks rationally in this sort of circumstance. Thinking about it with more clarity now, it makes sense and I can understand/respect her choice.

***

Anyway, one of the tires on my Ford went flat yesterday. My spare is also flat, apparently. And, while biking to ICF this evening, I hoped a curb and my rear tire went flat. 3 flat tires. Good thing I like walking eh? Well, a few hours from now a friend will help me get my spare out of storage and we'll go to the Firestone.

So, it's 3:00AM, I just finished my "Japanese lessons" (dubbed anime) and I guess I'll have to post about the C4 and Mhz mic later.
じゃあ ね



2 Comments:

Blogger -jacob said...

I often do experiments that involve a large number of .2ml tubes to be set in a tube rack. I will pour a bunch of tubes on my desk and start racking them. Every once in a while I will need the exact # of tubes for my experiments that I randomly poured from the bag.

3:21 PM  
Blogger tmm said...

Yeah, I'm telling you, things aren't as random as they seem...

6:09 PM  

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