[GreenKeys] Furlongs per Fortnight, Buckets per Man-Year, Etc.

[George B. Hutchison]

GreenKeyers - - -

The rate of movement of slugs and snails can be converted to Furlongs 
per Fortnight.  Draining swamps can be done with a pump in terms of 
gallons per hour, or with a human brigade in terms of Buckets per 
Man-Year.

Magnetic Field intensity is measured in Gauss, and the only 
Gaussmeter I have ever seen or used was back in my days at Stanford 
University, where we had bubble chamber magnets that ran at 340 volts 
at 10000 amps, or the little magnet that ran at about 240 volts at 
4800 amps. You could stack your tools in the arc of the magnetic 
field you were working in, and wearing steel-toed boots would cause 
some difficulty in walking because you tended to kick anything your 
foot passed that had any measure of flux lines emerging from it. The 
field intensity was 20,000 Gauss.

There are no "Gauss R Us" stores. The U.S. can no longer produce 
rare-earth magnets because someone a few administrations ago allowed 
the Chinese to buy up and transport to China our rare-earth magnet 
technology.  The first thing China produced with their newly acquired 
technology was servo motors for Silkworm Missiles.

All these are things that I, as a human being living in a beautiful 
area, cannot change.

What I can hopefully change, as a human being living in a beautiful 
area, is the temperament exhibited when a group of people I happen to 
admire and respect because of the marvelous spectrum of experience, 
knowledge, age and backgrounds so often exhibited therein, begin to 
call each other names over such mundane things as coil saturation 
current, and how to measure it.

I like "Troll House" cookies. I like to go and Troll down a beach. 
Trolling motors allow one to fish a bit better. I pay a Troll when I 
go over a Troll Bridge. Sadly, I have no friends who are Trolls.

Methinks we should lighten up a bit and knock off the name calling 
and innuendo.

To me, (bad form, starting a sentence with a preposition) all of you 
guys are fairly well brilliant, and you would not be here if you 
didn't have that tiny little thing that got into your brains some 
time ago, and that is that you like teletype machines. And to me that 
is cool as hell. I got my addiction when I was fifteen, and my first 
paycheck in this world went for a model 26. I infected Bill Bytheway 
when he was fifteen by selling him a model 19. And so it goes...

Each of you please take a giant breath of helium, and lighten up.

A Happy Summer to all,

George - W7TTY