This is some pretty cool work by a father and his son — building a capsule holding a video camera and an i-Phone for location and retrieval, launching the whole works on a weather balloon to the stratosphere and safely back to earth, then finding it.

(More awesomeness from Gizmag.)

Note:  I wrote this almost a year ago, for a newsletter I used to publish.  It seems a good time to revisit it.

CHARLES ALBERT WELCH, JULY 4, 1943 — OCTOBER 10, 2009

Your Extreme Editor Says Goodbye To His Father-in-Law

I won’t try to tell you all that much about Charles Welch.  He loved Elvis and the Beach Boys and all kinds of early rock music.  He loved cars and animals (the latter a very good thing, given his decades-long career as a zookeeper in Memphis).  He loved where he was born and grew up and lived his whole life, out there in rural west Tennessee, even if he also loved to travel to other places.  Most of all, he loved his family.

I have so much to thank my father-in-law for:

– Obviously, for the beautiful, sweet, beautiful, kind, beautiful, smart, beautiful and wonderful daughter he raised;

– For not taking one look at the VW-bus-driving, bicycle-racing, poison-ivy-prone, soft-handed Yankee fruitcake who wanted to marry that daughter, and sending him packing with jeering laughter ringing in his ears;

– For helping me learn how very smart a guy can be even with the drawl-iest of Southern drawls — and how very dumb so many people can be even if they sound all Northern-y and “smart”;

– For being nothing but supportive when I and my career moved his beautiful daughter far, far away from him — it must have hurt him like the devil, but he never let on;

– For traveling to all those far-flung places I’d moved his daughter to, packing along a cooler of his best-in-the-world pork shoulder barbecue and the Pancho’s cheese dip we couldn’t get;

– For all the homegrown tomatoes he shipped us in those places;

– And most of all, for making me a true part of that wonderful, messed-up, dear, annoying, tight-knit family he loved so much.

I count myself lucky that don’t have much by way of regrets with regard to my relationship with Charles.  He knew I loved and respected him, and I knew he felt the same about me, even as different as we two were.

I guess the only real regret I do have is that I didn’t ask him for his daughter’s hand in marriage.  I meant him no disrespect.  I was just young and stupid and really had no idea that people still did such quaint things.  Only later, hearing and reading about others’ experiences with it, did I realize I’d missed something important.  Charles never gave me any indication that my omission upset him, and there didn’t seem to be much point in asking him about it.  But now… well, I surely do hope that he didn’t take it as anything more than the cluelessness it was.

Anyway, as regrets go, that one’s pretty mild, I think.

In the grand scheme of things, I really wouldn’t trade the friendship we built over the last 23 years for anything.  Still, I can’t help that in the last awful week I’ve been tempted by one other wicked pseudo-regret.  Why couldn’t my in-laws and I hate each other, like we were supposed to?  Then maybe it wouldn’t hurt so damned much.

 And goddamn it, I still miss you terribly.

Holy cow, this song takes me back.

 It was my junior year of college when this was getting airplay, and I finally had a girlfriend!  And she was everything I’d ever dreamed about:  heart-meltingly beautiful, and smart, and sweet and kind and on and on.

She still is.

This time, it’s about the patently obvious fact that a pregnant woman having a drink or two does no harm to her unborn child, the moronic posturing of health Nazis and governments notwithstanding.

It’s both a blessing and a curse to be as brilliant as I am.

Capt. Jack Conroyd, comparing his landing with malfunctioning landing gear to Capt. Chesley “Sulley” Sullenberger’s ditching in the Hudson River after losing both engines:

“What Sullenberger did was significantly more difficult than what we did. He’s a hero,” Conroyd said. “When we came in to land, we had both engines running. And we landed on a runway. I am not a hero. I was doing my job.”

Well done on all fronts, Captain Conroyd.

Last year my brother John gave me a copy of David McCullough’s The Great Bridge:  The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, which I finished some months back.

It was a smashing good book in many ways.  McCullough is a superb popular historian, following finely in the footsteps of his predecessor Cornelius Ryan in the way he keeps the narrative lively and engaging.  Of course, the story itself lends to this liveliness, covering the astonishing technical methods employed in the bridge’s construction (just a handful of years after the end of the Civil War!), the personal histories and individual challenges of the chief characters, and of the course the corrupt and self-serving machinations of the politicians at both the local and state levels of New York (some things, apparently, never change).

The tale of how the supports for the bridge’s towers were built is itself riveting enough to anchor the whole book.  Along the way, though, we learn of the evolution of bridge building as the still-young country slowly knit itself together with better and better means of transit from one place to another.

I highly recommend this book.  Thanks, John!

Carbon fiber bicycle rims have been around for a while now — but they’ve always been a challenge for braking, since they don’t offer the same “grab” from standard rubber brake pads as the old aluminum alloy rims do.

So these cats at a company called Zircotec came up with a sprayed-on ceramic coating that eliminates the braking challenge for carbon fiber rims.  It’s also used on carbon fiber Formula 1 car components to extend life, and on motorcycle panniers to protect them from heat damage from the exhaust system.

What’ll they think of next?

Read here for the full story, courtesy Gizmag.

I had a chance since my previous post about Steven Johnson to check his books out.  I need to read them — they look phenomenal.

And I also had the misfortune of reading another pantload from that braying ninny Thomas Friedman.  You know, I kind of liked The World is Flat, though I pointed out to anyone who would listen at the time I read it that his man-love for China was based on seeing what the Chi-Com tyrants wanted him to see and nothing else.

Well, he hasn’t changed in that regard, and he’s gotten positively bile-raising in his endless glowing tributes to the Chinese.  Not the Chinese people, mind you — the Chinese government, and their enlightenment in spending the money they rob from their mostly grindingly poor populace to fund things like Olympic Games and empty cities and space missions and trains nobody uses.

His article today bloviated on and on about how the Chinese communists are so wise to be spending on electric cars, and how we’ve lost our way because we created the original auto industry and oil industry and we’re not creating the electric car industry.  But he’s missing a couple awfully important points.  First, does he remember the ’80s, when people like him were wetting their pants about the Japanese government picking the big winners?  Or the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, when it was the Soviets?  And second, he does realize that the government didn’t create the auto or oil industries in the US, right?  Well, clearly not.

See, to Tom Friedman, who believes you’re an idiot who needs incredibly smart and important people like him to lead you to wisdom, the intellectual elite must always pick the winners.  Never mind that they’ve failed colossally every time they’ve tried.  His latest obsession about electric cars is because he’s a green zealot, not because he has any evidence that they’ll be a marketplace winner.

Meanwhile, Steven Johnson wants us to watch more TV and play more video games.  Oh, and for the nitwits running our not quite communist government to get out of the way so we can tinker and innovate super-successfully, the way we have here in the US for hundreds of years.

I pray for Steven Johnson to eclipse Tom Friedman in earnings.  Probably won’t happen, though, because Friedman sings the tune so many rich people want to hear:  that they’re geniuses who should control mankind.

I’m going to have to check out Steven Johnson’s books — if they’re anything like as good as his Wall Street Journal article, “The Genius of the Tinkerer,” I’m in for some great reading.  I sure didn’t know this, for example:

More recently, a graduate student named Brent Constantz, working on a Ph.D. that explored the techniques that coral polyps use to build amazingly durable reefs, realized that those same techniques could be harnessed to heal human bones. Several IPOs later, the cements that Mr. Constantz created are employed in most orthopedic operating rooms throughout the U.S. and Europe.

And I found this really intriguing:

Organizations like IBM and Procter & Gamble, who have a long history of profiting from patented, closed-door innovations, have embraced open innovation platforms over the past decade, sharing their leading-edge research with universities, partners, suppliers and customers. Modeled on the success of services like Twitter and Flickr, new Web startups now routinely make their software accessible to programmers who are not on their payroll, allowing these outsiders to expand on and remix the core product in surprising new ways.

I could be completely wrong, but it feels like my company pays mere lip service to this idea; we putatively welcome outside ideas, but I don’t feel like we’re open with anything we have, at least not on any grand basis.  As with any organization, of course, we have much to learn.  And it looks like Steven Johnson is a heck of a teacher.

Nineteenth-century Chicago architect John Root was a contemporary of Louis Sullivan’s, and was another force behind the development of the tall building.  Unfortunately he died young, at age 41 of pneumonia.

The north half of the 1891 Monadnock Building (foreground below) is one of very few surviving John Root designs.  It’s the last Chicago skyscraper with load-bearing walls, which are six feet thick at the base.  (The south building — background below — built immediately after the north half by Holabird & Roche, is steel-framed.)  While Root intended Egyptian-themed ornamentation, the building’s owners insisted on none, such that it prefigures the modern architecture that would arise early the next century.

The name comes from a mountain in southwest New Hampshire.  John Root’s father was friends with Daniel Webster, who lived near it; its name became eponymous for the geological term for a lone mountain.