Appreciating the doers!

This past weekend we took a road trip, covering a swath of New Mexico and a swath of Texas. My wife did most of the driving, giving me the opportunity to just look at the wonders that whizzed by.

Some were nature's wonders, like the occasional small herd of antelope (American pronghorns, actually) peacefully grazing in sparse grasslands. Strange geographic features like the miles of dunes of snow white gypsum which gathered on the east side of the San Andreas mountains.

Mostly, however, I marveled at the man made wonders, reflected on the work it took to create them and thought of all the people who benefit from those creations while bearing no knowledge of, or appreciation for, their benefactors.

I saw a lot of oil wells pumping away. I wondered about the men who sweated in summer heat or shivered in winter cold to erect the drilling rigs, then labored for weeks to drive the drill deep enough to reach oil.

I thought of the folks who provided capital for that drilling. Many have invested their savings to acquire a 1/64 interest in a drilling operation which failed to produce oil and they lost their investment. If oil is found, these investors will periodically receive small checks, hoping the oil will hold out long enough to get all their money back and, hopefully, enough additional to earn more than they could have received from a bank savings account.

From those windswept fields, the crude oil is transported to a distant refinery where gasoline is extracted, then shipped back to a filling station in a nearby village. There I am able to fill my tank and thus cruise in comfort down this highway... its hard surface another by-product of the stuff those pumps are extracting. I note the nicely formed plastic control panel of our car, also made from that crude oil, and I wonder why so many demonize this amazing gift from nature.

There are electrical wires everywhere you go. This was not the case in the 1930s when my family's farmhouse had no electricity and my sisters did their homework by the light of a kerosene lamp - also fueled by a product of the aforementioned crude oil.

Among the utility poles we passed, I saw an occasional one which carried a pod of large capacitors. I recalled a classroom, decades ago, and an instructor who explained that even a straight wire, if long enough, will introduce enough inductive reactance to shift the phase angle between the voltage and the flowing current. This requires the occasional introduction of enough capacitive reactance to straighten things back out. I know I am speaking Greek to most, but if it were not for someone studying that particular Greek and solving that particular problem, the family in the ranch house we passed could not watch their TV programs tonight. Or operate the myriad of other things powered by electricity.

We drove alongside miles of railroad tracks and I wondered at the fact that oak ties, laid directly on the ground with rails spiked to them, is still the best way to transport a train. Men once drove those spikes by hand, swinging sledgehammers endlessly to build the miles of track that carried trains across this vast nation.

I saw where rails and also highways cut through rolling, rocky terrain and up the sides of mountains. I remember reading how early roads were built with horse drawn excavating equipment and only black powder to blast a path through solid rock. How did they ever get it done?

We passed fields with deeply plowed furrows, stretching straight as a string to the horizon. I marveled that anyone can hold a huge tractor in a true, straight line. Later this spring those furrows will sprout cotton plants and when the summer is nearing its end, bolls of snow white cotton. Then, men on other machines will harvest the cotton and it will go to mills around the globe to be made into jeans and T-shirts for the world's youth.

Here in America we have much to be thankful for. Near the top of the list are the millions of men and women who work their entire lives to give us the many luxuries we enjoy. And we never even bother to say "Thanks!".

Work Station President

Back in the 1960s, a banker friend took me on a tour of his bank's computer. In the lobby, employees operated card readers and other wonderful devices that sorted checks, recorded withdrawals and deposits, computed balances, issued statements, etc.

We went to the bank's basement and entered a "clean" room. The walls were lined with large equipment cabinets, several of which had reels of recording tape on the front - these reels spinning forward and backward as bank employees operated the computer from their work stations. Upon returning to the bank lobby, I realized that all those work stations counted for little. It was the sprawling computer in the basement that was doing the work.

A couple of decades later, in the 1980s, my company installed our first computer system. Made by Wang, it consisted of a central unit (a micro version of that old bank's computer!) with work stations on each employee's desk. Each station consisted of a keyboard and a monochrome monitor, not unlike the CRT monitors used for PCs, but that was before PCs.

You could do all sorts of things at each work station... but the work station itself was nothing. Disconnect the cables connecting it to the central processing unit and the work station no longer functioned. Enter errors into the central unit, and every work station will repeat those errors

I think of those early computers every time I hear President Obama speak. Looking like a well-groomed intellectual, he stands in front of his teleprompter and sounds very wise indeed. Unplug the teleprompter and he is like a disconnected work station on our old Wang computer. He no longer functions intelligently.

When Barack Obama makes an unscripted statement about a current event, his comments are often ignorant and destructive: "The police acted stupidly"; "If I had a son he would look like Trayvon"; etc.

Our concern must be with whomever is programming Obama's "central unit". And we must realize that if we re-elect Barack Obama, we re-elect those programmers.