| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
|
 |
|
Evelyn was not interested in dinner so I worked on my log and put a movie on TV. The Motel 6 is cheaper an more comfortable than the weird place we stayed last night. It is now a little after 11 PM and I am caught up in my log.
Log-writing really becomes a major chunk of work on these trips. This was a short day for seeing things with only one major site, but it still is a lot of work to get caught up. Luckily I can do that in my spare time. That is why I started log-writing rather than taking pictures. It is like being able to go back and take pictures in my off hours. I get my impressions written in what would be slack time. However, it means that there is very little slack time. The palmtop makes keeping a log a lot easier also. (I basically use an HP 200LX as a third lobe of my brain. It is an orderly way of keeping all sorts of records, doing simple calculations, and acting as a reminder clock. But doing that well becomes a major part of my thinking. If I could ever convey to people how much I use the thing, I think HP would hire me.) I used to write the log in a paper notebook, but that forced me to write in near chronological order. I could by a series of redirection write more about an event in the past, but with a palmtop that is not necessary. I can insert wherever I want. This has a bigger effect than it sounds like since as I am leaving a site I can be writing my impressions while they are fresh. If a week from now I think of something to say about Skyline Caverns, I can let the find mechanism find that passage in seconds. And typing has got to be nearly as fast as hand-writing-it may be even faster. The first thing people say when they see the palmtop is that the keyboard is too small for them to use. There are some drawbacks for a palmtop, but that is a lesser one. Mostly I hold it in my hand and type with my thumbs, resting the palmtop on the other four fingers. I will however at times two-finger type with the right or both hands. I do this by holding the base between my thumb and little finger and type with my index finger and middle finger. But in any case really what you learn when you learn to type is where the keys are. If you lost two fingers you would not take nearly as long to learn to type again. You already know where the keys are, you just need a little practice hitting them there in a different way. Within a few minutes you learn to thumb type on a palmtop. Then I enter the log looking at my thumbs typing. It is almost like reading the log as I write it even though my eyes are flying over the keyboard as fast as my thumbs do. Net result: I type on a palmtop nearly as fast, maybe 95%, as typing on a full-sized keyboard. The keyboard is not what makes the log a big job, it is thinking what to say. I am just 'talking' slowly into a keyboard.
The other big advantage is that it used to take months to get the handwritten log typed and it was a big task, usually done by Evelyn when she got the time, bless her. Without her help the lot could not have been published. The last log was published before she even got a chance to see it. I type the log in with each day being a separate file. The log is nearly all typed at the end of the trip. Then one at a time, I pull the files into MSWord and spell-check them. That takes maybe ten minutes per file. Then I concatenate the files and print up the proof of the log. I read that over making notes on what I want to change and then call in the individual files and make the changes.
Maybe it is just me, but I also like to see the chapters have approximately equal length. At least I like to minimize the standard deviation. If I have a comment to go in that really does not especially apply to any day (like this one, I could have talked about this process anywhere in the log) I will sometimes put it in about the place where I had the thought and other times I will look for a short day's log to put it in. In this case I confess that these are not thoughts I had this Sunday, but on the following Thursday morning. They apply as well to this day. But even part of the nice thing about a log is that even if Evelyn is asleep, I always have someone to talk to. The bad thing is that I have committed myself to do a lot of talking and as soon as I stop I am behind. That makes the trip a little less restful than it would otherwise be, but any trip that you do not come back from exhausted you have wasted.
I have discovered something of a universal law of motel air conditioners that can simplify the process for the traveler. As you go from motel to motel, they all have very different controls and it is very hard to figure out them all. No problem, there is a law that saves you having to learn all the controls. I have discovered that a motel air conditioner that is on will remain on, and an air conditioner that is off will remain off unless acted upon by direct human intervention. However complex the controls, they really just hide what is essentially an on-off switch. Do not expect any comfort control or thermostat to save you from temperature extremes. The difference between a thermostat in a motel air conditioner and the Easter Bunny is you can at least get someone to wear a suit and pretend to be the Easter Bunny. If you set an air conditioner to turn on when the room gets too warm, no matter what you set as the supposed threshold, the room will never get there. It can get hot enough to melt tungsten in the room and the air conditioner will sit there like a lump. If you go to sleep with the air conditioner on, bundle up warm. A blizzard is coming.
|
08/18/97--Tennessee: Oak Ridge and Dayton:
|
Well, it was somewhat noisy during the night. But the room was still the better of the two.
Driving certainly has some advantages over flying. The main one is you get a much better feel for distance. Flying is too much like traveling by matter transmitter. Driving you get a feel that you can get in a car and go for six hours and people talk differently and have a very different world-view. You get a sense of how much things can change per mile of distance.
We scan the radio for something to listen to and find one religious station after another. Can there be so much demand? In this part of the country people just steep themselves in religious rhetoric. Our major stop of the day is the American Museum of Science and Energy at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Somehow American Museum makes it sound as if it is huge, like the American Museum of Natural History. It is two floors, not really very big, but you can see the whole museum in about 90 to 120 minutes. The first floor is a history of the atomic bomb project in Oak Ridge and what happened here after. The simple fact is that Oak Ridge was built for one task, the separation of U-235 from U-238 and the creation of enriched U-235. It was top secret, it was vital to the Manhattan Project, and it was technically somewhat uninteresting. The cutting edge scientists were nearly all at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Oak Ridge was working on an important but not very creative task executing a process that is still semi-secret. That makes this a less interesting site than Los Alamos. Oak Ridge was chosen because it was only sparsely populated, a long distance inland (so less vulnerable to attack), and it had a ready supply of cheap labor.
The government just came in bought up the land with what was supposed to be six weeks notice (though often it was as little as two), and it started building buildings at explosive speed. Many of the houses were pre-fabricated or built from kits. At their height, the house-building averaged a house completion every thirty seconds. People used to go into town and know everyone they saw, now suddenly three-quarters of the people on the street were strangers.
All of this was to vaporize uranium remove impurities, then divide it into two gasses with different weights, one was U-235, one was U-238.
Another part of the museum on the first floor is devoted to cars and gasoline.
The museum offers a visit to the site of the Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The plants were given designations instead of names. As the highway sign says: 'This plant is K-12. The K-25 plant was a part of the Manhattan Project, the K-25 plant was designed to house the work on separating U-235 from U-238 through gaseous diffusion. At the time the largest industrial complex in history. Construction was begun 1943 and completed 1945. 25,000 construction personnel worked on the plant.' (That probably is not an exact quote, I was expecting to paraphrase. Well the facts are all correct. I bet Shakespeare's history plays were a lot more inaccurate.)
The biggest thing at K-25 is the U-building at over 44 acres. The claim is that it is a mile in length. If the truth be known it is two three-story buildings side-by-side, each a half mile long, connected by a one-story connecting building. You could walk a mile on the first floor. On the second floor you could not.
The plant has a 347-foot tall water tower, one of the tallest in the world. Our guides took us around showing us the old barracks, The place where they are making absorbent 'stuff' to put on spills. The have a hazardous waste incinerator. It burns solid and liquid waste at the same time which I think was supposed to be impressive. Our guide said the steam coming out the top was 99.9% pure. I did not take him literally. I would assume he did not know what he said. If that plant were releasing one part per thousand of dangerous toxins I would want to be far away right at that instant. The person in charge of the operation came over to talk to us and said that it was a lot purer than that. I did not catch how many 9s he said but it was more like 99.9999%. I guess one of the reasons he made the big bucks is he knew that 99.9% pure is not very pure when you are talking hazardous materials.
At one point they tried to keep geese from landing on the lab grounds. They actually caught them and released them elsewhere hundreds of miles away. The population just increased faster. It seems the geese were making new friends and bringing them to Oak Ridge.
After the tour we were taken back to the museum. We finished it and headed out for Dayton, Tennessee, site of the Scopes Monkey trial.
On the road I see a church announcing a sermon on the topic 'Jesus on Labor Unions.' I wonder if Jesus can recommend me a good Internet Service Provider.
As I used to think, in part by doing case studies with audiences of Contact and Fiddler on the Roof, Christians see four classes of people. The innermost circle are people of the same religion. These are the people who have found the truth and are Saved. Well, at least if they believe the parts that really count. The next larger circle contains all Christians. Generally Christians are pretty comfortable with Christians. Well, that's not true. I mean historically there was the Spanish Armada. And, true, there was the English Civil War, things like that. But we live in an enlightened age and liberal times and generally Christians accept other Christians as Christians, unless they are Mormons. |
|
| Copyright © - "Mark R. Leeper" |
|
 |
| Other travelogues by the same author: |
|
|
|
