Re: RC: Up Hill or Down

[David LeBlanc <dleblanc@mindspring.com>]

At 06:17 PM 1/9/00 -0500, Rides 2 Far wrote:

>WOW.  Kaboot must be a heck of a lot smarter than I gave him credit for. 

Yup - there's some amazing stuff going on in those dinky little brains of
theirs.

>Whatever the physics of the matter is, you can toss footing in as a
>variable.  Kaboot can usually fly downhill at a huge trot at Biltmore in
>the Spring.  The ground is soft and loamy.  He's perfectly balanced, and
>it feels great.  This fall it was like a different place.  The ground was
>hard as a rock.  He baby stepped down them this time.  He must have been
>up all night doing the math. >g<

Yeah - footing is another variable.  Something I learned while working on
aerospace engineering was that all they taught you in undergrad school was
the really simplified stuff - enough to get you in the ballpark so you
could fine-tune manually.  Once I started trying to take out some of those
assumptions and deal with something approaching the real world, the math
got really difficult.  I thought that it was bad enough dealing with
something as complicated as a helicopter blade, but then I moved on to
things like modelling air flow in a lung, the mechanics of arteries - stuff
like that.  As soon as you start trying to figure out how all these natural
things we take so much for granted work, you start realizing how
wonderfully complicated the real world is.  Simple physics isn't good for
anything more than making a table or something - the real mechanics of
these wonderful animals (and us on top of them) is tremendously
complicated.  One of the best things about grad school - taught me how
little we really know.


David LeBlanc
dleblanc@mindspring.com


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