Update 11-11-03


Hi,

In honor of Veteran's Day -- and because there wasn't a whole lot of mail -- some quasi-public service announcements. But first, a little business:

Paul Zegler thinks he can join Lynn, Thomas, and me for dinner on the 18th. He also has a new girlfriend, who he's hoping will be his last. (Dinner's still scheduled at the Pacific Palm Resort 
(www.pacificpalmsresort.com/dining1.htm) in the City of Industry. I'm guessing at around 7:00 p.m.)

Marilyn Horowitz Goldhammer has a new e-mail address. She can now be reached at: mgoldhammer@earthlink.net

Ray Staley got back in touch with us by way of Larry Rugen. Ray wondered why he hadn't been getting the updates weekly, but it was simply an e-mail problem. So if people you know have suddenly stopped getting the updates, please have them contact me. I only drop names off the mailing list when the newsletters have been consistently returned.

And Emily Kleinman Schreiber sent some pictures from the Class of '61's party. I'll add them to the Forest Road Party pictures as soon as I can. Some of these teachers you've see: Joe Caruso, Bernie O'Brien, and Booker Gibson. But there's also a shot of Irv Saffrin.

Next, the public service segment, beginning with a forward from Barbara Blithfield Pech: A Texas woman recently had an accident which totaled her car. It was raining, though not excessively, when the car suddenly began to hydroplane. The woman wasn't seriously injured, but was stunned at the occurrence. When she explained to the highway patrolman what had happened, he told her something every driver should know -- never drive in the rain with your cruise control on. The patrolman went on to say that if the cruise control is on, and your car begins to hydroplane, when your tires lose contact with the pavement, your car will accelerate to a higher rate of speed than you've set. The patrolman said a warning should be listed, on the driver's-side sun visor, to never use cruise control when the pavement is icy or wet.

[Rich -- I checked this out on Urban Legends. Their comment: As is usually the case with safety alerts circulating in the form of first-person narratives, we are unable to confirm that this exact incident really happened, but the warning is generally valid: Driving at high speeds on wet or icy pavement with the cruise control engaged could make it more difficult for the driver to regain control of the vehicle if it hydroplanes (skids) and therefore result in a deadly accident. This has been confirmed by sources ranging from insurance companies to state police to the National Automobile Dealers Association, which bluntly advises: "Never use cruise control when road conditions are slippery."
"Your cruise control does not know the difference in road surface types," explains South Dakota Highway Patrol Trooper Mike Bock on his agency's website. "This makes having it activated dangerous, because it will not allow you to slow down during a skid and you will continually accelerate. This does not allow you, the driver, to regain control of the vehicle." The experts agree: if the highway is wet or icy, turn off your cruise control; otherwise you're putting your own and others' lives in danger.
Still, one of Urban Legend's readers also replied: "This does not make any sense to me. I own four cars, all with cruise control, and all of them immediately disengage cruise control with the slightest tap of the brake."]

Info on a different subject from the New York Times, usually reputable enough to not need confirmation from Urban Legend. From a November 9th article titled "When Bad DVDs Happen to Great Movies": Digital technology seems, on the face of it, a preposterously inadequate medium for storing movies, and we should gape in wonder that DVDs yield coherent pictures at all, much less the gloriously sharp, detailed images they churn out under the best of conditions. Consider: A DVD stores only 17 gigabytes of data. A two-hour film, transferred to digital data and otherwise untreated, would take up more than 150 gigabytes.
So the data must first be massively compressed, mainly by digitally sampling a frame, then sampling only the information that changes in subsequent frames. This is no big deal for a scene of someone standing still against a blank wall. But it's a major challenge for a scene of someone running through traffic surrounded by dozens of flashing lights and moving objects. If a film is old and damaged, the compression machine will "read" random dirt and scratches in the same way it reads motion. If the machine's operator doesn't pay attention and make adjustments, or if the machine is sub-par, the digitized image will be full of waves, zigzags and other distracting distortions.
Similar problems can plague color or, if it's a black-and-white film, the gradations of gray. When transferring film from a negative to a print, someone has to practice the fine art of "color timing." The same thing has to be done, though electronically, when transferring it to DVD. The job can be done well or it can be done badly. "The main reason a lot of Dad's are so bad," says Robert A. Harris, president of the Film Preserve, one of the top film-restoring companies, "is that the people making them don't know what they're doing and don't care what they're doing."

Also from November 9th's New York Times, an explanation of why so many kids and their parents are paying off larger than expected college loans: Poverty is hardly a rarity among the students of California State University at Fresno. About three hours and a world away sits Stanford. Far fewer of its students are poor, yet the federal government gives it about 7 times as much money under one program, 28 times as much in another, and almost 100 times as much in a third. Similar discrepancies emerge across the nation, adhering to a somewhat counterintuitive underlying theme: The federal government typically gives the wealthiest private universities, which often serve the smallest percentage of low-income students, significantly more financial aid money than their struggling counterparts with much greater shares of poor students. Brown, for example, got $169.23 for every student who applied for its low-interest Perkins loan in the 2000-1 academic year. Dartmouth got $174.88; Stanford, $211.80. But most universities did not get nearly that much: the median for the nation's colleges was $14.38, and nearly 200 colleges received less than $3 per applicant for financial aid. The University of Wisconsin at Madison got 21 cents.
As for the origins of the disparities, most veterans of university finance agree that they date back at least to the 1970s, when regional panels of educational experts, not formulas, decided how much colleges would receive. Because each university had to make its own case for the money, those with long histories and a certain financial savoir-faire tended to do particularly well. In fact, the panels were sometimes composed of their peers. Congress tried to correct the imbalance in 1980, voting to divide the aid according to a "fair share" formula. But that applied only to whatever new money flowed into these programs, guaranteeing that no college would receive less than it was already getting. The compromise averted a political melee over redistribution, but because spending in these programs has grown relatively slowly in the last 20 years, it did little to eliminate the disparities. Today, about 60 percent of the money is still spent honoring old pledges.

Finally, something I learned personally this week, apart from what a potato ricer is. I was coming out of a mall, and a team of guys was assembling a 35-foot tall Christmas tree. It wasn't an artificial tree. It was real -- but augmented. It seems they start with a real tree and a mess of extra branches. Then, they trim back all the asymmetrical branches and fill out the tree to perfect form by drilling holes and inserting the branches taken from other trees. Evergreen branches, of course, will hold their color and seem to be alive for several months after they've been cut.
"How long has then been going on?" I asked one of the guys who was working. "Years," he said. "We do trees for big malls, and for Disneyland, and for any other place that has the money." It costs about a thousand bucks a foot for a fully decorated tree.

The home page: http://hometown.aol.com/falcons1965a


Rich