The AM Forum

For some fun - take a look at the sentence on the bottom of the page in CAPITAL letters. Read it once as you count the number of F's you read.  Do it now and come back to this point before reading on...


How many F's did you count?  If only three, then try again before reading on - there are more than three F's.



I've had this card in my wallet since the 80's.   Over 90% of the people I show it to count only three F's. There are actually six.  Print it out and try it on a few friends and see.  Axe them several times if they are sure - they will take the bait over and over... ;D

The reason is the of's sound like ov's to the brain...

My card sample is typed up exactly as shown. I don't know if the hypens are really needed or not, but that's how it's typed out.  I see it's on Google, so maybe this has already been seen by everyone, I dunno.

Did anyone count six the first shot?  I remember only one guy who got it right - he instinctively used his finger to uncover each letter at a time. No one else did this.

Taking the kayak out sailing this weekend on the CT River --- ahhhhhhh.

T
----------------------------

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-
IC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

I counted six 'fs' the first time. How could anyone miss them?

I like your sailboat and would like to join you! My dad was a boater, and boat builder, building them of welded sheet steel--no ribs. Lots lighter than wooden boats with ribs. One he built was a 36' cabin cruiser--draft 8" not including prop and rudder. His last build was a 27' sloop, of which I have great memories, including climbing the mast when the mainsail halyard broke.

I counted 3.  Walt, did you READ it first?  I think that really sets up the deception.  If you simply start counting without reading, you're more likely to catch all 6 I think.  I copied and pasted it to a larger text processor (windows write) and my 14 year old son also replied 3.

Admittedly, I actually counted 3 twice until I read on about "OF". 

Ya got me Tom!

when i counted i got 5 but that was because i miised one of the of's, which in my mind never sounds like ov to me and sounds more like ah when i pronounce it do to how fast and sloppily i usually talk

No John, I didn't read it first--just started counting the 'fs'. Yer probably right concerning reading it first and missing the 'ofs'. Good point.

Walt

I counted 3 F's, read it again and counted 3 F's the second time.

3 F's + 3 F's = 6 F's ;D

Kept counting three F's unit I read your whole message and said should be 6
F's guess I'm normal    ;)

Devil's in the details, or in this case the little words.  Nice wake-me-up.  And that was after only 1/2 cup of BEAN.

Al

8 F's- Antenna Engineer
7 F's - Business Development
6 F's - Export Control
5 F's - Drawing Checker
4 F's - Technical Lead
3 F's - Manufacturing
2 F's - Quality
1 F - Finance
No F's Noticed - Program Manager

Swing..an a miss....wpheeeeuu....

Got 6 the first time...

read it backwards; kinda like a proof reader.

klc

I read it first, then counted 5 first time. Then counted 4, then 6.  It took several tries before I counted the same number going forwards and backwards.

I think you are less likely to make the "ov" error counting backwards than counting as you read in a forward direction.

I counted 3 first time. Then I carefully counted again being very slow and deliberate. Still counted 3! Makes me wonder what things I am missing in my normal daily routines. Kind of scary.

Yep, I get the same feeling, Dave. These kinds of "trick"  tests are humbling.  I counted only three the first few times too, so I know it works.  Yes, the trick to catching all six F's is going backwards so that the words don't make sense and phonetics are meaningless - or uncover each letter one at a time.

I think the first two words, "finished files" set us up looking for the hard "FFFF" sound. After that, we tend to skim and miss the "V' sounds... ;)

I once tried it on my  boss at the time in 1987. He had a big ego and acted like a know-it-all. When he came up with three F's I axed him four times in a row to recheck. He started to get irritated. After pointing  out six he looked at it in disbelief and just handed the card back and walked away....  He was POed.  He's the same guy I used one of those gag handshake buzzers on one time. He never seemed to like me after that....   Some people just can't take a joke...  ;D ;D


Walt - Fasinating about your OM building sailboats using sheet steel. He must have been some homebrewer!  Maybe you have a few pics of his boats.    Yaz and I did at least 10 miles up and down the CT River both days. He loves to get out on the beaches where the power boats tie up and run with the kids and other dogs. There are tidal pools that pull in and out with the moon, so are fun to wade and explore. The big power boat waves don't bother me at all - we just bounce up and down and the water bails itself out with the kayak venturis. I can go anywhere with this rig - down small streams, etc where sailboats and power boats wouldn't dare to. When the wind is up we skim along with the best of them. The range is X2 with the sails compared to standard kayaks.. I paddle when I must - sail when I can...  ;D

T

What are the torpedoes for?

Bill -

They're for the jet-skiers when they get too close.  Assuming you're serious, here's the schtick:

The torpedos are outriggers, or so-called patoons that provide rotational (longitudinal) stability when potentially flipping over. They're homebrew from 6" PVC pipe, alum tubing and alum rail fittings. They work on leverage. The farther out they extend, the more leverage to keep the boat from capsizing.   Normally a kayak doesn't need them, even though they do flip at times. But with Yaz walking around the fore and aft randomly, big boat waves and a sudden gust hitting the sail from the side they are truly needed here. I've flipped just one time in 3 years. It was a few weeks ago in deep water from a big wind gust. Yaz got thrown in and was swimming around the boat trying to get back in. I lost his leash, my hat and sun glasses. Getting the boat upright once it's upside down is a chore with the outriggers, sail and one person, but it can be done if practiced. I spent an hour practicng in shallower water. Yaz doesn't seem to mind anymore.... ;)

When I lived in Colo there weren't many places for sailing, no?  I guess they saved it all up and put it all in the Colo River.  I did like boating on Lake Powell?, Utah. Nice place. Some big cat sailers in there.

T

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR5aMY9uGJU&feature=fvw

BTW. I'm thinking of buying a Roland RD-700SX piano. I was lookin on YouTube at the demos and came across this guy... unreal drum solo on a piano...

Hello Tom,

Just finished viewing your fabulous bio page on QRZ! Very impressive!!! Your antenna farm is as impressive as K3LR's. Your rigs are pretty handsome, too.

Speaking of my dad and his boats, he was a genious and creative mechanical engineer and machinist. He was also a ham, an astronomer, telescope builder, and of course, boat builder.

I'm going to include some pics, as you requested, of two of his several boats, one of his several reflecting telescopes, and his ham shack in 1956.

In one of the boat pics, the one showing the bow of the 36' footer, I'm the little guy sitting on the canopy. This was in 1928 when I was nine.

The pic of the 27' sloop suspended at the rear of the truck shows how we trailered it. He built the sloop in 1936.

The pic of the telescope shows the one he built on contract for the Daytona Beach Astronomical Society in 1938, a pic of which appears in Ingalls 'Amateur Telescope Making' book.

More pics in the next post.

Walt

Forgot to mention, my Dad built the rigs seen in the pic of his ham station.

The pics of the sloop are included here.

Since only three attachments are allowed in one post, the pic of the telescope will be in the next post.

Walt

The three pics attached are of the telescope he built for the Daytona Beach Astronomical Society.

The first pic shows the original setup in front of his machine shop in Mt. Pleasant, MI, our home town.

The second pic shows it anchored down on open ground south of Daytona.

The third pic shows it on the campus of Stetson University, DeLand, FL. After WW2 the ambient light south of Daytona was too high for astronomical pursuits, so the Astronomical Society donated the telescope to Stetson U. 

Note that the mounting section is the rear-axle housing from a 1927 Chevrolet, taken from a junk yard.

Walt

Well first I only counted four- F's the first time round, then I just looked at each individual letter (not reading) and found the "of"s .  That's me though Always rushing in...

Wow Walt.  You OM's boat's are very nice!  Sheet steel?  That's Manly Boat-building. That sloop had nice lines too, looked like it would have been a good cruiser on the open ocean. 
I sail around on a converted john-boat. I added a big sprit-sail (too big really, but strapping is good right?  Big Poly-tarp sail with No dagger or leeboards, and she beats to windward FB, once you dig in the sharp corner (chine).  Since it's flat bottomed she GOES.   Someday I'll get aroundd to-it and build a real hull that'll FLY.  People stop and stare, sometimes laugh, until the see her turn to windward and Go.

Well Ed, we sailed both of the boats shown on Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron. They both had a galley, head, and four bunks. The sloop had self-bailing scuppers. Dad sold the sloop to a local guy, who trailered it to Cincinnati and launched it in the Ohio River, then sailed it down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico and on to Cedar Key, FL. That is the last we knew of it.

As I said in an earlier post, my Dad's boats were all built of sheet steel, 1/8" thick if I remember correctly, but with one bulkhead and no ribs. He reasoned that having curved steel pieces welded together from different angles would rigidize each other, which they did. One time we foundered on rocks with the sloop with such force that would have stoven in a wooden boat of like make, but all that happened was paint scraped from the bow. We had great fun sailing them, and as a kid I have great memories of the sailings.

Walt

Amazing pictues, Walt!   Your OM was a true homebrewer and reminds me of the telescope work done by Russell Porter of Sellafane fame.  Amazing how he improvised with junkyard stuff. That tow vehicle set up was quite strapping for the 1929 era.

I see he liked the old modified English mount. That's the most stable design for polar scopes. Compare that to a single pier.

I like that sloop. The mast for the main sail is tremendously tall. I'll bet that thing was a handful in big winds.

Thanks for posting, OM.

T

As a St Anderson sucker I was afraid to count...actually got 5 the first try.

Tom, Russell Porter stopped by Daytona Beach and inspected my Dad's scope, and was impressed by the wide and stable mounting. Told my Dad it was the most stable scope he'd ever seen. Porter had seen the pic of it in the 'Amateur Telescope Book'. Dad and Porter corresponded quite regularly.

Walt

How 'bout that. As you well know, Russell Porter is a god in the telescope making world. Designed the 200" Hale telescope.

Do you know how all of those scopes were protected from the WX?  Did they use some kind of roll-away shelters?

I'm also a tele-builder. I built a set of Newtonian 10" reflector binoculars that were mounted in a moving "telephone booth" style enclosure. I could ride in comfort.

Also have a 22" reflector with a 28" optical flat that is similar to Porters famous turret scope. Something like a heliostat or sideostat. Instead, mine uses a 18' tall fixed frame to hold the primary above the flat. The flat has a 6" hole and is controlled by steppers and a computer. The eyepiece is in a wx proof shelter below the flat for comfort.

Yep, scopes are pretty cool.

T

Interesting, Tom, didn't know you are an astronomer too!

Yes, I knew Porter designed the Hale scope. In fact, the mirror in Dad's Daytona scope came from the same Pyrex pour as the Hale mirror. Incidentally, you left the 't' out of Stellafane, hi.

The attached pic shows the scope with its shelter in the background at the Daytona location. The shelter is on rails, which allows it to be moved over the scope when not in use. A similar shelter was used in the Stetson U installation.

Walt

Walt, what a classic picture that is!  The old car, the scope using an old car rear end as its equatorial mount...

OK on the shelter with wheels, riding on the rails. I did the same for my binocs, though after a number of years the shelter started to rot from exposure. But it's good to make it easy to "get on the air" or we will come up with excuses for not using it.

Looking at the mount, do you think there is are some blind spots in motion when looking at the zenith? I wonder if the bottom of the scope would hit one of the concrete piers at certain orientations?  That may be the disadvantage of the English mount vs: a single pier, I dunno. But stability is certainly more important. My siderstat has a blind spot at the zenith when the flat is looking directly at the parabola.

Anyway, those old pics you posted deserve to be in the display up at Stellafane in the club house. They look so much like the Russell Porter era. A comment that Russell actually inspected the scope would put it over the top... ;D

T


Here's some shots of my scope. Notice the military shelter where the eyepieces are for viewing comfort from the bugs or cold.  The 28" Russian Astro-sital flat is on top of the roof, controlled by a computer and steppers. The 22" parabola is on the 18' tower looking down. Light enters the flat, reflects up to the f 8.5 parabola and then reflects down thru the 6" hole in the flat to the eyepiece inside the shelter. Except for a blind spot at the zenith, I can cover the whole sky from horizon to horizon via remote control inside the shelter. (and except for treeline)  The flat sits on a homebrew alt/az mount. It uses a turnstile bearing from a large crane for the az..

Right now I'm working on mapping the sky for error correction pointing. This will make it accurate to about 2-3 arc minutes across the sky. Mel Bartels supplies the stepper software.

Tom, I'm pleased that you find my pics of interest, and that they might be useful at Stellafane. I have quite a number of them, more than I posted, some showing details that aren't visible in the ones I posted. If you think the people at Stellafane would like to have copies of them I can make a CD that will hold all of them. I'll leave it to you to determine how I should handle it. Incidentally, I took all of the pics. Those taken in Mt. Pleasant, MI were in 1938, those in Daytona were taken in 1940 while I was working at WMFJ, and the ones at Stetson U, in DeLand, FL were taken in 1962. You probably know that my home is in DeLand.

In the meantime I'm recalling a little more about the subject. I'm sure you're aware of Albert Ingalls' book, 'Amateur Telescope Making'. In addition to the book he also had a monthly column on the subject published in the Scientific American. In one of his articles he described the scope my Dad built. It's been more than thirty years since I looked at the copy containing that article, but if I remember correctly it was in the October 1938 issue. I'm in Mt. Pleasant, MI, now, the home of my alma mater, Central MI University, and its library has copies of the Scientific American. At this point I'm not physically able to visit the library, but I'll try to get some help in finding the article. If I do I'll post it on the Forum. If I can't get a copy perhaps you have access to a library that would have it. If this fails I'll be back home in FL in November, where I can dig out my copy and scan it.

Concerning the possible blind spots with the equatorial mounting, I don't know whether there were any such problems or not--never heard that that there were. However, considering the zenith angle, I know the piers were constructed sufficiently high so that the bottom end of the scope would clear the ground underneath it when positioned vertically.

Your setup is amazing! It's been a long time since I delved into the mechanisms of telescoptics, so some of the explanation of your pics is a little over my head. I've forgotten how the flat plate enters into the picture. Are you saying the flat plate views the sky and reflects the view up onto the parabolic mirror, which then focuses the image down through a 6" hole in the flat and onto the eyepiece?

What I don't understand is how the mirror follows the line normal to the flat plate as the flat plate scans the sky if the mirror is stationed on a tower ? I must be missing something.

Walt

OK Walt -

What you might do is look up Stellafane and go to their website. Find the email contacts and send them a few samples of the pics you posted here. Be sure to say Russell inspected one of them and your dad corresponded with him. Let them go from there.. They will probably be very interested and look to put some copies in a permanent place for future generations of tele-makers. They really do have a love for history in that club.

You have the light path correct for my scope. The parabola on top stays stationary. The flat moves and is always directing light into the parabola. As you can see, unless the flat is looking at near to the zenith, only a fraction of the light will hit the parabola.  This is why the flat is bigger than the parabola. Fortunately, the majority of light is available in the higher angles of the sky and tapers off at the horizon where the seeing is poor anyway.   Picture it like using a standard refractor scope that is looking at a large flat mirror 18' away. The light is uncolimated until it hits the refractor (or parabola), so the flat mirror can be far away. Only when the flat takes on very acute angles to cover areas away from the zenith does the light quantity taper off.  I figure the "effective" scope aperature goes from about 21" to maybe 18" at the horizon using this method.

Porter's turret used a moving frame with the flat tracking the parabola, whereas my parabola is stationary and makes use of a computer which permits a simpler alt/az mechanical structure for the moveable flat. Just imagine a 22" and 28" set of mirrors on a moving 18' frame. It would be way out of my league.  The advantage is in the winter I have heat in the shelter and have it insulated enuff so the seeing is FB. Also no bugs or ladders. I sit and listen to jazz while watching. The computer software will do a "grand tour" where it will cruise the Messier 100+, galaxies or whatever automatically.  The software is the whole heart of the system. I've have  maybe 10 eypieces of various powers for planetary to wide field work.

T