Speed Kills.

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Being the car-hacker type, I was eager to eavesdrop on these guys here at the bar. Earnest youthful types, I figured them to be good for a laugh. I was mistaken, though it took a long time to leave the usual Male Car Convo for stochiometry.

Yep, these guys were car tweakers with brains. As I'm just a one-book expert on handling-mods, I still entwined myself into their convo with relish and, for once in my life, more ears than mouth. We had a damned good time, and learned/taught a lot.

I'm becoming a real fan of Xenocrates, he sat on my shoulder throughout this and kept muzzling me when I wanted to join in: these guys were out of my league in much of what goes on when the air-fuel mixture goes BANG.

I was able to keep things grounded in matters practical to keeping the power on the road and the car over the contact patches. At one point, I was quite surprised when one spouted an aphorism I'd heard a reality-TV celeb mutter in a recent episode. (Hey, when it comes to hacking, there's only a few places to get your media fill.) I asked about this: so you put huge wheels and lo-profile tires on your Escalade and now you need up-rated brakes. Huh? Where's the change in mass*speed that obviates this choice? We agreed, after some envelope-scratching, that as a practical matter, the choice for those boss new Brembos would be looks, not necessity.

Course, there wasn't an SUV owner for miles in this convo, still we all saw the same show and enjoyed the usual chuckle mixed with admiration for the license to chop.

The thread returned to the stratosphere and I understood only every other concept, but that's how I learn best. Sit at the feet of my betters and listen. Then go puzzle it out on my own. (The internet helps a lot there.)

I love being talked over. I relish the chance to listen to those whose thinking is just slightly out of my reach. Besides, I find my analog way of thinking provides surprising inputs, as long as I keep my mouth on a short leash.

Flashback time: my high school planned a field trip to a little college named for a Swedish saint that hosts an annual conference of Nobel Laureates. As a solidly C student in what we'd be told was the worst class in the school's history, I wasn't really maybe the first choice for attendance. But I was on the bus. The point? Listening to Murray Gell-Mann talk about sub-atomic particles. My eyes were crossed with the effort to understand what I could and remember what I couldn't. And in the end, I came out without clearly integrating flavor, color, spin and the relationship between the pitiful numbers of quarks we understood then and the atomic particles we all knew and loved.

So at one point in the Chicken Pig, I was smiling with a distant stare, thinking of that lecture and the same feeling of running to catch up. Only here I was trying to hang onto details of thermal gradients that were going to get me home. Funny, I never personalized those quarks, they seemed to get lost like the weak forces in the bosonic scaling.

Well, I now have a huge number of things to look up and grasp. And I feel well acquitted in my minor contributions. They were of the type that succinctly reminded the audience of what—at that instant—mattered. Scientist Phrasing, I call it. But that's a subject for a whole 'nother blog...

You meet the most unusual people in this place. If two angels were enjoying a liquid respite after a week of being good, listening Mark Knopfler's filling the air with notes unimagined, I wouldn't be surprised at all. (With thanks to Douglas Adams for that verbal image.)