32 Comments

🥳great story!!

Expand full comment

What a cool story, TES! You called the factory! Too funny. Reminds me of the recent commercial that says, "it's basically cheating." (Of course, it's not in this case.)

Serendipity serves those who are ready, methinks.

(Edited to add. I LOVE RPN calculators, although the love was hard-earned back in the day when I too was a young engineer.)

Expand full comment

RPN, reverse polish notation, calculators rock. They are superior to the algebraic TI calculators. After 10 years of being out of college, I went back to get a civil engineering degree. One of my first purchases was a HP48SX calculator. It had two ways of programming and a lot of memory and a large screen for its time.

Carly Fiorina destroyed HP's calculator division to concentrate on computers. That was a great loss to engineering students.

For more information on HP calculators see https://www.hpcalc.org/

Expand full comment

Nah, RPN was just weird. Back in college, a number of decades ago, I achieved two technical degrees on the back of my trusty TI 55. Yep, that’s right. Reliable as hell. A number of classmates had an HP of some sort. We would sit around occasionally and talk about it. But I could never, ever, get the hang of it. It was relegated to novelty status….alas.

Expand full comment

EFFIN BRILLIANT story about your cheese thumping.

Expand full comment

After proper ripening by the fervor of preparation and the luminosity of opportunity, much enjoyment may be had of the delicious fruits of complexity.

Such a marvelous story with obscure and deceptively trivial lead ins, suspenseful culmination, and an exhilarating denouement.

Expand full comment

enjoyed the stories a lot.

i certainly would have wondered if some "mouse" ate some cheese from the bottom side or something.

Expand full comment

This is such an impressive story! God worked his miracle through you.

Expand full comment

I love this! You know how to use your Rigpa- the clear light of the attention of your mind. No wonder you are a genius.

Expand full comment

I had to look that up LMS, thank you!

Expand full comment

You and Mark Oshinskie have a knack for storytelling. When I start reading a Stack of yours, I quickly find myself finishing the story. Sign of a great storyteller, to me.

Expand full comment

True raconteurs.

Expand full comment

Great story. I've sent to both my kids who are voraciously devouring my income at "elite" engineering schools.... sans financial aid or loans of course....

Expand full comment

Had 3 HP 15C for mortgage loans. For years escrow companies called me to calculate payoffs on private loans.

Expand full comment

It's paramount to illustrate this process. For so many the process is a black box, steering them away from exploration to outsourincing their thinking, into credulity, and ultimately nasty labels for anything deviating from the resulting dogma.

Expand full comment

Absolutely, we perish through the tyranny of abductive reasoning employed in place of the passionate dispassion of observation and thought. The whole point of my blog.

Expand full comment

My very simple observation is you left nothing to chance in calculating the weight of the cheese. You went to the source in a methodical and logical manner of thinking, each link or stage finally led you to the solution. An inquiring mind combined with methodical preparation is a wonderful thing to observe and dovetails perfectly with the universe, it can carry you through all challenges big and small.

Expand full comment

Great story.

An inquiring mind is a wonder of nature.

Expand full comment

ABSOLUTELY!

Very recently after a friend relayed a true story regarding their now-adult child, we stopped to appreciate that we never could have imagined how an action of years ago would come to make a life-saving difference. Why do we ever bother to plan anything, when God's providence proves so surpising, astoundingly perfect?

Expand full comment

Brilliant. As a young engineer, I asked my boss if we could buy one. When it arrived he said "at that price I thought it be a lot larger......" He smiled.

Expand full comment