Hold on to your hats girls and boys...we're gonna take some QUANTUM LEAPs (from its use in physics meaning the sudden jump of an electron, atom, and the like from one energy level to another) here. MR. "HOLLYWOOD" HARVEY EARL, The Da Vinci of Detroit (beauty for everyone was his rap), was responsible for the quantum leap the automobile industry took when he designed the 1958 Firebird III, a futuristic experimental car with an on-board computer. Whadda GEEK! Handsome tho.

Quantum mechanics and aerodynamics are inexorably linked. Pretty much ya got one, ya got the other. Aerodynamics has taken QUANTUM LEAPs in the last century. Ya got bicycles, compressible aerodynamics calculators, the Feynman Double Slit (we're not talkin' pussies, we're talkin' bullets and electron guns, you know, AMMO), kites, motorcycles, probablity, racing cars, rocketships, software (SYNAPS), uncertainty, and ya even got bugs. Check out the Robo-fly Dr. Michael Dickinson, known fondly as "flyman," created in his lab at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is professor of Integrative Biology. Dickinson is a MacArthur Fellow (he won their "genius" award). Whadda GEEK!

The background patch signifies the Space Shuttle Columbia's scientific mission, STS-107, intended to carry out a series of routine biological, medical and physics experiments when it crashed on February 1, 2003. The NASA (Need Another Seven Astronauts) line is accidents are inevitable and there will be more accidents in the future. Great recruiting line. Big Al remembers the Mars Climate Orbiter Space Probe crash. Apparently one team used English units (e.g., inches, feet and pounds) while the other used metric units for a key spacecraft operation, critical to the maneuvers required to place it in the correct Mars orbit. "Our inability to recognize and correct this simple error has had major implications," said Dr. Edward Stone, Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Duh. Inches ain't centimeters and $125 million ain't hay.

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