Absent For A Bit ....

I am away for a little while working on a few or more episodes for The Adventures of My Space Alien Alter Ego story ... will return (to Earth) soon!

Notice: Blogger has screwed up and lost a bunch of photos out of my blog! They are replaced with a gray silhouette of a human head. I will eventually get them replaced with the correct photo, it may take a while to find and fix everything. So some of my stories don't make much sense without their photos, sorry for the inconvenience.

esbb

2009-08-04

I'm a Smoot !!!!!; Are You?

smoot - a non-standard unit of length = 5 foot 7 inches



During a recent episode of the CBS sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" there was a cameo appearance by physicist George Fitzgerald Smoot III, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. While reading the wikipedia article about George, I came across this disclaimer:





From wikipedia: George F Smoot



Although Smoot attended MIT, he was not the same Smoot who was laid end to end to measure the Harvard Bridge between Cambridge and Boston;[4][5] this was his cousin Oliver R. Smoot, an MIT alumnus who served as the chairman of the American National Standards Institute.[5][6]




This led me to read about Oliver, who had a unit of length - his height of 5 ' 7" - designated as a "smoot"



From wikipedia: Smoot

The smoot is a nonstandard unit of length created as part of an MIT fraternity prank. It is named after Oliver R. Smoot (class of 1962), a fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in October 1958 was used by his fraternity brothers to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.



So they could have also used me, a Boston, to measure the distance from Boston to Cambridge across their bridge. (That was a cool construction - see how I did a 'Boston Boston bridge bridge'?) Of course in the year 1958 I was not yet 5 years old, much less 5' 7", and much closer to 5 months old, so they would have had to wait a few years for me to reach my full smootedness.





Note: This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the following:


Smoot

and

George F Smoot



(and lastly, the answer to your subliminal question is 'Yes', the "!!!!!;" in the title was a sneaky reference to 5 foot 7 inches -> smooth, huh?)

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First poem in the series of linked poems ....

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