Last update: 10-Dec-1997 by ABS.
This is how it started. Well, actually, I'm not exactly sure how it started, but this is the best I can remember. We may have swapped a few whoppers on occasions before this, but the night Brook put in the satellite dish stands out in my mind. I don't believe he bought the thing -- the salesman probably loaned it to him to try it out, telling him it would boost business in the bar, couldn't miss. I supposed he expected we'd watch football games on it, but it has been my experience that the Santa Fe/Los Alamos crowd is less interested in sports than the average Joe. We ended up watching the Weather Channel with the sound off, and talking about when supercomputers would have enough memory and power to integrate big enough finite difference grids to do practical weather prediction. Then this commercial came on for a video about tornadoes, and Shep said, "I had a buddy once who designed a tornado catcher."
We all turned and looked at him, and he had this little trace of a suppressed grin on his face.
"True story," he went on, "he'd been playing with some microclimate simulations on a little minicomputer -- he was on the faculty of a small state college in Tornado Alley, and he had a hunch it might be possible to divert tornadoes with some kind of physical trap. He called it a 'wave guide for wind' but I told him it was a flawed analogy."
At this point Hector either coughed or said "bullshit," I couldn't really tell which. Then there was an awkward silence.
I looked around the little adobe saloon. Brook was behind the bar in his "FOR THIS I WENT TO FOUR YEARS OF COLLEGE" apron, drying some wasp-wasted beer glasses. Hector was trying to peel the cellophane tape off of a pack of Marlboro filters, while making a disgusting sound deep in his throat. (I always worried that one night he'd cough himself to death right in front of us.) Santos looked like he was waxing his mustache without wax, lost in thought. Bingo was cracking peanuts and carefully dropping the shells in an ashtray to avoid the wrath of Brook.
Finally, the suspense was too much for me, and I bit the bait. "So, did he succeed? Did he come up with a working design?"
"Well, yes, in increments. He was basically a process of trial and error. His simulation wouldn't tell him what the perfect shape would be -- it just told him how well a given design worked."
"Just like in crystallography," Hector interjected.
"How's that?" asked Brook quizzically.
"You know, an X-ray crystallography image doesn't tell you the actual atomic structure of a crystal. You have to guess the pattern, and then apply known formulas to see what image that pattern would generate, and compare that with the image you actually got. The best crystallographers are good guessers."
"Ahem," said Shep. "This is my story, if you don't mind."
"Well, ex-cuuuuuse me," grumbled Hector, and he lit the cigarette he'd finally managed to shake out of the pack.
Shep seized the moment and plowed ahead. "He just kept trying any shape he could think of, making little modifications, trying to fine-tune his design into the perfect geometry for vortex capturing. He was at it for months, in his spare time, between his teaching responsibilities and his officially funded research projects, which I think were more along the lines of improving centrifugal pump designs or something. I think he had a grant from Honda or somebody to refine some work they'd done on shop vacuums -- something practical and boring like that."
"Sounds like what they do in Russia," said Bingo, pronouncing it 'Rosh-ah' with his unmistakable Aussie accent. "They have whole institutes devoted to pump design, turbine blade design, things like that. No crossover between the researchers at all. Helluvah way to organize research."
"Whatever," said Shep, trying to seize the moment again. "The point is, he never knew if he was barking up the wrong tree. It's like the classic hill-climbing algorithms. Maybe you find a local hill, but how do you know if it's the highest hill around?"
"You don't," said Hector.
"Precisely," agreed Shep. "He kind of lost hope for a while, and then one day he hit upon the corrugations."
"You mean like corrugated tin roofs?" I asked?
"Pretty much," said Shep. "I think he was inspired by Quonset hut design. He had to really increase his grid size to model corrugations that were, I don't know, two or three centimeters apart on a ten or twenty meter shape. And of course it slowed his integrator way down on the little mini he was using. He had to go to an out-of-core design because he didn't have enough memory, and the disk I/O just killed his performance. Plus there were bugs in the integrator, which I think a grad student wrote for him before dropping out to hike the continental divide or some crazy thing. Debugging it cost him a couple of months, but even with the bugs it looked like those corrugations were on the right track. And he was right. Next he hit upon the laminations."
"Like baklava?" I asked.
Well, more like plywood," he clarified. "Layers of tiny air channels at right angles to each other as you moved from layer to layer, and these air channels turned out to be ideally just a few millimeters wide."
"I'll bet that made his grid requirements a hell of a lot bigger," Hector opined.
"Of course," agreed Shep. "By now it was taking him weeks of computer time to run one simulation. But he was getting great results. That's when he finally decided to make it official and apply for a grant to get a bigger computer."
"So he stopped doing the research and started writing grant proposals," concluded Santos. "Been there, done that."
"Yep," said Shep, "and the bitch of it was, the boards all thought he was crazy. He probably shouldn't have told them he was trying to find a tornado catcher, because that's what shot him down."
"So, no Grant?" I guessed.
"Not at that point," corrected Shep. "I think about a year passed as he kept tinkering with his out-of-core integrator and his huge grid, but finally he hit upon what looked like the optimum design. It wasn't at all like what he'd first thought it would be. His original design looked like a big centrifugal pump. But what he ended up with was a single, simple rectilinear solid, about the shape of a shoebox, only thirty or forty meters long, and covered with the laminated layers of air channels in turn covered with corrugation." Shep paused a beat.
"A house trailer!" Santos erupted, followed by a fit of the giggles.
"You got it," said Shep. "So it only seemed natural that he'd approach ________, in Oklahoma City, the biggest manufacturer of mobile homes in the country, and ask them for a grant."
"Why in the world would they want to fund research like this?" Brook questioned.
"Well, there's two ways to look at it. You could say he wanted to help them modify their designs to make trailers less dangerous in tornadoes. Or, you might infer he was trying a subtle form of blackmail."
"Did it work?" Bingo asked.
"Only too well," Shep explained. "They bought him a Cray 1A, a big deal at his little state college, and funded the whole project for five years. But of course, he had to sign a non-disclosure contract."
"They gagged him," I realized.
"Of course they did. That was their payoff. Trailers are built the way they are because it's the cheapest way to make them. They couldn't afford to make them any safer, or so they claimed. ________ got to avoid customer panic -- and maybe lawsuits, and postpone the problem while he looked at it harder. My friend got his Cray and his funding, which was a great help to his other research and to his students. In fact, the students got an excellent new curriculum in computaional physics at a little state school. The only losers were the trailer trash." Shep downed the last inch of his beer.
"The what?" Hector objected.
"Excuse me, the fine upstanding citizens who happened to live in trailer parks."
"So, that's a pretty dismal ending to this tale," Bingo complained.
"But it isn't the end," countered Shep. Then he looked down at his empty glass. "Oh, damn, I'm out of beer."
"Empty glass!" shouted Bingo at Brook, pointing.
"Refill coming right up," Brook assured.
"Only, my wallet's empty, too," Shep mentioned. We all looked at each other. Bingo cracked another peanut. The Miller Genuine Draft sign made a popping noise from its transformer and flickered off.
"Got damn it," said Hector, "I'll but the man a beer." Brook brought a fresh glass. Shep drained half of it and wiped the foam off of his upper lip on his sleeve. "Okay, go on," Hector prodded.
"Well, my buddy was in what you might call an ethical dilemma. He knew his research would probably do people some good some day, especially those who buy shop vacuums, but at the present moment he was sitting on knowledge that could save lives if only he could divulge it. But that would end the research, and maybe get him in legal hot water. He lost a lot of sleep over it, until by lucky coincidence his brother-in-law got a job at that new Cable News Network."
"CNN!" said Brook, and he changed the channel to bring in Headline News. He kept the sound off, though.
"Well, he told his wife's brother the whole story, swore him to secrecy first, but the brother-in-law was able to use his new position to ensure that whenever CNN ran a story about a devastating tornado, whenever possible they would show footage of a trailer park ripped to shreds. That way my pal's cover wasn't blown, but the public began to associate tornadoes and trailers."
And as if on cue, the TV screen showed an image of plywood splinters, ripped corrugated metal, and furniture fragments spread out across the prairie in a helicopter shot, with the caption, "Killer Tornado" in blue block letters.
"Now, that's a plate o' shrimp," said Bingo enigmatically.
"True story," reiterated Shep.
Well, Brook never did buy that antenna dish, and eventually the salesman took it back to sell to a motel on I-40 to bring in HBO and adult movies. But as I look back I realize that in a sense Brook installed Shep at El Ciervo Blanco -- eventually induced by free drinks -- to serve much the same purpose on Tuesday nights.