Cheaper Ways to Do It

Recently, some moron in the US Air Force thought it would be kind of cute to get a picture or two of Air Force One, the president's plane, flying past the Statue of Liberty with a jet escort. So they fueled up Air Force Two, which looks a lot like Air Force One and flew it low past the Statue of Liberty and New York City. Not surprising, the people of New York City completely freaked out and evacuated buildings and went running in the streets and the Mayor was ticked off in a big way. Word is the whole thing probably cost us around half a million, not counting the lost wages in NYC. The White House, sensing a PR disaster, apologized and expressed ignorance of and outrage over the whole affair. This kind of spending looks really bad during a recession.

The problem I have with the whole thing is that with today's modern computer graphics technology, they could have left the planes on the ground and still worked up some nice images.


Here's a picture of me at the Wright Brother's Memorial with Air Force One flying over behind me.

Something that Bothered Me, that got Fixed

One of the big problems of being a nit-picker like myself is that, on occasion, I see an error so glaring that I squirm in my seat and rant at the wife and kids but I can't do a damn thing about it. This is such a story.

For a long time Exxon ran a bunch of ads that talked about what a wonderful company Exxon is, especially with respect to the environment. When I looked up Exxon ads in Google, there were a whole lot of people screaming about how hypocritical the ads were. But for me there was a bigger problem. The ads featured this lovely glass molecule rotating in space with science sounding music playing in the background and a narrator talking about Exxon's work saving the environment. The problem is, the structure of the glass molecule is all wrong. The molecule is cyclohexane. Now if you're an organic chemist or even if you were slightly exposed to organic chemistry, you know that cyclohexane is a ring of six carbon atoms with two hydrogens attached to each carbon. The other thing that you know is that the carbon ring has a distinct pucker to it. It's called a chair conformation and cyclohexane's shape even has it's own wikipedia page. Here's a screen shot from one of the ads.



You can see the ring flatness even better if you watch the ad itself. This flat abomination showed up in a lot of places including the front cover of their 2008 annual report to stockholders.

My wife used to work at Exxon Research a long time ago and I got to know a few of the organic chemists who worked there, some who are still there. This had to be driving them crazy, too. Well guess what? They fixed it. The newer ads actually have the structure of the molecule correct. Here is a screen shot,



and you can view the ad to get a better sense of the pucker. At first I thought that they had to get their glass blower to go back and make another pretty glass molecule with all the right angles but I suspect the whole thing was done with computer graphics. I did write Exxon and ask if they would tell me how they came to find out about the error and fix it. I'm haven't heard back from them yet.

Anyhow, that's one less thing in the world that I have to worry about.

Forty Years Ago

The local high school drama class at East Chapel Hill High put on the play, "Once Upon a Mattress" this spring. My daughter and I went to see the show. It brought back memories of when our high school chorus put on the same play my freshman year at Tabor City High School. I was in the chorus and so I had a minor role, standing around in crowds and singing the occasional choral backup. I was also part of the stage crew and recently someone sent me a copy of a picture of the stage crew from the local paper. It was in one of those, "Do you remember and can you name the participants?" features that you often find in local papers. Here it is. Give it a try if you are from those parts in that era.



Oh, I'm the skinny guy on the far right.