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Entries for  the Name That Detune puzzle need to be in by noon Pacific Time, Monday the 28th. Send yours to Puzzle, and qualify to win a Fabulous Prize.

Fair leads,

Brion Toss

Rigging sometimes means climbing, and climbing sometimes means falling. For all of my professional life, not a year has gone by that I haven’t heard at least one or two tragic stories about falls from aloft. It happens on construction sites, on mountains, on ships, and in theaters. It happens on rooftops, on bridges, in stadiums, on windmills. It happens wherever some combination of inattentiveness, poor training, defective gear, poor judgement, an unstable platform, unanticipated actions, fatigue, injury, and the inherent malevolence of the universe conspire to expose the climber to unimpeded gravity.

But I am not going to write about injurious nor fatal falls, not this time. As instructive as the saddest stories are, their very gruesomeness is what takes our attention, so instead of learning from the mistakes or misfortunes of the fallen, we tend to fixate on the fall itself. Stories of death or serious injuries from falls can be useful, but, like capital punishment, they aren’t necessarily good at getting people to change their behavior. So this time I’m going to talk about some near-misses, about times where things came out okay.

At deck level on this, the mainmast of the barque Sea Cloud, the shrouds are thick and stable, with fat ratlines.

Things are still good at the next level, the topmast, but not as good; the shrouds are thinner, and there are fewer of them, and their fore-and aft spacing diminishes as they go up.

At the third level there are few shrouds, and spaced so close together that they twist from my weight. My feet barely fit on the narrowing gaps between the shrouds.

When I am over 200 feet up, hanging on to the skysail lifts, which are the last bits of  significant rigging on this mast, my goal is still several feet above me. It is the gleaming mast truck, the cap at the very top. It houses pulleys for flag halyards, and has always performed admirably, but the Yale Alumni Club is arriving soon, to cruise the Turkish coast, and they have sent ahead a huge Yale flag; the bosun is afraid that if the wind picks up, the flag might tear the truck off. So he has assigned me to lash a separate block on, right under the truck, just for that flag. But there is nothing to hang onto up there; I will have to shinny up and tie myself on before tying the flag on.

There is no safe way to do this job, but at this time, 30-some years ago, it is especially dangerous, because I have neither the training nor the knowledge of how to keep myself tied on at every moment. I will just try to hang on until I can get into position above the lifts.

          By brute force I manage to get up. The boat is at the dock on a fairly calm day, but up here the mast is going through at least a 20 foot arc, back and forth. With one hand I reach for the lanyard on my belt that will secure me to the mast. My feet slip. The mast probably still shows dents from where I make a convulsive grab.  As I hang there, an image pops into my mind of the obituary page of my hometown newspaper. The headline reads, “Local man dies hanging Yale flag in Turkey.”

          I think, “No. Too embarrassing,” and I reposition, and get secure, and use my hands and teeth to secure the halyard block for the damn flag, and I get back to deck the gradual way.

This was the first part of the three-part “Not Falling Far” series. Keep reading for the others!

Enjoy the story? Looking for more? You’re in luck! “Falling,” which in includes all three of these stories along with other tales from aloft, both thrilling and amusing, is now for sale on Amazon.com in handy e-book form! Or click here to get it on Apple iBooks!

From dropped tools to collapsed towers to near-fatal falls, the litany of accidents and near-accidents is long… and the sometimes miraculous outcomes are both instructive and thought-provoking.

Not a technical manual, “Falling” is nonetheless a must-have companion in the library of anyone working at heights.

If you have a not-falling-far story that ends happily, and which might prove instructive and/or amusing, please  Contact Me and I will try to fit it into the next installment.

Next week: The Bounce Test

For more stories, many of them about rigging, but many about random topics, be sure to comb through our blog. You can reach it Here, or you can click on the link at the bottom of the page. Binge-read away. Oh, and also at the bottom of the page, you can also sign up to receive an email notification when I deliver myself of a new post.

As always, I recommend you visit our Online Store, a great place for rigging gear and supplies, plus educational books and videos.

Fair Leads,

Brion Toss

We have definitely struck a chord with the current Puzzle (see below), with by far the most entries — and the widest range of answers — that we’ve seen before. And as of today, only two of the entries are correct.

For those few of you who are posting the correct answer on Facebook, you do realize that this is a contest, right? This means that the people who figure things out for themselves will have their odds of winning diminished by those who copy your work. So enter, but save the bragging for later, okay?

By way of coaching, I will stress that equal downward force is applied to both tackles. One of them will come in faster, but neither will go slack. Assume a constant load of 1 pound (or whatever else you choose), and go from there. So to review, here is the Puzzle:

Puzzle Contest: Extravagant Purchase

          The drive towards the Metric system continues, though now by way of erosion, rather than replacement. Here are some reasons to resist it.

          In the last century, the world leapt to adopt many radically new things: airplanes; automobiles; computers; phones; and television, to name just a few. When introduced, these things upset ancient patterns of life, and came with the usual array of unintended consequences, but we jumped for them anyway, because they gave us something we really wanted, for better or for worse. And this is a familiar phenomenon, throughout human history. Oh, sometimes we’re a little slow on the uptake, but just about by definition, we don’t need to be forced into accepting things that work. That brings us to the subject of this essay. What I’ll be addressing here is a tool that has long been touted as being a vast improvement over its predecessors, as being simple and easy and logical, yet which has never been accepted, anywhere, except by force of law. That tool is the Metric System.

          I know, I know, we’ve all been told since infancy about the supposed advantages of this system, and about the supposed barbaric inefficiencies of conventional measure, but stay with me a while here. Most of the supposed advantages of Metrics are shared by conventional measure. Most of the so-called inefficiencies and illogic of conventional measure are either obscure aspects that almost no one uses, or actual advantages that have gone unrecognized in the rush to Metrication. In short, Metric measuring isn’t nearly as good as it’s cracked up to be, and conventional measure is a lot better than typically assessed. This is true right through both systems, so it’s tough to decide where to start in detail. So I’ll commence with one of my favorites: Temperature.

          Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was a German-born scientist, inventor of the first practical thermometer. His first big technological breakthrough was in discovering the effect of barometric pressure on the boiling point of water. In order to have a meaningful standard temperature for this point, he came up with a standard barometric pressure. The other big breakthrough was in establishing the freezing point of water. Here he discovered that a liquid can exist in three states simultaneously, the so-called “triple point”. That is, a substance can be in a liquid, solid, and gaseous state, all at once, in equilibrium.  Nailing this point down had been beyond previous researchers, who had been trying in vain for an absolute point.

          With these two fundamental parameters established for the fundamental substance of water, Fahrenheit set about the practical matter of actually constructing a thermometer. This involved a lot of experimentation, both in terms of materials and design, but he eventually settled on the same combination of mercury-in-a-glass-tube that we use today. That left the matter of calibration, and the scale he chose has been one of the primary whipping boys of metrication advocates. Instead of following the “logical” route and calling zero the freezing point of water and 100 the boiling point, he assigned the weird values of 32 and 212 degrees for these points. Illogical, right?

          Maybe not. Consider, first, that this man was smart enough to come up with the principles of this instrument in the first place; it is vanishingly unlikely that he would skip past this detail without excellent reason. And he had excellent reason.  He realized that, though water made for handy reference points, its behavior had little to do with how humans perceive temperature. In the northern hemisphere, where most of the world’s population lives and lived, we experience a range of temperature which is well below the freezing point of water at one end, and (fortunately) well below the boiling point of water at the other. Calibrating a thermometer relative to water makes about as much sense as calibrating a clock to the day on Mars –– it has no connection to us. So Fahrenheit measured what people actually experience, averaging extreme lows at 0, and extreme highs at 100, then left the scale open at either end. To this day, this range is useful for humans everywhere, on an intuitive level. We know that anything over 100 degrees is getting dangerously hot, and that anything under 0 is getting dangerously cold. We can relate to this scale.

          It is also significant that Fahrenheit used a 0-to-100 scale at all. Remember, this was long pre-metrics, but people were accustomed, since antiquity, to make use of a “100” scale. Think centurions, for instance, or century, or percent. Hundreds are often the handiest way to measure and bracket significant ranges, and people make use of this, when it makes sense.  Hundreds can easily be converted to higher or lower levels, so we have our money in decimal values, as well as very fine measurements, as in thousandths or parts-per-million. Fahrenheit recognized the value of hundreds; he just put them to work relative to human perceptions, rather than forcing humans to translate their perceptions relative to the characteristics of water. Unlike Mr. Celsius, who apparently missed all this.  Mr. Fahrenheit made it a point to relate the fruits of his labors to human beings, and he did so using a decimal range for typical living conditions. This range was fine-grained enough to mark perceptible changes in temperature, but coarse-grained enough that it wasn’t unwieldy. Mr. Celsius locked himself into a range that had nothing to do with people, and one consequence of this is that Celsius’ scale is much coarser than Fahrenheit’s, almost twice as coarse. In practice, this means that if you take the easy road, and just jump in whole degrees when taking readings, you will miss significant changes. And if you don’t, you’ll be dealing, unnecessarily, with decimal points.

           Some Celsius asides here: did you know that the original scale had 0 as the boiling point, and 100 as the freezing point? That the French National Assembly adopted it into the Metric system on April Fool’s Day? And did you realize that the Celsius scale is no more intrinsically “metric” than the Mr. Fahrenheit’s? Either one could have been used as calibration for 1 cubic centimeter of water.

          Now the question must surely arise: why not count everything by hundreds? Why does so much of conventional measure veer off into dozens and sixteenths and scores? In answer, let me tell you about some French carpenters.

           I was in Montreal years ago, having dinner with a couple of carpenters who were visiting from near Paris. They were describing a brilliant technique whereby they had vastly simplified layout for their jobs. “Instead of using 1 meter as a standard,” one of them said, “we use 1.2 meters. That way we hardly ever have to deal with decimal points, as 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, and itself.”

          And I said, “You mean, like the foot?”

          And I swear, they both slapped their foreheads and made various French exclamations of astonishment. The most significant thing for me was that they knew that the foot has twelve inches in it. They had just never considered that there might be a logical reason for it. But 1.2 meters, well, that made sense.

          We had a very productive discussion that night, getting into the logic behind radical notions like sixteenths and eighths, which allow for useful increments of change, instead of the orders-of-magnitude leaps that the Metric system locks one into. And I told them about an old framing square I had, which was primarily in inches and fractions, but had a little hundredths scale in one corner. The idea here is that one can calculate the constants for things like rafter runs very precisely, in hundredths of an inch, then use a pair of calipers to find the nearest sixteenth or eighth, once the run had been multiplied out to full length. They got it right away, saw how the square makes use of decimals where they are useful –– for fine-grain tweeziness –– but lets the operator escape into easier- to-see-and-work-with fractions. By the way, the 1.2 meters trick might be common in France, for all I know, as I have heard of it from other people. If so, it’s a clear case of common sense finding a way to deal with what is only ostensible logic.

          This faux logic runs right through the Metric system. We are at first blinded by its seeming simplicity and rationality, but close examination reveals that it has no advantages, with two exceptions: it provides a common language for scientific exchange, much as Latin used to; and it provides a convenient homogenization for multi-national companies. Neither of these reasons are enough to displace a system that already works at least as well. Americans have built airplanes, oil rigs, skyscrapers, and lots of other complex items, and you never hear about rooms full of people, slaving away at dealing with “cumbersome fractions” to get the job done. For simpler, but no less vital projects, like housebuilding, we have the classic 16” centers relating easily to 8’ plywood, and plumbing flow rates that manage quite nicely with gallons instead of liters. Why mess with what works? In our rigging shop, we often have to deal with assorted forms of measurement, but we have pocket calculators that can do this at the touch of a button. We get along just fine with Metrics; we just have no need to adopt them exclusively.

          On a larger scale, there have been some spectacular rational/metric disasters, like the Mars orbiter crash. Predictably, many people blamed the rational measurement system, even though Metrics are the latecomers to aerospace. For perspective, there have been many, many other engineering disasters, in both systems, due to misplaced decimal points. The Mars crash was about sloppy engineering.

           So much Metric propaganda has to do with how cumbersome and confusing conventional measure is supposed to be, but this is misleading at best; Metrics gain simplicity only at the expense of becoming simplistic, so that the user is stuck with inflexible parameters, and no way to change things. And what’s at least as bad, those same parameters are touted, incessantly, as being all one needs, so if we get confused, we think it must be our fault.

          Contrast this with the wonderful array of measuring tools in conventional measure. Sure there are some that are so much historical baggage, but by and large people came up with and perservered with these tools because they were useful. Decimals form an important part of conventional measure, but they lack power, versatility, and the ability to “shift gears” the way other portioning methods can.

          Much has been made of the inevitable triumph of the Metric system, and of how the U.S. is nearly alone in avoiding it.  But people all over the world are backsliding, especially in English-speaking countries, but also notably Japan, where their traditional measure is resurfacing.  Or in China, where people have come up with the metric equivalent of cups, pints, and quarts (for more on this, and many other topics, read About the Size of It, by Warwick Cairns: https://www.amazon.com/About-Size-Warwick-Cairns/dp/0330450301).

The reason for all this is that Metrics are pidgin measurement – very simple, but therefore very limited in range of expression. Schoolteachers like millimeters because they are easy to teach; fortunately that logic has yet to pervade, for the most part, things like history, geography, and mathematics. Or language: think how much simpler and streamlined things would be if we only had to learn pidgin English, with a hyper-limited vocabulary and hyper-simple syntax. No more cumbersome participles and infinitives, no more illogical dependent clauses or outmoded parenthetical expressions. We would be free at last of the burdens that make English such a powerful, versatile, adaptive language. Judging from the way many people speak, this notion has significant appeal, but the disadvantages of such an approach are ludicrously obvious. Our mistake has been in assuming that measurement can be similarly “simplified” without being similarly disabled.

1. Find a house on a piece of land far from anywhere else. At night, the only significant light sources should be the headlights of passing cars, and the blazing electric sign out front with the name of the place. Suitable names include “Hideaway,” “Valley Bar,” “Elmo’s Place,” or any other name likely to draw a wince from an ad agency hipster.
2. Remove most of the interior walls of the house, leaving only what is needed to keep the roof up, and to separate the industrial-scale kitchen in the back.
3. Install a 20-foot-long bar immediately inside the entrance, then fill every other bit of available space with sturdy, minimalist tables and bent-metal-framed chairs with token padding. Cover the tables with flannel-backed vinyl tablecloths. Leave just enough space between the tables that you can pull a chair out and sque-e-e-ze in to sit down. Arrange the tables in strict geometrical rows. No precious feng shui conversation islands here.
4. Clear an area outside for the parking lot. This should be big enough to allow about half of the crowd of pickup trucks that will jam the location every night. Overflow traffic will line the adjacent two-lane road. Deep irrigation ditches along these roads are optional, but are encouraged.
5. Open the doors. The place will immediately fill with large, kind, boisterous, friendly, hungry people. They have been working all day together, and now they are coming in to continue their day with each other, and to greet other members of their far-flung community. Average table occupancy is eight; a four-top is considered an intimate party, and two-tops are an oddity. Lone diners will almost certainly be dragged into a larger group.
6. When a group is seated, place a “relish tray” on table (see mandatory Facebook “food on a plate” picture). This tray contains ice-cream scoops of (I am not making this up ) braunschweiger, beer cheese, krab [sic] salad, and a small bowl of ranch dressing. All this, plus crackers, celery, carrots, and assorted other noshes make for an appetizer course to rival a complete meal in many urban bistros.
7. Present the menus. These are laminated cards printed sometime around 1957. Popular entrees include several types of steak, pork chops, prime rib, and, for the discerning palate, chicken cordon bleu. These are also about the only entrees, because why would you want to go out and order anything else? Fer cryin’ out loud, if you want pizza you can drive to Dubuque. Side dishes include steamed vegetables, cottage cheese, and my favorite, coleslaw. The latter is made with approximately 60% mayonnaise, 20% sugar, 20% cabbage, and a dash of salt. Delicious; I had two helpings. Couldn’t quite bring myself to try the bacon-wrapped cheese curds, though.
8. Don’t ask for a wine list. But try some of that Spotted Cow Beer. Or the Miller Lite.
9. Bring out the slabs of meat. There is something in the air out here that enables people to cook meat to an exalted, taste-bud-spraining, enlightenment-inducing level of perfection. It probably helps that they keep all the best meat for themselves, and ship the rest out of state, but there is real skill at work here.
At our table we have a prime rib the size of a Buick, a ribeye steak that would barely fit on a queen-size bed, a pork chop that could roof a small house, and an aren’t-we-special order of the chicken cordon bleu, the making of which must have decimated an entire henhouse. All around us people are tearing into similar dishes with a sort of genial ferocity. It doesn’t seem to matter that serving sizes are some multiple of the holding capacity of the human stomach; most of the people present do hard physical work for a living, and they need the fuel. The motto of this place should be, “The Best of Everything, and Too Much, Please.”
10. Have a drink for dessert. This is a hallmark tradition. Take a scoop of Vanilla ice cream and pour some form of liquor over it. These drinks go by names like “Grasshopper,” “Dreamsicle Floatini,” and “Dirty Banana.” The idea is to make up for any shortfall of alcohol, sugar, and fat that you might somehow have experienced thus far.
11. Stick around. Supper clubs are rural social nodes, places where relationships can be nurtured and maintained over a lifetime, where generations of people can keep track of each other, share stories, greet strangers, celebrate with and console each other. To be that kind of place, you need to be a constant, over generations. Like a church where you can laugh out loud.