I’ve always felt there were merits to golf beyond the recreational. So on Friday, mostly to carry my bag and lose some weight, I decided to walk on at the Ala Wai Golf Course and joined three others, two of noteworthiness. We asked Sky (Skye?) to tee off first, as he was 12 years old, somewhat short, and skinny. He waited…and waited, and when the foursome ahead of us neared the green on the first hole, he teed of and almost reached the green. That was the longest drive I ever saw on that hole. He had a complete game and has a handicap of 0.5, not per hole, but for the full 18. You will read about him someday. But you heard of him first from me.
The other interesting person was on vacation from Finland. As he owns a golf course there, he can be forgiven for also being a terrific player. He brought me up to date on their educational system (see my Chapter 3 of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity) and Nokia. The modern day history of this Finnish company really started only in 1967 when a rubber boot company merged with a pulp mill (I’m somewhat exaggerating, but only a little) and they ended up marketing the first portable phone about two decades ago. Today, Nokia is the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones and has 120,000 employees in 120 countries.
I usually also bring a magazine with me on these golf walks, which that day was the April 2008 issue of Scientific American. What particularly caught my attention was an article on graphene. Did you know that the lead pencil you once used is not real lead, but graphite, one of the forms of carbon? Of course you do. And diamond is another version of carbon. But did you know that this pencil graphite comes in atomic layers, and scientists use plastic adhesive tape to peel off layers until, voila; there is only one atomic layer. How low tech can you get? This sheet of carbon in perfect hexagon (six sided) patterns is called GRAPHENE. If you then form this sheet into a cylinder, you get the CARBON NANOTUBE, one of the hottest materials to store, say, hydrogen. When twelve of these hexagons form a small ball, you have a BUCKYBALL, in honor of Buckminster Fuller. All these carbon forms are now at the cutting edge of technology for next generation miracle products.
One more rather disturbing article on smuggling nuclear materials sounds scary. Two hundred ninety seven million shipping containers (generally 20 feet long) are delivered each year, 42,000,000 entering American ports. No instrument being used today is capable of detecting a soda can size amount of high level nuclear waste capable of being combined into a nuclear weapon. Better scanners are being developed, but if terrorists wanted to smuggle something in, they would have succeeded by now.
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The other interesting person was on vacation from Finland. As he owns a golf course there, he can be forgiven for also being a terrific player. He brought me up to date on their educational system (see my Chapter 3 of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity) and Nokia. The modern day history of this Finnish company really started only in 1967 when a rubber boot company merged with a pulp mill (I’m somewhat exaggerating, but only a little) and they ended up marketing the first portable phone about two decades ago. Today, Nokia is the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones and has 120,000 employees in 120 countries.
I usually also bring a magazine with me on these golf walks, which that day was the April 2008 issue of Scientific American. What particularly caught my attention was an article on graphene. Did you know that the lead pencil you once used is not real lead, but graphite, one of the forms of carbon? Of course you do. And diamond is another version of carbon. But did you know that this pencil graphite comes in atomic layers, and scientists use plastic adhesive tape to peel off layers until, voila; there is only one atomic layer. How low tech can you get? This sheet of carbon in perfect hexagon (six sided) patterns is called GRAPHENE. If you then form this sheet into a cylinder, you get the CARBON NANOTUBE, one of the hottest materials to store, say, hydrogen. When twelve of these hexagons form a small ball, you have a BUCKYBALL, in honor of Buckminster Fuller. All these carbon forms are now at the cutting edge of technology for next generation miracle products.
One more rather disturbing article on smuggling nuclear materials sounds scary. Two hundred ninety seven million shipping containers (generally 20 feet long) are delivered each year, 42,000,000 entering American ports. No instrument being used today is capable of detecting a soda can size amount of high level nuclear waste capable of being combined into a nuclear weapon. Better scanners are being developed, but if terrorists wanted to smuggle something in, they would have succeeded by now.
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