Electronics School

Have you met Oscar is the oscilloscope gremlin. He is a fiendish little fellow with a head like a vacuum tube and a greenish leer on his face. Indeed, be is one of the most hateful of all gremlins. He sneaks in silently, and than you hear him laughing hollowly in the back of the instrument. You open it to look for him, but by that time he isn't there. You wish he'd come back so you could find him and get rid of him. He won't, though, at least not until you've got everything put back together again.

But yesterday I found Oscar in a lamentable condition. I was sincerely sorry for him. He was lying in a crumpled heap on top of a "scope." I guess one of the Master Minds had knocked all the sparks out of him, because when I approached, he bowed reverently toward the East in an oriental fashion and muttered "Chaffee is the only God and Tatum is his prophet."

Volunteers Wanted

The Marines have landed and have the situation well in hand. One of them picked up a hot lead in the lab the other day and let go of the situaiton in a hurry. Lieutenant Bullock, who happened to be nearby, took notes. He is making a survey of the electrical muscular sensitivity of humans in inches per volt. Volunteers to be subjects for his experiments, please see Lieutenant Bullock in his office.

I was an involuntary volunteer myself last Wednesday, and my muscular sensitivity is pretty good. I've only tried four hundred so far, but I figure that with 4000 volts, I could beat the world's high jump record.

Mystery Solved!

I always thought untill recently that the close association between Electronics and the Soil Engineers was something strange and mystical, beyond the range of human understanding. We share this little corner of the paper cheerily enough, but we never meet except here . I thought that perhaps, like earthworms, the Soil Engineers only came out of the ground when it rained. But last Tuesday I found out the practical reason why Soil Engineering and Electronics are so closely united. I wanted to connect a cathode to ground, and I didn't know where to hook the wire, when along came a Soil Engineer with a new kind of circuit element which he said was "ground."

It was a little box about an inch square with two wires in ft. I opened it up; and sure enough, it was ground--rich and dark, just like back home on the farm. I put it in the circuit. It doesn't work very well, but I am growing a Victory Garden in it.