The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [66]
He used to give pop quizzes and would count each answer as one point on his mathematical scale of numbers from 0 to n. He even did a "Sneak Midterm" test one day. Even though I lived at home, our intelligence on these activities was not very good.
His grading system solved the dilemma of how to grade his own son without appearing to favor (or not). It was so based on hard numbers that it was beyond dispute—except once, when the final quarterly grades were given. There was a group of grade totals that started in the mid-nineties and dropped down to about 87, then there was this gap with the next score being about 80. The usual A to B cut would have been made at that point, but instead it was done at 88, leaving me and one hapless fellow 87-total student without effective recourse.
For the most part, our days at Ohio State were pretty dull, but some history of import was happening right in front of us. Few people know that the origin of the "Campus Riot," something that became quite common at the height of the unpopular Vietnam War, was actually a student reaction to the Faculty Council decision to not let the Ohio State football team go to the Rose Bowl. I can still remember one of my high school classmates—well, maybe he was a year ahead—leading the chant "Give me an R, Give me an I, Give me an O. . . ." It was several more years before these things turned really ugly and culminated in the tragedy at Kent State University.
Welding cannot be long separated from nondestructive testing. Nondestructive testing, or NDT, encompasses a number of methodologies for determining that a part or component is sound without actually destroying the part by testing it to destruction. Radiography, or the use of X-rays or gamma rays to look inside a part, is one of the best-known examples. NDT mimics our own senses. But it has the ability to go beyond the abilities of our senses by extending their range.
I don't know where nondestructive testing came in as such a serious pursuit, except that it is a topic that goes hand in hand with welding. I do remember him, maybe in about 1948 or 1949, talking about nondestructive testing. Somehow, and because his favorite topics were high-pressure arcs and nondestructive testing, that led him to Welding Engineering.
All NDT involves a probing medium and a detector. You see with your eyes, hear with your ears, smell with your nose, feel with your fingers and other body parts, and taste with your tongue. Think of it as using your own five—or, for some, maybe six—senses. When you walk into a room, you "see" using visible spectrum radiation, you "hear" using a range of acoustic vibrations sound, you "smell" trace amounts of chemical present in the air, you feel heat or "touch" to determine the textures of a surface, you "taste" to determine the salinity or sweetness of things.
One of his class and lecture demonstrations was to show how carefully a coin slot in a vending machine tested your nickel before it would give up a bottle of Coke or whatever prize you sought from the machine. He would drop a nickel into the slot and in a brief second it clicked and clanked through the mechanism to fall into the collection tray. But then he went back and looked at each step in detail. First, the coin had to be the right diameter and thickness just to get it into the slot. But then it rolled down a ramp past a magnet that ether speeded or slowed the coin depending on its magnetic characteristics. Its mass determined how fast it might be going at the end of the ramp, and the coin had to make a leap at just the right velocity from the end of the ramp into a narrow space in the middle that didn't lead it back to the reject bin. And then he would say, "Do you think they trust you for your nickel yet?" and go on to explain that