Happy Birthday, Al

Happy Birthday Albert E.
by Harold Pollack
Albert Einstein’s 130th birthday shouldn’t go unnoticed. His range of achievement goes far beyond E=mc squared. If you used a GPS receiver today, a grocery store scanner, or a digital camera, he touched your life. He deciphered the mathematics of molecular motion, the photoelectric effect.

It just so happens that I performed all three of those tasks today, giving none of them a second thought. Thanks, Albert.

The Sausage Creature's Offspring

"Some people will tell you that slow is good - and it may be, on some days - but I am here to tell you that fast is better."

Hunter S. Thompson - Song of the Sausage Creature

Be careful what you wish for:

There are some things in this world that require - no- command, respect. My personal short list, taken from almost six decades of an indulgent and incautious life would be, in no particular order, firearms; explosives; airplanes; large, aggressive dogs and the RC51.

"It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it." - HST


Certain activities that create pleasure and fear excite the primitive, primal limbic part of the human brain. Most people thoughtfully shun engaging in exercises that pose a high statistical quotient for physical injury, pursuits often viewed by the whole of proper society as self-destructive, anti-social, devoid of common sense or downright insane.

Somewhere, in the sheltered, comfortable cradle that was my idyllic childhood, that program failed to load. I have in the past, and still do, take a differing view. Mind you now, I'm not suicidal and I harbor no adolescent delusions or romantic fantasies of a glorious demise - No, I just enjoy fast, well-handling motorbikes. Hence, the RC51.

"Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba.... " - HST

I have been fortunate enough to own a handful of motorcycles in my life and even more fortunate to have ridden many others owned by trusting souls who, for reasons I have yet to understand, have handed over their beloved mounts to the likes of me. Bless them all.

Some of these machines were the average, daily driver, garden variety motorcycles. Pleasant, docile and forgiving. Slow on the throttle, gentle into the curves, forgiving to a fault. Some of them were Death Machines, supplied from the factory with ill-handling chassis, terrible brakes and high power-to-weight ratios like my first motorcycle, a 1967 350cc Yamaha R1, that I, quite inelegantly, crashed into a school bus as a dumb-assed and inexperienced kid.

"I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them." - HST

But a few of these two-wheeled marvels could be described as Scalpels. Fine examples of high engineering acumen and the engine builder's art. Replica-racers, not designed for the city commuter or the soulless ribbon of concrete that is the American Interstate System: Bikes that demand the highest respect and chastise all who fail to do so. Some, by way of definition, call them Superbikes. Such is the RC51.

"The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations." - HST

Fast? Yes, deceptively, so very fast. But that is not really the point. The Scalpel is Quick. Quick on the throttle. Quick turning in on the curve. Quick on the brakes. Reostat Quick.

"The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body." - HST

Hunter S. Thompson composed the Song of the Sausage Creature as both a cautionary essay and an homage to the Scalpel.

To the Art and Fear of being Quick.

Faith v. Certainty

Faith is the expectation that certain actions or occurrences will, in fact, become reality. Certainty, on the other hand, is the sure knowledge that an action or an occurrence has or will become reality.


For example: We have absolute certainty that the sun will rise in the morning. We know this not only from our science classes, where (hopefully) we learned about the conservation of angular momentum as applied to the rotation of the Earth, but also from personally observed evidence that we see every day of our own lives. Faith could be expressed as the expectation that we would be alive to see that sunrise. We have no definitive proof that we will survive that long, but we have the hope (faith) that we will probably live long enough to witness that certainty.

Probably? Uh, What?

Faith, you see, really all rests upon the probability of an outcome. Most of us can rely upon the probability that we can get into our motorcar, hurtle ourselves along a narrow, twisty asphalt roadway at 90 feet per second, avoid the oncoming cars also traveling at the same speed, missing them by only a few feet, and arrive at our destination completely unscathed. We do it all of the time. Those probabilities, statistically, are really pretty good. We have the required faith to place ourselves in that situation. But, if you add alcohol consumption and an ice storm to that equation, those good probabilities will rapidly deteriorate, statistically making the planned outcome far less certain, and, perhaps, our faith would need some reasonable re-evaluation.

If, like many of us, you are an atheist, and have ever discussed with a believer your reasonable lack of faith in gods or deities, you have undoubtedly been questioned on how you can hold to the certainty of your convictions. Do you, the believer asks, have the absolute certainty that you are not wrong, and that your tormented soul will be not be condemned to spend all of eternity (what ever that really is) stoking the fires of Hell? Of course you don't. But what you do have is a reasonable degree of certainty that your views are correct.

In other words, you are certain enough.

Very few reasonable adults have faith that unicorns exist. Granted, there may be a faithful few, but if they talked much about it, most people would think that they were crazy. But, let us suppose that a lot of people believed in unicorns, and it was socially acceptable to discuss unicorns, extolling their many virtues and mysteries in a way that gave credence to the idea that they are real and yet unknowable. Would faith in these unproved claims validate the unicorn’s existence as certainty?

No, of course not, you are certain enough that there would be no such thing.

And that would be a reasonable degree of faith that you can believe in.