How To Be... a Human Cannonball

Have you ever wanted to fly? No, not airplane kind of flying or even hang glider kind of flying; I mean real flying. Like Superman... well, except without the ability to control where you're going or anything like that. If that sounds like the job for you, you might want to look into being a human cannonball.

Me? Really? I can fly!

No, not like that guy. Theoretically, that guy is a superhero. I'm not sure what the head honchos at DC were thinking when they gave the green light on this guy, but I think he gets my vote as lamest superhero ever.

Just aim me at the bad guy and fire!

Actually, I was talking about this kind of human cannonball:

The short answer for what you need to do to be a human cannonball is to be brave enough to climb into one of those cannons. The good news there is that they don't actually use gun powder as part of the firing mechanism. Any gun powder that's used is just part of the spectacle of making it look like it works the way a real cannon does. In actuality, they use springs or compressed air.

The first human cannonball stunt was performed in 1877 from a spring-style cannon designed by "The Great Farini" (the guy that used to tightrope walk across Niagra Falls with people on his back and stuff like that), but he wasn't the one fired from the cannon. No, that honor went to a 14-year-old girl called "Zazel." Which brings us to the second thing that works out really well if you, as a person, want to be a cannonball: be small and light.

Really, that's all there is to it. You need to have a certain amount of recklessness, and, you know, fit into the cannon. Or, well, I suppose you could have one specially built if you really wanted the experience but were too big for a normal cannon. Be sure, though, because there have been more than 30 cannonball deaths since the advent of the stunt. Sure, you get to fly, but, really, it's not the flying that will kill you.

How To Be... a Genetic Engineer

One of the earliest loves of my younger son was Pokemon (his first love was Star Wars at all of one year of age, but that's a story for another time). I suppose this was back around when he was four or five, although the exact age when all of the Pokemon stuff started is a little hazy. However, I do remember that he was, at first, disappointed to find out that Pikachus

do not really exist, but that passed quickly into a determination to grow up and make one. With the way things are going, that may actually be a possibility by the time he is of an age to do so.

Genetic engineering, as we most commonly think of it, the direct manipulation of DNA by humans (not including selective breeding or mutagenesis), has only existed since the 70s, but we have come oh so far since then (check last year's post for some of the things we've already accomplished). The real issue is that, right now, we don't really know where we're going with it, and some people are scared of the field in its entirety. And, hey, who can blame anyone for being scared with all of the zombie fear? Genetically engineered diseases are at the root of many of these ideas.

However, with the sort of wide openness in the field of genetic engineering, it leaves a lot of room to do with it what you want. Right now, there is no "genetic engineering" degree. It's not like electrical engineering where you can go to school and learn the basics. There are no real basics for genetic engineering. Well, there are, but they are very basic. Like, you need to know a lot about biology (in general), cell biology (in specific), chemistry, biochemistry, and... well, and whatever it is you want to be working with. Plants? Animals? Microbes? You need to know about it.

Once you have the background knowledge you need, it's really just about finding someone willing to hire you on to work in a lab working on genetic engineering projects. Well, that, or taking that Dr. Frankenstein route and doing it yourself, which seems completely plausible assuming you had the resources to do it. Like I said, no one really knows, yet, where we can go with genetic engineering or what is and is not possible, so, maybe, my son will grow up and engineer his own Pikachu.

How To Be... a Fighter Pilot

The dad of my best friends when I was a kid was in the Air Force. Every so often, I would get to go to the base with them, the base being Barksdale Air Force Base. It was the coolest place. Except for one thing: no fighter planes. Oh, there were some, but Barksdale was a bomber base, so, mostly, it was full of B-52's. I never did get to go in one, but, man, are they big. I don't know if this is still the case, but, in the 80s, Barksdale had the largest strategic bombing force in the nation and, at need, could "bomb Russia" without the need for refueling. It was great, because it made Barksdale in the top 3 on "Russia's" nuke list. But I digress...

As cool as the bombers were, they were never what we were interested in. My friends (3 brothers (and a sister)) had books and books about fighters, and that's what we wanted to fly. My favorite was, and has always been, the F-16. To put it in Star Wars terms, the F-16 would be the A-wing, as it was designed out of a need to have better air-to-air fighters. Basically, it was a plane designed around dog fighting. The things can pull 9-g maneuvers! Let me just say that when everyone was busy being enamored of the F-14, a Y-wing at best, after Top Gun came out, I was never dissuaded from my love of the F-16, the far superior plane (as attested to by the fact that the F-16 is still in production and the F-14 is not). But I still digress...

The F-16

Although I never wanted to be a fighter pilot, every boy wants to be a fighter pilot. I mean, how cool is that? Unfortunately, it's not the kind of career you can just decide to do and spend your life working toward it. There are physical limitations on the job. Like basketball but in reverse. Yes, there really is a height limit to being a fighter pilot. For the Air Force, that's 77 inches (6'5"). I suppose, above that, there's no way you're cramming yourself into one of those cockpits. There's also a height minimum: 64 inches, along with a sitting height requirement! Between 33 and 40 inches. How many of you have ever thought about how tall you are while sitting? Yeah, that's what I thought. Me, either. So it's not just about height but about body proportion, which is pretty specific.

And we haven't even gotten to the part about the vision yet! Vision requirements are somewhat easier to meet these days. When I was in high school, you had to have at least 20/20 uncorrected vision. Now, as long as it can be corrected to 20/20 vision, you can have vision as low as 20/70. See, my vision, which is in the 20/30-40 range, was the only thing that kept me from accepting an invitation to the Air Force Academy after high school. I'm not a good fit for the military because of that lack of respect for authority thing I have going, that and my tendency to use that word which is the bane of parents everywhere: "Why?" However, I would have gone if it had meant a chance to fly fighters. It's all just as well, I suppose.

But why was the Air Force Academy after me to begin with? Test scores. Even though I never applied there or anything. And I'm not talking flyers in the mail kind of stuff, either, although they did send me stuff in the mail. And call me. A lot. And even sent someone to my house to talk to me. So, yeah, you have to be smart. Although, after looking at their requirements on the their website, the current academic requirements don't seem that stringent. At any rate, you have to have pretty high scores to get into the Academy, and you have to have even higher scores to be considered for flying.

And then there are all the physical shape requirements...

So, then, how do you get to be a fighter pilot?
1. Don't be too tall.
2. Don't be too short.
3. Have the right length torso.
4. Have good vision.
5. Be smart or study hard enough to seem like you're really smart,
6. Be in excellent physical condition.
One you've taken care of those basics, you might get the shot at being a fighter pilot.

How To Be... an Electrical Engineer

Ah, electricity! What a shocker!
Just kidding...

And, no, I'm not talking about that "spark" between you and that special someone. I'm talking about that raw flow of electrons that's oh so important to the world today. Where did that all begin?

William Gilbert, an astronomer, is generally considered the first electrical engineer because of his invention of the first electroscope, a device he called the versorium, all the way back in 1600. It was pretty simple, actually, a needle that detected static charges.

It was the 19th century, though, before electrical engineering really became a thing, leading to the "War of Currents" between Edison and Westinghouse, but, really Edison and Tesla. And it's really Tesla I want to mention here because Tesla still holds the record for longest blast of artificial lightning (electricity), and no one, over a hundred years later, has been able to figure out how he did it.

So, these days, a good education is the key to becoming an electrical engineer. You just go and get a degree in it. Education is never a bad thing. However, it's not a field that's limited to your education. There is still plenty we don't know, especially considering that we can't reproduce many of the things we know Tesla could do and have absolutely no idea about some of the things he claimed to be able to do. Heck, for all we know, he and his buddy Mark Twain were zipping around in a time machine.

The point is this, almost everything you own uses electricity. Even some of the books. Electrical engineering is not a static field (heh heh, get it?). It's definitely the kind of place where bright people with an eye to the future and all of the possibilities therein would want to be. So, yes, go to school, get a degree, learn all you can, but, then, get out there and experiment. Electrical engineering is wide and diverse field.

How To Be... a Demolition Expert

When I was a kid, firecrackers were never quite enough. I mean, a single firecracker is rather wimpy. Not that you can get them around here. I don't think my kids have ever even seen a firecracker, but we used to get big bundles of them every Christmas for quite a few years when I was in that 10-year-old range. We got enough of them to get plenty creative with them despite being told not to. But, other than sparklers, we never got any other kinds of fireworks, so we had to do something with them to achieve more spectacular results.

That usually meant experimenting with bundling them together, emptying them out, and blowing things up. Really, though, my favorite was just dropping them into a Coke can. Simple and loud.

I want to believe that people that go into demolition started out that way, playing with firecrackers, but bigger. But I don't know that.

Actually, a good background in construction is necessary if you want to be involved in de-struction. Tell that to any two-year-old, right? My oldest loved to knock things over when he was that age. The only reason ever to put something together, in his mind, was to knock it apart. I sort of imagine demolition people never growing out of that, but, again, I don't know that.

At any rate, it seems that many demolition experts say that hands-on experience is the best training for this particular job. You can get training, especially in the military, but you really need to do it to understand it. Be involved in it. Getting apprenticeships with construction companies that do the kind of demolition you're interested in can be a great way to get training.

The kind of demolition? Isn't demolition just blowing stuff up?

Well, no...

You can excavate, undermine, wrecking ball, explode, implode, and just plain old knocking it over. The demolition expert will need to be able to choose the best option for the job. Of course, building implosion is probably everyone's favorite. It's pretty spectacular and takes a lot of skill and a lot of preparation. Months worth, because any error can be disastrous. An error can include imploding on a day when the cloud cover is too low, which will direct the shock wave out into surrounding buildings rather than dissipate upwards. Yeah, I never considered that either. I would hate to have been the guy to have made that mistake the first time.
Here's one that went as planned:

So, although you can become a demolition expert without any proper schooling, the military is still one of the best ways to get trained in the field. They offer a broader range of experience and one more focused on explosives. If you really want to learn how to blow stuff up, the Army might be a good place to learn.

How To Be... a master Chef (and IWSG)

So... you want to learn to cook, do you?

I see you there saying yes.

It's your lifelong dream, but how do you go about it?

Well... let's just talk about that.

First, you need to learn how to boil water. Yeah, you wouldn't think that would be such a big deal, but, evidently, it is. I mean, my brother can't boil water to the extent that my mother banned him from trying to cook anything that didn't involve the microwave oven. I suppose he just burned up too many of her pots. I'm not talking about when he was a kid, either. This was when he was a full grown adult. Seriously, if he had gone to college, he would have starved from lack of being able to make ramen noodle soup.

Boiling water, though, is a basic skill of cooking. After that, boiling eggs. I think I was about nine or so when I started doing the boiled egg thing. I got a recipe for making deviled eggs off of some TV show (I sort of think it was The Electric Company, but I don't remember for sure), and I was really into doing that for a while. I'd make them for my brother (who was about three at the time) and me after school or on Saturdays or, basically, whenever I wanted to, and I was competent enough that my mom let me do it whenever I wanted without any supervision.

Everything I've learned since then, I've learned just from doing it, and, I have to say, I'm a good cooker. That's how I like to say it, "I'm the cooker in the family." The thing is, though, you can get a recipe for anything online. And I mean anything. You want the top secret recipe to make fried chicken just like KFC? It's online. You want the special chocolate sauce recipe from Outback? It's online. You want to make your great grandmother's squirrel dumplings (and squirrel is big in England and France, right now), I'm sure you can find it online. Or, you know, something that's so close you can't tell the difference.

The thing is, if you really want to be a chef, the best way to go about it is to practice cooking. A lot. Constantly try out new recipes and expand what you can do and make. Sure, you can go to school for it; you can even get a degree in it, but, when it comes down to it, when it actually comes time to get a job in a restaurant, that degree is not as helpful as it may seem, because most restaurants still use an apprenticeship system for their chefs, so, no matter how good you are or what kind of degree you have, you're going to get hired at the bottom and have to work your way up. From that standpoint, the guy that's been a cook at Applebee's for five years is going to have just the same kind of chance as someone fresh out of culinary school. The main thing is to do it.

IWSG:
Living Between the Spikes

Being Wednesday, it's also IWSG day.

Sometimes, it can be hard to live between the spikes. The problem, if there is a problem, is that there are spikes. With, well, everything. Personally, I'd prefer a nice smooth incline. Just a gradual trip up the slope without any dips, but that's not how it works. Knowing this doesn't help. I mean, I know that the spikes don't matter as long as there is an overall increase, BUT...

Every time there's one of those dips, I feel a bit of panic. I can't help it. The beginning of each month is... uncomfortable, no matter what I say to myself about it.

But I'm not really talking about the blog here, even if that is a graph of my blog traffic. No, what I'm talking about is "book traffic." As I mentioned here, the release of "The Tree of Light" was my best release so far.

This week's release of "The Angel" was not nearly as inspiring.

(Even though the cover is SO cool! Say a big thank you to Rusty Webb and tell him how cool his work is!)
So another dip... and, even though everything is tending upward, the dips are... well, they're dips. When what you really want is for everything to just keep going up and up and up, the dips are kind of a bummer. But, if the stock market is any example (and I'm not saying it is), the dips are good. You don't want anything to just keep going up and up and up until it breaks. The dips, I'm sure, are healthy, but, man, it sure is difficult to climb back up the other side!

How To Be... a Brain Surgeon

Have you heard, "It's not brain surgery?" Well, sometimes, it is.

The most interesting thing I've found out about this career is that it takes much longer to become a brain surgeon in the United States than it does anywhere else in the world. That's kind of a frightening thought and one that makes me hope I never need to have my brain operated on in any place outside of the States.

But how do you become one?

Well, the old fashioned way would be to get yourself a saw (a bone saw, preferably), open up the skull, and poke around a bit to see what would happen. That's rather frowned upon these days, though, even if it is funny to poke someone's brain and make his leg jerk. What that means is that this is not a "do it yourself" career path. Basically, you're looking at 15+ years of post secondary education for this one: four years of college, four years of medical school, some time interning (a year or two), and, then, five to seven years of neurosurgery residency. And that's just for the basics. If you want to specialize, then you get some additional training. It's a career you need to really want to do, because you're going to be learning it for a long time.

But, hey, being a brain surgeon allows you to get to use such cool tech as the gamma knife!

My dad had one of those used on him several years ago.

There are all sorts of things we can treat, now, that used to just be a death sentence, not the least of which is aneurysms. Don't get me wrong, aneurysms are still deadly, but, if they find them in advance, now, they can often do things to prevent them from rupturing. Not like when I was a kid when we had a family friend in whom they found one (he was having headaches), and, basically, they told him all he could do was hope that it didn't burst.

So, yeah, if you're willing to put in the time, being a brain surgeon can be a cool gig. Just go ask Anne; she used to be one.

NOTE:
"Part Eighteen: The Angel" is still FREE! today, so go pick up a copy if you haven't done that yet.