[Rick Masters]

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[Rick Masters]

Independent, Long Beach, 18 Feb 1972, page 3.

[JoeF]

Wow! Rick,
Don't remember ever seeing that clip.
Nice Christmas morning gift ... from my view.
Thanks.
Wishing you and yours the best.

Joseph Faust
aka
Joe Faust

[JoeF]

Cooperative/interactive learning system for logic instruction
US 5868575 A
Filed: May 20, 1996
==========================================

[Bob Kuczewski]

Cooperative/interactive learning system for logic instruction
US 5868575 A
Filed: May 20, 1996

In 1995 (almost 20 years ago) I was working for a company that had a great volunteer program where engineers would donate their time once a week to teach science lessons at local elementary schools. I signed up for the program and met many people who are my closest friends to this day.

The curriculum was made up of lessons that various engineers had put together and they included things like buoyancy, magnetism, and aerodynamics. But they didn't have anything on our main expertise - computer technology. I thought it might be fun to teach digital logic, so I came up with an idea to have each kid in the class operate a logic gate (like AND, OR, XOR...) and then wire them all together so they actually perfomed a real task (like adding numbers). In late 1995 and early 1996 I came up with a design and filed a patent application in May of 1996 ... just in time to teach a class of actual students before the end of the school year.

Here's a picture of some students in what we called the "round up" where all of the gates (configured as "OR" gates) were connected end to end in a circle. I would operate one of the gates in the circle, and when I switched it on, that would signal the next student to switch theirs on, and it would propagate (like dominoes) around the circle until it came back to me. With about 20 students, they would end up going around the circle in just a few seconds - very impressive to them. Then I would switch the circuit into "automatic" mode where the silicon "OR" gates would do it automatically. I would then tell the students to watch to see the "signal" going around the circle. Of course it was instantaneous to our eyes, and I used that to drive home the point that computers do very very simple things ... but they do them very very fast!!

gates_class0.jpg (76.84 KiB) Viewed 13537 times

This next picture shows the adding circuit. We used a large Twister-style mat with a diagram of the adding circuit. The kids would wire their gates according to the diagram (or it could be pre-wired to save time). The adding circuit could add a 3 bit number and a 2 bit number producing a 4 bit result. The whole circuit used 16 logic gates (5 of which were inputs), so we would end up with two adding circuits for a typical 32 student elementary school class. We would split the class and hold a competition where I would draw the numbers to be added on the board and the two teams would race to see who could finish first. The kids would have to translate the decimal numbers to binary (we had a conversion chart on display), put them into the circuit, and then perform all of the logic functions until the answer trickled out the other end. This picture shows the kids holding up their hands indicating that they are done. The first team done (with the correct answer) got a point, and we would run a dozen or so "points" in a competition. It was a lot of fun, and the classes always ended with the kids wanting to do "just one more ... pleeease".

gates_class1.jpg (83.81 KiB) Viewed 13537 times

[Bob Kuczewski]

To bring things full circle ... I found a nice article about Rick Masters at: http://www.jango.com/music/Rick+Masters/_full_bio?l=0.

Rick_Masters_Follow.jpg (31.71 KiB) Viewed 13537 times

Rick Masters is a solo guitarist, songwriter and filmmaker from California, primarily recognized for his two films: Aoli, Comet Clones & Pod People (1982 - US Gray Prize) and Hydrogen Hawaii (2001 - Tely Award). Although his musical focus tends toward film soundtracks, he was moved to release the album Man Shall Follow in April of 2013 to warn of the impending environmental catastrophe facing humanity.

At the age of 19, Rick Masters attended Ventura Jr. College in the months following the devastating blow-out of a Union Oil drilling rig off the Santa Barbara coast, which remains California’s worst environmental disaster to date. Forever polarized by the despoiled, once pristine beaches and the astronomical death toll of wildlife, he published his apocalyptic “Rain Poem 1981” in the college newspaper to mark the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970). Set in a grim and hopeless future where storms of acid rain rake the Earth, ending all life, the lone protagonist recalls warning his children about the deadly rain. “How could I tell them once that I had tried to stop the rape of skies but somehow failed along the line? And they were doomed to sit and watch as misty drops kissed blades of grass that slowly yellowed, bent and died…”

In 1976, Masters heard of a theory blaming refrigeration chemicals for the destruction of the Earth’s vital ozone layer and attended the first International Conference on Problems Related to the Stratosphere in Logan, Utah, where he was stunned by the delaying tactics of the chemical lobby. Soon after, Masters penned another long poem about environmental catastrophe, “Return of the Warrior.” Here the protagonist leaves the last remaining outpost of starving humanity and makes an epic trek to the Pacific Ocean to drown himself in the sea he had once loved.

    “You know that I’ve lost everything I’ve ever loved. It’s true,” he says to the dead ocean.
    “But what I’ve lost is nothing, when I see what we’ve done to you.

    For nothing lives and nothing flies beneath this hellish light.
    I can’t believe we let it come to this without a fight…

    I raise my arms in hopeless rage. I curse the cities of the dead.
    I wade into the ancient sea, for the last whale’s song had said

    ‘Man shall follow me.’ And so we did…”

In 1986, Masters merged the two poems into one and set them to music in a marathon 16-minute vocal performance. But it was not until the triple-meltdown of the nuclear power plants in Fukushima, Japan, and growing reports of raw methane bubbling up from the permafrost bordering the melting Arctic sea that the reclusive Masters was moved to finally release “Man Shall Follow” in April of 2013 on an album of the same name. Gary Richardson, Executive Director of Idaho’s nuclear watchdog, the Snake River Alliance, describes the song as “an eerie prophesy of a not far distant future. …his ghostly voice and lyrics create an Edgar Allen Poe-like journey and vision carried on the stream of rhythm and melody created by Masters’ unique 12-string guitar, and occasionally synthesized accompaniment.”

On the album, three instrumental tracks accompany “Man Shall Follow.” The first, “The 900” (9:35), is an ode to the one thousand paraglider pilots who have died since 2002. Masters, a pioneering cross country hang glider pilot who made a name for himself as president of the international Cross Country Pilots Association in the early 1980s, became infamously outspoken on the Internet over what he felt was a monumental and totally unnecessary waste of lives due to the flawed capabilities of today’s gliding parachutes. The second track, “Infinite Journey” (10:02), showcases Masters’ self-taught and self-described “trampoline” technique of finger percussion, “delay riding” and guitar synth coloring, which leads some to believe they are listening to a group of musicians rather than a solo performance. The third instrumental, “Nest of Angels” (9:10), was the soundtrack for Masters’ 2005 promotional video for the spectacular sustainable mansion, Angels Nest, in Taos, New Mexico.

The US Hawks seems to be attracting people who care enough to actually go out and do things in this world. It's a group of men and women that I'm proud to be associated with!!

[Rick Masters]

Freeport Journal-Standard, (Freeport, Illinois)
21 November 1973 • Page 49

Man realizes oldest fantasy of self-launching flying craft

- Low and Slow, a monthly hang-glider magazine, increased its circulation in one year from 2,000 to 7,000 readers. Editor Joe Faust, a former Olympic high-jumper who found "another form of self-launched flight," says the subscribers come from all 50 states plus 15 foreign countries.

[JoeF]

Nice find, Rick. Also fresh at this desk.
I captured the full article now sans lower half of left dark photo.

Part of the article's impact seems to be the flow of Volmer Jensen; such flow indicates a continual hang gliding river ... 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s ...
Indeed Otto sported and played and formally indicated advancing sport of HG.
~ JoeF

[Rick Masters]

Part of the article's impact seems to be the flow of Volmer Jensen; such flow indicates a continual hang gliding river ... 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s ...

Yeah. If we think too hard about what Volmer Jensen accomplished, we will have to re-evaluate what we believe the history of our sport to be.