4 Play Gentlemen's ClubWest Los Angeles (310-575-0660) Though totally nude in L.A. means no booze, who cares? This joint has enough silicone to caulk over the San Andreas Fault.

HEY JiMMY! JOEL T. ASKS "WHY DO YOU FEEL DIZZY WHEN YOU SPIN AROUND?"

November/December Contest

In our May/June issue we asked you to decide if things around your room were boys or girls. We don't have room to print all the entries, so we've put more on our Web site at www.askmagkids.com.

Dear Dr. Dino:

If you are a bike rider, you may remember the first time you were able to get up and go. You could now travel so much faster and farther than you ever could on foot. Off you went to your friends house, to school, or to the park. What freedom!

You are a brilliant, young (really young) paleontologist. You have searched for ancient bones and fossils all over, well, your neighborhood. Today, as you walk Fido in the local dry riverbed, you notice her snuffle the ground. "What is it, girr You look down. BONES! But WHOSE BONES are they? Cut out the bones on this page and assemble them to re-create the dinosaur you think they belonged to. This is not a complete skeleton, and some of the bones are broken, so you'll have to fill in the missing parts. After you have put your creature together, make a drawing of what it looked like when it roamed the earth. Have you discovered an unknown, new dino?

Gigantoraptor

More than 20 brand-new kinds of dinos are discovered every year. But finding a new fossil is just the beginning. Read on to learn what some very old bones are teaching scientists about how dinosaurs lived, how they looked, and how they grew.

Octopuses have eight legs, right? Marine researchers in Britain aren't so sure. Studying the way the creatures use their limbs, researchers began to notice that they moved through the water with their two back legs and used their two front limbs more like arms to explore their environment. They favored the limbs in between (two on each side) for other tasks, such as eating. Someone even gave the octopuses Rubik's cubes, the puzzle that requires players to line up all the squares of the same color. While the animals enjoy manipulating the cubes with their two front arms, so far none has solved the puzzle.

This snake is more like a needle in a haystack: it's the world's smallest, recently found on the island of Barbados. (Natives of Barbados have known about it for a long time, A perfect snake in every way, the threadsnake is no bigger than a quarter. It burrows in the dirt and eats insect larvae.

So small and so smart. Scientists know that leaf-cutter ants live in huge colonies and actually farm a certain fungus to eat. They grow the fungus on pieces of leaves that they cut and transport to the nest. Now researchers have discovered that when these ants run into a roadblock on their leaf cutting missions, they are able to adjust and carry on. In one experiment, researchers placed a small roof over the ants' path. In no time, the ants figured out that cutting the leaf into smaller, rounder pieces would allow them to fit under the roof. At the same time, more ants from the colony joined the workers so that they could get all the leaf pieces back to the nest in the same amount of time.

Displacement Transmitters

Experimental modal analysis (EMA), also called modal testing or a modal survey, is performed on real structures to characterize their dynamic behavior in terms of their modes of vibration. Each mode is defined by its modal frequency, modal damping and mode shape.

A finite-element model was created for an aerospace structure using new in-house model creation tools designed to decrease the time from solid model to fully functional structural dynamics model. To ascertain that the model created with these tools was an accurate representation of the dynamics of the system, the model needed to be validated with test data. With previous knowledge that few models are accurate without some debugging and model updating, a series of modal tests were planned to be used for both model updating and model validation.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008, rang down the final curtain upon a long-standing love affair and the life of one of this industry's strongest and most charismatic players. Ralph Hillquist drew his last breath and quietly left us. His wife of forty-four years, Sharon, was by his side as she has been for nearly half a century. Those of you who knew Ralph probably know Sharon; they sometimes seemed bonded at the hip. Yet these have always been two very independent and quite different people, each individually productive in a different manner. They truly enjoyed living, working and playing together, and they were nice people to be with individually and collectively. To know "family Hillquist" was to understand the word "synergy." Any and all of Ralph's friends understand Sharon's pain and we would do anything to reduce the grief of her loss.

LMS Engineering Services performed a modal test campaign on Goodrich landing gear for the Airbus A380. In the "Super Rig" at Goodrich Corporation's landing-gear facility in Oakville, Ontario, Canada, LMS engineering consultants subjected a body landing gear prototype assembly for the Airbus A380 to experimental modal analysis (EMA). After suspending the 12,000-pound body gear 12 feet high above the floor, they applied burst-random and stepped-sine excitation at up to 1,000 Newton force levels. The major landing gear mode shapes extracted from the test data, both in static and fully extended stroke, supported structural studies at Airbus and helped engineers verify finite-element (FE) models generated by Goodrich's Landing Gear Division.

While the most destructive concept on the planet may very well be that of government, even our ponderous federal bureaucracy occasionally does something quite right. This happened on October 1, 1958, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was inaugurated. For 50 years, NASA has set the world's pace for technical innovation, improving our daily lives as a by-product. What I hadn't realized until very recently was just how cost effectively they have provided this leadership.

Call for Papers

INTRODUCTION: BEFORE 1520