| As a child, I never liked gears. I’ve always associated them with cars, trucks, and buses. They never came alone and were invariably accompanied by noise, dirt, grease, and unpleasant smells. I really grew to hate them when my father would draft my company to help him work on the family car(s). |
| “The mind of a child lasts one hundred years.” – Japanese proverb. |
| I’m still not a fan of mechanical objects. Never have been. No matter how graceful they may be made to be, they are old-fashioned, clunky, inelegant, and prone to failure. Guess there is some truth to the above. Now I am looking at gears and mechanisms to get through this class in order that I might not appear as a non-cooperative stick-in-the-mud (or worse).Today I discovered something very interesting. Looks like gears are used in the insect world to assist in locomotion. I may have to reassess my emotional bias against gears for being – if nothing else, too “man-made.”Click the image of the photograph by an electron microscope of gears in the jumping legs of a “planthopper nymph.” |
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| You are probably wondering about the reference to “Disraeli Gears,” the only gears I ever liked. Here’s the album cover which was totally cool when I was in high school and the album (if it doesn’t get yanked). |
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