The room is crowded tonight but because you are a visitor you will have to just listen. The names and faces here are Top Secrete and you must not attempt to take off your hood and blindfold. The suits we all work for might have one or more of us removed from the positions held with some crazy idea about our sanity. As I have more patents then they do it is not as important to me. The meeting has several new members but we will not mention their names as word of our condition can never reach the suits they work for. If they never know why their highest performing programmers, electronic designers and every other creative person excels past the ones that always got the good grades in the lower schools but some where in college or at their job found that they could see things in ways that normal students did not and they use that in their occupation to do marvelous things that the guys with the good grades could never understand things as simply as we do.

That is the two edge sword of dyslexia. You are the one who does not try hard enough in school and the one advancing the jobs you excel in once you have found your skill. Some here are Mathematicians, Some Aeronautical, Some Dancers, some composers and a few astronauts thrown in to round out the group.

We never know who the others are that work with us but my guess is they are the ones that can explain a simple solution to as complex problem that no one will believe is a real solution until it is running some control er somewhere, is performed in the concert hall or a new medical device is born. Dyslexics do not want to ever let the secret out of their gift as those without it become suspicious of what they cannot explain. So if you are that underachiever, or you just do not apply yourself hard enough know that you will excel in what you do with the discovery of your special talent God has given you. Put up with people who you know have little empathy for your condition as they are the ones who will stab you in the back for envy of what you can do and they cannot. I give you below a small story of my life below and my resume resides elsewhere on this site. Good news when you realize what you have.

Dr. William Putnam’s (Mister Bill when I would find a mistake in his work.) He was Tops at aerodynamics but an Electronics ace? His control system was not working and Sikorsky had contracted with me to help him get his control system up and running so it could be sued to test the item it was for in the big wind tunnel at Pratt and Whitney division. And his workshop and small wind tunnel. I was a contract engineer working for Sikorsky on a special project that Dr. Putman needed some help with. Bill's office was directly across a little lane from the office of Albert Einsteine on the Forrestal Campus of Prinston University. I would spend days sitting at Einsteine’s desk doing my work. The main reason was his office was air conditioned and there was a soda machine in the his building. But I would occasionally drift off into a day dream of what the reactions of my early professors if they saw me sitting were I was.

Hello, my name is Jim and I am a dyslexic. It was funny to find this out by accident when I was forty while I was doing an inventory program for my wife's internet business. I assigned FIVE categories of items and allotted two-hundred four digit number to each item. It automatically removed an item sold from inventory and added a received item into inventory. It also kept sales tax and income / payments for tax time. It was a very slick program but it found out I could not always enter a number correctly. A customer would call in with a part number and I would put it into the computer and it would tell me what the part number represented and many times it was not the one I heard the order was for. I would check the data base and see the number I entered was not the one for the item ordered. After some study I found the name of the problem that made me feel the academic world was useless. I turned into a rebel.

I had no explanation since I was programming far more advanced real time control programs in machine language my entire career. I began a trip through time as a tourist. Back to grade school and my problems with spelling and reading. I totally gave up and rebelled against all school work. I was the kid who didn’t try hard enough, needed to apply myself, the real problem was the way things were done back then. For spelling I had no clue. Reading was fine until I had to keep track of where the reader before me had stopped, stand and continue to read from the spot the previous reader had been stopped. Then I was the boy who didn’t pay attention. I remember it was like I had a different book than he did as I could not see the same words they were reading in my book.

The whole spelling, reading and music thing was not anything I deliberately performed poorly so all the things people said about my attention, study habits and abilities became the cause of my total shutdown of attempting to play their silly games anymore. This went through till I was working as a mechanic in the day time and attending a make up year in night school for my totally nothing second year in university. The lame professors seemed to just ignore my questions either because they could not answer them or did not think I was worthy of their time. In night school I learned it was probably the former. Night school I took mostly math and it was taught by working engineers very involved in the use of the subject they taught every day at work. The explanations and examples of the subjects took my love of it to a level of seeing it as almost music. Not a good metaphor but what do you want from a dyslexic. So it was Professors O engineers 10. My moonlighting engineers showed me the way and when I returned to university the following year I was scoring very high and produced a scholastic average good enough to get me four job offers months before gradation. I took the one working on the Apollo program as it was hot job at that time in history. A serendipity moment. I was in Electrical Design for less that two years when the design phase was over and everyone of us was laid off in alphabetical order. I went home and started to plan my new life on the LA beaches. Personnel called several time to tell me I was supposed to be at work for two weeks notice and not take a vacation but I would quickly speak up and say.“I believe you have severed our relationship and it will take more that two weeks to make amends for that. You have taken from me months of mandatory unpaid overtime. You can now apply that time served to my two weeks notice. Thank you very, very much. click!” That is me hanging up before they can reply.

It was a somewhat amusing game for the first couple of calls. Then I got a call from an engineer in Guidance and Control (referred to as G & C then now it seems to be G

So how did I work with that group and contribute. How was I getting more patents in weird things that were so simple to me but the engineers outside this group did not have a clue what I was doing and some so unbelieving talked about I was making up the results. My results were almost out of my control, the engines gave me the data via a magnetic pickup watching the ring gear teeth go by, fed through a clamping circuit that converted the voltage output to a computer friendly square wave of 0 and 5 volts. All the computer did was time period of the square wave and apply my filter which was necessary because I found that using each pulse instead of using every pair of two pulsed was garbage. The filter was to compensate for what I observed of a very repeatable spacial displacement of every other gear tooth. I got the idea of this by walking through the huge machine shop every day to be away where I could clear my thoughts and concentrate better. It was one of those walks that I saw a row of huge machines (each machine working on one part) drilling multiple holes with each down stroke of the multiple drill head. I thought this would explain the change in ever other gear tooth that was haunting me. I gave the filter to Phil my programming expert and he had it up and running in a few minutes after it went and had a new tape made to feed the computer input. The filtered results was the velocity of each gear at the time it was passing the magnetic pickup. or for my purpose the velocity of the flywheel at ever engine crank angle represented by the gear’s teeth. The first derivative of that was the acceleration the cylinder contributed to the speed and the next derivative was the Jerk of the cylinder to th velocity curve. The Jerk impulse I was part of the key to cylinder performance tuning So I can only assume that the technique used by Phil and I is being used in some of the engine control systems. I was working full time on diesel engines but I saw the potential of what I was learning to fuel control in drag racing. Unfortunately I did not have a computer able to fit into a race car that could keep up with the rpm of a race engine but I was planing the controls at home.

I could not sing in class or anywhere else, but I could on my 68 Norton Ranger going down the highway. My friend Danny was the lead guitarist of a warm up band for the big names that came to the Woodrose Ballroom in the late 1960s-early 1970s. His day job was working in a car wash with a gentile man we called Bo Jangles. Bo had a three room second floor apartment which was always open to anyone and many times the big name bands would com over . Bo was very poor but he did have a small child’s record player and when visiting we would always bring wine. Bo was very old and had a lot of stories to tell and many times Danny would bring the bands he played warm up for over to bo’s. Spending the night drinking wine and telling stories around bo’s little record player. and and would bring some of these bands to Bo’s house after the concert was over. His band never came as they were in College and after playing they had to study or get to sleep His group played warm up for a lot of bands in the late 1960’. One night, with my guitar strapped to my back I rode my Norton up to the ballroom. To my great embarrassment late that night after the concert concert one of the big named band’s members asked me to play my guitar. I told him I could not sing or play anything he would recognize as music but he and soon the rest joining in with the help of gallons of Gallo’s Hearty Burgundy courage I said OK you asked for it. I played about five of my private wood’s songs and when I was done they seemed pleased so I asked them how could they stand my songs when theirs were so far greater than mine. The lead singer said it was because I was playing for them instead of them playing for strangers. I learned a lesson that night. Never bring my guitar to Bo’ again.

Copyright © 2019 Crossfire, See note №: 5
dyslexics_anonymous.html 11/11/2019