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Science and Saran Wrap at the Waffle House
How Polarizers and Digital Watches Made Everyone Smile
It was 2 in the morning. We’d been driving for hours. We were tired, hungry and cranky. So we stopped for waffles.
This was back in 1990. What else was open in the deep South? I think we were in Georgia at the time, on our way down to Florida.
I grew up in New York City. My buddy grew up in Iowa. We both had degrees in Electrical Engineering. Yet instead of working in Silicon Valley, where all good nerds longed to be, we worked in rural South Carolina. While we enjoyed designing computers, it didn’t change the fact that we lived in the middle of nowhere.
Some people, faced with this situation, might have been driven to drink. We just drove. We took long road trips in our Tercels.
His was silver gray, mine was candy-apple red. We usually took mine because red cars go faster. Wait, you say, is that the science I’m going to prove? Not a chance. Go read about the Doppler effect on your own time… and don’t ask me what it has to do with the color of cars. It’s 2 in the morning, remember?
We walked inside the Waffle House. Even at that hour, there were other customers. They looked at us with suspicion. The hostility wasn’t personal. The wait staff wore the same…
