cc: file, Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via hardcopy taken to Grandma's Funeral, Sara and Des Penny, Claude and Katherine Warner, Lloyd and Luana Warner. and Diane Cluff.
"Grandma Hafen died Friday afternoon. She had stopped taking her pills and was having a hard time taking any liquids. Aunt Sara called Thursday evening and said her passing was imminent, and that the earliest the funeral would be would be Tuesday. Andrea called me on Saturday morning on a cell phone to tell me the funeral would be next Tuesday. Between Andrea and I we have had a chance to talk to each of you about Grandma's funeral. To repeat, Andrea and I are going to fly out Monday afternoon on a $456.50 per person Continental compassion fare. I would love to take all of you. Money is an issue. I understand the work and test commitments, and know Grandma Hafen does also. I will try to get the digital camera and take some photos so everyone is able to participate virtually.
I was going to write a memorial to Grandma, and I decided to wait for a while. I was very close to Grandma. She sent me money each month when I was on my mission. I sent her a postcard each week. She gave all of these back to me, and they are in one of the boxes in the garage. Then I started to call her every Sunday night, and have been doing this as long as I remember. I feel very good about her being released from this sphere of sorrow and tears. I expect over time there will be words come to mind to express the love and support and guidance and wisdom and friendship and understanding and compassion and laughs and joy which Grandma Hafen brought into my life. I did a search on `Grandma Hafen' and discovered that this is one of the most used phrases in Thoughtlets. That in and of itself is a testament to Grandma Hafen's impact on my life.
So one of the wonders of life is it continues, despite emotional losses. And I decided, since many of you are struggling with finals, to use as a topic a calculus concept, which demonstrates this on-going nature of processes and specifically of life. The concept of a derivative.
The dictionary defines a derivative as a word formed by derivation or something derived. However, in calculus I learned to think of a derivative as differences calculated at some regular interval. For instance, if a car needs to travel 60 miles (d=distance), and plan to do this in 1 hour, the velocity is the first derivative of the distance across the time interval, or 60 miles per 1 hour). In otherwards the car travels at 60 miles per hour, or 60 mph. If the car reaches 60 mph in 1 minute, then the acceleration or second derivative of distance, calculated per minutes, is 60 mph/minute. This is because the velocity is 0 at time 0 and 60 mph at time 1 minute, making the difference simply 60. For each additional minute the veolocity remains a constant 60, making the difference between the additional minutes equal to 0, which results in an acceleration of 0 mph/minute for the remaining 59 minutes of the trip. I'm sure Uncle Des has a simpler way to teach the concept of a derivative.
As an alternative example, consider the following numbers:
Maybe if I put it on a daily basis, this will make more sense:
Note that there the first and second derivative shows there was some event that happened on Wednesday, which affected my weight on Thursday. Possibly something happened on Thursday, which affected my weight on Friday. My proposition is that if we measure any physical attribute of something we are interested in, and look at the 1st and 2nd derivatives we are bound to identify patterns which will prove to be useful in understanding the system as a whole.
Given that background, I will briefly recount my week. Last Sunday evening Andrea and I went to a fireside by the couple responsible for monitoring construction on the Houston Temple. It is both exciting and inspirational. He was responsible for building Terminal C at Intercontinental Airport. He had a heart attack and died. Fifteen minutes later, after a priesthood blessing, he revived. He always thought Terminal C was the crown jewel of his life. Now he knows this was only preparation for building the Houston Temple. I hope all of you will plan on spending some time in Houston the week of the open houses just before the dedication next summer. Then we went to choir practice for the joint concert with Epiphany. I really enjoy these practices and this concert. Again, anyone who can arrange to be in town on Sunday, December 12th, we would love to have you come and listen to us sing our hearts out. Music is an analog deriviative of cultural events.
Monday morning I recorded a script written by Dave Ridyard based on my presentation `The Impending Obsolescense of Maps.' It was amazing how many times he talked about how we evolved from the apes on the plains of Africa. I said the words the way he wrote them, and I am so glad I know I am a child of God. There is so much more inherent purpose in life knowing we are Heavenly Father's children (his derivatives if you will) and are here to prove ourselves to ourselves so we can return to be with our Heavenly Parents again. My friend and first geophysical boss, Parker Gay from Salt Lake, called up and came over to see the CoRe Theater in the afternoon.
When I was a student at the University of Utah I had four different part time jobs during my undergraduate years. One of the two girls who went out on a couple of dates with me, Judy Iowami, a University of Utah cheerleader from Toolee and of Japanese descent, had an older brother who was in my fraternity, Phi Sigma Kappa. He had a tutoring business, and I tutored several kids in the valley. I enjoyed this, and was told by one of the parents I was the only one who had made a difference with their child. Second, one of Aunt Sara's boyfriends had a lawn mowing business, and I mowed lawns. I remember hitting some sprinkler heads on one job after my mission and cutting them off. There was a sting of explatives, and I was really embarassed to find these words had been heard over the lawn mower and reported to the Mom by one of her kids. I remember how hard it was to go and tell the lady whose house it was about my mistake. Third, I worked in the Department of Geological and Geophysical Sciences. Made copies of reports, ran errands, worked on reports, etc. The funnest thing I did for the Department was to put together an advertising campaign for new students. When the oil embargo of 1973 happened, oil companies were doing anything they could to get new employees. So the Department set up a 1 year Masters in Geophysics Program for biology, chemistry, physics, math, and certain engineering majors. I put together flyers, put them all over campus, and the result was a large class of geophysics graduates in 1975. Several of these recruits ended up working for Mobil. The reason this was funny was that I was told 9 months before when I got home from my mission that there were no jobs in Geophysics, and I really should seek a job in the social sciences. I explained I wanted a job where there are numerical derivatives.
The fourth and most interesting job was at Applied Geophysics working for Parker Gay. Parker, is an aeromagnetic expert. He thinks in 3-D, and we have talked for years about displaying data in 3-D. We have even done some joint projects to demonstrate how to merge seismic and aeromagnetic data. The work I did was detail rescaling of magnetic profiles or cross-sections. They had a machine that used mirrors to rescale the image on a light table, and then I would trace the data at the right scale. As I think back, it is just a smaller version of the CoRe Theater. Also, it was basically drawing out a derivative curve, which Parker now calls NewMag.
It was fun to show Parker what we have done at Continuum. We met with Peter Duncan and agreed on a way to move forward. When we finished talking it was time for me to go and pick up the missionaries for dinner. We had a good evening. We played a National Geographic Game for Family Home Evening, a type of spatial derivative.
Tuesday morning started with a CES conference call. Everything CES had been working on seemed to fall apart at about the time of the SEG. However, there are a variety of derivatives from all of the work done. So this call was to pursue some of those loose threads. I went down town and visited with Wulf Massell in the afternoon. He invited us all down to Galveston to the cabin they are renting for Friday after Thanksgiving if we want to. It sounds like fun to me, and so I'm interested in knowing if you would like to do this. Tuesday night I worked on catching up with reading.
Wednesday I went to the 7 Houston earth science societies joint luncheon. It was nice to talk to Tom Smith of SeismicMicro Technology. He got his PhD at the University of Houston when I was there, and we went water skiing with his family once. He is an expert in Kirkhoff migration (a special type of derivative), and has built his company up to be competitive with Landmark over the last couple of decades. To builds a PC based seismic interpretation system. Wednesday night Rob and I went out to dinner. I learned a few suprises. Rob joined us for a career night at scouts. Brother Talley talked about all of the work he has been doing to identify suvivors of the Holocaust who have not been paid on insurance policies due to them. When I got home I ate a bunch of ice cream as an emotional reaction to suprises.
Thursday morning's sales forecast meeting was exciting. The forecast numbers look great, however if you take a derivative of business closed and the trends are not moving in the right direction very fast. I really didn't want to go to Stake Leadership Meeting Thursday evening. However, my priesthood leader asked me to be there and so I was. When I walked in I told him I was there and I was wearing a black shirt in rebellion. Over the course of the evening, I ended up meeting the Young Men's President for Rob's ward and taking him over to Rob's house to meet him. Rob, I think you liked him, and I felt very good about the evening. In fact, I went home and celebrated by eating a bunch of ice cream. Kind of sad when both disapointment and joy result in the same negative behavior. Oh well!
Friday I had training in how to run the theater. I am getting set up so I can bring everyone down and show off some of our stuff on Thursday or Friday if you are interested. Jeff Jurinak, who is the Chief Reservoir Engineer for Conoco, came over for a demonstration. I spent the afternoon with Carolyn Sumners and Gary Young talking about Mr. Finstad's portable planetariums. We identified some areas to focus on and they are preparing a derivative presentation to forward on to Norway. I missed the CoRe Exchange meeting. However, Matt and I went camping to Camp iendo, and had a great 24 hours. In addition to writing about Grandma Hafen, I considered writing about this camping trip for this week's Thoughtlet. However, I decided since I posted all of the digital photos for the scouts, I will just point to where the photos and the song I wrote this weekend are on the Web, and let those interested enjoy this themselves. The directory is located at: http://www.walden3d.com/photos/Scouts/CampLiendo20Nov99, and I particularly like the photo 036MattNielsonSalutingConfederateSoldiers.JPG. We got back just in time Saturday to go and see Justin Packard, one of the Venturing Scouts, perform in a gymnastics meet. Male gymnastics is quite different from what I watched Melanie and Sara do. Then Andrea and I went out to Katy Mills for my first experience in their AMC Theaters to see the ultimate derivative: James Bond.
We are looking forward to this week and to having everyone here for Thanksgiving. Thanks for coming, and let us know if there are things you would like to do while you are here. Tentative, please note the word tentative, schedule is:
Andrea says there are 3 birthdays to celebrate also. Mine, Rob's and Roice's which actually falls on Thanksgiving day this year. If Rob and Roice have a favorite kind of cake, let Andrea know."
