Over the next two weeks N-1 is putting on another school, this time for new IAEA inspectors. I'm helping teach again, specifically on the HLNCC (high level neutron coincidence counter) instrument. Today was the first day of classes and it was mostly taken up with logistical crap. For one thing, the inspectors all had to get their visitor badges (with one exception, they are all foreign nationals, which makes the whole process that much more involved). We were waiting around in the conference room for them to get back from the badge office for about two hours. This as a result of, and I quote, "the Oracle being down."

This refers to the Oracle database that controls damn near everything at LANL, including the badge readers. Of course, the CEO of Oracle didn't get to be fabulously rich by making a crappy product... it's the people at the lab who administer the Oracle database that suck.

Anyway, this left me with a lot of time to talk with the other instructors. The guy in charge of everthing is called Dave, and his claim to fame is that he was the masters-class national champion power lifter a couple years ago. This earns him the title, "World's Strongest Man." ...and he looks it. He was talking about how he had recently blown out his knee and would no longer be able to do squats, thus precluding him from the power lifting event. So he is reconditioning his body to be "tuned for bench pressing." This should allow him to increase his maximum bench press weight from <clears throat> 402 pounds to somewhere above 450 pounds.

Yowzer. And here's today's interesting World's Strongest Man Factoid: competition bench pressers wear special shirts that allow them to press more weight by storing energy in the fabric. The shirts are very tight when the arms are extended fully, and only tighten more against your body as you lower the bar down to your chest. When you go to push the bar back up, the fabric is actually being brought to a lower internal energy state and thus is contributing energy to your press. Dave says that with no shirt he can only bench about 340 pounds. With a "regulation" shirt (for the "federation" (?) that he is in) he can do 402 pounds. With a triple-ply denim shirt, he can bench about 450. So the choice of shirt can add 100 pounds to your bench! This came as some surprise to me.

Pardon me, I'm off to manufacture a 15-ply kevlar shirt with which I hope to throw a Volkswagen a whole half-block.