I've learned initial appearances and perceptions can be deceiving.
Bill, a former coworker of mine hailed from Massachusetts, and he checked off all the stereotypes. His New England accent was a great source of amusement to the rest of the team, and we constantly annoyed him with requests to repeat phrases to hear him drop his "r's". He's also a consummate sailor who used to race log canoes, a sailboat specific to the Chesapeake Bay area, and once captained a newly launched sailboat from its Florida boatyard to its owner's berth near Boston. I don't know where he stood on lobster boils, but this New England Yankee was the one who taught me how to deep fry a turkey. Not one of my good ol' boy buds from south of the Mason Dixon, but this guy who's likely never heard of RC Cola and Moonpies.
A college buddy of mine did some work for a manufacturer of jungle gyms. He told me when they ran the calculations for the cable system, based on the tensile strength of steel, they could use a really small gauge (thinner) cable. However, it was determined that visually, the cable looked too thin, and consumers would assume it was a flimsy, inferior product. A business decision was then made to use a thicker, more expensive cable not to satisfy a mechanical constraint, but to satisfy customers' perceptions of "safe" design.
While sitting in one of my college classes, a professor laid out a problem. Given a projectile with a known mass and initial velocity, at what angle would it need to be fired to hit a target at a known distance? A basic physics scenario, the math was pretty straightforward and was calculated to be 37°. One of my ROTC classmates pointed out there was another solution. The professor paused to check the math. He agreed the calculations would allow another value and started to run the numbers. Nearly every Navy guy in the room called out, "53°!" The professor paused in surprise, and when he completed the calculations, it was indeed 53°.
Among classes taken for Navy ROTC was naval gunnery. We weren't firing off live rounds, but we were learning the theory. In ship-to-ship encounters, firing at a shallow angle (such as 37°) gave you a more direct flight path of the projectile. This was fine unless your target was a large capital ship that tended to have heavily armored hulls, particularly below the waterline. The complementary angle (53°) would send the projectile on a high, lobbing arc that would target the thinner deck plating.
The professor was both surprised and impressed.
There are a lot of songs out there that belie their deeper meaning because listeners cue in on its hook or chorus. "Born in the USA", the title track of the Boss's '84 album, sounds like a patriotic song worthy of a presidential rally. However, initial appearances aside, it's a condemnation of this country's treatment of returning Vietnam vets.
First impressions can be misleading.
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