∂ Clockwise: Cavallaro sands the propeller in his Mountain View garage. The Blackbird ready to go at Ivanpah. Cavallaro adjusts the brakes. John Bolton welds the chassis in the Sportvision shop.
prized his ability to recognize and admit his wrongness, to avoid the trap of the Dunning-Kruger effect, that pesky tendency of humans to feel more confident about a subject the less they actually know about it. Flashes of academic overconfidence aside, at Tech Cavallaro came to see critical thinking and problem solving as their own disciplines, things that could be taught and learned and practiced. He became especially enamored with word problems—solving them methodically, always working backward, parsing out every bit of information needed to reach the end result. In his aerospace engineering classes, Cavallaro also grew to admire counterintuitive solutions to complex conundrums— Gordian-knot type situations, problems better solved by pulling out a knife and slicing through rather than picking apart tedious tangles just to maintain the status quo. When he found himself struggling in a history course because there were no basic formulas to guide his studies, he tried to learn selfhypnosis to trick his brain into latching onto all the discordant facts of the world. It didn’t exactly work, but he learned the benefit of approaching problems with a certain open-minded skepticism. And as his respect grew for the scientific laws of the universe—the laws of conservation, of thermodynamics—he felt less and less attached to the rules of received wisdom and socalled common sense. He came to believe that the world is made of two kinds of people: those who, after the apocalypse, would still stop for a red light, and those who would drive on through, unencumbered by what was “supposed” to be. He decided he would be one to drive on through.
Rick Cavallaro had dissected the problem of the sailboat
and the balloon for his own obsessive enjoyment, but his propeller-spun conclusion seemed worth sharing with the world. And so, around 2001, he turned to the internet messageboards for hobbyist kite-surfers that he frequented and posted a friendly brainteaser: Could a wind-powered craft travel directly downwind faster than the wind? The response was a resounding “of course not,” but he pressed on, posting his calculations, going back and forth with other message-board users, hashing out and clarifying his data. Unbelieving readers called him moron, a huckster, a hack—but he knew he was right. General debate and balking continued apace for several years. In 2006, one especially vocal skeptic, a fellow hobbyist named Mark Conroy, gave in and built a model based on Cavallaro’s rough plans. He tested it at home and posted his results: The model did not work; it could not go faster than the wind. But Rick Cavallaro, being Rick Cavallaro, pushed on ahead. He knew Conroy’s failed attempt didn’t prove that his idea didn’t work, only that it hadn’t worked yet. So he and John Borton, a coworker and toy helicopter enthusiast, built a model of their own, carved the propeller themselves, set the craft up on a moving treadmill in a room with otherwise still air. And that one worked— but just barely. They posted their results and a video online, and were startled to hear back within 48 hours from Conroy, who had tested an even simpler version of the cart built from model helicopter and airplane parts. This time, before his skeptical eyes, it had worked—not only better than his first test model, but better than anything Cavallaro and Borton had built so far. And so Cavallaro’s GTALUMNIMAG.COM VOLUME 89 NO.2 2013
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