Baseball Line-Up Sheet: Fill & Download for Free

In the mid ‘60s, my mom and sisters took a train to Utah to see relatives; my dad, brother, and I took the VW bug down from Santa Cruz to Anaheim.I was six and my brother was eight. We looked wantingly as we drove by Disneyland, which we had seen on TV and heard about from friends, but we weren’t going there. We were in Anaheim to see the Angels play the Yankees.Santa Cruz is about 90 minutes away from Candlestick Park, so we had seen Willie Mays. We had seen Marichal, McCovey, Cepeda, Perry, and all sorts of Alous during our trips. We also saw Aaron, Gibson, Koufax and other National League greats play the Giants. But the A’s were a few years away from moving to Oakland from Kansas City, so my brother and I had never seen an American League player in person.Dad was taking us hundreds of miles so we could see the Mick before he retired.We stayed overnight in a motel. One room; two beds. My brother and I implored my dad to not smoke in bed because that’s how Uncle John died. Annoyed, he snuffed it out.We got up early. Dad wanted to get good seats, and we didn’t have tickets yet.Both of us kids were impressed by the escalator that took us up to the second deck of the stadium. Dad bought a program for a quarter, and we found seats.Dad read the program and the loose-leaf line up sheet that came with it. He looked at the rosters and sighed.The Mick didn’t make the trip.

Paper is mostly carbon, hydrogen and oxygen - carbohydrates.An alpha particle is big, it has 2 protons and 2 neutrons - same as a Helium nucleus.(Note: this will apply to normal alpha particles from radioactive decay, with energies from a few keV to several Mev, and does not apply to the high energy alpha particles found in cosmic rays)The alpha particle will fly into the paper, and disturb a number of molecules, possibly breaking chemical bonds. It will get close to the nucleus of the various atoms, and will be repelled by electrostatic force (both the nucleus and the alpha particle have a positive charge) This will scatter the alpha particle.Some will bounce out and be absorbed in the air. Most will stay in the paper, and grab electrons to become Helium atoms. This electrostatic repulsion will also move the nucleus of the atom in the paper, likely breaking many more chemical bonds.If the paper was living tissue the biological effects would be huge. A rough analogy would be to have a large number of bowling pins lined up in a grid.An alpha particle is not like a bowling ball, but like a baseball or cricket ball thrown at the pins. It will cause some to fall over. In tissue, a large number of chemical bonds will be broken, and they will then reform, often in strange ways.Unlike neutrons, it very unlikely that alpha particles will make the paper radioactive. Photons, mostly in the infrared range will be emitted from the bond breaking.Alpha particles are very dangerous INSIDE the human body. On the skin surface, most will be stopped by the dead layer of skin on top. Outside the body, most can be stopped by a sheet of paper. Or a layer of sunscreen. Or a Tyvek bunnysuit.There are very few things that can go from being very dangerous to a minor issuewhen there such flimsy separation and containment.Pay attention to the Biological effects & history of discovery sections.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_particle

This may not be the answer you're looking for, since I'm not actually an employee of The New York Times and have never set foot in the building. But in January 2013, I worked for two days as an intern for Will Shortz, crossword editor for the NYT.I had been constructing crosswords for the NYT for a little over a year, and had had a few email correspondences with Will in that time. I heard that he sometimes took college-age constructors as unpaid interns, so I wrote him an email. He already had someone lined up for the winter, but asked if I could come in for two days when his intern was away. I eagerly accepted, he gave me his contact info, and on the 16th I rode the MetroNorth up to Pleasantville.Will greeted me at the door and asked me to take my shoes off when I came in. He was very warm and welcoming the entire time I was there and seemed to be pleased by my company. I noticed that there were crossword submissions addressed to the NYT building at his door and he told me they forward all the crossword mail along to him so he can work from home. It quickly became clear that the entire NYT crossword empire is orchestrated by this one man in his modest home in upstate New York.It wasn't until he showed me around the house that I came to realize he lived alone. I had never heard anything about a Mrs. Shortz or kids, but I hadn't thought much of it. There were no pictures around the house of women or children, only photos of Will and his various table tennis partners—table tennis, he told me, was his primary passion, even above crosswords. The rest of the art and pictures around the house were mostly crossword- and NYT-related: a political cartoon from the 1920s, a framed original copy of the world's first crossword, various other puzzles and word games.He led me upstairs to his office, which would more aptly be described as his crossword room. On one desk was a stack of manila envelopes filled with crosswords, and some more piles of crosswords on either side. Another desk had a computer with a PDF of a crossword puzzle open, a phone, a printer, and many more crosswords.By far the most notable feature of this room, to a crossword addict like me, was the library. The bookshelves were filled with such a perfectly strange collection of reference works and important books, about in the proportion that each subject appears in NYT crossword puzzles. There was a baseball encyclopedia, a giant Shakespeare reference, a book of important figures in American history, a Bible and a handful of accompanying guides, a collection of important poems, a fat atlas which presumably has all of those vowelly European rivers like Ouse and Aare, a very impressive collection of dictionaries, and much more that I don't remember.I told him I liked his library and he said, "Yeah... I really had a leg up on everyone else until about 1999."For the first portion of the day, we edited the crosswords that were running about two weeks in the future. We went through the submission sheets, marking off clues that didn't work or were the wrong difficulty, and then went back and edited clues. We spent a lot of time just brainstorming for clue ideas, with Will's personal judgment being the ultimate decider of what clues work and don't. I remember he didn't like my clue idea "Tear paper?" for TISSUE because tissues aren't really paper. (We went with "Cold comfort?")I felt a little bit of an old guard–new guard thing going on with the way we wrote and researched clues. For the entry KAT, he was ready to go with another standard Kit Kat or Krazy Kat clue before I suggested Kat Dennings, of whom he hadn't heard. For each factcheck, he would browse through his bookshelf for the right reference, thumb through the index for the relevant term, and locate the information. I would google or wiki it and then wait patiently to compare our results.We talked on speakerphone for a little bit with Frank A. Longo, who had playtested the crosswords for the next week and was giving feedback on clues he thought needed changing. Frank was very specific and litigious about the wording of clues, often taking issue with playful clues that got a little too loose with conventions. Will often stuck up for these clues, saying he'd rather make for an enjoyable solve than follow the guidelines strictly. I didn't contribute much at this point, but after the editing was complete I typeset the puzzles for the next week into the format they'd appear in the paper.For lunch, he made himself a soup and I took out my bag lunch. He asked me to choose music from his extensive collection of 60s vinyl records, so we listened to Donovan on an old-fashioned record player. Something about the house felt like not much had changed in a few decades.We talked at lunch about my major and what classes I'd taken at college, and touched briefly on the subject of his time at college. He is, as far as I know, the only person to have ever majored in "enigmatology"—the science of puzzles.As I was finishing up lunch he showed me two physical puzzles, one where I had to get two metal balls into corresponding slots and one where I had to remove a wooden block from a slot without touching it. I got the impression that he doesn't entertain new guests all too often and was eager to show off his various trinkets.For the second portion of the day, we sat on his couch downstairs and went through new puzzle submissions. I was less useful here, as it really came down to whether or not he liked the puzzle. He would go through every word of the puzzle and mark off those he particularly liked (WHAT A JOKE, BUZZKILL, etc.) with a check and those he particularly disliked (ATE A LOT, ERG, etc.) with a dash. My main role was saying if I was familiar with certain terms he was unfamiliar with (the only one I remember is ZZZQUIL), and maybe once or twice I told him to consider a submission I liked that he was ready to toss.A bit after 5 he drove me back to the MetroNorth stop, on his way to go play table tennis. I came back the next day and we did mostly the same activities throughout the day, with a little less editing and a little more reviewing submissions. I could imagine his work getting rather tiring rather quickly. He must like crosswords a lot to do this every day.Just before I left the second time I asked if he played the iPhone game Letterpress, which I was addicted to at the time. I thought it would be pretty great to have a game going with Will Shortz. He said he hadn't heard of the particular game but that he in general feels that he tends not to enjoy word games that much because "they feel too much like work."