A cool picture and an interesting story

Bruce Holmes on a project he worked on at NASA in the early days of computers.

The heritage of the picture starts under Jimmy Carter's Administration -- not a fact that would leap off the page for most of us. Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia, brought to Washington D.C. a person who spent some time at NASA Headquarters, advocating for research that could help farmers with a vexing problem involving aerial applications (or crop dusting in the vernacular). The problem was that the flow behind the aircraft wing disrupts the desired even spread of seeds or chemicals and can carry spray to places that cause trouble (streams, for example).