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A waiter comes over and says he's setting a table for us. We invite Frank to join us, since it's unclear whether he's eaten tonight, but he politely declines. He says he'll come sit with us later on, but he won't eat.
The tables are "owned" by regulars and "no one gives them up," says Rao's owner Frank Pellegrino. "In every three-month period, I see all my clients. And now I'm dealing with their children and grandchildren." In the field of ship design and design of other floating structures, a response amplitude operator ( RAO) is an engineering statistic, or set of such statistics, that are used to determine the likely behavior of a ship when operating at sea. Known by the acronym of RAO, response amplitude operators are usually obtained from models of proposed ship designs tested in a model basin, or from running specialized CFD computer programs, often both. RAOs are usually calculated for all ship motions and for all wave headings. Congressman! Does Hillary have a shot?" Frank asks U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, who represents the 9th District of New Jersey and is with a group that was given a table by its regular owner. "Bill is a Democrat like I am," Frank tells me. He points out his picture with Hillary Clinton on the wall, alongside the other photos of celebrities who have dined here. I say I don't think I've ever met a congressman out in the world. "Come here! You'll meet them!" he says.
This was in January, and Frank said, 'Can you come here May 6?' I didn't know anything. So he writes the date on a business card and hands it to me and says, 'Two things just happened: One, you got a reservation at Rao's which is no small deal. Two, you can always get a reservation at Rao's. I love you. [Abbot makes a kissing sound.] Both cheeks." The Orcina convention is to use the amplitude of response (in length units for surge, sway, heave, in degrees for roll, pitch, yaw) per unit wave amplitude, and to use the phase lag from the time the wave crest passes the RAO origin until the maximum positive excursion is reached (in other words, the phase origin being at the RAO origin). Mathematically, this is given by Just think about what happened while you were here," he tells me, putting his hand on my forearm for emphasis. "You met my tailor. You met Tony Tantillo. You met Tony Abbot." (I met a trio of Tonys, if you include Tony the bartender.) "You met all these people. You met the congressman. You're seeing Rao's." And because it's so bright, which Frank says is because "it adds to the energy of the room," I really am seeing everything.
However, OrcaFlex can accept RAO data using a wide range of different conventions, so you can input your RAO data in its original form and simply tell OrcaFlex what conventions apply to those data. In the old days, Abbot says, Frank used to open the reservation book on a quarterly basis and when he came by to get his table assignment, Donald Trump was waiting in line outside the door with other regulars. RAOs are effectively transfer functions used to determine the effect that a sea state will have upon the motion of a ship through the water, and therefore, for example, whether or not (in the case of cargo vessels) the addition of cargo to the vessel will require measures to be taken to improve stability and prevent the cargo from shifting within the vessel. Generation of extensive RAOs at the design phase allows shipbuilders to determine the modifications to a design that may be required for safety reasons (i.e., to make the design robust and resistant to capsizing or sinking in highly adverse sea conditions) or to improve performance (e.g., improve top speed, fuel consumption, stability in rough seas). RAOs are computed in tandem with the generation of a hydrodynamic database, which is a model of the effects of water pressure upon the ship's hull under a wide variety of flow conditions. Together, the RAOs and hydrodynamic database provide (inasmuch as this is possible within modelling and engineering constraints) certain assurances about the behavior of a proposed ship design. They also allow the designer to dimension the ship or structure so it will hold up to the most extreme sea states it will likely be subjected to (based on sea state statistics). Anthony! This is Anthony Abbot," Frank says. "He's a member of Stanwich, a great golf club. He invites me to play golf with him." Abbot went on a golf trip with 11 other guys 20 years ago. Frank was one of them, and when names were drawn out of a hat, he and Abbot were matched up.
Rao's Menu
The first thing I noticed when we walked in was how bright the place is. It may be the brightest fine-dining establishment I've ever been to. The second thing I noticed was all the Christmas decorations (a story I'd read said they stay up year-round). Every chair at every table was full and the bar was crowded. An older bespectacled man sat on a stool in the corner, surveying the room, and motioned to suggest we sit at the two stools open next to him. Finding the forces on the ship when it is forced to oscillate in still water conditions. The forces are divided into:
One deuce," Emma—who's in graduate school and until recently worked part-time as a restaurant hostess—corrects me. In the above, "Ship" must be interpreted widely to also include other forms of floating structures. The obvious problem in the above method is the neglection of viscous forces which contribute heavily in modes of motion like surge and roll. I am that old! I could be your father!" says Frank, who will celebrate his 70th birthday this year. Sciortino, who recently celebrated his 50th birthday at Rao's in Los Angeles, gets a table about once a month, but the days vary. Tonight he has a Monday. Next month he has a Thursday. Like the rest of the table owners, he gets his assignments at the beginning of the year. He's been coming here—"coming home," as he calls it—for 25 years. I am married 46 years," he says. "Same woman. She's great. I love my wife. 46 years. Does she come here? No. I don't want her here. When I come here, I work. What am I going to do? Sit with her at the bar? I have people I have to talk to, things I have to do."Good guy. I like him. He's okay. I could sit with Peter King and say what I like and what I don't like. I'm a political junkie," Frank says. There's a letter from President George H.W. Bush on the wall. Frank doesn't discriminate. Additionally, RAOs are amplitude operators which enables to determine amplitude of motion based on a unitary wave. They are superposable, thus effective on sea state based probability solutions. As it turns out, Frank sang in a group called the Holidaes in the 1960s. "I was an old doo-wop guy," he says. "I get Billy Joel, Sting, Jimmy Fallon in here. Jimmy Fallon loves to sing doo-wops! So whenever he's here, I start singing, and boom, he jumps up and starts singing. And before you know it the whole room is going nuts." The Diffraction forces, which are pressures that occur due to the disturbances in the water because of a body being present.
And this is Tony Tantillo. He's on CBS every day, cooking with his daughter," Frank says, introducing us to another friend who's come up to the bar. "Listen, Tantillo. I gotta tell you. You're too good-looking. You're too handsome." Wave load RAOs do not completely define the vessel motion as do displacement RAOs: they merely define the force and moment which a wave exerts on the vessel. OrcaFlex uses these forces and moments, together with any other loads on the vessel and data on the vessel's mass and inertia, to determine the vessel motion from its equation of motion. The coordinate system used to define vessel motions and, in particular, which direction is positive. That is, whether surge is positive forward or aft, whether heave is positive up or down and whether pitch is positive bow up or bow down. Frank looked around the room. "That first table there, they gave their table to this group at the bar. These guys are all executives from PepsiCo. If you have a table, you can give it to your friends, your business associates, or to a charity auction. I had Bobby Flay, Michael Romano, a whole bunch of big chefs last week and I didn' t know they're coming. I never know who's coming in. That's what makes it wonderful. It's serendipity. There's no grand design or plan. The only caveat is if you're not going to use your table and no one else is going to use that table, that's when you call me." And you would be protected," he tells her. "I am a gentleman and I only allow gentlemen. If anybody is stupid, I would be right there. I only allow ladies and gentlemen. I don't want anything else."The system used to define wave direction. In OrcaFlex 0° means waves approaching the vessel from astern and 90° means waves coming from the starboard side, but if a different convention applies to your data then you must allow for this when entering the data. The RAO is a transfer function that is only defined when the ship motions can be assumed to be linear. The above forces can then be assembled into an equation of motion:
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