I just spent an hour looking over past comments I received on various posts.  Each one contained an inexplicable word.  I asked the person who wrote the comment to explain the seemingly inexplicable.  I hope I don’t embarrass anyone, especially me.  Maybe they were just typos.  I didn’t ask about the ones that I thought were actual typos.  The people I did ask can refuse to answer.  That would be fine.  I just had to ask.

Having written four novels and numerous technical reports and memos, I know that editing out mistakes is a lot of work.  I once changed the sex of a character in one of my books without noticing.  A friend caught it before I published it, thank goodness.  You may wonder how I could do such a thing, loosing track of a charater’s sex.  It was easy.  The character was a dog…I mean an actual dog, one with fur, fangs, claws, and all that.

And now I notice a typo in one of my attempts to get a “word” explained!

There is always something left open in my mind.  I hope it’s not a real hole.

I don’t remember what made me think of this lately, but I’m still wondering about something.  In a gas mixture, who wins out:  gravity or diffusion?  Or possibly, do they each have their portion of the win?

Hey!  I’m not a physicist.  I’m an engineer.  This is actually a real problem.  Somebody must have the answer, or do they?

Over thirty years ago, this question actually showed up in my work as an engineer.  I had a clever answer for it, but now I would like as real an answer as possible — just out of curiosity.

Way back many years ago, I was working on the design of an oxygen generator that is now on U.S. submarines.  It was a technology that we bought in the middle of its development from another company.  It involved water electrolysis to produce separate streams of the two components of water:  oxygen and hydrogen.  In that sense it was nothing new, but the company that was developing it for the Navy seemed in the Navy’s eyes to be a bit slow in bringing the design out of the development stage and into production.

The new generator was a replacement for the previous design then in use on submarines, one developed by another company.  (By the way, I’m leaving out company names because there is no bad guy in this story.  And, it is not relevant in this context anyway.)

The new design operated at 3,000 psi using distilled water with no electrolyte.  And then it was noticed that there was another market for commercial low pressure generators as well, separate from the Navy contract.  And that is where the problem arose.  In the design of the Navy generator, I had taken great care to make sure the design was safe to use.  I didn’t want the thing to blow up.  Why would it do that?  Well, if you allow oxygen gas and hydrogen gas to somehow contact each other (after they have been separated) at the design pressure of 3,000 psi, there would be an explosion…no flame or spark required.  That danger decreases with decreasing pressure, but it is never far away.  In the case of the Navy generator, one of the design requirements that I insisted on was that the worst possible explosion had to be contained within the equipment itself.

And then one day, sometime after I was through with the design of the Navy unit, a different design group had developed a low pressure generator for a commercial purpose.  Unfortunately, there had been a slight lack of safety concerns in that design.  The design allowed hydrogen and oxygen to contact each other.  First, a single failure of a single barrier allowed the contact, and second, a catalyst was used in the system and had spread pretty much everywhere.  The presence of the catalyst caused the mixture to explode even though the pressure was only slightly above normal atmospheric pressure.  The third flaw was that the commercial system was not built to withstand an internal explosion.

I don’t remember how I got involved in the investigation process, but there I was.  One side of the argument was that leakage of hydrogen  was OK once we solved the catalyst problem, which was doable.  The problem that still existed was the possibility of leakage of hydrogen out of the system into the room.  To some, that didn’t seem to be a problem worth talking about.  After all, hydrogen is lighter than air, and it would simple rise to the top of the room and slowly dissipate given enough time.

And thus the question arises, is gravity the main player here, or is it diffusion?  Obviously, most of the people in the room thought that gravity would overcome diffusion, and the hydrogen would rise to the highest point in the room and not be a hazard…but would it really?  (For now we’ll ignore the question of the hazard it might be  at ceiling level.)

So, just considering the question of gravity overcoming diffusion, I wasn’t about to pin the safety of the system on something we obviously did not understand, but how to convince others?

Several of the attendees were smokers (people smoked in the office back then).  So I proposed that we run an experiment.  Everyone was to put out their cigarettes, pipes, and cigars.  I would go get a bottle of hydrogen.  I would open it on the table in front of us and let some out (avoiding suffocation with too much hydrogen).  We would then give the hydrogen time to collect at the ceiling level.  AND FINALLY, light’m up boys!  If they were willing to do that, I would go along with their opinions on the safety of hydrogen leaks.

Wisely, they caved.

And here I sit many years later, still wondering who won:  gravity, diffusion, or just a clever argument that assumed that in then end, nothing is what it looks like.  I’ve done a little searching on the web, but to no avail.  It seems to be that there is a consensus that in a 1 g gravitional field, gravity loses big time.

The right answer appears to be more like:  Why risk it?   Put your money, or in this case “your life,” where your mouth is!

And here is the joke of it all — I mean you have to ask —

So, does hot air really rise?

Saw this last week.  I’ve pretty much always liked James Bond, both as a movie and a movie character…not much in this case.  It appears that “politically correct” has finally taken over.  In addition, in the normal attempt to show Bond as vulnerable but triumphant, vulnerable seems to have just about found its game.  I know that Daniel Craig is no comic, but some of the old Bond humor would be a relief.  Oh, also get a new writer…or better yet, an old one.

And since when does M get to be a hero?

And whatever happened to Q?  Another great character gets a brain wash!

Come on people!  You can do better than this!  “If it ain’t broke…don’t fix it.”

I watched this yesterday on disk with my wife, son, and his oldest son.  As disaster movies go, it was up there with the best.  Pretty well cast.  Pretty well written.  Pretty well directed.  No complaints about the acting, good job.  Plenty of action from start to finish.  Excellent special affects.

I’m not a geologist, but even as an engineer, I could see some faults in it here and there (a little play on words can’t hurt).  However, for the type of movie it is, those things don’t matter much.

If you like disaster movies, watch it if you missed it in theaters.

However, given the now often up close news coverage of real disasters, it takes a lot to match reality.  I happened to be having trouble sleeping at the time of the Japanese psunami.  I found it live on TV by accident.  It wasn’t the visual spectacle of fiction, but the realization of the actual reality dwarfs even the most spectacular disaster movie!

One of my favorites.  We only had a VHS copy, so ROKU came in handy so that we could see it in HD.  Watched it again a week ago.  Been awhile.

I’m not a lawyer, so the realistic level of what happens is not mine to judge.  However the story is strong right up to the climax.  It is military.  So, if you aren’t into military films, then you may not like it.  However, it is not about war.  It is a legal battle.

Writing, acting, directing, and casting are all exellent!  I highly recommend it!

I saw this last week with my wife.  A nice little comedy with a human interest theme.  Just generally nice people being nice to each other.  No mystery.  No violence.  No adventure.  No scenery.  Well written.  Well acted.  Well directed.  Musical score — can’t remember.  Not belly laugh material, just mild fun.

I get a lot of comments that are determined to be SPAM by the WordPress software.  Rather than getting involved, I simply delete them.  However, a few of them are complimentary, and I don’t like ignoring honest comments.  So, for those of you who are sincere in your comments, please know that I appreciate your words.

Before I go on talking about the pitfalls of dealing with data, I thought I would say a few things about writing  for this web site.   The other day I was thinking that I should really name it “My Own Two Cents dot com.”  Writing is a egocentric act in many ways.  If you keep it to yourself, I guess it falls out of that category, but doing what I do here does at times seem rather self-centered.  So, I looked up myowntwocents.com in a search engine.  I figured someone must have a site by that name.  Turns out that there is no such web site…but I could buy the name for $2495.00.  Now that was funny, to me anyway.  TWO CENTS would only cost me $2495.00!

So, why do I write these blogs for all to see?

I write because I enjoy the flow of what passes for logic in my brain down onto paper, the written word.  We all spend our lives wondering why most people don’t truly appreciate our thoughts about things, and the older we get, the longer the list becomes.  This blog and my novels are my list.  The blog is free and the novels are cheap.  Read what you want.  Then make your own list.

*****

So, back to talking about my logic and how it applies to data.  Feel free to comment.  I refuse to roast criticism, although I may comment back politely.  Don’t worry about embarrassment, The Novel Slide Rule doesn’t get many visitors, but the visitor list does cover a very wide range of countries.  That also surprises me.

*****

“Watch Out!”

If someone says that to you, are your senses heightened?  Now let’s say someone asks you to collect observations for them.  Are you liable to see things that you never noticed before?  There lies the problem.

A number of years ago a government agency that we all know was brought in to investigate a particular set of employee complaints about working conditions that seemed to be causing illnesses in the employees.  It was in an area that was of interest to me, so I read their report.  The report contained one rather silly mathematical mistake, but we can forget that for now.  It is what the report failed to contain that is of interest.

The level of complaints included those recorded both before and after the agency was on site working with the employees.  However, the report never presented the data as a function of time.  And as a function of time, it looked like this.  Before the agency came on site, the level was five complaints per month.  While the agency was on site, the level was ten complaints per month.  After the agency left, the level immediately dropped back to five complaints per month.

Now you can read anything you like into that, but be careful.  It is just data without explanation.  To its credit, the agency did a thorough check of possible causes, and no cause was ever found for any of the complaints.  Guessing is not an option at this point.

I have witnessed similar situations for other types of reported observations at least twice.  In both cases, the level of observations slowly returned to “normal” in about a year.  The observers in question were aware at the beginning that the levels were out of proportion to “normal”.  How did they know this?  Probably this can be blamed on two causes:  word of mouth rumors and the fact that they were asked to specifically look for the problem.  Eventually the excitement of the problem grew dim in the minds of the observers, and it disappeared.

I’m sure the world of psychology has already noticed this effect and written extensively about it, but I’m afraid that general data taking by public or private observations doesn’t always keep that in mind, maybe seldom keeps that in mind.

So, be careful how data is gathered by observation.   Try hard to keep the human mind out of the picture.

Just remember how many times you said in anger to a friend or loved one, “You always do that!”  No they don’t!  You didn’t really keep track.  You just think you did.  Prove it with objective data, or better yet, cut them some slack!

Extrapolation:  The riskiest form of prediction.

It has been said that when you are afraid that people will think you are a fool, don’t open your mouth and remove all doubt.  That is precisely the risk involved in making a prediction based upon someone else’s theory, especially if you do not fully understand the theory.

To that end I will tell you a true story.  I have left out some of the names as my intent is not to embarrass.

The propagation of disease by the inhaling of airborne particles of the disease is of no small interest.  And I will tell you up front that it is not my area of expertise…but when has that ever stopped me.

A colleague of mine was studying airborne disease propagation, and I kept hearing about the “Wells-Riley” equation.  It is an equation that looks at propagation as a process of inhaling disease carrying particles in quantities called, oddly enough, “quanta”.  The theory is that if you inhale a single quanta of diseased particles, you will get the disease.  I’m purposely leaving out two important issues for the moment, but don’t worry about them for now.

OK, so along comes the equation.  It’s relatively simple, it’s elegant, and unfortunately for a particular group of researchers, it was beguiling.

Do you remember the anthrax scare?  Sure you do.  There were stories of letters and packages being delivered by mail.  In them was a powder which usually was harmless, but was thought initially to be anthrax, a deadly source of disease.  One such incident involved what I think was the main Washington D.C. Post Office.  This then became the focus of a now published study.  The study was done for good reason.  There were unanswered questions about how difficult it was to provide sufficient protection against the threat of anthrax, and since that post office had actually been attacked, it appeared to be an ideal case to study using the Wells-Riley equation.  Sounds perfect, doesn’t it.

When my collegue first showed me the equation, it looked strangely familiar.  So, I looked at a statistics book and confirmed that the equation was actually a form of the Poisson Distribution equation for the probability of having one or more encounters with a single item that is randomly distributed.  So, here is the first thing I neglected to tell you.  In their original paper, to their credit, Wells and Riley mentioned that very fact.  We’ll get back to this.

The next thing I didn’t tell you is that each type of disease is thought to require a different number of separate particles (identical particles in theory) in order to form a single “quanta”.  That is, not all diseases have a single particle quanta.  Most require several particles to form a quanta.  The only disease with a single particle quanta as far as I know is tuberculosis, and as I said. this is not my field of expertise.  I have heard that the common cold requires a few hundred particles before a quanta is reached.  Anthrax supposedly requires thousands of particles to make up one quanta.  This is important to know because the Wells-Riley equation only works for a single particle quanta.  If it takes more than a single particle to make up one quanta, the equation has to be modified to include more terms.

And there lies the problem.  The Wells-Riley theory freely admits that it only covers the one particle quanta problem.  If you are dealing with a disease that requires thousands of particles to form one quanta, you need to add thousands of separate terms of the Poisson Distribution equation to run the proper calculation.  As it turns out, the conclusion reached by the anthrax researchers was off by a very substantial amount for just this reason.  As mentioned above, anthrax requires thousands of separate particles to constitute one quanta.

A foot note for this is that no one seemed to be sure at that time how many particles are in a quanta for any given disease or any type of particle that carries the disease.  I would also guess that a quanta for one person is not necessarily a quanta for some other person.  So at best, you can only look at this from the standpoint of the “average” person, whoever that is.

As I said up front, this is not my area of expertise.  I presume that the study of disease propagation has moved on since this incident.  This is just an example of one of the pitfalls of dealing with data where adequate theories have yet to be promulgated.  “All that glitters is not gold.”

It happened around 1970. An exact date is beyond my memory, but I can tell you the following.

Our department within Hamilton Standard consisted of about two hundred people during the many years of the development of the Apollo Portable Life Support System (PLSS) and the environmental control system for the Lunar Excursion Module. Most of the two hundred were engineers, male engineers. True, we did employ one female engineer, but not in an engineering position. She had received her degree in the 1940’s as I recall, and she appeared satisfied with the type of work that she did. Why was she our only female engineer? I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t think it was a lack of appreciation of the engineering abilities of women. The fact was that there simply weren’t many women in the profession at that time.  And what a time it was.

Our first hiring in the new era of a young woman engineer right out of college happened after we had finished our designs for Apollo, made the hardware, tested it, and provided it to NASA. In fact, it had already gone to the Moon. So that left just about exactly an acre of space without cubicles, a sea of desks and drawing boards containing no computers or even calculators, awash in engineers that had no contract left to support them. We then did what any upstanding company would do under the circumstances.  We started laying people off.

By the time layoffs had run their course, the leavings looked pretty bleak. Coffee mug stained empty desks were everywhere.  Those two hundred people had done a spectacular job of putting the first man on the Moon for their country, and now the country was done with them. It was truly a sad thing to see.

However, as most upstanding companies will do under such circumstances, our department went hunting for new work.  Slowly it began to happen. New work started to emerge, but it was too late for those who were transferred to other parts of the company or who had been layed off. And one day, into this sparse atmosphere, walked our first female engineer of the new era. I never met her. I never knew her name.  Why, you ask?  Read on!

This young woman had hired on to work on a project funded by the new EPA. It was that and the fact that her brother was nearby in a school for either the blind or the deaf, just another detail I don’t remember. She had accepted the offer from Hamilton based upon those two items.

The story gets kind of bizarre at this point. Her new boss, being one of us, a man that is, blindly insensitive to the aesthetics that please women, set her down at a desk in the middle of several other empty desks. He then piled half the desk high with documents having nothing to do with the EPA contract, told her to study them, and informed her that the EPA contract was delayed for a while, and she would have to do other work instead. He then turned and walked away. And just to top it all off, the desk was filthy.

I’m sure none of this was done on purpose. They would have done the same, maybe worse, if they just hired a young man. And the young man would simply have said, “OK.” Ah, but this was no simple case. This person was a young woman. The very next day I watched from my desk, maybe thirty feet away, as two guards escorted her out of our one acre wasteland of a department, never to be seen again. Goodbye, whoever you are! It was one of those “What just happened?” moments.

Later that day, one of our young male engineers stopped by my desk. If anyone would have the whole story, he would. He told me about her desire to work on the EPA contract and her desire to be near her brother. And he said in amazement that she had been displeased with what she had experienced upon arrival less than twenty-four hours earlier and had quit right then and there.

And then he said a curious thing. “If it happened to a man, he wouldn’t quit.  We don’t have the guts!”

I went on the air in 1954 and became known as KN2JOY — K, because I lived in the United States; N, because I was a novice; 2, because I lived in New York State; and JOY, because the FCC must have thought I was happy, and I was. I was awarded a license to transmit radio signals by the FCC.  And “JOY” just happened to be the next set of letters on their list.  The friend who did it with me got “JOZ”.

I was fourteen years old, and I was a ham radio operator. It hadn’t been too many years after our home phone number was simply 1220, four digits, that was all. There were no area codes then. You needed an operator to get long distance, and long distance was not all that long, but when KN2JOY went on the air, anything was possible…the whole world could hear me, and I could hear them, at least in theory, and that was exciting.  As confirmation of my contacts  I would send out what is called a QSL card.  Here is the first one I ever received back.

I didn’t invent radio, but I felt like I had. I had built two Heathkits: an AT1 transmitter and an AR2 receiver. I had put up a long wire antenna that was about twelve feet above the ground. I had a simple telegraph key, and I was connected to the largest “grid” on planet Earth — RADIO. A year later I passed another test and became simply K2JOY, a ham with a General Class license.

I built another transmitter using money I made during the summers, a Johnson Viking Ranger, one beautiful, top of the line unit.

And then life began to happen. My mother became ill. My dad needed money because of it. I sold the Ranger and gave him the money. My mother died, and life changed. Ham radio fell out of my life, and several years later I was an officer in the USAF and a new husband.

A lot of years followed that, years without a license to transmit. And then in 2002, at the encouragement of a friend, I became known on air as K7WST with an Extra Class amateur radio license this time. I’m not obsessive about it, but even without an obsession, I have enjoyed contacts with other ham radio operators all around the globe, not just the East coast. My antennas now reach sixty feet above the ground, and my first signals as K7WST are now light years out into space and well behind those of that old K2JOY guy.

The first reaction among many people is, “Why bother? Today we have cell phones and the internet. You can contact anyone on the planet with no effort whatsoever.” It’s a fair question. And it represents the point where those of us in amateur radio say, “They just don’t get it, do they.” Well actually, millions of people do get it. There are literally millions of people around the world who are licensed amateurs. In the U.S. alone, one in every four hundred people are licensed hams. In my town of just a little over twenty thousand people, there are one hundred and seventy-one licensed amateur radio operators. Given that, there are at least one hundred and seventy-one different reasons for why they do it. Some because they like the gadgets, some because they like the challenge of making contacts around the globe, some because they want to help their community during times of disaster. Some of them are gregarious, extroverted people. Some are introverted. It doesn’t matter. You can be any type of person and enjoy amateur radio. You can be the most private person in the world and still like contacting other stations thousands of miles away.  And come on, do you really know someone in Bora Bora who is willing to accept your phone call or email?  You can bet there is a ham there who will listen to your morse code!

You can design and build your own equipment and antennas, or you can buy those same types of equipment and antennas from a myriad of companies in the amateur radio business. The ways you can lead your ham radio life are nearly endless.

Admittedly, amateur radio requires your learning about many technical issues, but you don’t have to be an engineer or scientist to do it. Plenty of people of all ages and backgrounds get licensed. There are numerous cases of children under ten years old who have licenses. And what do they receive in return? They learn about the sun, the atmosphere, even the ground and the oceans. They learn that you can bounce signals off just about anything: the moon, buildings, mountains, the Northern and Southern Lights. They learn about geography, time zones, sun up, and sun down.

And if you like competitive events, amateur radio has many, many contests for a wide ranging list of interests.

So, let’s look at amateur radio in more detail.

What Does a Station Look Like?

In its simplest form, all you need us a transmitter, a receiver, and an antenna. Nowadays, transmitters are usually built as one unit, a transceiver. Here is how I started back in 2002.

The transceiver is a used ICOM IC-737. At the time I had been awarded AC7VM for a call sign, but having an Extra Class license, I was allowed to pick a different unused call sign. I chose K7WST. Why that? Well, it had some advantages. First, it is rhythmic for the hand when sending it by Morse code. Second, WST are my wife’s maiden initials. I could have waited to get a call with just two letters after the seven, but that takes a lot of waiting.

The antenna was a GAP (a manufacturer) multi-band (meaning it worked for several different frequency ranges) vertical. Vertical antennas tend to pick up more noise, but they send your signal out at a low angle, which usually gets you longer distances. And in fact, my longest distance contact was made with that antenna. I still use it today.

My station today has picked up a few more transmitters, receivers, a new transceiver, and two long wire antennas. I won’t go into all the details, but here is what my station looks like now.  It’s actually the QSL card I use at present.

What can you do with an amateur radio station?

We’ve touched on this subject, but there is a lot more to learn. I, for instance, pretty much only use Morse code. I could say that I do that because my wife is related to Samuel F. B. Morse, which she is, but that’s not why I do it. I do it because I like sending code. It’s fun. It also tends to go longer distances and still be understandable. It doesn’t take as much power as voice transmission, and it doesn’t take as much bandwidth (the spread of frequencies that comprise your signal).

When I got my license, you had to know Morse code. Now you don’t. So you can just use your voice if you like. I made a contact with someone in Brazil by voice, with only five watts! And that brings up another issue. How much power can you use? There is a limit, a legal limit. It’s fifteen hundred watts. That’s plenty. I would guess that many, if not most hams use a hundred watts or less. Most transceivers are built for one hundred watts. If you limit yourself to a maximum of five watts, it is recognized in the ham world as “QRP”, meaning low power. Some contests and other awards require that you use the QRP mode.

One of the more interesting awards that is not a contest is set up by a British group, IOTA, Islands On The Air. The idea is to contact all of the saltwater surrounded islands on their list. Check them out at rsgbiota.org on the web.

Besides contests and awards programs, you can participate in disaster support, collect contacts with stations at a great distance from you (DX’ing), experiment with radio designs, or just find a good friend and talk.

How does your signal go around the world?

No doubt you have heard of the ionosphere. If you haven’t, I’ll give you a simplified explanation. It is a series of layers containing ionized (electrically charged) particles (electrons, atoms, and molecules). It is at a height of about 30 miles to 600 miles above sea level. It changes constantly, especially from day to night, but also as a result of the activities of the sun. At any rate, it was amateur radio operators that found they could bounce signals off the ionosphere, thus getting the signals to travel well beyond the horizon. The distance from a station to the place where it’s signal hits the earth again after bouncing off the ionosphere is typically around two thousand miles. And it can then bounce back up and continue bouncing around the globe. Under the right set of conditions, it will actually bounce all the way around and back to the originating station. Conclusion? You can potentially contact anyone anywhere on the face of the Earth!

OK, there are a few problems with this story. Storms interfere, the state of the sun determines the strength of the ionosphere, and of course, someone has to be listening and hear your transmission. If there were no challenge to doing it, if it were easy, why bother? Challenges in life are part of the fun. You will find, however, that it won’t take long before you have contacted any number of far off places.

At very high and ultra high frequencies, especially the latter, things don’t bounce off the ionosphere well. They go right on through, but you can still bounce your signal off the Moon. True, it takes specialized equipment, but many hams do it.

This is only a broad look at how radio waves propagate. As you get more into amateur radio, you’ll learn a lot more.

Acronyms and Abbreviations 

Probably more than any other sport, hobby, or profession, except medicine, amateur radio has a long list of specialized terms, acronyms, and abbreviations. And there is a good reason for it all, brevity on air. In addition to all that, it carries with it the terminology of mechanical, electrical, and electronic engineering, and now, computing. Ham radio covers a wide range of technologies, anything from the mechanical aspects of putting up large towers capable of withstanding storms to the use of computers to operate transceivers and other devices.

Obviously, this booklet is too small to provide explanations for all the terminology you may encounter, and you shouldn’t be worried about it anyway. You’ll learn as you go, and you don’t have to know it all, just as much as you need. It’s always easy to look things up. The ARRL website and others can provide lists of abbreviations and acronyms that are particular to ham radio.

Clubs

There are clubs galore. They are great places to find help. They are great places to find like minded hams. Probably the mother of them all is the Amateur Radio Relay League, the ARRL. You can find them at www.arrl.org. They publish a monthly magazine, “QST”. Yearly membership in the ARRL is not very expensive, and you get QST monthly as part of the deal, either as a paper magazine or an ezine, or both.

Without looking very hard, you will find local clubs in your area.

Reading Material 

There seems to be no end of books and magazines about ham radio. The ARRL publishes a pretty long list, including a set of very helpful books on how to get ready to pass the needed tests.  And then there is the internet. Go there and go crazy!

$$$?

Money, it’s always money! OK, so it can be expensive or cheap. There is used equipment all over the place for good prices, including on the Internet. Just learn first. Get to know other hams. Their advice will be a great help. Virtually all hams are happy to be helpful. If you have only a little money to spend, you can always find what you need, even if it means fixing a transceiver that no longer works, building a kit, or waiting until you find the best deal. Antennas can be the cheapest part of the whole thing, or you can spend until you’re blue in the face. At any rate, cheap or expensive, the main ingredient is time and effort. All you really need is enthusiasm! 

Go for it! It will change your life!

Here are are few websites that will come in handy:

www.arrl.org

www.qrz.com

http://www.dxsummit.fi

www.ac6v.com

http://swap.qth.com

http://www.rsgbiota.org/index.php

During a sunny day in the summer, it is hard to beat the views of the Seattle/Puget Sound area.  Night time is another story.  True you can see the moon come up over Puget Sound or the Cascade Mountains, depending on where you are in the area.  And it is many times quite beautiful.  Its reflection on the sound at night can be stunning also.

So here’s the problem.  It never seems to be truly clear at night around the Puget Sound.  There is always some haze or clouds.  I remember sleeping outdoors on a lake in Maine many years ago — talk about a clear sky!  WOW!

Yet we have one little secret we never told you…until now.  You can go for a whole month in the summer here without a cloud in the sky.  Summers are gorgeous, but for that pesky night thing.

You can pretty well count on a lunar eclipse, or a Northern Lights, or a meteor shower happening with hazy skies,  rainy skies, or cloudy skies without rain.  They play it up big several days ahead on the news, and then BANG!  You can’t see anything of interest at night, except the lights of Seattle.  Admittedly, they are a sight, but the eclipse, the meteors, the aurora — no such luck.

Recently there was a lunar eclipse, the fourth this year that could be seen from here if it were clear, but it wasn’t as I remember, for any of them.

Back when I lived in Connecticut, our house was on the side of a hill that looked a long ways out over the Connecticut River valley.  And as it so happened, I owned an 8 inch Celestron telescope.  And a lunar eclipse was predicted.  In those days I never heard it called a “blood moon,” but now everyone calls it that as though it were some new thing, rather than just hype.

Did I mention that I also owned a film SLR camera back then?

A FULL LUNAR ECLIPSE OVER THE CONNECTICUT RIVER VALLEY

I received my Master of Science degree from RPI in 1977.  What was the most interesting thing I learned, you ask?  The dirty little truth of the metric system.

Hey, units of measure have been a problem right from the start.  It got so bad at one point that standards for units of measure were spelled out in the Magna Carta!  Go look…it’s true.

The problem was taxes.  One year the king wanted higher taxes, but instead of raising the number of bushels a farmer owed, the king simply changed the size of an official bushel.  So, when they forced the king to agree to the Magna Carta, they included standardized units of measure in the document.  That worked until King Charles I started ignoring the Magna Carta.  And from that came rhymes like, “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water…”  At the time, Jack, Jill, and pail were all units of measure.  The rhyme goes on to say that “Jack fell down, ” referring to a change in the size of a Jack.  “And broke his crown” referred to the king.

And then there was another rhyme, “A pint’s a pound the world around.” Where did that come from?  Well, according to our Heat Transfer professor, who once spent a whole class period decrying the metric system, it was part of a union protest song against the incorporation of the metric system.  As you are aware, pints and pounds do not belong to the metric system.

So, what’s the big deal?  Why don’t we just change to the metric system and have done with it?  And here is where it gets interesting.  The primary reason why we in the United States stay with the English system of units is…you waiting for this?…screw threads!  There is no equivalency between metric thread sizes and English thread sizes.  The cost to manufacturers to make the change over in thread sizes, not only for their products, but also their machines, their instrumentation, their drawings, their documents, their tolerance studies, their stress analyses, their product literature, their stock of replacement parts,  the number of screws used in their parts, the number and type of screws stockpiled for new and replacement products, and the product literature for customers and customer service people would cost huge amounts of both time and money.  Guess who would pay for that…YOU!

And what is truly laughable about it is that few, if any countries are running completely on the metric system.

So here is another little thing you may not know.  Calories are not in the metric system.  For all intents and purposes, calories don’t exist.  I can’t wait to tell all the weight loss gurus that it is Joules, not calories, that are the units of energy recognized by the metric system.

Another well known secret that we aerospace engineers try not to tell anyone is that all length dimensions on airplanes and spacecraft are recorded in inches and decimals of inches.  We don’t use feet.  We don’t use yards.  Try to find anything but inches on our drawings or in our calculations?  Lots of luck!  I wonder how far it is to the sun in inches.  Somewhere around 5.9 trillion inches I believe.  No wonder it takes so long to get there.

I touched on this a little in my previous post on music, GOT RHYTHM? — 2, when I mentioned that the rhythm of a steam engine can be heard in the left hand of boogie woogie when played on a piano.  And that brings up the question of just what is it that has created various musical rhythms throughout the history of music?

Obviously, I am not professional musician.  I had one music course in college, an engineering college, and I don’t remember much about it.  So, it is safe to say that I am far from a musical scholar.  That I have played the piano for nearly seventy years and have listened to all sorts music, new and old, is all that I can claim.  So, here is my generalization about the creation of musical rhythms through the part of musical history with which I am familiar.  Rhythm is about movement of the human body!

And you are now saying in your head, “Tell me something I didn’t already know.”  When you think of the movement of the human body as it relates to music, you usually think of dance, but I’m not talking about dance.  I’m talking about “transportation” — the rhythm of walking, the rhythm of riding a horse, the rhythm of riding in a horse drawn carriage, the rhythm of riding in a ship, the rhythm of riding on a train.  And I admit this is truly a generalization, but you can hear those different rhythms become commonplace in music as the modes of travel become commonplace in history.  You may have to listen to some classical music all the way up through boogie woogie, but I would argue that changes in commonplace modes of travel cause changes in commonplace musical rhythms.

Modes of travel and modes of music share a common desire…freedom!  Maybe that’s why they share rhythms.

What do you think?

(So here is a small digression related only to riding horses — another piece of history on which I am not an expert.  Military tanks are part of the  “cavalry”.  And that is because they replaced horses on the battlefield as a weapon of war.  Tanks have been around about one hundred years as the premier mobile weapon on the ground.  Prior to that, horses were the premier mobile weapon of war on the ground.  Horses on the other hand, held the job for four thousand years!  Do you think tanks will ever match that record?)

In my last several years working for Boeing, I rode in a vanpool.  Sometimes I drove, and sometimes I just sat.  In the times that I just sat, I noticed something interesting.  If I simply mentioned something, even just a single word, the conversation in the van would change to the subject that I mentioned.  I pointed that out once and explained that I had been placed in the vanpool as a psychological researcher to observe vanpool conversations.  Of course it was a joke, but the process of uttering a single word to change the whole conversation was impressive.

One day, the single word influence was challenged by my fellow riders.  They swore they wouldn’t say anything, no matter what word or subject I suggested.  I thought about it for a few seconds and then said the single word that proved my theory, “shoes”.

Immediately, the van went quiet, and it remained that way for a minute or two, but you could literally feel the tension building.  The vanpool was roughly even between men and women, and as I suspected, one of the women finally broke.  In tones of desperation  she said she could no longer stand the strain.  And off went the conversation about shoes.

I can’t give you much advice about the best words to use.  I tried “dinosaurs” once.  That worked pretty well.  I think you have to know your audience well enough to know what they will talk about easily.  Don’t tell them what you’re doing, simply pick a word and say it aloud.  See what happens.

Let us know how well it works by commenting on this particular blog!

By now, you are aware that I like at least some, maybe most, classical music, but there’s more to the story…

When I was a boy growing up in Hicksville, New York, I enjoyed going to the train station.  I was told back then that the Long Island Railroad ended in Hicksville.  I just recently found out that Mr. Hicks owned the railroad when he was alive.  So, it all sort of makes sense.  Nowadays it goes much further out on the Island.

Diesel engines were just starting to show up in the mix when I was a kid.  Most of what I saw at the station were steam engines.  There were no safety rails or fences, no yellow lines you had to stay behind, and no one looking out for a small boy who wanted to stand close to the tracks.  I remember standing there as a steam engine rolled in slowly to a stop.  The wheels were taller than I was.  The powerful rhythm of the engine was nearly deafening.  The motion of the linkages was complicated and fascinating.  It was a dance really, a dance of power. I was transfixed by it all.  I stood there willing myself not to move, taking in every noise, motion, and vibration I could.

Beholding a steam engine in motion conveys many things to your mind — power, strength, speed, distance.  And the one thing that holds all those experiences together is rhythm.  You don’t hear much of steam engines in music, certainly not the music of today.  However, there was a day when there was a music that had that same sense of rhythm, that same sense of unstoppable power, Boogie Woogie.  Sometimes referred to as Eight to the Bar, Boogie Woogie is music that was built for the solo piano.  It shows up in bands sometimes, but the piano is its home.  Four names come to my mind in this discussion, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis, and Jim Yancey.  Certainly there are others both before and after these men, but these are the ones with which I am familiar.  Among these four, I would rate Albert Ammons as my favorite.

So, why do I like Boogie Woogie?  Because it sounds, for the most part, like train engines — the relentless left hand providing the rhythm that drives the train forward.  It has that sense of a machine with a purpose, an unstoppable one.

There’s plenty to read about Boogie Woogie, but listening to it tells you more than anything.  I would recommend two CD’s.  One is an early CD reproduction of recordings made by Albert Ammons.  On that CD, you will also find his version of “The St. Louis Blues,” written by W. C. Handy, and published in 1914.  Now admittedly it’s a blues piece not Boogie Woogie, but blues is a close cousin.  In a way, Boogie Woogie is blues without words.

The CD is titled, “Albert Ammons The Boogie Woogie Man.”  Also included on it are four of what I remember to be eight great duets featuring Pete Johnson with Albert Ammons. I like “Barrelhouse Boogie” and “Sixth Avenue Express” the best.  I’m a sucker for polyrhythm.  Here is the Amazon link.  See if you hear the same train engines I do.

A second CD I would recommend is called “Albert Ammons 1936 – 1939,” and it is another great source of the music.  “Chicago on My Mind,” is my favorite on that CD.  [I just noticed that the price shown on the link is $125.  On the Amazon site there are several options for price.  That is not the Amazon price.  That is from a separate source.  The Amazon price is around $27.]

We all wonder at the flight of birds, baseballs, and airplanes.  Well, I’m neither an ornithologist nor a pitching coach, but I am an engineer.  And I would like to tell you about the wonder of flying machines.  I’ve watched many airplanes takeoff while standing at ground level not too far away.  Besides commercial airplanes, I’ve flown in a fair number of  other planes, quite a few rides in C-130’s, once in a C-123 (and once was enough), once in a T-33 single engine jet trainer, once in a float plane, once in a biplane, a few other rides in small planes, and a couple rides in gliders.  They were all fun to ride in, but watching a takeoff while standing nearby in the open is something altogether different.

An airplane goes through many stages in its life — from a brief flash of an idea to real flying metal.  As each stage runs its course, any number of things can go wrong.  The initial concept itself changes rapidly as new ideas come to the forefront.  Some of those ideas are good, and some are not, but eventually some of each get incorporated.  Then the hard design gets going.  Calculations are made.  Schematics are drawn.  Parts are selected.  New part designs are developed.  And all through the design process mistakes are made.  They usually aren’t big, or else the plane would fail miserably somewhere in its development, or it would possibly turn out to be too expensive.  It is not uncommon to find better ways to do things, and many times those things cause changes to be made, but some “mistakes” become apparent  too late in the process, and we learn to live with them.

As the design progresses and corrections are made, finished drawings start to flow out of the engineering departments.  And, you guessed it, they also have errors in them.  So, they get checked, and the ones that are found get fixed.   As manufacturing goes on, other problems arise, and most of the mistakes that cause them are fixed, but not all.

One day a hanger door opens and a new plane is rolled out.  It won’t be perfect.  Perfection is always beyond reach.  And ultimately, there is only one way to be sure it will fly…FLY IT!

That first flight of a new design is an amazing thing.  I’m sure the Wright brothers were no less amazed than we are today when a new design takes flight for the first time.  I’ve seen it, and many others have seen it, but most people never do.  So, let’s see if I can make it real to you.

It will be a day of good, if not great weather.  It won’t happen at the crack of dawn.  It will be near midday, not too early to get the plane ready, and not too late to curtail the flight to come.  I’ve seen many airplanes takeoff, as I have said, but watching a design that has never flown takeoff for it’s first flight is especially breath taking.  I’ve seen new models of the 767 and the 747 takeoff for the first time, and I’ve seen the first takeoff of the ultra flexible 787.  They were all nail biters in their own way, and they were all spectacular.

So, don’t just watch an airplane takeoff from where you sit or stand at an airport waiting area window.  Find a place to watch either a large jet or a jet fighter takeoff, and be right there on the ground nearby.  Listen to it.  Feel the ground shake.  Ask yourself, how can this be possible?  How can a machine seem so alive?  And even if it isn’t the first takeoff of a new design, it will be new to you every time you see it.  And the imperfections will no longer matter.  No one ever asks a bird how it feels.

It is impossible to ignore music.  You may say you don’t like music, but music exists in everything you do.  It exists in everything in your personal universe.  One of my novels, Beyond the Breakers, has a cover that was made from this picture:

It’s a picture of waves in the Indian Ocean.  I’ve never seen the Indian Ocean, but it looks like the same waves I swam in as a boy on Jones Beach, off of Long Island, NY.  If you stuck a long pole in the sand and measured the time it took for each peak to pass the pole in terms of the number of peaks passing it per second, it would be less than one peak per second.  Yet, as we all know, ocean waves are loud.

So, how can that be?  Our ears can’t hear sounds at frequencies as low as the frequency of the peaks of those ocean waves.  It’s because there are other waves mixed in with the big ones.  And those waves have all sorts of frequencies.  Many pass the  poll at frequencies that are in our hearing range…usually considered to be about 20 to 20,000 cycles per second.  So, there must be waves in that mix of ocean water that you hear that are passing the pole anywhere from 20 to 20,000 times each second.

I don’t want to make this too technical, so I will leave out the tiny, and in some cases not so tiny, details.

That said, I will only add that vibrations and waves run the universe.  They carry energy, both sound and radiation, everywhere.  There is one other thing that you should be told.  They interfere with each other.  In so doing, they create other waves at different frequencies.  And that will bring us back to music and ultimately to ” The Flight of the Bumblebee.”

I wrote a blog recently about my piano.  It was all writing and a couple of pictures.  You will note that I did not include a sound file.  Why didn’t I?  It would have been a natural fit.  The reason is that recordings are not as easy to make as you might think.  And one of the most difficult things to record faithfully is a piano.  It is all because of waves, what frequencies the microphones can hear, where they have to be placed in the piano, and how the wave characteristics inherent in all electronics interact with the wave characteristics of the piano.  On top of that, add the hearing characteristics of the human ear and brain.  Believe me, I’ve tried to record my piano.  It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t my specialty.

So, when you hear a recording of musical instruments, keep in mind that live music is the only type that actually sounds like live music.

What if a composer or performer has died?  Are their performances lost forever?  It would seem like it, but I have a recording of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” which, except for the fact that it is not live, is as close to the actual performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff as you can find.  And strangely enough, the recording was created by an engineer.

At this point I have to introduce you to a different kind of piano, a “recording piano.”  You know what a piano roll is.  It’s a paper record of the keys played and the timing of those keys that matches what a pianist has actually played.  What it does not do is record how loud or softly the  keys are played.  It doesn’t record how the peddles are used.  It misses a lot.  Recording pianos record all of that.  So, if you play back the “tape” made by a recording piano on another recording piano, you will hear pretty much exactly what the original pianist actually played.  If Rachmaninoff recorded his playing on a recording piano, you could play it back “exactly” as he played it even after he was dead, which unfortunately, he is.  However, he did make those recordings!

There was a restaurant in New York City that had a recording grand piano.  It may be still in business.  I don’t know.  I’ve never been there, the restaurant, not New York.  I was born in New York City, stayed there a day or so, and then was sent home to Hicksville.  Meanwhile, you could (maybe can) eat dinner in that restaurant and listen to Rachmaninoff and many other great composers play their own music as a ghost, so to speak…not that creepy actually.

So, would you like to hear a recording of Rachmaninoff playing “The Flight of the Bumblebee” by Rimsky-Korsakov and other music?  Well an engineer named Wayne Stahnke has made that possible at the highest level so far.  I have two CD’s of Rachmaninoff playing a list of classical pieces for the piano.  And for the impatient among you, they are each rather short.

OK, so I like classical music and some of you don’t.  I don’t like everything I hear, but you will be surprised when you hear some of these pieces.  “The Flight of the Bumblebee” is the third piece on the first CD below.  So, sit in front of a grand piano with nobody at the keys and listen to Rachmaninoff himself.  Like all music, some you will like and some you won’t, but you will be amazed at what that man could do!  Here’s a picture of my piano you can pull up and print if you don’t have a grand piano hanging around.  Don’t light the candle!  It is wood after all.

And here are links to the CD’s:

Enjoy the waves!

“Flight of the Bumblebee” by Rimsky-Korsakov is a short, busy piece of classical music.  And although I would love to tell you more about it, I will save that for another time, but there are more than just bees in the air — airplanes!  Have you ever considered how amazing they are?  The 747 weighs nearly a million pounds!  Its wings do not flap, and yet it flies — at nearly the speed of sound — at up to 43,000 feet above the ground!

How do I know this?  You may have guessed.  In my former life before retirement, I was an aerospace engineer, probably still am at heart.  In the recent past, I spent time certifying cooling systems for the latest 747-8 passenger and freighter airplanes.  That included flight testing.  So, I know it can fly.  I assure you it can fly…and fly well!  And here is one interesting story about one of those test flights.

We were testing the EE Cooling system at various altitudes a few years back, and on one particular day, late in the day, we were flying over the Pacific Ocean not too far from Los Angeles.  The sun was near to setting, and we were at 3,000 feet above the water.  We did that type of testing over the ocean to be sure we didn’t run into things at that low altitude…you know, like a mountain or something.  What happened next was that we climbed back up to 43,000 feet, and that baby can climb!

Behind us, as seen by a landlubber, was a streak in the sky starting at what looked like ocean level and going up rapidly.  Behind that was the sun.  The streak, although we couldn’t see it from inside the airplane, was made a brilliant yellow, gold by the sun, a hard to miss event.  It made the news all across the country.  Some people thought it was the Chinese firing a test missile offshore of the United States.  At least that was the most spectacular explanation.

And no one seemed to know.  The FAA was contacted, and they didn’t know.  None of the “experts” knew.  We knew!

It was us.  We were the missile.  We were the streak in the sky that evening.  It was simply a test flight of the 747-8.  And, of course, we never got credit for it.

Oh well, fame…even when you’re  famous, they don’t know who you really are.

It has been said that bumblebees can’t fly, any aerodynamicist can tell you that, but yet, the bees fly.  A propulsion engineer once said in defiance of the aerodynamicist, “Give me a big enough engine, and I can make anything fly!”  So, I guess all bumblebees are cleared for takeoff.

FYI…

Here are some books about the Boeing 747 available from Amazon:

And just for kicks, here are a few of the other links for some of the Boeing related books on Amazon:

The PLSS, or “Portable Life Support System” is the backpack that was used for the Apollo Moon missions.  Since I have mentioned a number of things about it, I thought it would be of interest if you had a bit more information about it in general.  I recently found this link on the NASA website:

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/LM15_Portable_Life_Support_System_ppP1-5.pdf

It evidently was written by my old company, Hamilton Standard.   And no, the guy in the picture is not me.  Maybe I knew him, but that was nearly half a century ago.  I can’t expect to remember everyone.

If you have any questions, drop me an email or leave a comment.

If you go back to one of the earliest posts found on this website, you can read about the importance of water to the Apollo Moon missions. The story below relates to a device that was developed for the Apollo backpack, but never included in the final versions.

Just as a quick reminder, you may remember that water was boiled off into the vacuum of space by the Sublimator in the Apollo backpack. Since the water quantity left in the backpack reservoir was then a crucial issue, we thought that adding a water quantity sensor would be a good idea. That way an astronaut using the backpack could tell how much time he had left before he had to return to the Lunar Module from walking on the Moon’s surface. So, one of our designers designed one, and it was built and tested. It worked as planned, but…

When tested, it always overestimated the amount of water used by quite a bit. That came as a surprise, a very disappointing surprise, and one that took a while to figure out. And then one day it dawned on one of our engineers just why it happened. Unfortunately, it made perfect sense, and there was nothing we could do about it.

If you remember, there was nitrogen dissolved in the water held in the Reservoir of the backpack. And, as the water was released for use in the Sublimater, the pressure of the water dropped dramatically as this happened, and the nitrogen would come out of solution and form bubbles in the water, much like the formation of bubbles when you open a soda. Well, that now happened inside the newly designed Water Quantity Sensor. The Water Quantity Sensor then counted the volume of bubbles as it did the volume of water that passed through it. As a result, the sensor was always wrong on the high side. Given that sort of reading, an astronaut on the Moon’s surface would always stop his moon walk quite early. That wasn’t acceptable, so the wonderful little mechanical Water Quantity Sensor was never used in the final design of the backpack. The astronauts then had to limit their walks by timing them.

Another great idea down the drain, if you’ll excuse the pun!

As a kid, I lived on Long Island, NY. I’ve actually spent two thirds of my life living on islands and still do. However, when you look at Long Island you realize it is sizable, 110 miles long and about 30 miles from south to north at roughly the middle. It’s hard to think of it as an island when you live there.

On Long Island there are two counties that are a part of New York City, Queens and Brooklyn. I was born in a hospital in Queens in 1940. A couple of days later I went with my new parents back to our home in Hicksville, a village in the town of Oyster Bay, which is in Nassau County, outside of NYC.

Given all that geometry, I should mention that there was a Major League baseball team in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Dodgers. One would think that as a boy I would root for the Dodgers, but my parents were from southern New Jersey, and although they did not follow baseball, my Uncle Arthur did. He was a Philadelphia Phillies fan…and so was I.

Our TV was black and white in those days. I never saw a game in color on TV. And then my Uncle took me to Connie Mack stadium in Philadelphia to a night game between the Phillies and the Dodgers. I was probably around ten at the time.

I cannot tell you who won, but it was the time of the Whiz Kids, and Philly could certainly have won. What I can tell you is that I will always remember the colors of the uniforms and the color of the grass. Both were a sight to be seen for a boy who had watched games only in black and white. I was a little disappointed to see that the uniforms of the Dodgers stood out in the bright lights of the night game much more so than the uniforms of my team.

And there was one other thing I saw. It was simply amazing. A Dodger swung, and the ball climbed like a rocket, easily lifting itself over the very high double decker left field stands and out of sight into the streets of Philadelphia.

The man who did it was named Jackie Robinson! I can still see it happening.

{copyright 2014 Arthur K Davenport}

There is much written about the history of the piano, and I will leave it to the reader to find what they want on the subject.  So, what can I add?  Well first, I should say that I play the piano, but not professionally.  I am fair at it, but not great.  I once memorized twenty pages of Gershwin’s, “Rhapsody in Blue”.  That gives you sort of an idea.

I took lessons for eleven years starting at age six.  I took my second year off and finished the remaining ten years starting at age 8 or so.  Who knew it would take that much boring practice.  Why did I continue to do it?  Simple, I love the piano.

The first nine years of lessons were wasted with teachers who were nice enough, but not inspiring enough.  And I didn’t practice enough.  I never had anything to learn that I liked.  It was probably typical of many music student’s lives, except that I didn’t give up.  And then I met a guy across the street, Harry O’Mera, who was a jazz pianist by trade.  I think most of what his quartet played were weddings and night clubs.  He kept miserable hours, and was a chain smoker.  However, he was generally a nice guy with a good sense of humor and an ability to play just about anything if you just hummed the tune for him.  I learned more about music in two years with Harry than all the other lessons combined.  Heck, I learned that much from him in the first month.  AND, I started practicing.  I played things I liked. Harry enjoyed it, and I enjoyed it.

So, what type of piano music do I like?  Well, just about everything.  I like classical, jazz, boogie boogie, ragtime.  However, I have my limits in all of those fields.  Who is my favorite classical pianist?  There are many, but I would say my all time favorite is Gary Graffman.  My favorite jazz pianist:  Earl Garner…boogie boogie:  Albert Ammons (his duets with Pete Johnson are classics)…ragtime:  Max Morath.

And what do I really know about the insides of a piano?  OK, I’m no expert, but most engineers don’t let that stop them.

There was an article in Scientific American many years ago about acoustic pianos versus electronic pianos, and electronic ones have come a long way since then, but here are some of the interesting points that were made.  First, acoustic pianos are filled with sounds that you don’t really notice.  You hear them, but you don’t notice them.  So, when they asked a group of strangers to determine which recording was from an acoustic piano and which was not, 85% of them picked the right answer.  The noise comes from numerous sources:  the pedals, the hammers, the movement, strings that are not being struck, parts of the strings that are never struck, any number of things.  It’s what makes the acoustic sound unique.  Remove those sounds, and it doesn’t sound like a piano.  I have never heard an electronic keyboard that can touch it.  And maybe that’s just me.  I wasn’t raised listening to electronic music.

However, it would be wise to conclude that not all acoustic pianos sound the same.  After all, there are numerous mechanical items whose materials vary, even though they are the same on paper.  The designs of different size pianos and different manufacturers are another large influence.  How each piano is tuned and adjusted is also a big influence.  And then there is always humidity, room acoustics, and who knows what else.

Finally, there is the ear of the listener.  If you were to be in the market for a piano, what would sound good to you?  I happen to like “bright” pianos.  Typically, solo concert pianos are bright.  They are great for solo piano work, but not so great for background situations such as accompanying singers or for use in bands.  Some manufacturers are better at bright pianos, and some are better at pianos used for accompanying other instruments and voices.  If you are a soprano, you probably do not want to be accompanied by a piano that sparkles in your voice range.

For all of my piano playing history, I have loved the sound of a Steinway, a concert grand Steinway.  It is certainly a bright piano…just what I like.  Decades ago I visited a dealer that had ninety Steinways on the floor.  I tried several of them and found a seven foot grand piano that I loved.  I should add that not all Steinways of the same size and design sound the same or feel the same.  You have to find the one that fits you best, just what real concert pianists do.

There was only one problem with the piano I liked.  The price was $40,000.  That was far out of my range.  So, I went back to my upright and settled on the idea that I would never own a grand piano.  And then one day, decades later, my wife heard of a concert grand piano, a bright one, that was for sale.  It was old, built in 1906, but within our price range.  It was a Weber concert grand, fully nine feet long, and it was my piano in both sound and feel from the moment I touched it.  We bought it.

So, I am going to tell you about a Weber piano that sparkles and booms, one that doesn’t like competition for the top spot.  Here are two pictures:

This piano is quite special to me.  I love its sound.  I love the feel of it.  And yet, as they say, there’s more.  What follows is not verified, although it’s probably true.  It’s hard to get the facts pinned down.

It’s well known among professional pianists that concert tours are physically demanding.  And even for a famous man like Ignacy Jan Paderewski, it can take its toll on arms and nerves.  He is known to have had problems with one arm.  And here is where there is no direct support for the story, but he is said to have asked his normal supplier, Steinway, to make four special pianos for him.  These pianos were to have a greater number of strings in each unison, the group of strings that make up each separate note.  The idea was to limit the effort required to get the same sound level.  In a normal piano at the upper end, there are three strings per unison.  In his pianos, he wanted four per unison.  Supposedly, Steinway refused.  However, Weber is said to have agreed.  If you look again at the right hand picture above, you will see that the unisons have four strings each.  It seems that this is one of the four Paderewski’s pianos.  Another one belongs (or did belong) to a dealer in California.  I am told that another one is in a bar in Portland, Oregon.  The location of the fourth is unknown to me.  Paderewski did indeed play some of his concerts on Weber pianos and did write at least one letter of recommendation for Weber, a copy of which I have.  And here is one more proof of his use.  This is a copy of a playbill that I found in the Seattle Public Library.

If you look closely at the bottom, you will see that a Weber piano was used.  My guess is that the pictures above are of that exact piano.

All I know of the piano’s history after Paderewski is what the salesman told me.  He said that it had belonged to the Mason’s for many years.  After that it was owned by a woman whose name I do not know.  When I got it, I found fourteen pieces of dried chewing gum on the underside and numerous glass stains inside (not visible when fully assembled) under the action assembly.  True, it could use a little work, but it is really in good condition overall and sounds wonderful.  At the time we bought it, I had no idea of its possible history.  It was our first piano tuner who was surprised by the four string unisons, and who knew the owner of the other piano down in California.  It would be nice to know more, but it plays and sounds just as well even if that’s all we ever learn about it.

file:///Users/Art/Pictures/iPhoto%20Library/Previews/2010/Jan%206,%202010_2/IMG_1863.JPG

Just so you have the weekend to consider things, here is the solution for the last post.  I did it ten or fifteen years ago.  If you have any questions after looking at it, drop me a line.  I used three pages to do it, but with smaller writing, it will fit on just one page.  In the end, I remembered the correct selection of numbers from the first time I solved the problem.  If you were doing it for the first time, you would have to do a few more quick trials at the end of the process.  If you used a computer to find the answer for you, you get no points for the solution.

Well, it’s been a while since my last post.  I’ve been busy.  Here is something that will keep you busy as well.  There is only one rule.  You must solve this problem with paper and pencil only — No Computers Allowed.  It is easily solved by a computer, but where’s the fun?  Where’s the understanding?

To the best of my memory, this problem first came to my attention in the 1960’s.  That was before we had personal computers.  Back then, it had to be solved by hand (and mind).  I gave this problem to a colleague a few years ago with the same admonition to not use a computer.  He was really proud of himself for solving it with his computer.  Good computer, bad memory.

Anyway, as I recall, I found this in a copy of Aviation Week.  If my memory is wrong on this, my apologies.  I do not recall if the problem listed its author.  Here goes:

There are three rectangles of the same area.  The area is a positive whole number.  (no hidden  tricks)  The sides are as follows:

X by (X – 278), Y by (Y – 96), and Z by (Z – 542)

X, Y, and Z are also positive whole numbers.

What is the area?

I assure you, there is only one correct answer.  And you can fit the solution on one side of one sheet of 8X10 paper if you don’t write too big.  You don’t have to write all that small either.  However, use as much paper as you want.

I’ll post my solution in late June.  I have an old handwritten version that I can scan.  I wrote fairly big, so it took three pages.  However, I could fit it on one page if pressed only slightly.

You’ll have to trust me when I say I have already solved this three times over the years.  The first time took a week.  The last time took less than an hour.  They were done far enough apart so that I forgot most of the details of the solution, but having a vague memory of it certainly helped on the second and third efforts.

Maybe you have a better way.  Just remember, do not use a computer!  This must be solved by hand.

I’ve been giving this some thought, and I will provide a few simple rules here, but I may add to them in the future.  I never wrote these things down.  So, please be patient as I recall them over time.

I will start with two rules from two Rays, Ray Horstman and Ray Trush, neither of whom knew each other.  I can’t say with assurance that the rules were originated by the Rays, but they certainly could have been.  I am still in contact with RH, but I have not seen RT in nearly thirty years.  And although these two rules are both possibly in the category of humor, there is quite a bit of serious truth in them.

1.  RH:  “Thumb times it works, and thumb times it doesn’t!”  Depending on your own view of the world, you could interpret this to mean that either success is inevitable or failure is inevitable.  At any rate, you have to be ready for either.

2.  RT:  “An once of image is worth a pound of performance!”  My memory of RT is of his positive humor.  He used this phrase to softly mock those who followed the path of image before performance.  I include it here to remind you that good engineering is sometimes an uphill battle of attitudes.

And here is a third rule of thumb.  It is a serious comment, and I am sorry to say that I do not remember the name of the person who penned it.  It was in an article about the engineering of systems from many years back.

3.  “Remember, a model is not reality!”  Mathematical modeling of physical and electrical systems has become common place with the introduction of computers on every desk.  And it is both a wonder and a danger.  When you print out the results of computers on graphs and other media (especially in color), it adds a sense of reality that all too often is not quite true, sometimes not true at all.  Computer output may be impressive, but it should always be looked at with caution. Don’t read too much into it.  It is the easy way out at times, and very tempting.

Here’s an example:  computational fluid dynamics, CFD, depends on things called “turbulence models”.  And to quote a phrase, thumb times they work and thumb times they don’t.  The reason for this is that no one truly understands turbulence, and therefore can not truly model turbulence.  And the answers produced by these various models can be quite different from actual test data.  Now don’t throw CFD out the window because I just said that, but as with all mathematical models, be careful how you use it.

And finally, here is an old one that has been around the block many times.

4.  “We never have time to do it right, but we always have time to do it over!”  (origin unknown, at least to me)  Unfortunately, this is more than the ordinary rule of thumb.  In many cases it is the “Law of Thumb.”  All I can say is that when you run across it, do the best you can.

There is a category of rules that is worth a short discussion.
Murphy’s Law, or Laws, consists primarily of one statement, “If something can go wrong, it will,” or words to that effect. You can find various lists of Murphy’s Laws, some being rather long. Many items on these lists probably did not come from Captain Murphy.  Some are entertaining, and some are true; however, the original law is not a central point in design.  Rather the point is that everything has a probability of failure, and the point of good design is to reduce that probability to an acceptable level.

When I started my engineering career, I didn’t know how much engineers were paid. I knew roughly how much my dad was paid, and he was an engineer, but he was way beyond the starting salary level. Nowadays you can go on the web and find numerous sources for pay information, and I assume you have done that.

So, what can I tell you that you don’t already know? You’ve probably noticed that pay varies with specialty, industry, company, and location. And no doubt you assume that it goes up with experience. Well, I would say that experience is tricky. In general, pay eventually goes down with experience!

OK, that does sound strange, and you may not want to worry about that early in your career, but someday it will become an issue. You no doubt can find information about this phenomena on the web if you look hard enough. Here is a quick and simplified explanation.

The good news is that the younger engineers get the best raises. Of course that means the older engineers don’t. If you were to see a graph of salaries of all the engineers at your company versus years out of college you would notice that it climbs, flattens out, and then goes down! It isn’t that the salaries of the older engineers actually go down. It shows up in the graph that way because of salary inflation. The younger employees started out higher, and that starting level loads the curve to the left. Companies actually use that sort of data in mapping out their salary plans.

The shape of the curve also reflects the fact that the older engineers are a captive audience, so to speak. A company holds onto employees by giving the biggest raises to the young and inexperienced. Sorry, but that is the way things are done. Some people try to avoid that by changing jobs in an attempt to get higher pay at the point where the graph starts to flatten. I have never seen data on that, but my impression is that it is by no means a guaranteed strategy. There are things at play here other than salary level. Change has its problems, many of which are personal. Also, change actually does cost money. What you see about changing jobs for money in the news, in TV shows, and in the movies is not representative of average reality.

I changed employers in my mid forties. I didn’t do it for the money. The real reason is complicated. I can’t even explain it to myself. If I had the chance to do it over, I would. The money was better where I was, the job was better, and starting over at that age wasn’t easy — but who knew? One of my first bosses was born and raised in Germany. His favorite quote was, “Ve grow too soon old and too late schmart!” He had an accent.

Some things you are going have to figure out for yourself. Just remember that the way pay looks this year will not be how it looks twenty years from now.

Hey, you won’t be poor.

Just to get you going, how about a little sarcasm? Here’s my definition of “politics”.

Poli-tics : many blood sucking insects.

OK, now I can back off a little, just a little.

The first and already discussed aspect of politics is the use of lies to get ahead. I think I discussed that enough in the blog about ethics, so I’ll skip that part of politics.

Possibly the least objectionable thing about office politics is the surest way to the top, treating the company as though it is the most important thing in your life. All you have to do is work more hours than anyone else. Work weekends. Work nights. Companies tend to reward that type of behavior with promotions. Pretty soon you will give the impression that you will make a good manager.

That was simple! Yet, it has some flaws that can catch you unawares. First, when you are promoted into management, you will convince yourself that you got there because you are the greatest engineer the world has ever seen. The odds of that being true are near zero. If you don’t fall for that, you will probably be a better manager. The next falsehood you need to avoid is that you got the job because you are a great manager…WRONG! You got the job because you sacrificed most of your life for the company.

So, if you can avoid those two traps, and you don’t mind what it has done to your private life, and you actually do have good management skills, you will do well and be happy.

So, here is the other side of the coin. I have a friend who was faced with a request to work a lot of free overtime. This was his response, “I have a job, and I have a wife, and I am only married to one of them!” You might want to think about that.

The third side of the coin comes from a statement by one of my undergraduate professors, whose name I can not recall. “You will never get rich as an engineer, but you will always love your work.” That is no small thing for most of us. Remaining part of the “productive flow” has great charm. There is no shame in it, even if you never have anyone work for you throughout your whole career. And it has one really nice benefit, you can pretty much avoid any involvement in office politics.

When I was a new engineer on the job, I learned a valuable lesson.  Quality Control is not about Quality of Design.  Quality Control is about being assured that the drawings were followed faithfully during the manufacturing and testing phases of producing products.  That was fine with me, and still is.  I don’t actually want a Quality Control Engineer telling me how to design “real” quality into a product.

Ethics, on the other hand, is something your company doesn’t think you have unless they put it in you!  Now that is where I start to have a problem.  It is quite evident that ethics as a subject has been taken over by the legal profession.  It is not about “doing the right thing.”  It is about doing nothing that will put the company in legal trouble.  That’s all it is in their view — case closed.

Well, that may be all it is to a lawyer.  That may be all it is to Management.  That is not what it all is to me.  When you take your first class in ethics that is sponsored by your company, you’ll see what I am talking about.  Ethics is not about keeping your word.  Ethics is not about telling the truth.  Ethics is only about keeping the company out of court.  They won’t come right out and say that to you, but that is exactly what they mean.

It has always grated on my sense of justice that a company has the gall to set itself up as the judge of ethics, as if you had none of your own when you hired on.  And I would guess that working for the government works the same way.

Now, I have no objection to keeping the company on the right side of the law, but to me there is much more to ethics than that.  Understanding the laws that affect your products and business is a good thing, but always adhering to the truth is not heavily stressed in ethics classes.

Once someone lies to me, I will never trust them again.  And lack of trust is erosive.  It wastes time with having to check things that you are told because the teller lacks credibility.  Customers in particular hate being lied to.  Can you blame them?

Unfortunately, I have run into quite a few coworkers who lie to get what they want or to get what they think the company wants.  That usually means putting you down and taking credit for your work or not telling a customer the truth about what you are going to supply, when, and how much it will cost in the end.

Watch your back and the backs of those you trust — and watch the backs of your customers!

The simplest answer is “everything”.  Maybe the question should really be, “What Should Influence Decisions?”

I suppose the answers depend on who you are, but since this is my blog, I can only offer you my view.  Here is the list as I see it:

• Safety
• Performance
• Expected life
• Reliability
• Maintainability
• Ease of operation
• Cost

I would include legal requirements, such as government regulations, but they can affect any of the above.  And in that sense, they do affect decisions.  Weight is also a frequent requirement, so is power usage, range of operating conditions, simplicity, etc.  However, these types of requirements usually fall under one or more of the above categories.

What this should tell you is that writing the requirements for any particular design is by no means an easy task.  And getting them right is extremely important.

And what shouldn’t affect decisions, or at least should not significantly compromise a proper design?

• Politics
• Personal animosity
• Ignorance or stupidity on the part of the customer — that may take some polite convincing on your part.

We haven’t discussed schedule.  As they say, “time is money”.  I would caution you against swapping time for any number of real requirements, but don’t hang on to unnecessary requirements.  When you make a promise of time to a customer, put yourself in their shoes.  Quicker is better, as long as you meet all necessary requirements.

One last thing, aesthetics!

So, here is a little story from the past ––

We were in competition for particular device that was to be mounted to the Apollo Space Suit.  And as a part of that competition, all the potential suppliers were required to show prototypes of their designs to NASA.  We all complied, but there was one thing that our company did that a competitor did not do.  We paid all of our attention to performance and none to aesthetics — even in how we presented our design that day.  Our man on the scene said that he placed our fully compliant design on the table for NASA to see.  Ours was not bright and shiny, nor was it colored in anyway.  It simply worked as ordered.  Right after our man placed our device down, the competitor brought out a Tensor light and placed in on the table.  Then he put down a piece of black velvet.  And then he put down their design on the velvet — all shiny and color anodized.  And then he turned on the light.  The only thing their design lacked was compliance to the design requirements — not a small thing one would think.  And what went through the mind of our man?  “We are going to lose.” And so we did.

Not sure what to do with this imformation…

This is not a big subject, but it is worth discussing.

Generally speaking, the categories are pretty much as given below:

1. Research – Research is the type of work that involves figuring out how something works, what laws or rules it follows.  It may or may not be pointed at a specific final application. And it may be that several separate areas of research ultimately underpin the development and design of a product.  The research may or may not be original.  Indeed it may simply be a matter of finding the research of others and cataloging it for future use.
2. Development – Development is an early stage of design in that you take what you learned from your own research and/or someone else’s research and you develop a method(s) to put the knowledge to a practical use.  Development bridges the gap between research and the design of the final product.  It is the application of the knowledge gained in research to a practical objective.  It can be simply one approach to the design or a series of approaches to the design.  And part of what is being developed is the specification(s) of what is desired in the final design in terms of performance, life, maintainability, and price.  In this case, performance is really all encompassing.  It is not just how well the design accomplishes its mission, but how easy it is to use, what resources it expends, and possibly some aesthetic issues.

1. Design – In a final sense, the design is what defines the final desired product.  The word design will show up during the development phase, but I use it here to designate the final design.  The final design will probably go through rigid test and evaluation to assure that it meets its by now firm requirements.  Failures may require backing up into the development phase to some degree in order to solve the problem(s).  Once those issues are resolved, the final design will continue to be tested at some level to be sure of the manufacturing and materials that go into the final product.  Those “acceptance tests or inspections” may vary over the life of production, but their objective is only to assure the quality of the final product.  They are not meant to be a test of the design definition.