Sunday, August 16, 2015
Speechless, I am...
A negative example of state government...
A negative example of state government... California, of course. This site has a compendium of California governance incompetence that is mind-numbingly long. From now on when someone asks me why I left California, this is where I'm sending them. Oh, the incompetence! It burns, it burns!
The site linked was written by Andrew K. Dart, whom I had never heard of before. He's written extensively on a broad range of subjects. I haven't read any of his other stuff, but simply from the quantity I can tell this is one very engaged fellow. I googled him and found nothing except moonbat lefties ranting about how crazy he (Andrew K. Dart) is. That's an endorsement if I ever saw one!
Via my lovely bride of 34 years (today!)...
The site linked was written by Andrew K. Dart, whom I had never heard of before. He's written extensively on a broad range of subjects. I haven't read any of his other stuff, but simply from the quantity I can tell this is one very engaged fellow. I googled him and found nothing except moonbat lefties ranting about how crazy he (Andrew K. Dart) is. That's an endorsement if I ever saw one!
Via my lovely bride of 34 years (today!)...
Developing from scratch...
Developing from scratch... This article really piqued my interest. It discusses something I've run into quite often, but hadn't thought it out as much as this author does.
A surprising (to me, at least) number of times in my career, I've run into a situation where an engineer I'm working with simply has no idea how to start attacking the problem. Usually if I (or someone else) sketched out an approach and design, they'd be able to take it from there – but that first step was impossible for them to take. Every time I ran into that, I was just astonished – because that first step, for me, is the part that is the most exciting and rewarding. It's the part I like the best about engineering!
Thinking back on the occasions this has happened to me, I'm remembering an occasion when I asked an engineer who worked for me to try to figure out a way to compress the color information in an image. He sounded very interested in the problem, and went off to go work on it. A few days later, I stopped by his office to see how he was doing – and he had gotten exactly nowhere. He had no idea at all how to approach the problem. I don't mean that he had no ideas left – I mean he had had no ideas at all! We talked about it for a while, and together came up with several approaches – and he was actively participating in the brainstorming. Eventually we settled on an approach of mapping 24 bit RGB color space to an 8 bit RGB color space, using a technique to choose the closest point in the 8 bit space to the original point in 24 bit space. That's a fairly obvious approach, and once we settled on it, he was able to implement it in just a couple days. But he couldn't, somehow, take that first step himself.
I still have no idea why some engineers can take that first step, and others can't. I do know that those who can are in a distinct minority, and all the more valuable because of that...
A surprising (to me, at least) number of times in my career, I've run into a situation where an engineer I'm working with simply has no idea how to start attacking the problem. Usually if I (or someone else) sketched out an approach and design, they'd be able to take it from there – but that first step was impossible for them to take. Every time I ran into that, I was just astonished – because that first step, for me, is the part that is the most exciting and rewarding. It's the part I like the best about engineering!
Thinking back on the occasions this has happened to me, I'm remembering an occasion when I asked an engineer who worked for me to try to figure out a way to compress the color information in an image. He sounded very interested in the problem, and went off to go work on it. A few days later, I stopped by his office to see how he was doing – and he had gotten exactly nowhere. He had no idea at all how to approach the problem. I don't mean that he had no ideas left – I mean he had had no ideas at all! We talked about it for a while, and together came up with several approaches – and he was actively participating in the brainstorming. Eventually we settled on an approach of mapping 24 bit RGB color space to an 8 bit RGB color space, using a technique to choose the closest point in the 8 bit space to the original point in 24 bit space. That's a fairly obvious approach, and once we settled on it, he was able to implement it in just a couple days. But he couldn't, somehow, take that first step himself.
I still have no idea why some engineers can take that first step, and others can't. I do know that those who can are in a distinct minority, and all the more valuable because of that...
Animations of mechanisms...
Anchors away!
One such occasion was our arrival in Auckland, New Zealand, in the mid '70s. Protesters opposed to the nuclear power (and weapons) on board our ship tried to blockade the port, but we came right through them (sinking two small sailboats in the process, but thankfully nobody was hurt). After the ship anchored a mile or so offshore, the crew had several days of liberty in New Zealand. At night, some of the protesters sneaked out to the ship and installed homemade steel structures onto our anchor chains, underwater where nobody could see them. These were designed to prevent the anchors from being raised.
Those devices didn't perform as intended, mainly because the capstan winch that raises the anchors was ridiculously powerful, as was the cast iron bushing that the chain passed through on its way into the chain locker. When the protesters' devices hit that bushing, the winch didn't even slow down – it just dragged them right through it, squashing and smashing them beyond all recognition. In the process huge clouds of dust and steam were raised (the squashing generated a lot of heat), and bits of metal were flying in all directions at high speed. I was standing on a deck above and behind the bushing, and pieces of metal were screeching by me – but I wasn't hit by anything. A couple sailors on the anchor deck weren't so lucky. The worst injury was a broken arm, and there were lots of lacerations and punctures. Nothing serious, fortunately. The bosun's mates took a while to figure out what the heck was going on. By the time they got the winch stopped, all the protesters' devices had been dragged through the bushing and destroyed. They just had to clean the bits of wreckage out of the chain, and kept pulling up the anchor. Those protesters had no idea of the power and strength of the anchor system...
Seeing the cloud of rust dust on the photo above brought that all back...
Glass houses...
Don't say “alien”!
Don't say “alien”! At least not in California. We escaped in just the nick of time. From our current perch in Utah, it looks like Jerry Brown has gone around the bend. But then, it looked like that back in the '70s, on his first run as governor...
Morning in Paradise...
Morning in Paradise... It's a special day for us: our 34th wedding anniversary. It hardly seems possible that so much time has passed by since we said “I do” in the little chapel in Bonita, California – but then we think of all the experiences we've shared, and we wonder how the hell we fit that into just 34 years. We're hoping for 34 more, just as wonderful as the first 34...
We had some odd weather last night. No rain (or storm of any kind) was forecast, but around 4 am one passed right over us. It dumped two tenths of an inch of rain in about an hour, quite by surprise. The storm was very oddly shaped – sort of like a cigar, about 12 miles long by a half mile wide. It swooshed from west to east, right overhead, with a fairly intense rain cell centered basically on our house. There was much lightning and thunder, including a couple of giant crashes that shook the house very nicely. By daybreak the storm was ten or fifteen miles east of us, and the sun rose through thick haze. Our valley was also full of haze.
Miki, Race, and I set off on our morning walk just after the sun rose. The weather was the sort that flower photographers dream of: rain dotted everything with droplets, the humidity kept those droplets there for an extended time, and the haze made for perfect, white, omni-directional lighting – there wasn't a shadow anywhere. Naturally I didn't have my macro photography gear with me :) I did take a few flower photos with my iPhone, and I'm surprised how well they came out. I suspect it won't be too long before my cell phone's camera is so good that I won't even want a “real” camera any more...
We had a lot of good bird watching this morning. I got to see a kite hunting less than 100 feet from me, hovering briefly in many spots, perhaps 35' high. We never saw him stoop, but I had several minutes of great views of his hovering. We had a large flock (> 100 birds) of white-faced ibis fly over us, just a few feet over our heads. There were a dozen or so hawks (I haven't identified the species yet, but not red-tailed) perched where they could look over the alfalfa fields. One we saw hunting in the style of a pueo in Hawaii, swooping low over a barley field trying to provoke some little rodent into frightened flight. Miki flushed two pairs of quail, plus a male meadowlark. Great bird watching!
Roger's corner garden is looking positively luscious...
On the way back, three Paso Fino horses came over to the fence to see us. One of them was browsing just a couple feet from the fence, and Race kept darting under the fence to try to nip his nose. The horse flicked away every time, annoyed but not nipped :) I couldn't stop Race from doing this; it was like he was compelled...
We had some odd weather last night. No rain (or storm of any kind) was forecast, but around 4 am one passed right over us. It dumped two tenths of an inch of rain in about an hour, quite by surprise. The storm was very oddly shaped – sort of like a cigar, about 12 miles long by a half mile wide. It swooshed from west to east, right overhead, with a fairly intense rain cell centered basically on our house. There was much lightning and thunder, including a couple of giant crashes that shook the house very nicely. By daybreak the storm was ten or fifteen miles east of us, and the sun rose through thick haze. Our valley was also full of haze.
Miki, Race, and I set off on our morning walk just after the sun rose. The weather was the sort that flower photographers dream of: rain dotted everything with droplets, the humidity kept those droplets there for an extended time, and the haze made for perfect, white, omni-directional lighting – there wasn't a shadow anywhere. Naturally I didn't have my macro photography gear with me :) I did take a few flower photos with my iPhone, and I'm surprised how well they came out. I suspect it won't be too long before my cell phone's camera is so good that I won't even want a “real” camera any more...
We had a lot of good bird watching this morning. I got to see a kite hunting less than 100 feet from me, hovering briefly in many spots, perhaps 35' high. We never saw him stoop, but I had several minutes of great views of his hovering. We had a large flock (> 100 birds) of white-faced ibis fly over us, just a few feet over our heads. There were a dozen or so hawks (I haven't identified the species yet, but not red-tailed) perched where they could look over the alfalfa fields. One we saw hunting in the style of a pueo in Hawaii, swooping low over a barley field trying to provoke some little rodent into frightened flight. Miki flushed two pairs of quail, plus a male meadowlark. Great bird watching!
Roger's corner garden is looking positively luscious...
On the way back, three Paso Fino horses came over to the fence to see us. One of them was browsing just a couple feet from the fence, and Race kept darting under the fence to try to nip his nose. The horse flicked away every time, annoyed but not nipped :) I couldn't stop Race from doing this; it was like he was compelled...
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