James L Adams—People and Products

Automotive Seat Belts — A Good and Bad Product

Automotive seat belts save lives. And since most automotive accidents occur close to home (see https://www.progressive.com/newsroom/article/2002/may/fivemiles/, an old study but probably still valid), one should put on one’s seatbelt before the start of one’s trip. A simple reason for this is that the act of putting on one’s seat belt after one is in motion is well nigh suicidal. Why? Because it is usuälly almost impossible to both fasten the seat belt and drive safely. I am an expert on this, because I drove for some 20 years before seat belts became mandatory in the U.S., and the early years of one’s driving career embed themselves strongly in one’s habit. So, although I have improved because of yells of “put on your seat belt” from kids, grand kids, and wives, (and the knowledge that the seat-belt warning sound in my last car —a Toyota Pickup’ can drive you mad in a short time) I still, especially for short trips (which I realize are when accidents occur), sometimes neglect to fasten the thing.

If I then fasten the seat belt, my driving is severely impaired .Why? Because seat belts are often ridiculously difficult to fasten, considering that they have been required for almost 50 years. There are a number of reasons, such as these.

1. The take-up reels usually wear after a few years of use, so the belts do not always retract – sometimes even being grabbed by the door when it is closed, but often requiring groping between the door and the seat.
2. The sliding gizmo on the belt often slides out of sight between the door and the seat
3. The receptacle for this sliding gizmo is often hidden in the upholstery, between the seat and the drive shaft tunnel, or between seats.
4. The button location and design on the receptacle for the sliding gizmo is not standardized.

While battling these problems, especially in a strange car, the vehicle often weaves wildly down the road, while the driver valiantly tries to fasten the belt by feel while cursing, losing his/her temper, and otherwise exhibiting dangerous behavior. The worse situation often occurs when heading for the freeway in a rental car at night in a strange airport.  And of course you all realize the difficulty of fastening the seat belt for the passenger seat in someone else's car.

Why do I not always fasten my belt before starting the car? Bad news – there are a lot of people like me, who learned to drive before driver’s training, who are often in a hurry when they climb in their car, who drive a number of automobiles, and who think they can simply grab the sliding gizmo and click it into place (usually not true).

It seems that after 50 years, the massive improvements in technology, and the achievement of autonomous vehicles, we could do a better job of figuring out seat belts. I remember that when I was in the air force, we had big wide combined shoulder and seat belts with a massive quick-release buckle holding them together. At this point I would prefer them over the set-up in my truck. Granted they were of drab color, and did not retract, but they were standardized, honest in function, and easy to find, since the shoulder harness straps were usually over the seat back and the seat straps on the seat.

As some of you may remember, when seat belts were a new thing, many manufacturers made them automatic, so that when the door closed, the shoulder harness would wrap around the driver or passenger. Granted that seat belts still had to be fastened by hand, but at least the shoulder belt was already in place and fastened. I kind of liked them.  But but most drivers didn’t. The ancient video at http://jalopnik.com/5835426/this-is-why-we-dont-miss-automatic-seat-belts is an example of negative feelings. But come on – there has to be a better answer than what we now have.

Technology and Noise

The past weekend must have been an informal welcoming of spring on the Stanford campus, because every dorm on campus seemed to be having a party. The parties were generally out of doors and included a band. The bands were delivering contemporary dance music through the now standard large amplification and speaker systems. Our house is quite close to several dorms, so we once again had an opportunity to cower inside our house with our earplugs in and experience the joy of relentlessly repetitively sounds at a volume well in excess of the county rules on decibel levels.

The good news, is that the music masked the noise generated by automobile and truck traffic, airplanes (especially private ones and the helicopter owned by our hospital), the myriad of two-cycle engines employed by the gardeners in the area, and the construction equipment that seems to have resided on campus for the past ten years. I couldn’t help again thinking about the change in noise level on the campus and in our increasingly urban world during the time I have been at Stanford.

In particular, I notice the increase in noise from the growth in numbers and power of amplifiers and speakers. In the summer Stanford hosts a number of “sports camps” for kids, and the leaders of these groups are all equipped with amplified speakers to communicate with them. This might seem reasonable, since the kids make a lot of noise, but the leaders used to just tell them to be quiet when they needed to do so. My office on campus is beneath a large classroom, and the classroom is equipped with an amplification system. Teachers and guest speakers use these to talk to the students, and to those of us who have the dubious pleasure of listening to them through the air circulation system even though we are totally uninterested in what they have to say. I certainly never needed an amplification system to talk to a class. The bands performing in the dorms seem to need the requisite amplifiers, mixers and speaker systems made popular by rock bands, even though such bands had no difficulty making themselves heard with much less amplification when I first came here.

It seems that people love amplifiers. If the type of amplifier/speaker used by coaches (the modern megaphone) is lying around, people will pick it up, turn it to high, walk up to a friend from behind, and yell at them with it. If an amplifier and speaker system is in a classroom (often to provide sound for video or other media material) people will use it to amplify their own voices. If a band has a rack of speakers and amplifiers, they will turn them up to a level that has been shown to adversely affect the hearing of the audience if they are subjected to it over time. Both band and audience seem to enjoy it, but the band members typically are wearing ear plugs (musicians are careful of their hearing) and those trying to study, listen to their own music, or live in a nearby house may not.

Granted that I am old and grouchy, behind on my pop music, and complaining about things that other people enjoy or that are an output of work others think necessary (gardeners and construction crews), but for the sake of all of us, since we are heading into ever increasing population density, noise has to be controlled.   It has happened with automobiles and motorcycles. When I was in high school, it was prestigious to run ones vehicles with minimal muffling. If you are old enough, you remember “cut out pipes”, that allowed the driver to divert the exhaust straight from the engine, bypassing the muffler altogether. I wondered what the result would be of clamping down on motorcycle noise, but the owners actually came to believe that a very fast and quiet machine was cool, except for a few who are now thought to be merely obnoxious. Campus leaf blowers are now all electric, powered by a gas generator, which being four cycle is much quieter than the two-cycle commonly used on yard machines. Large diesel driven machines have not quite gotten the message yet, but they will. And even as I write this, there is a campaign underway on campus to do something about bands at parties.

But what is going to happen when Amazon and other organizations flood the atmosphere with noisy drones? Drones carrying significant weight and traveling relatively long distances are not going to be electrically powered for a long while.

Technology and Sports

As in most area of human life, technology has had major influences in athletics, ranging from the airplanes that allow teams to compete even though they are very long distances apart, new medical procedures for injuries, and improved shoes, rackets, safety and training equipment, etc. And, of course, the sophisticated devices used to make games available over such media channels as TV and the internet and allowing the observer to witness the details of the game perhaps better than those in the stadium (slow motion re-plays, multiple camera positions, etc). And uniform styles have also changed a bit. The photo  at the left is me 60 ears ago attired in the cool basketball uniform of those days. Notice short pants and less colorful shoes . But although no longer worn much in basketball games, Converse’s Chuck Taylor white high-tops are still alive and well.

But technology has had less effect on the action on the field or court, with the exception of annoying things such as advertisement time-outs. Tradition and the human element hold center stage. This is good, because after all, athletics is supposed to be a contest between humans. Apparently early Greek Olympians competed in the nude, to demonstrate that they were using nothing but their bodies. Modern athletes obviously wear clothes, but are still limited in the type of tools or devices they can use.

Of course, the games themselves have changed over time. Once while my wife and I were in Italy, we attended a re-enactment of Calcio Storico, a game introduced in the 15^th century and described here. It is played on a large field with goals at each end, and each team intends to get the ball into the other team’s goal. But there are 27 people on each team, and no rules to speak of, so one method of gaining an advantage is to disable the people on the other team. It is thought by many to be the parent of modern soccer, and if so, at least soccer has become more humane on the field through paring the team size and putting many more rules in place. Of course it has perhaps become more violent in the stands. But purists would enjoy the old game as well as the new ones —a field, people, a ball, and goal posts.

Technology seldom shows up on the sport page, but the first page of the sport section in the Sunday New York Times of the Sunday May 1 issue contains a story on the automatic home plate “umpire” developed by an engineering team from General Electric in the 1950.s, and championed by Branch Rickey, a man noted for innovations in the sport. The story is here.

The year 1950 was a bit early, both technically and emotionally, for this innovation. Rickey was perhaps more interested in it as a teaching tool than a replacement for the human umpire, but it was not to happen. All of us have disagreed from time to time with the umpire, as have players, coaches, and the broadcast people, but it is probably that this human element, as well as the apparent danger to the umpire exposed to foul balls, the swing of the bat, and attack from angry players and fans, adds to the pleasure of the game. Certainly modern technology, which allows observation of everything from the speed of the pitch to spin rate, the exit velocity of a home run, and the time between bat contact and the first step of the fielder, could call balls and strikes —and I can see that happening some day, much as the video-based play reviews by the referees in football, although the tradition of arguing with and booing the umpire is integral to baseball.

But it is interesting that sports do not display more use of technology, especially in this day and age, and especially for amateurs. I am not particularly interested in golf. I do like to hike through attractive scenery, but don’t particularly want to cruise through it in a golf cart being frustrated because I screwed up the previous hole. And it is an expensive past time in both time and money. But I might be more tempted if the restrictions on the equipment were not so restrictive. An example of some of the rules on golf clubs and balls can be seen here. I think it might be interesting to see what non-pro golfers might come up with if they would relax such things a bit. I might get much more interested in the game if I could invent and use clubs, rackets and balls of my own design with fewer restrictions (no compressed air or chemical propellants). Of course, I am an engineer.

And I was watching some young kids playing basketball on a court at a school recently. They were quibbling about the score and one side was losing terribly and not having much fun. I was thinking how easy it would be not only to build in an automatic score keeping system on the court , but also to mechanize the hoops so that the basket for the team with the higher score would become smaller, move higher, or both during the game. A real-time robotic equivalent of the handicap in golf!

I am not seriously proposing this, since I used to play basketball and consider it a sacred game, but it is interesting to think about such things. After all, even with roughly the same equipment the game itself has changed since I played—increased physical contact, dunking the ball and happily hanging on the hoop, the three point shot, the giant center, etc. How about some breaks for average sized people?

Of course, technology occasionally sneaks in when not allowed, and is soon discovered and the perpetrator punished. The article here concerns a bicycle racer found to be using a bicycle using an electric motor. Can you believe these bicycle racers?

Potential Good News for Lots of People

Most people, especially males, suffer loss of hearing as they age. This is a much larger problem than our society admits. Helen Keller, a woman who lost her hearing and sight at the age of two, and became well known for her ability to overcome these handicaps, claimed that given a choice between one or the other, she would prefer to be blind. A famous quote from her was “Blindness separates people from things: deafness separates people from people”. I have known outstanding teachers who retired because they felt separated from their students, and business people who felt separated from their clients.   I am fortunate in having so far retained my hearing ability , but at my age I am surrounded by people having mild to serious problems engaging in everything from meetings to casual social conversation.

As the two New York Times articles here, and here indicate, this is a widespread problem that will become more severe as populations age. Hearing aids have improved markedly over time, but only a fraction of the people who could benefit from them own one, for reasons ranging from cost to “looking old”. They also can be uncomfortable to wear and have short battery lives. Cost is probably primary, since the top of the line instruments can cost thousands of dollars, partly because of the archaic process needed to obtain one in countries such as the U.S.

In this day and age of technological wonders, especially the shrinkage in cost and size of electronic devices, this should definitely not be the case. But from these articles it looks as though there is hope. If some of the research and development money and talent going into the design of apps, trivial changes in operating systems, “smart watches”, and such things as autonomous cars could be spent on making better, cheaper hearing aids, a very large number of people could remain happily much more engaged in a full life.

The odd thing about this situation is that it seems that hearing aids could be rather easily matched to potential customers by use of tests administered by a computer coupled with a bit of fitting to the geometry of the potential customer’s ears. To throw a medical procedure into the mix without the coverage of insurance seems absurd. But from my own experience being involved in a start-up based on a potentially cheap serum-based test for allergies, I am not naïve about the difficulty of changing tradition. But in this case we are talking about large numbers of people who could be benefited by some of innovation both in the design and the distribution of hearing aids. I read an article about Facebook’s pressure on computer companies to either reduce the cost of the equipment needed to do social networking by a factor of ten, or to make it operate ten times as fast. How about reducing the cost of obtaining a hearing aid by a factor of ten and ensuring that they all have re-chargeable batteries?

Thinking About Science, Technology, and Society

I had the privilege of chairing the Stanford University program in Science, Technology, and Society (S.T.S) for five years in the 1980’s. I was talked into this by the then president and provost of the university, so had some clout, and was able to push a couple of degree programs through the academic senate, raise some money, hire some people, and think much more deeply about the subject matter than I had before. If you are not familiar with such programs, as the name indicates the subject matter is the interaction of these three broad areas, and there are on the order of 100 such programs existing in universities throughout the world (see this link).

I found that there is resistance to such thinking and such programs at many levels and for many reasons. At Stanford, for instance, there are many majors in both the A.B. and B.S. tracks in the S.T.S. program (begun in 1970 by four professors, two in engineering, one in philosophy, and one in religion), but the program is underfunded and understaffed. There are presently 38 faculty members listed as participants, but their appointments (and salaries and often their hearts) are in other departments, And S.T.S. work is highly interdisciplinary, and although interdisciplinary work is in vogue these days in universities, such things as hiring, promotion, and tenure tend to be judged based on traditional disciplines. As a non-Stanford example of the effect of this, in the 1980’s Jerome Wiesner, a man of outstanding accomplishments in government as well as academe, was president of M.I.T., and attempted to establish a whole S.T.S school. An excellent idea. But the faculty turned against this, I think partly because it threatened traditional disciplines.  And to some people, thinking broadly, and especially negatively,  about the nature and usage of science and technology is almost sacrilegious.

In countries such as the U.S. the directions of technology, and even science, are heavily influenced by such things as financial profit and war. Granted, there is tremendous satisfaction in working in the areas, and the results make for exciting media and discussion, but the fit between new science and technology and the quality of human life does not get adequate discussion. If you look at the discussion of S.T.S programs on Wikipedia here (not the best in the world) you can see some of the problems that we should think about more, but do not. One example is the old “tragedy of the commons”, which has to do with the loss in supply and quality of necessary resources if they are free. The original example was free grazing on the town commons. Present examples include using the environment including the atmosphere as a dump, the supply of fresh water, and the internet. Another set or problems comes from what is sometimes called technological determinism. Examples abound, such as the oft-heard comment that “technology must be fed”. Always?

We western cultures are loath to thoughtfully criticize technological developments. Do we really want a sky full of drones delivering packages? Do we really want driverless cars? Certainly we are learning a lot in our attempt to control them, but cars? It seems that traffic problems are due to the large and clumsy nature of individually over powered luxury packages as well as drivers. How about the present activities in the U.S, Russia, and China to develop smaller and faster nuclear weapons? Many years ago nuclear artillery shells were being developed, but people realized that it would not be a good idea to scale nuclear weapons down so they seemed more usable. Is it now a better idea?  We are thinking a bit about CRISPR/Cas9 DNA technology (put it into your browser), but we will undoubtedly forge ahead. Are we smart enough to improve ourselves through DNA technology?

I was motivated to write this blob by an article in the April 16-22^nd edition of The Economist, concerning the decision of Yuri Milner, ((a Russian physicist and investor who intends to spend $100 million on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)), to spend another $100 million on a Laser propelled star ship. I am not criticizing Mr. Milner, since it is his money and he can spend it how he wants and his projects are literally “out there” definitely technologically advanced, and make for good media, but wow! His proposed star ship will tentatively be powered by 10 million 10 kilowatt lasers on earth combined into one 100 gigawatt beam, and reach the planets around other stars in decades rather than hundreds of thousands of years. The catch is that the spacecraft must weigh on the order of one gram. Possible? Read all about it here. But what do you think of it as an expenditure of resources? I wonder whether the wealthy are coming down with Elon Musk envy? But Musk is an idealist and in my opinion getting us to expect zero emission vehicles and re-usable rockets is of more benefit than one gram spacecraft.

I worked on the first lunar and planetary spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the later 1950’s and 60’s, and an early and influential SETI study supervised by Barney Oliver, a pioneer in the effort, was funded by a NASA contract I had in the 1960’s, so I am familiar with the origin of such efforts. And as I said, I believe that the wealthy should spend their money how they choose, but when it comes to government money, shouldn’t we have a bit more discussion? Certainly those involved in such things as SETI have discussed the downsides and upsides of detecting extraterrestrial intelligence, but shouldn’t there be more discussion by the public? We will probably send people to Mars, but it has been proven to be an awful place and will cost a lot of money, even though it will be a real adventure for those few who go, as well as a vicarious one for the rest of us. But is that the best way to spend the money, when there are so many useful things that could be accomplished here on earth?

I am certainly not against science and technology, and in fact lead a wonderful and exciting life by being part of them, but I see their purpose as improving the human condition, and what we are capable of doing is not always something that we should do. My years in the S.T.S program changed my life, and perhaps made me less valuable as a contributor to science and technology, but I have definitely come to think that in many situations we should think more before we leap, and perhaps even more while we are leaping.

Recycling and Deposits

There was a small article in the magazine section of the April 10, 2016 New York Times, which caught my attention. The title is How to Make Money Collecting Bottles and Cans, by Malia Wollan. It is here. Read it, it will make you feel good. It is an interview with Eugene Gadsden, who describes himself as a “canner”. In it, he gives good advice on how to follow his trade. Two of my favorite pearls of wisdom are the advice to find a shopping cart “that rolls smoothly and fits your stature and style”, and “In the beginning, prepare to feel ashamed, humiliated People might yell at you………..Don’t listen, hold your head up, you’re not hurting anybody, It’s honest work.” Gadsden claims in a typical night (1 a.m. to 7 a.m.) to collect on the order of 1000 containers, worth $50 or so in New York City.

One reason that it caught my attention is that it was the way I made money until I was old enough to mow lawns. I had my chores to do, but my parents encouraged me to also earn money to buy necessities such as candy and comic books. Since I lived in the country, there was no garbage service, and in those days (1940’s or so) , not much waste. Food left overs were fed to the cats and dogs, organic garbage went into the grove to be plowed in, bent nails and wire were straightened, cans were either used as is, or flattened for various purposes, and bottles and jars became repositories for small objects or preserves.

Items that could not be used that were flammable were burnt, and anything that was left could be put into the town dump, which was simply an unused ten acre plot. But there was one exception.

In those times, people would throw trash out of car windows, and the population was low enough and the prevailing wind strong enough that it would disappear over time. The one exception was glass bottles. Since roads were narrow, and trees close to the edge, many of them would end up under the nearest trees. But there were also bottles discarded by the orange picking crews, and people such as my father, who were always out patrolling their crops. At that time many bottles were recycled, and often by kids such as me. The economics were attractive to us, although less so to the adults who threw them away. One of the phenomenal marketing stories is that of Coca Cola. The company sold the syrup to bottlers, soda fountains, etc., and they wanted to sell as much as they could. In order to do this they convinced their customers to sell the drink (the syrup and soda water) for five cents a glass (or bottle). This lasted from 1886 to 1959 – some 70 years. The results are apparent today in the presence of the drink all over the world. But the bottles were rather fancy (photo at the left), and heavy, since they were meant to be re-used (the best type of re-cycling). There was therefore a two cent deposit on each.

In most states, there is still a deposit on many bottles, but it is so small in comparison to the cost of the drink (often still 2 cents, or 5 cents), that many people toss their used bottles into the trash can, or in enlightened areas, the re-cycling bin. But two cents was a hot deal to a kid in the 40’s, since it would buy a candy bar, or one fifth of a comic book.

So I hunted bottles and gave them to my mother, who would take them to the grocery store, and bring the cash back to me. The bottles would then go back to the bottling plant in San Bernardino, be washed and steam cleaned, filled, capped, and sent out into the world again. So I made what seemed to be lots of money collecting bottles, the bottling company got them back, and the grove (and those of all our neighbors who did not have kids) stayed clean. I was a young Eugene Gadsden.

I now live in an enlightened area that puts much effort into recycling various products, and it is somewhat successful. But we have three bins, one for yard waste, one for recycled plastics, paper, and metal, and one for garbage. They are emptied into giant trucks each week. The trucks have large automatic arms that pick up the bins, empty them into the truck, and then bang them a few times to make sure that they are empty before returning them to the ground. In the process, they make a lot of noise and exhaust fumes, and block traffic. Not too long ago there were humans with smaller trucks who emptied the bins, but they have been replaced by these large mechanical monsters. There is still a driver, but that too will probably go in a few years. How about autonomous garbage trucks? And they make a separate pass to pick up each bin, thereby competing with the leaf blowers during the day,

And of course, re-cyclable material still ends up in the garbage can, plastic in the paper section of the appropriate bin, etcetera. The result is a noisier, less complete, and more costly way of getting rid of trash than bribing kids to take at least some of it to the grocery store. That approach is good enough to get quite a few adults to take their aluminum cans in, which is good, because aluminum is a most re-cyclable material.

In my coke bottle days, the deposit was two sevenths of the buying price. I just bought a bottle of tomato juice that cost $4.50. Two sevenths of that would be about $1.30. For that I would have definitely taken the bottle somewhere, or even re-sorted my bottles. But I just tossed it into our re-cycle bin, and since it was probably non-biodegradable plastic, and different plastics don’t like to be mixed, it will probably end up living forever in a landfill.

Product Quality and Serviceability

I have several small machines (chain saw, hedge shears, blower, weed whacker) powered by gas engines that no longer work.  For  some time I have intended to go through them and heal their problems, but I keep postponing this, so I made a vow a few days ago that yesterday (a Sunday), I would work on them. But I didn’t. Instead I spent the day happily working on a non-working old tractor I own. It is a late 1920’s Cletrac that has not been run for many years, during which it was rained on enough to develop the nicest uniform coat of rust I have ever seen, and through lack of use was terminally gummed up.    

The small machines, after I repair them, will be immediately useful in the garden. The tractor will not be—in fact it does not even fit in the yard. The small machines will help my wife in her gardening, and will make her happy, even though she hates the sound of small gas engines (as do I – we won’t be pleased when the air is filled with drones). The tractor will not help her. What is with me?

Partly it has to do with when, where, and how I grew up. My parents and great grandparents went through the Great Depression scraping out a living on a small orange orchard plus outside jobs in Southern California, which at the time was occupied by many people doing the same thing. Because of this, no one considered themselves poor, and in fact in terms of satisfaction in life they weren’t, but people made what they could, bought the minimum of what they couldn’t, and repaired everything to the point where many of their possessions they built and maintained are still being employed by my brother, my children and I, including a house they built of materials such as siding from no longer used freight cars and shingles made from old orange boxes (nice house in great shape still lived in by my brother). The reigning ethic was never to throw anything away (hours spent straightening bent nails and bailing wire) and repair anything that broke. I can still hear the voice of my grandmother, sounding like the wrath of God, saying “If you can’t take care of it, you don’t deserve it!

I grew up in the middle of this, and somehow came to love making and fixing things and generally tinkering with them. Probably why I became an engineer and was attracted to hobbies that involve such activities. But I have not been able to escape wondering why these activities seem to appeal to some people (me), and not to others (my wife), and why some of them are more fun for me  than others . For instance, in the case of the tractor vs. the yard machines I can think of several reasons . First of all, to me it is more of an accomplishment to rescue something that is rusted together and hasn’t worked for years, than simply diagnose and repair something fairly new. Secondly, I find older objects, with their history, different ways of accomplishing their function (and often with great aesthetic appeal overall and in their parts), sometimes more interesting than contemporary ones. And strangely enough, the task is often easier.

Why easier? Farmers were the main purchasers of tractors and other such products and they had spare time to maintain them when the weather didn’t allow them to work directly on their crops. They demanded serviceability. As mentioned they often didn’t have enough cash to hire other people to maintain their products. They often liked to work on machinery. And in those days tractors were designed to be assembled in the factory more by hand, rather than by machines, so they were designed to be worked on by humans. Finally, they were less sophisticated technically (no digital circuitry) and manufacturing technology  did not allow the complexity that one finds in such things as modern multi-functional injection molded plastic parts

As a result, the Cletrac is relatively simple to take apart (few fastener types and not that many of them), understand, diagnose, and put back together. A couple of photos might help make the message, even though they are a bit confusing. The first one on the left shows shows my tractor minus its sheet metal parts and a large casting that covers the clutch, gear train, brakes, etc. Stripping it down to that level, despite the rust, took little time and was straightforward. Note the resulting easy access to the various components, compared to access of similar parts in an automobile. The photo on the right below is a close up of the components of the drive train —the differential, the transmission, and the brakes— at the same stage. If you are not familiar with such things, they are beautifully explained on the internet. But take my word for the fact that in old tractors like the Cletrac they are easy to reach and identify, and only a few standard tools are needed for further disassembly and repair, And as you may be able to see, one can work on these things without cranes, special tools, grease pits, or lying on the ground under the machine. Granted the parts are dirty and one becomes so also, but the dirt is easily removable (except perhaps under the fingernails, but dirty fingernails show that one is doing useful work).

The blower could be called more sophisticated, but although cleaner, and with smaller lighter parts, taking it apart and diagnosing what is wrong with it, finding the necessary parts, and putting it back together will be much less fun. Even the meager instructions are less intuitive. One dead giveaway to complexity and strange  fasteners is the phrase “Service on the blower must be performed by qualified repair personnel only”. Another is “Using a Torx screwdriver to….” I would bet that most people buying this sort of product do not own a set of Torx screwdrivers.

It is easy to tell the difference in what is often called serviceability with respect to the tractor and the blower by looking at the manuals that came with each. The blower manual mainly consists of instructions on how to operate it (should be obvious by looking at a good product), warnings about safety, various notices obviously for the purpose of avoiding lawsuits, a full page of exemptions from the warranty, and notices such as “if these solutions do not solve the problem, contact your authorized service dealer”. I happen to have copies of the Instruction Manual and Parts Manual that came with the tractor, and they represent the opposite end of the spectrum. The Instruction Manual spends a bit of time on the tractor operation, but then goes into the details of each sub-assembly of the tractor, how to assemble and disassemble it, and how to maintain it including beautiful drawings. The Parts Manual offers drawings of each part in various exploded views along with part numbers. Neither has warnings about safety, pleas to contact the dealer if anything goes wrong, or statements of how wonderful the product is.  And certainly not instructions to rely on “qualified repair personnel only”. The photo below shows two pages from the Cletrac Instruction Manual as an example. They show a portion of the undercarriage of the tractor and accompany a detailed discussion of how to test the assembly, take it apart, replace parts of necessary, and put it back together.

As I said in a previous post, serviceability is one of the central components of product quality. I am afraid we have lost a great deal of that as products have become more complex and difficult to understand. Or possibly we are considered (are becoming) less capable of taking care of our products. Or lost interest in doing so —throw it away and get a new one (as in "Oh goody, now I can get  a 6S plus with 64 gigs "). Or looking at it more positively, perhaps we would rather outsource the service function to specialists, thus creating more jobs for skilled workers. Maybe I should un-retire and fix things for money for other people instead of working on my own stuff. But then  my grandmother’s voice would be even louder. 

And I will fix the blower tomorrow.

The Small as Well as the Large

As I discussed in my last blog, we can improve our lives by developing a better feeling for very large (to us) quantities, but the same is true with the very small. As I mentioned in a recent post, some modern integrated circuits contain over five billion electronic components (a large number), with transistors separated by only 22 nanometers (small— a human hair is approximately 75,000 nanometers in diameter). Integrated circuits are all over the place these days, and I think it is fair to say that most of us have only a marginal feeling for five billion, and none at all for a nanometer. Does this matter? I think so, for reasons both economic and our overall understanding and appreciation of our world.

 As you may have read, not too long ago, through the use of extremely sophisticated instrumentation, scientists succeeded for the first time in detecting a gravity wave, an important phenomenon theorized by Einstein, but only recently measured. There is a nice article by Bryan Green on what that means in the Smithsonian magazine, entitled Catching a Wave, here. The wave had been traveling through the universe for over a billion years, after having been generated by the collision of two black holes the size of the sun. Since gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, there are some very large numbers indeed involved here. I find thinking about the dimensions and the nature of the universe to be good for me, because I can’t even begin to get a sense of them. It certainly keeps one from becoming too centered on oneself. I think we should all occasionally think about how trivial we are as individuals in the cosmic sense of things. But as the Smithsonian article states, detecting this wave required an instrument capable of measuring a variation in length of a laser beam of less than a billionth of a billionth of a meter —a very small distance.

At present there is a great deal of research in an area called nanotechnology with an increasing amount of successful application. In fact we are increasingly profiting from our ability to make use of our knowledge of the behavior of very large numbers of very small things. Some examples are here. Related examples, are resulting from study of the microbiome, or bacteria population of the human body. Our bodies contain more bacteria than human cells. Exactly how many and what kind is still being determined. An interesting article on the topic is here.  Or you can just type microbiome into your browser.

Without these bacteria, we can’t live. Anyone who has had a large dose of ciprofloxin (an antibiotic commonly used for treating food poisoning, but that kills good bacteria as well as bad) has had a bit of insight as to the importance of these bacteria. Out of this microbiome research is coming such things as fecal transplants and other new and powerful methods of curing previously difficult medical conditions, which I will not discuss because my wife considers them gross, but which can be found on the internet. Feel free to type it into your browser.

The estimate in one of the web links above is that we have about 50 trillion bacteria in our body, of which 40 trillion live in our colon. We have approximately 30 trillion of our own cells, of which 80 percent are red blood cells. (more big numbers of little things)

Incidentally, another method I have of realizing I am not as big a deal as I sometimes think I am is to consider myself primarily a very sophisticated system to provide food for the bacteria living in and on me. At times they seem much more impressive than I—of course I am better looking.

Large Quantities and Elections

The presidential election is beginning to become more real, as the candidates are being forced to deal with more serious questions – such as the federal budget. This is the time when the federal debt becomes an issue and people begin to speak of trillions. This is interesting, because most people know that a trillion is a large number, but have no “feel” for it. That is because most people can live happily avoiding large quantities, and tend to do so because their lives are complicated enough. We shorthand such quantities (using trillion, or tera instead of “a thousand thousand thousand thousand”), but even that does not capture the exponential nature of powers of ten. A short and clever movie was made by Charles Eames, a famous designer, in 1977, and was entitled Powers of Ten. It is now not viewed as much as it used to be, but perhaps should be if we are going to deal with numbers such as a trillion. If you have never seen it, it is here on You Tube.

Around election time, the U.S. national debt comes up (federal debt in 2015 was about $19,009,230,758,000, or  19 trillion dollars, but of course there is state debt, individual debt, and so on). Politicians like to blame the other party and other causes for this, but the government traditionally overspends. But how much should we worry about this? Do we really know what 19 trillion is? Techies like me would approximate it as 1.9x10¹³ dollars, but even that is hard to get a feeling for. If we break that down to on the order of $60,000 or so per person in the U.S., we can think about it more clearly, but it isn’t like our personal debt, because governments can print money and sell bonds, but we can’t.

I think most of us can get our heads around a million, since many houses now cost that much, and after all, a million is a thousand thousands. But a billion is more difficult. Bill Gates has a net worth of about 82 billion dollars, but to appreciate that, it is necessary to put it into a form that is more understandable. For instance, the world’s population is about seven billion, so he could give 11 or 12 dollars to everyone on earth, and he and his family could still have five billion to cover their personal expenses. But if he has it invested in interests that return him 5% per year, he is making over 40 million a year, so he could keep his capital growing and live quite well.

But 19 trillion? It is a very big number. Let’s say I had a job which required me to type 19 trillion x’s on my computer. Using my trusty smart phone, I see that I can type this many—xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx or about 70 in ten seconds. That is or on the order of 500 in a minute if I practiced a lot. That’s believable, since when I took a typing course in high school I got up to 100 words a minute (piano player). According to the Guiness book of records, Barbara Blackburn is the champ at 212 words a minute, and typing test words average about five letters each. But I obviously couldn’t keep up this pace either physically or mentally for a whole day, so let’s imagine that with training I could put in the equivalent of six hours a day without going mad, and in the process type 60x500, or 30,000 x’s per hour, or 45 million per year (5 day week, 2 week vacation).   That means that even a million is a big number. But a billion is a thousand million, so to type a billion x’s would take I,000,000,000 divided by 45,000,000, or a bit over 22 years. So 19 trillion? How about four hundred and eighteen thousand years or so? Of course if we put 100,000 people on the job, they could finish in about four and a half years. (I may have slipped up on the arithmetic here, but you get the idea)

But how much should we care about the national debt? A lot. A simple discussion of the components of the national debt is here. It is a complex thing, ranging from repayment of bonds owned by individuals, companies, and governments inside and outside of the U.S. as well as intergovernmental loans, and other such complexities. and we have to cover the interest on much of it. Unlike individuals and companies, governments can not go bankrupt (as a few U. S cities and foreign countries have) and easily recover, if at all. Bankruptcy of the U .S. is unthinkable, since the U.S. as it is would no longer exist. Eventually the bill must be covered.

Focusing in on the election, many groups are calculating the effects on the national debt of the economic plans being proposed by the candidates. One of the less biased groups is called the Tax Foundation, and their findings are here. A more politically liberal group is the Brookings Institution, and their conclusions are here. They are saying that in ten years, Trump’s plan could add over ten trillion dollars to the national debt, and perhaps up to 80 % (over 15 trillion).

Trump is, of course, telling us that his plan will benefit us all at no cost, the increase in expenses and decrease in tax income will be overcome by the tremendous savings he will make in the costs of government and the surge in economic activity that will result. Are we going to continue to believe that one? Hopefully not, although we have accepted similar arguments in the past. We seem to be eternal suckers for supply-side economics.

But too many of us will focus on what the candidates say, rather than what they will do. And we will not pay as much attention as we should to the numbers , because they are so large they have little meaning compared to the incomes and expenses we are used to.

I will talk a bit more about magnitudes in my next post, because our ability to avoid thinking deeply about very large (and small) quantities is being overwhelmed by the necessity of doing so, whether elections are forthcoming or not.

Digital Clutter

The “Technology Quarterly” section in the March 12^th-18^th issue of The Economist magazine is concerned with the future of computing. Quite a few people, many in the media, are predicting that Moore’s Law, which has predicted the incredible increase of computing power over the past 50 years, is beginning to no longer hold true. Initially, in 1965, Moore’s law, named after Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, predicted that the number of electrical components that could be put into an integrated circuit would double every year.

In 1970, he changed that to every two years, and it has been amazingly accurate. It is difficult to realize what this means, but as the author of the initial article in the section points out, an integrated circuit manufactured 44 years ago by Intel had 2,300 transistors on it, which was thought miraculous. But since then the count has doubled 44 times, leading to a recent chip released from Intel that has over 5 billion transistors on it, only 22 nanometers apart. This incredible shrinking of transistors and increasing power of a chip will probably continue, but at a slower rate. As chip dimensions have increased, and the size of the electronic components decreased, they have become incredibly more powerful. But now the transistors are becoming so small that the performance gain is not as great, and simultaneously the manufacturing is becoming more expensive, it is probable that Silicon chips will to some extent slow down their miraculous growth

But no one expects the growth of computation to slow. Many organizations are working on alternate ways to build digital devices, ranging from using the strange behavior predicted by quantum theory, to using light, to carbon atoms, to following the processes in the human brain. But The Economist articlea emphasize that a great deal of development and business will accompany the better and alternate use of the integrated circuits we now possess. In particular, it speaks of the predicted coming of the “internet of things”, in which low cost, and perhaps lower performance integrated circuits will be integrated in almost everything we use or contact. As examples one article predicts refrigerators that order food, washing machines that ask dirty clothes for instructions, and paving that is capable of monitoring traffic. Apparently a consulting company named Gartner is predicting that by 2020 there will be 21 billion connected devices in the world. You can find the section at http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-03-12/after-moores-law#section-3

I read it with mixed feelings. I am an engineer, and have made use of computers since 1960 when I ran into an early IBM mainframe when I went to work at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Like most people, I have been amazed at the rapidity of their growth in power, and am fascinated that the little thing in my pocket that insists on slipping out and falling on the ground has more computing power than the big computers of those days, and the spacecraft we were designing and successfully launching on then exotic flights contained computers that would hardly deserve the name these days. But these days, I am not involved either in building spacecraft or trying to model the atmosphere, and am quite frankly swamped by the relatively small amount of digital equipment I own and use. This is partly due to the constant “upgrading” I am being asked to do and learn, the proliferation of hardware and software, the various encryption and security packages I am required to have and use, and in particular the lack of standardization. Most of my friends who use Apple desk-tops (as I do) are fed up with the frequency of operating system upgrades, what seems like backward progress in their programs such as the move from iPhoto to Photos, and the increasing “features” which make almost everything more, rather than less, confusing. In fact many of us would switch to Windows, except we did that when the University decided to standardize on it, and although the operating systems are not all that far apart, the distance is enough to be confusing, and Windows will not hold still either.

As to reliability of “things”, within the last few months I have replaced a washing machine, a dishwasher, and a microwave oven because the digital control systems gave up and replacing them was more expensive than the devices were worth. The old fashioned “machinery” part of them was fine. And now, a couple of months after I bought the microwave, the touch pads that control the cycles that depend on humidity are beginning to fail.   On the other hand we have a gas stove that is probably seventy years old and a refrigerator that is probably thirty, and they are doing fine —nothing digital.

I am tired of being unable to open my friend’s cars at night from the back seat, being required to read the operator’s manual (if available) on modern TV’s and audio systems in other people’s houses and in motels and hotels, and risking my neck in random rental cars that have too many controls that operate functions I don’t want located in what seem like strange places. Do we need this?

I realize we love innovation, and that digital capability is moving fast, but maybe it’s time to consider more standardization, before we connect up all of the 20 billion devices_— In fact, before we design them. I realize that great diversity of digital devices makes for challenge and  feelings of accomplishment, for engineers, lots of profit for companies, lots of IT jobs and openings for people who write instruction manuals and give classes on how to use the newest thing, and big profits for companies who can rapidly replace their products with “new and better” ones. But I want to keep using hardware and software that does what I need done, I know how to use, is reliable, and especially does not become useless to me  because the company developing it no longer ”supports” it. Many devices being considered for the “internet of things” should have a lifetime of many years, and perhaps will be imbedded in “things” in a way that makes it difficult to change them, especially if the format keeps changing (think of Apple’s projector plugs, the increasing flavors of USB plugs, and the pile of different looking, and sometimes different voltage transformers that pile up in people’s basements until they hit the trash barrel}.

It’s time for digital devices to start growing up. They are supposed to help us, not clutter up our lives with buying and learning to use new features we don’t need or want. Maybe if the magic growth of integrated circuits is going to slow down, we should take advantage of the opportunity to learn to build devices that fit the average user a little better, and the people who want to make exotic equipment should target users who need it—somebody must be building a simulation of expected earthquakes on Ceres. 

Having criticized the direction Apple’s desk tops are taking, I should say I think their iPhones are following a much more reasonable change pattern, since features (apps) are optional, and the yearly releases don’t change radically in operation. Maybe Apple is putting more effort and thought into hand-helds than desk-top models. But I just had to buy a new phone, because the operating system in my old one could not be encoded by whatever software is being used by Stanford to encode smart phones. And it is still ridiculously difficult to change iPhone batteries.

Get a Better One!

My father was an unknowing philosopher. He had various favorite rules of life (if work was fun, someone would do it for free), but didn’t know they were philosophy. One was “if you love something, and either lose it or someone takes it and you can’t find them and beat them to a pulp, get a better one”. I am a particular believer in the latter wise belief, so when someone swiped a bird I had made for my wife out of junk (reported on in a previous post), I could not find out who, and it did not seem a large enough theft to report to the FBI, so it was necessary to make at least a replacement, if not a better one. The result is shown at the left, and now sits splendidly overlooking our second floor deck and fastened securely to earth. Since I had much of the original material, it is the same as the first one, except for redder eyes, a different shaped head, and a better tail.

But that did not seem adequate, so I decided to make another one. Since my wife is often working in her garden, and I in my shop, our house doorbell doesn’t always do much good for visitors. Some time ago I suggested an outdoor klaxon (like submarines use before diving) instead of the indoor bell, but was vetoed. So I hung up an old-fashioned farm bell (see picture to the right). Hauling on the rope definitely lets us know someone is at the door, whether inside or outside. But I decided to add to that, and hung a no- longer-usable bottomless small welding gas tank by the back door with a stick beside it. (see left below) Hitting the tank with a stick also sends a noticeable signal. But not as splendid as the front door bell. So a few years ago I got another cylinder that was larger and cut the bottom off, thinking I would make a two-toned bell. But the cylinder was much thicker than I expected, so it made more of a clunk than a bell tone. So I put it in my “assorted metal things” pile and went on to other projects.

But I noticed while replacing my purloined bird that it could be a bird body , and right next to it was a scythe blade that could be a beak………..etc.etc.etc. The result is shown below. It is still under construction, but definitely bird-like. I apologize for the lack of legs, but after all, penguins don’t show much leg. And now I feel like I made up for the loss I received after some scum-ball(s?) stole my old bird. But fear not, some day I will find them.

The U.S. West?

I was looking through the Sunday paper, and came across an interview with Timothy Oliphant, an actor whose work I became familiar with when I was an addict of the TV series “Justified”, in which he starred as Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshal somewhat on the edge. He is now portraying a country music and movie star in a play in New York (apparently another “cowboy” role), entitled “Hold On To Me Darlng” So I looked through the article, and once again, found a statement similar to ones I have often seen or heard that has always confused me. It was “Mr. Oliphant, a California boy without a western bone in his body......”.

Seems to me that in the U.S. California is pretty far west, along with Oregon and Washington. In fact, the only U.S. states further west are Alaska and Hawaii. It is also interesting that California was early into cattle ranching and cowboys. According to Wikipedia, the early vaqueros that worked cattle came to California in 1687 and were reinforced by many others through the 18^th century. Although California then was part of Mexico, these were arguably the first cowboys in the U.S. territories.

So why do people in states such as Texas continue to refer to themselves as “the west” and act as though they invented cattle ranching , cowboys, and country western music? It is true that in the past there were somewhat heroic cattle drives from the Texas/Oklahoma area to railroad destinations such as Abilene, Kansas, but these occurred only over the 20 to 25 years after the Civil war, before railroad destinations closer to ranches were built, and open range began to be fenced. And why are cowboys and outlaws so romanticized, since from what I understand, being a cowboy was hard and low paying work, and outlaws did not live easy lives or do the country much good? Country Western music seems to draw heavily from the South rather than the true West (although Bakersfield, California does well —historically Buck Owens, Tommy Collins, and Merle Haggard, and a large number practicing the art now), and looking at a map, Texas is if anything slightly to the east of the middle of the country, and acts more like the South than the West.

During my visits to Texas, I have also been confused by the key role played by costume elements such as ten gallon hats (should be ten galón hats —Spanish for the narrow hatband on them—they clearly don’t hold ten gallons of water, and the hat would become fairly weird in shape if it were used as a bucket ) and cowboy boots, often made of exotic hides (Ted Cruz’s favorites are apparently alligator hide) . The hats have wide brims to protect one from the sun, but are hot and heavy, and the boots are made to be easily stuck into stirrups, (pointed toes, Cuban heels), but neither seem to be consistent with working in corporate offices or eating lunch in Dallas. In fact the boots don’t work with me at all, since my feet seem to be fairly square across the front, having five toes on each, and I drive motor vehicles rather than horses, both of which are probably true for most citizens of Texas.

I assume that much of this is a remnant from when Texas joined the U.S. slightly before other more western territories, so the phrase “old west”, is perhaps meaningful. But when the term “West” is used to describe Texas and neighbors, ignoring the 13 states further west than it, it seems like good marketing, but bad geography. And after all, the U.S. did not discover much of this land, but rather took it from Mexico by a combination of war and money. During the 4 year presidency of President James Polk, Texas was annexed in 1845, the Oregon Treaty was negotiated with Great Britain in 1846, and the Mexican-American War concluded in 1848, which ended with the signing and ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848. A busy four years indeed.

These events brought within the control of the United States the future states of Texas, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Washington, and Oregon, as well as portions of what would later become Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, and Montana. U.S. behavior during a land grab of this extent was probably not all above reproach. And since Texas joined the Union in 1845, and California in 1850, Texas was the “West” or the U.S. for only five years. When Hawaii joined, we were all in trouble, because not only was it further west than the rest of us, but it was early into big cattle ranches and cowboys. Check here.

Two Models

The photo below is of two bomber models.   Which one is best? The one in the background (letter A on tail) is a B-17, of World War II fame, built from a modern kit. As an engineer, I marvel at the accuracy and detail of the various molded pieces that the modern model maker cements together. I didn’t check to see if the small figures of crew members have fingernails or not, but I would not be surprised if they did. And such models go together beautifully, requiring little skill, except for keeping the paint and cement where it should be. My grandchildren were putting such things together when they were eight or nine years old, until their house ran out of available ceiling space to hang them on.

I built this model because through a fortunate chain of circumstances my wife and I were given a ride on the B-17 that the Collings Foundation has beautifully restored and tours around the country. I rode in World War II airplanes plenty when I was in the Air Force. World War II was well over, but many of its planes were in service, partly because the people who had served in World War II were nostalgic for them, and because they were sturdy, practical, and available. In fact the first military airplane I even rode in was a B-17, and I managed to sit in the  nose (great view) while we did a fly over for a parade in Marysville, California.

The ride was fun, and Marian seemed to enjoy it a great deal, so I put together the model to hang in her office to remind her of a fun day. But, although she did love the day, she wasn’t that thrilled with the model, which now resides in our basement, which together with our garage and a room I commandeered as an office, I control.

But the other model, although lacking in accuracy and detail, is by far the best. I built it when I was eight years old, and had just returned from a fly-over and a walk through a prototype of a bomber numbered the B-19, a Douglas Aircraft competitor to Boeing's B-29 for the successor to the B-17. It was to be a super bomber, and to eight year old me, it was. The B- 29 had won the competition, but Douglas was touring the B-19 around to learn from it, do a bit of advertising, and help build war fervor. The B-19 had a wing span of 212 feet, a length of 132 foot and weighed 130,000 pounds empty. As contrast, the B-17 had a wingspan of 104 feet, a length of 74 feet, and weighed 33,000 pounds empty. For that time the B-19 was huge, and in fact was the largest aircraft ever built in the United States. I still have a vivid memory of being at March Field in Riverside and having it fly what now would be considered dangerously low over our heads. A discussion of it is at http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/americas-real-wwii-flying-fortress-was-the-massive-doug-1632864365

I immediately went home and built a model of it. This was in 1942, and there was little plastic, injection molding was in the future, and I had never seen such a thing as a model kit (perhaps because my parents didn’t allow me to, or I would have nagged them incessantly). But at that age I was pretty agile with a few materials. Since I lived on an orange grove, and my father worked in an orange packing house and my grandfather had a fairly complete shop, I had excellent access to both picking and shipping orange boxes, a jig saw, a lots of files, hammers, glue, and above all tin cans. So I made the fuselage, wings, landing gear, and various small pieces  from an orange shipping box, the propellers and tail surfaces from tin can stock, and wheels and such from a dowel rod I found in my grandfather’s shop. I had a private stock of aluminum, red, white, blue, and black paint and a few small paint brushes I had scavenged from my mother. But no plans or photos.

I don’t know why the twin tail, except that in those days people didn’t carry cameras around, there was no internet and I could not find a B-19 photograph in the town library to augment my memory of it, and maybe I was thinking of the B-24, which was large, had a twin tail, and was introduced in 1941. Or maybe I just liked twin tails.

Although my B-19 model was not even in the same world of accuracy, complexity, finish, and scale as those that result from modern plastic model kits, I BUILT IT, and my friends, although they were at the demonstration, didn’t have a model of it at all. And in the process I learned a lot about airplanes in general, as well as about the B-19, which was loaded with armament and the state of the art in control systems and power plant. And rather amazingly I still have it, usually hanging in my office, and remember the real one flying over my head whenever I see it.  I still have it because my mother was very proud of it (and me, of course) and kept it. I found it late in her life when I was helping her go through her possessions, and took it home. I can’t say the same for other things I was doing when I was eight years old. But it was part of the long process that has made me good at making, fixing, and tinkering, as I have said in my blog, all necessary therapy in my life, appreciated by my wife and home, and passed on to my kids.

Incidentally, in the upper left corner of the photograph can be seen a portion of a sail boat. Although we were not that close to the ocean, I was interested in sail boats when I was a kid, and tried to make a model of one and failed, because the wood working was over my head and I had never seen a big one. So my mother made me one, and that is it in the background of the photograph. She kept my model, I kept hers.  She had never seen one either, but mothers are not stopped by little details like that. Later in life I scratched my itch by making several detailed models of old ships. But now you can buy them ready made from the New York Times store, at a price that doesn’t compare with the zillions of hours I spent on mine. BUT I BUILT MINE, and in the process spent zillions of very rewarding hours, and also learned lots about old sailing ships from the structure, through the function of the many lines on them, to much of the history of sailing ships and their role,  I learned how to work at very small scale, and needless to say, I met lots of interesting people who were hooked on old ships and making models of same.

I consider myself lucky to be an unrepentant DIY (Do It Yourself) guy, and am grateful to my parents and grandparents for encouraging and helping me.

Addiction to Old Machines

Today is Valentine’s day, so one would think my wife and I are out celebrating our love, but she is in Burma with some Indian friends, so I am working on restoring yet another tractor —I guess another (although weaker, of course) love. Besides it was Valentine’s day yesterday in Burma, and I sent her an unusually long and passionate message.   So I have quit my tractor project for the day, because  I have a couple of heavy house-cleaning and organizing days to do to convert it back from being ideal for me to reasonable for her.

The tractor presently undergoing treatment is a Cletrac K-20, manufactured by the Cleveland Tractor Company around 1930. This year is the 100^th anniversary of the Cleveland Tractor Company, so if you want to see some, go to a big tractor meet this year. The photograph at the left shows a restored K-20 in a museum.

Mine is shown at the right as it was  when I acquired it . The good news was that it was in a barn. The bad news was, of course, it did not run, and was filthy and bashed up, but that is part of the game. The next photo on the left shows signs of its rat habitation (also usual) The photo at the bottom left of the post shows it after it was towed outside.   California is having a stretch of beautiful (ugly if you are a farmer) weather, and I am taking advantage of it by working on the tractor in warm weather under a blue sky.

This tractor is interesting because it was unusually sophisticated for its time—perhaps too much so. The next photo on the right shows some of the plumbing that enables all track wheels to be lubricated from a central hand pump on the dashboard. The bad news was that the recommendation from the manual is that the pump be worked every 15 minutes, that the system needed oil instead of grease (which tended to leak more), and it had a tendency to clog. In contrast, the track wheels for Caterpillar’s tractors of those years required greasing each wheel separately, but not nearly as often, and really not that huge of a job. The Cletrac  also has wheel steering, using a mechanism to link the steering wheel to the brakes that actually turned the tractor —more parts to wear out and break, compared with caterpillar’s hand operated turning brakes. Also, a couple of people who had used them on their farms grumbled to me that the tractors did not weigh enough, and therefore didn’t have enough traction. Caterpillar, with simpler, heavier, more rugged machines out-competed them on the market. 

So far I have pressure washed it, to get rid of loose dirt, rat poop, spiders, and other such uneeded material. My first discovery as to its running problem is that the carburetor and the hose from the fuel tank were jammed with the kind of varnish that accumulates in gasoline fuel systems after years of disuse, so I took the carburetor apart and cleaned it out, and re-plumbed the whole fuel system. That is the reason the fuel tank is missing from the last photo. I have also cleaned up the magneto and it seems to be delivering an adequate spark at the plugs. Whether it is sparking at the right time I don’t know, but that’s adjustable. .If you do not follow old gasoline powered machinery, they tend to use a magneto (a small electric generator) to provide the spark. Unlike modern machinery, there is no battery involved, so starting them requires cranking— sometimes a challenging activity. The engine now turns over reasonably easily, and I have lubricated the engine with new grease and oil

Assuming I can get the creature running soon, I will begin seriously cleaning it, which consists of removing thick hardened grease deposits that cover much of the machine, including tracks, wheels, the undercarriage, and all existing crevices and corners. This involves use of scrapers, both hand and electric powered, occasional solvents and a heat gun to soften the most resistant deposits, much cursing, and finally a wondrous tool called a needle, gun, that I will advertise in a future post. Then after straightening out the sheet metal (obviously missing in the photos) I will paint the whole thing and happily add yet another rescued machine to my yard (or my son’s farm).

Some people wonder why I spend time doing this sort of thing, when I could be playing golf , taking my wife out to lunch and the theater, or watching sports on TV. My response is a carefully figured out “to each his or her own. And my wife likes me happy, rather than frustrated and cursing small annoying aspects of life (which I would be doing if I were playing golf), and while I am rescuing old machines, she can do things she likes to do and I don’t as much. As the wife of a friend of mine who has even more consuming hobbies than I do says, “I like Bill well hobbied up”.

The Training of a Pickup Owner

Some time ago, I wrote a post complaining about my then reasonably new Toyota 8ft. bed pickup. My complaints had to do with its size (except for the 8 foot long bed). It was simply too big.  But since I still have it, it must have some good points, so in all fairness.I figure that I should mention a few redeeming virtues to it.

I first experienced pickups when I rode around with my dad in his 1939 Chevrolet. Eight foot bed, but smaller machine. Eight feet is a magic number, since building materials, single mattresses, and all sorts of other things can be put into an eight foot long space, and if there is a closable end (the tailgate) they will stay there. He drove the truck for over 25 years, before losing it in an accident, and then acquired a 1966 Chevrolet pickup, which he drove until he died, at which point it went to my oldest son, and now I am restoring it. All eight foot long beds. But pickups have grown.

At one point, I needed my own pickup, and bought a new small Toyota truck (six foot bed). It was a wonderful machine, and passed through the hands of two of my children before it was finally sold. My older son is into his second small Toyota (Tacoma), and has had terrific luck with them, but they all had shorter beds. I meanwhile went through an 8 foot bed blue Ford F150 (wrong color for California’s central valley), and a white one (more acceptable to the culture). Both of them served me well, except as the bells and whistles increased in number and complexity, although the drive trains in both of them gave me no problems, I had increasing problems with failures of remote control features, electronic ignition systems, etc. So I decided to buy another no frills Toyota, and go back to the smaller model because of its convenience in parking and driving around cities. But as I tested the new Tacomas, I realized I had somehow gone from a large person to an extra large person, and I couldn’t easily get my knees under the steering wheel, my head under the top of the door opening, etc. Perhaps less flexible?

Also, I have always been  an ad-hoc camper, and had shells on my Fords, enabling me to sleep in the 8 foot bed in the rain, and my wife to ride in back on a mattress and read books and listen to music when we took long trips (probably illegal, since there was no seat or seat belt back there). So I bought a white Tundra, even though it had the shortcomings I mentioned in the earlier post.

1. Too high off the ground, demanding a running board for my wife to get into it, and making it impossible to reach objects in the middle of the bed.
2. Door too wide to be fully opened in tight parking situations.
3. Turning radius too large due to wheelbase of the truck, in turn partly due to an overly long cab. I wanted a single seat, but the “conventional cab” has room behind it, presumably to put things. But the space is such that things put there will disappear forever, because it is a high and narrow space, and how many of us are going to remember what we stuff into a space such as that?
4. Too “car like” instead of “truck like”. Large body panels with little structure behind them which dent easily, lavish and expensive rear light enclosures that are difficult to change when the break (it is a truck), etc.
5. The step on the back bumper enabling you to easily get into the back is covered by the tailgate when it is open.
6. And more

My previous experience had taught me much about ordering a pickup. I knew it was important for me to:

1. Order the minimum of bells and whistles (remote control devices, TV cameras, luxury upholstery, etc.), since over long usage, they would be likely to fail. If you lose your manual key to open the cab and start the engine, you probably have another one, and if not, the nice people from AAA can solve your problem. But if your digital “safety system” fails, you probably better hang on to your wallet and take it to a mechanic.
2. Go for the smallest engine available. It will have plenty of torque and speed for me and I don’t plan to race my pickup.
3. Go for two wheel drive. Four wheel drive obviously has more traction, but tempts one to try to attempt overly heroic feats. There is nothing more pathetic than a stuck four-wheel drive vehicle.
4. Get an eight foot bed. The two extra feet are worth the extra move needed to get into a parking space in most lots, and the worry about whether you are going to make the U- turn at the intersection. Besides, your friends and family always want to move eight foot long items. Security is a load of plywood sheets and other building material with the tail gate closed. And you can sleep in it.
5. Get one that is easy to get in and out of, because that seems to be a primary activity with a pick up.
6. Unless you have a dog or very small kids, forget anything behind the main seat, but make sure it can seat three people. I seem to do quite a bit of moving for young perhaps newly married couples, and they both want to go along, so stay away from fixed central consoles.

So what have I done to now be much more fond of my truck, than when I initially bought it?  I have not done the major modifications I had planned, like lowering the body and beefing up the springs.  But other things have happened.

1. First of all, I have accumulated the various dings and scrapes having to do with normal usage of such a truck, so I don’t have to worry about it. The truck and I can curse together when we find a new scrape in a parking lot, which makes us closer. (Incidentally, when people ding your pickup in a parking lot, they tend not to leave you a note—I guess that’s reserved for cars). I once had the unsettling experience of observing a farmer friend of mine drive a new pickup home, only to attack the inside of the bed with a crowbar, since he did not want a bed liner, and did not want to have to worry about the shiny new paint and bumpless interior. He wanted to put it to work immediately. I understand that, but can’t bring myself to do it.
2. I put running boards on it, just like in the 1930’s
3. I built several fine sturdy yet light weight boxes that I could stand on to reach material in the center of the box, and use to easily get in the back when the tail gate was open. But after the boxes were repeatedly stolen by people for storage containers (especially my wife}, I shortened an old rake which I keep in back to help me reach things. And I learned to climb in the back, using the bumper step, before I open the tail gate.
4. I have learned a set of skills associated with the truck. I have a plastic removable bed liner in the back, because I frequently load and unload heavy objects and it is somewhat slippery so that objects slide more easily on it. I have become quite good at moving things where I want them while en route. I can move them forward by an usually abrupt stop. I can move them backward by accelerating up the hill to my house. Just a few hours ago I had three toolboxes, some old tractor parts, and a bunch of just-bought loose groceries in the back, and I was able to use the uphill road to my house, my brakes, and my steering wheel to arrange everything in the order I wanted them—sophisticated swerving adjusts things sideways.

So I now love my Tundra. It has just taken fifty thousand miles for us to get used to each other. | It is still too big, too far off of the ground, and too fancy. But now it is looking older and more used like I do, and I am looking forward to the next fifty thousand miles.

Do you suppose people become more fond of products that they use a long time, both because they become more skillful at using them, and because they become “old friends”? I sure do. What does that say about constant new digital equipment and continual new “upgrades”?

U.S. Growth in the Future

I am reading various books and articles concerning future predictions of the U.S. and other countries because of the Homo Demi Sapiens book on which I am presently working. I have just finished reading The Rise and Fall of American Growth, subtitled The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (see recommended books), and loved it, although it is a heavy book, both in weight and in content. The author, Robert Gordon, is an economics professor at Northwestern University, with a deep interest in history, in this case the history of technology and related effects.

He makes two major points in the book: one being that simple measures such as GNP do not adequately describe the effects of technological developments, and the other being that the time period 1870 through 1970, and in particular 1920 through 1970, may be unique in the U.S. as far as growth is concerned.

He includes improvement in the quality of life in his measure of growth, as well as economic data. He particularly addresses a number of what he calls “great” inventions that happened in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, such as electrical light and power, internal combustion engines, the germ theory of medicine, wireless communication, and water, gas, electrical telephone and rail and highway networks. He feels that these inventions and developments, and the resulting exploitation of them, ranging from urbanization to rapid and affordable instant communication and rapid travel to household appliances and mass production rapidly changed the U.S. in remarkable and positive ways, ranging from urbanization, to much longer life expectancy, to education and entertainment.

But he thinks that the huge growth resulting from this activity is unusual, and perhaps is beginning to return to a lower, and more normal rate of growth. This is a rather unpopular view in the U.S., and quite different than the one present candidates for office are promising if they are elected. We fully expect to return to the high rate of growth we attained in the period 1920 to 1970. There are still areas in which great change is happening rapidly, the obvious one being information, communication, and entertainment as a result of digital technology, but Gordon offers a large amount of data and arguments that even this is slowing down, that such activities are allowing us to do things much more rapidly and cheaply than we could before, but we could do them, and information, communication, and entertainment are only a small part of the many factors that define our standard of living.

He finishes the book by specifically pointing out four factors that slow down growth—increased inequality, inadequate education, demographics, and repaying debt— and suggests what we have to do to combat them. But he clearly does not think that we will ever reach the rate and revolutionary effects of the growth that occurred in the period which he discusses in the book.

I found the book very thought provoking, and tend to believe many of the author’s arguments, even though I have been involved in technology (even “high” technology, whatever that means) all of my adult life. But although I am a great fan of Star Wars movies, I don’t think they predict where we are going (I hope).  I think we will figure out how to overcome the obstacles to growth that Gordon identifies to some extent and to help people displaced by digital devices to provide better and more satisfying lives. And too much growth and change can be unsettling to a large and growing population.  Finally according to Gordon, part of our stimulus to rapid growth during the 20^th century was due to recovery from the great depression and the spurt in production and recovery during and after World War II. That was a hard way to grow!

Wired Magazine—in my Opinion, a Good Product Gone Bad

As you may know, I am very interested in the quality of industrially made products. Certainly magazines qualify. I do not set myself up as an arbiter of taste, and do not usually question other people’s likes and dislikes, but sometimes I am amazed at the direction some products take,I guess in order to make more money. Wired, which used to be both fun to read and informative, had the good judgment to jump early into things digital. It featured articles on new and exciting technological developments, explained the way things worked and had interesting statistics about applications. But then Conde Naste bought it, and the result might be an improvement if you are looking for luxury goods such as ten thousand dollar watches and three thousand dollar bicycles, graphics that make the text much more difficult to read, and yet more news and interviews about and with movie actors and other wealthy glitterati.

I let my prescription lapse at that time, but I seem to continue to receive it with various inducements to re-join the subscriber list. This seems to be an ear mark of many magazines, especially those who carry a large amount of advertising. They seem to want to continue to be able to add you to their subscriber list, probably to boost “readership” and demographics to maintain and increase advertising income. Conde Naste seems to excel at this. Perhaps I will turn them in for putting trash in my mail box. But just to make sure I am not making a mistake I opened the last edition (rather than just throwing it into the trash) and did not change my mind. It has little left for me.

The cover article has to do with General Motor’s re-entry into the electric car business. Not exactly new news, and I wish them luck, but I plan to wait and see (yes, one of my sons was an early Tesla employee). Ads for Kit and Ace (luxury athletic clothing ), and TAGHeuer (luxury watches) follow, On the back cover is the Lincoln Black Label MKX (a Detroit Luxury car) and inside is an ad for Morgan Stanley. None of these are widely sought after by the people I know involved in digital devices or applications.  In between are lots of full page ads (including the kind that fold out), articles such as one about the 20 most politically influential “Tech Insiders”, an article on the GM electric car (the Chevrolet Bolt) and one on trends in transportation (bold face statements taken from text turned sideways and put in the middle of the page on both). And of course, suggestions for the well-appointed techie, including a $2000 table and a $870 office chair. The articles end with one treating a bizarre brain operation that I guess was intended to make the person owning the brain (who paid for the operation) more susceptible to being hooked up to a computer?????

I perhaps am not being fair to Wired, but I miss the old emphases, and don't seem to get much from the new. I admit I have a bias against Conde Naste magazines, except for the New Yorker, which has done a good job of holding onto tradition , and one expects luxury ads in it. It is difficult to escape these magazines, as they tend to end up in doctors offices, dentist offices, and other places where one encounters waiting rooms—they are especially worrisome in doctor’s offices because they feature models who clearly have eating disorders. And they even appear in my house. As an example, my wife subscribes to Architectural Digest (she refers to it as a “guilty pleasure”), and I hate it. First of all, there is little in it about architecture. It occasionally contains impressive houses (usually owned by celebrities) , but the emphasis is on the furnishings and decorations in the rooms.  The items are all identified by source, and can be bought from dealers often listed in the magazine if one has a large amount of money to spend on such things. But the three reasons it annoys me the most is the staggering amount of advertising in the magazine (they should pay me to read it), the fact that very few of the spaces in the magazine show any signs of human habitation (no toys on the floor, magazines on the table, glasses on the drainboard, bicycles on the porch, or butt-dents on the couches), and third, the letters seldom of ever fall short of raving about the magazine and its contents. I admit that I have never written a letter to the magazine, and maybe I will to see what happens. I will have no trouble at all in finding something that I consider awful, and I suspect they will not print my letter. If they do, I will write an apology to them and a retraction to this post (maybe).

Repurposing Products of Technology (Trash)

I have a fairly complete home shop and like to make things. I also have access to a huge amount of old scrap material at a friend’s farm, and discarded objects put out on the street for the twice a year free trash pickup in the area of my house. I frequently attend shows of antique machinery, which typically have a so-called swap meet, where no-longer-used pieces of equipment and components are available for very friendly prices. I have discovered that I can please not only myself, but friends and neighbors by turning old stuff back into useful objects. Eventually this scrap will be recycled either into raw materials (iron, aluminum, etc) or ground fill. Why not get some use out of it in the interim?

This post is about turning scrap metal into so-called yard art. I recently was not only annoyed, but flattered when a bird I had made out of various discarded objects was actually stolen. I just thought I was having fun, not creating objects of value. It is shown in the photo before it flew away.  Since I spent a year as an art student at UCLA, and was brainwashed as to what real art is, I do not consider this real art, but it is fun.  Maybe it is yard decoration.

In fact I have done a lot of this sort of stuff, now that I have outlived my art teachers. The photos below  show two more birds, an ant ,and a flower that also reside in our yard.

I also enjoy making functional looking things that do nothing. The next photo looks like water runs through it, or at least in and out of it, but that is not the case. As you know, I also restore abandoned machines, so that they operate and retain some of their early glory. A few are shown in the following picture, and I will talk about that use of time  in a future post. The final two are of  a restored pump-jack  holding our mail box ((corny, but Marian (yellow vest with bird and ant, likes it)) and a restored  oil pump doing nothing but sticking in the ground. (Incidentally, I realize that the layout of this post is awful, but I use the Typepad service, and no matter what I do, the service screws it up.)

 

 

 

 

 

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Are Computers Turning Us Into Slaves?

Are Computers Turning Us Into Slaves?

In 1996, Clifford Stoll, already a long-time computer user, wrote a book entitled Silicon Snake Oil, which was critical of the internet. I loved it and recommended it to all of my friends. It was a breath of fresh air in an atmosphere which was polluted with the breathing of people sure that computers and the internet would solve all problems and generally lead to nirvana. Many of the latter are still around.

One observation I remember from the book, was that in the early days of the computer, he claimed he spent half of his computer time simply trying to get his equipment to do what he wanted it to do, which was reasonable, but in 1996 it seemed like he was still doing this, and it hardly seemed reasonable at all.

Now it is ten years later. It has been raining for the last two days in California, and although I probably should have gone outside and played in the rain, it being miraculous in our drought ridden state, I decided to stay inside and work on my computer, happily typing on books, getting my photographs out of Apple’s new and disastrous Photos software, doing small things such as this post, and so on. I did none of that. Instead I worked on our relatively simple home computer system, which consists merely of two computers, two printers, and related equipment.

At the beginning, my wife was having problems with scanning material to Word, and downloading Christmas photos from her camera, and my printer was doing an awful job printing pictures – streaky and too dark. The streaky was clearly from a printer needing cleaning. But the too-dark seemed like maybe something more profound. The result was a struggle with color balance, where was it being controlled, etc, and the usual downloading of new software. Still too dark. So I ran it through the cleaning sequence three times. No difference. At that point I had already spent far more time than the printer was worth, so I went and bought a new printer, and you know how much time that takes, especially since it is sales season, people are still returning Christmas gifts, and the traffic is a nightmare in this area anyway. And of course, there was then the time spent learning to use all of its features, most of which I didn't need.

After selfishly solving my own problems first, I attacked those of my wife, and made a slight bit of progress. Like most people we work with lots of peripherals and are hampered by finite desk space and large screened maschines with not enough USB ports (which are in the back of the machine, and therefore sweep everything on the desk to the floor when the computer is rotated to reach the damn things). She was powering one USB hub off of another one, and since the light on her card reader was not going on, maybe not enough power to download the photos? So I did the usual shuffling of USB cords, including trying to trace them through the snarl that accompanies most computers, hoping that some combination would let everything work, but no luck. I then re-entered the post holiday traffic and got a new and better brand of hub, but still no luck. I finally tried her card on my computer and it also didn’t load – woops, something wrong with the card. It turns out she bought it overseas, so I set that one aside for later.

On to the scanning. Somewhere in the recent “upgrading” we have been doing due to changes in operating systems (required on mine by the encryption now demanded by Stanford servers and hers demanded by peripherals and consistency with mine), and resulting obsolescence of applications, she couldn’t find her favorite method of simply scanning to RTF and then saving the document as a Word document. We worked on that for a while before succeeding, also trying to translate the marketing language concerning available new optical character recognition software that maybe we should download (impossible to learn such things over the phone, all advertised as the best on the internet, and I wasn’t about to go driving again). But by then, my two days were over.

So, Mr. Stoll, in those two days days, I  far exceeded spending half of my time trying to get my “system” to do what I want it to. I  spent ALL OF IT. And was not done! And to make matters worse, quite a bit of my time was spent accommodating to having to “upgrade” software which, I didn’t want to do, because it will require me to modify useful habits I have acquired over time, and the changes will not improve my life—so far, quite the contrary. In my present mood, typewriters were pretty cool.

Following day note: My wife’s computer had lost its connection to the internet the day before in all the excitement. We initially thought it was because we had pulled something loose in the afore mentioned swarm of wiring which not only interconnects our computers, printers, and so on, but also allows us to participate in a beta test of Google Fiber and TV, all controllable from a pad and working through many black boxes. My credentials would seem to indicate that I should be better than average at screwing around with this kind of stuff, since I have been an engineer for 60 years, have used computers since they became available, and I guess was once a “rocket scientist”, since I worked on spacecraft at J.P.L.  If true, I have great sympathy for those who are only average and are in the same boat as I seem to be in.

Turned out it was a faulty power strip, now replaced and all systems are go, except that one of the external back-up drives seems to be balking.  I will now post this thing, call for help from a friend, Tim Keely, the world’s best IT person, who will know what is up with the external drive (no clue from its manual on the web), get back to the imported photo card, and then begin my periodic unsnarling of wires that seem to love to intertwine beneath desks and tables and behind sofas, bookcases, heavy chests of drawers, and other heavy objects. My world is not yet wireless.

And aren't computers supposed to serve us, rather than the opposite?

A Great Book About Everything

 Every once in a while I read a book that really impresses me. Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari (HarperCollins books, more info on recommended books at left), is one of these. Maybe it is because I am working on a book concerning the influence of our evolution on problem solving. Sapiens is a book about us, including  a bit about the evolution of our brains. Maybe it’s because I learned a lot and tend to agree with what he says.

It also impresses me because Harari writes better than I do, is better at referencing sources than I am, and perhaps is smarter and knows more than I do about the history of the human race. But I will only admit this to those of you who read my posts, because I trust you not to tell anyone. And it doesn’t make me feel too bad, because he is a historian (writing and referencing), and probably doesn’t know as much techy stuff as I do. But his photo doesn’t make him look very old…………..

I have read many books about the origins and evolution of homo sapiens, but none that are as fun to read and that cover as broad a span of material. There is a quote on the front of his book from Jared Diamond, who is definitely no slouch in the knowledge and writing departments, and it pretty well summarizes the book. It is “Sapiens tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language”.

The book is divided into four sections, The Cognitive Revolution, The Agricultural Revolution, The Unification of Humankind, and The Scientific Revolution. It’s emphasis is more on relatively recent times rather than primitive (more history available after we developed writing). It gives a few insights into where the author thinks it is all going, and although he leaves open the option that we have that ability to destroy ourselves, and may do so, it is generally positive, although he does point out a few mistakes he thinks we may have made. One example I found interesting, was his questioning of the agricultural revolution. He suggests, for example, after talking about life before and after the Neolithic Revolution, that wheat domesticated us instead of the opposite, turning us into slaves to increase it’s population and health at the expense of our free time and relatively crime and worry free lives.

Another interesting section is his ambivalence about money (economics). He is definitely convinced that money was one of the main reasons that we went through a major change in our material world. When we bartered for our help and goods, we were restricted on what we could get by what we had to offer. When money, which could buy almost anything, came into the picture, we not only had more access to what we wanted, but we could now grow in our ability to do this buying through loans and other financial means.

But as he does a good job of pointing out, modern economic systems are entirely based on faith, require growth, and lead to leveraging. He believes that in the long term the world will become one (if nothing else, business pushes this), and our varying faith in money and financial institutions as to the value of money could cause much more serious and wide-spread panics and crashes.

But enough. If you haven’t already, read the book. You’ll enjoy it, learn some things, and be able to argue with your friends about it.

Space and Nostalgia — the Joy of Successful Projects.

When I watched the video of the successful landing, after deploying eleven satellites, of the Space Exploration Systems Corp. Falcon 9 first stage booster the other day, I teared up, which I also did when I watched the successful landing of the Curiosity Mars Rover. Why? Granted they were both incredible technological successes, but for me there was more.

I worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena CA part time in 1960 and 1961, and then full time until 1966, when I joined the Stanford faculty. It was a wonderful time to be there, as the U.S. was in the “space race” with the Soviet Union, NASA had taken over the lab from the army (although it is managed by Caltech), the military had built the necessary booster rockets, such things as solid state electronic circuitry and computers were available. Despite the Cold War, it was also a happy time in the U.S., as far as confidence and the economy were concerned, and a comparatively innocent one, since the U.S. was still in its post World War II victory mood (despite the Korean War), and not yet facing the many large problems at home and in the world that bombard us from all directions.

In 1960, when I arrived, the Lab employed about 2000 extremely competent people and built its products internally, as it had learned to do while developing rockets for the army. It was then working on the Ranger spacecraft to the moon, which was to accomplish a number of missions having to do with learning more about getting there, and its nature. I joined the people in the Lab who were thinking about exploring the planets and other bodies much further from Earth. In those days, many unprecedented problems needed to be solved, and the Ranger project, in which the first six missions failed for various reasons, was the big learning experience, which resulted in much technology and understanding used in following missions. The first launch was in August of 1961, the first successful one in July of 1964 (the photographs of the approach to impact that flooded every TV screen in the country), and the final one in November of 1964. Although I was primarily involved with the first Venus and Mars flyby spacecraft (Mariner 2 and 4 were highly successful, 1 and 3 failed, so we were better, but still learning), The various technical groups had continual contact with each other, so we planetary folk were very aware of what the lunar people were doing, and took as much advantage as we could of what they had learned and designed and built.

I worked on various temperature control and structural problems for the Venus shot but was on the preliminary design team through design, fabrication, and mission control for the Mariner Mars — probably the high spot of my time working on aerospace projects. At the time I was at JPL, the work was not only technically extremely challenging, but a bit romantic, since traveling in space has always had a certain cachet, and we did not yet know that the other moons and planets were as barren as they turned out to be. People still believed in canals on Mars, and at least some form of life. Also, through the Ranger failures, we had learned the difficulty of designing very complex and necessarily light weight, and therefore somewhat fragile equipment that could survive the launch environment and was extremely reliable from launch to the end of its mission. I will not try to describe the feeling when these spacecraft, which represented years of hard and challenging work, succeeded in their mission. One reason I cannot capture it, is when one works on a complicated system involving many disciplines, goals, and processes, one becomes increasingly aware of how many things can go wrong. Also, at the time I was at JPL, spacecraft were attracting an amazing amount of attention in the world, and failures were not accepted by those not involved in designing, making, and flying them. The failure of the first six Rangers earned a Congressional Investigation for JPL, which was no fun at all.

So I teared up upon watching the Falcon 9 landing and the people who made it cheering on my TV because it stirred up feelings I had over 50 years ago. I managed R&D groups, was involved in feasibility studies for future projects such as the Voyager series, and did other overall jobs at JPL, but nothing came close to the feelings of being an anonymous part of a larger group successfully completing a difficult project that they considered significant.

Kudos to Elon Musk. He is definitely carrying out his goal of making a difference. My son Dan was an early engineering employee at Tesla and worked there until very recently, at which point he resigned and joined a start up. He had a wonderful run at Tesla, and I imagine quit because he does prefer smaller companies.   He joined Tesla because he is very conscious of the environment, and Tesla’s goal was (and is) to demonstrate the feasibility of electric cars. They certainly have accomplished that goal. Next year a whole series of electric cars will hit the road from other companies.

But Tesla, and now Space X, whose goal was to get the private sector involved in space travel?   Is Musk for real? Perhaps he is a more highly developed life form. He speaks often of wanting to build a city on Mars, die on Mars, etc. Perhaps he simply wants to go home. But I hope he stays here. We need more like him.

Oh, by the way, if you have not seen the video of the Falcon 9 flight, it is here

And Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Politicians,Their Fantasies, and Change

I wrote a post on October 28^th concerning resistance to change, and I briefly described my Homo Demi Sapiens book effort in my last one, but the best recent show of Homo Demi Sapiens has been the Republican presidential candidate debates, which recently concluded . I understand that politicians try to say things that will cause people to vote for them, and that they usually drift toward the middle after elected (Reagan ended up raising taxes). And also that they infer that they have detailed plans (seldom published) as to how to fix everything that is wrong quickly and cheaply, But give me a break. Change is not easy nor does it happen rapidly in a society, and individual politicians are not that much smarter than each other, although some of them certainly think they are.

In the last debate, they were discussing national security—keeping people safe. The recent “extremist muslim terrorist” shootings in San Bernardino California received a lot of attention. They were tragic, and therefore newsworthy, but not off of the chart. I went to high school in San Bernardino, and even then it was far from a crime-free city. There were 46 murders in San Bernardino in 2013 with no terrorist involvement at all. At present the San Bernardino overall crime rating is about twice the national average, and as I mentioned in a previous post, is in terrible shape at present due to the closing of Norton Air Force Base, the Santa Fe Railroad Shops, and Kaiser Steel Mill and the disappearance of agriculture. True, the 14 deaths in San Bernardino were outrageous, but we don’t seem to be as outraged by the approximately 30,000 deaths per year in traffic accidents, the approximately 11,000 murders per year from gun violence, or by the 2-1/2 million people who just die each year in the U.S.

Yet this shooting of fourteen people by a Muslim couple was a prime subject of discussion by the candidates, most of whom seemed to have a simple-sounding solution to the terrorism problem. Of course, their solution had much to do with their favorite causes (Trump immigration, Fiorino technology, etc.) And the all agreed that the “bad guys” should be killed (the instigator of the San Bernardino killings was apparently a woman) and that terrorist shootings and bombings should be stopped immediately (A lot of people are trying and it seems to be difficult). Interestingly, there was little if any attention paid to Russia, China, North Korea, or other such nuclear-armed countries that we seem to be worried about.

The problems with terrorism are complex. We seem to want to blame Muslims, but only a tiny percentage of muslims are terrorists, and those that are vary widely. The husband of the couple blamed for the San Bernardino shootings was born in the U.S. To my knowledge, few if any terrorists are from countries such as India, Indonesia, Turkey, and many other countries with large numbers of Muslims. The source seems to be the Middle-East, and we have demonstrated our inabilities there.

Terrorists are not killing themselves and other people because it is fun. They are doing it because it is consistent with their beliefs and the frustrations of their lives. Terrorism seems to be very effective against the U.S. Look at the effects the perpetrators of 9/11 have had on us, not only in casualties and property damage, but in confidence and convenience (think airport). The U.S. became scared, and is still scared, and therefore weaker. Nor do we seem to be able to agree as to whether we need more guns or fewer guns. So some level of terrorism will probably continue as long as it works, or until it seems to go out of style or is no longer news worthy (remember youth gang killings), or until nations shape up their act. People who have fought in and study the mid east believe that we will be there for a long time. And as for keeping them out of the U.S. as long as we succeed in getting our spies into other countries, a few terrorists will probably get into the U.S. (or already be here)

As an aside, although I have never met the man, the campaigning Trump was an overwhelming example of Homo Demi Sapiens. He was again trumpeting about the evils of Mexican immigrants and the need for his wall, but Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin has stated the Canadian border should received more worry than the Mexican border as far as national security is concerned. And as competing candidates timidly pointed out, his fixes for stopping terrorism violate many U.S. ideals.

His suggested wall would be an insult to everyone. Remember “El Chapo” Guzman’s escape from a high security prison via a relatively luxurious tunnel which ended in his prison shower? I have spent a reasonable amount of time on the border (relatives in Somerton Arizona, U.S. Air Force duty in El Centro, California), and it is long and unsettled, and a wall along it would take many years to build, require an immense amount of money and labor, and could be breached either by tunnel, airplane, boat, or explosives. And hopefully the U.S. would not get the reputation of killing Mexican people crossing it, as was the case with the comparatively short Berlin Wall. Historically, walls have not worked well in the long run—even the Great Wall of China. But politically, there is apparently enough fear in the U.S. (cleverly bolstered a bit by Trump) and lack of knowledge about the money and labor necessary to build such a wall, that some people actually seem not only to accept the concept, but be in favor of it.  I am very fond of Mexico and its people, have spent a reasonable amount of time there and going to school and working with Mexicans here, and do not remember any of them being murderers or rapists. But maybe Trump sees building the wall as a potential excellent construction job if he is not elected and can sell the concept.

Maybe some day we will accept an economy and elect a congress that keeps the infrastructure up and supports those who retire, those who are unable to support themselves, and the necessary military,. Maybe we’ll even stop killing and raping each other and be able to provide acceptable food, shelter, and medical care for all. But this is not all going to occur in the four or eight years after the next president is elected. The British are smart, educated, and civilized, and they have been tinkering with their government furnished medical care since 1948 and are still unhappy with it.

I will talk more about change in the future, but let me just say here that even though such things as technology, population size, expectations, and awareness of the finite nature of “natural” resources are changing rapidly, changes in large numbers of people move slowly, and the more disruption of which people are aware (thank the media and presidential candidates), the more they look to the past, which was never as benign as people remember it to be.

It would be nice if these candidate debates were based a bit more on well thought-out and realistic plans rather than opinions and desires for power on the part of the participants. But that doesn’t seem to be how the electoral process works, especially in the days of TV, marketing, and the internet, so bring on the fantasies. They are at least entertaining.

Thinking and Writing

I am presently working on a couple of books I have been thinking about for years, as well as my “rescue old machinery” projects, house maintenance, and life in general. I will from time to time talk about all of these, but fortunately the title of this blog is People and Products, so I have given myself a lot of room to move.

One of these books is about the benefits of working with one’s hands. I have always had hobbies/jobs that require this, and such activity seems to be necessary to keep me fulfilled. The book is about why working with one’s hands is a good thing to do. It is perhaps a defense of the fact I spend quite a bit of my time in such activities, and of many of my friends who also do so. In my opinion use of the hands becomes more and more necessary as more and more of our lives seem to be focused on interacting with digital devices. To me, typing just doesn’t quite qualify.

The other one has the working title Homo Demi Sapiens (Half Wise Humans). The gist of the book can be seen below, which was the final slide I included in a talk I recently gave to a 50^th reunion class of the Stanford Graduate School of Business,  They agreed with me.

HOMO DEMI SAPIENS
Maybe We’re Not Quite as Smart
As We Think We are

AND MAYBE WE SHOULD FACE IT!

PERHAPS THERE ARE NO PERFECT ANSWERS TO MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEMS,

OR MAYBE WE AREN’T INTELLIGENT ENOUGH TO FIND THEM.

MAYBE WE SHOULD ACQUIRE A BIT MORE HUMILITY ABOUT HOW SMART WE ARE.

MAYBE PEOPLE ON THE OPPOSITE SIDES OF FENCES SHOULD LEARN TO BETTER COMPROMISE

AND COME UP WITH AND IMPLEMENT SOME WORKABLE CREATIVE SOLUTIONS.

 

This book has been years in the making, although I didn’t know it at the time. The initial edition of my Conceptual Blockbusting book was concerned with blocks to individual creativitiy. But as time went by, I included group creativity and organizational creativity. Homo Demi Sapiens is concerned with problem solving in even larger populations —religions, nations, the world, etc. A perhaps grandiose attempt, but fun to try.

A book I have read many times over the years is entitled Sagittarius Rising, and was written by Cecil A. Lewis, who was a World War I fighter pilot, later to become one of the founders of the British Broadcasting Company and a successful writer. The book, which is beautifully written, is a flattering picture of flying, but much of his World War I flying was over the trenches, in which he could look down from the beautiful sky to see people killing themselves in the mud and wreckage. One comment from the book  was “Man individually was sane and reasonable. Only collectively was he a fool.” True?

That comment has stayed with me, and perhaps is one of the reason I am writing this book. Other stimuli are such things as the international situation, replete with such things as the Middle East impasse, the environmental situation, and if we want to remain a credible world power, the war between the democrats and the republicans in the U.S. It is past time for we humans to get our act together. Termites have been around for 250 million years. They have what is sometimes called group intelligence. How long will we last? Our group intelligence as a species has not yet been fully tested. The modern form of humans showed up only 200,000 years ago, The Neolithic revolution (agriculture, settlements) happened only 12,000 years ago. In the past few hundred years we have made major changes in the way we live, but they are leading us in worrisome directions. If C.S. Lewis is right, we had better start worrying more about the “Sapiens” in the title we have given ourselves.

Virtual Reallity —Media Flavor of the Month

I trust you had a happy Thanksgiving.  The University (and I) take a thorough vacation being thankful, so I am being a bit sloppy on posts.  But I am back, for better or worse.

Judging from the media, the world is agog with the thought of virtual reality devices and programs being available at a reasonable cost.  VR, as it is sometimes called, is being heralded as the next best thing, the replacement for television, and so on.  Apparently billions of dollars are being spent on developing the hardware by major players in the digital world and which is imminent on the market.  I am definitely not involved, and my only experience with VR is because a few  weekends ago the Sunday New York Times put together a down-loadable sample of how their material could be presented in VR, and included one of Google’s cardboard box viewers with their paper. 

 At this stage of the game, one cannot expect to receive a technologically mature product for free, but we had had a lot of fun playing with it. and it is indeed mind-boggling to be able to turn your head and watch the world swim by.  The image in the sample was not comparable in quality to that presently available on a TV or computer screen, but probably superior to the first TV image I ever saw, and if the decreasing cost and increasing ability to handle data continue, it will continue to improve.

 But I have had the privilege of observing movies  go to color and sophisticated sound and projection equipment and now three-d, TV going to color and larger screens with ever-increasing resolution and accompanying surround sound, opera doing a wonderful job with "hi-def", and everything from theater through vocal performance to classic orchestras taking advantage of technology.  These improvements have definitely made for a more complete experience, but I am not sure how much they have revolutionized the experience, because people seem to adapt to technological innovation, and take it for granted. 

In my opinion, the main factor in entertainment, is the quality of the message being presented.  Three dimensional films have not obsoleted the “old fashioned” film approach, which does not totally surprise me, because I happen to know a few people who have lost sight in one eye, and do not claim a great loss in their enjoyment of life.  My wife and I seem not to desire a TV screen that covers most of a wall.  Neither do we need woofers that cause discernable changes  in the size of our chest cavities.  In fact, we are often drawn to presentation of first class material presented in a more primitive way (old movies?)

 So my question about VR, which obviously requires more complex and therefore expensive camera and viewing equipment, is what is it best to be used for?  Obviously it will be used for games —it will add to the realism of war games if one has to worry about being shot in the back or bombed from straight over head.  But I recently looked again at the New York Times sample news presentation and found the VR to be somewhat distracting to its purpose.   The New York Times story in the sample concerned  children who had been displaced by war, something with which we should be very concerned,  but the wheat fields behind my head, seemed to fill no great need, especially because I kept checking what was there rather than focusing on the children and their problems.

  Theater often has great power because it focuses on a few characters and a set which adds to the story.  I am not aware of a travelogue movie that has used three d.  In fact, travelogues are usually made more interesting by including interesting characters and some sort of plot, on which the viewer can focus.  Even then, I am not sure that they are superior to high quality still  photos. Advertisements in Grocery stores tend to try to focus our attention, not allow us to see the merchandise behind us.

 So I think the future of virtual reality, other than in games and as a novel way to present information (for a while), depends on the ability to generate programs that can accomplish things that can not be done more cheaply, with simpler equipment, and perhaps more effectively due to less distraction by material not germane to the intention of those producing the material.  Good luck to it, but I plan to focus on real reality for a while.  

Edible Automobile Wiring - Homo Sapiens vs. Rodentia

My wife has a 2004 Acura TSX, which she loves greatly.  But maybe due to where we live (lots of greenery), maybe due to where she parks it, maybe due to changes in the environment, we have had a few sessions of rodent damage to the wiring, a couple of them worrisomely expensive.

Rats, mice, and squirrels love to nestle around or in cars, build nests, and chew on automobile wiring.  This has happened as long as I remember, but it used to be possible to see the damage, wrap some electrical tape around the bare copper, and get on with life.  No longer.  Wiring harnesses become increasingly complex as owners demand more and more electronic and electrical gadgets in their cars, so that the damage is often not visible, and can be found only by weird behavior on the part of engines, transmissions, lights, instruments, etc. etc. etc.  And as near as I can tell, wiring harnesses are installed early in the assembly process and are often buried within the body, so often even I, who pride myself on my ability to fix anything that is broken, have to rely upon mechanics who have the proper equipment and detailed knowledge. 

 Our last adventure took place a couple of weeks ago, and cost us a thousand dollars and a good bit of inconvenience.  My wife was parking the car in our carport, and it was not only protected from rain, but when she returned from driving it, the engine compartment was  warm and snug —a rodent’s dream. A new wiring harness was required.  The day after we brought the car home, there was a beautiful new nest and signs of more gnawing.  I was able to tape over the bare copper and destroy the nest, we moved the the car's parking spot (many rodents can remember how to find food spatially as well as by smell), and we sprayed one of the many available “rodent repellants” in the engine compartment and on the exposed wiring.  Most of these don’t work very well, and the next day it happened again.  Upon looking more carefully to see where the soft and clean nest material came from, we found that the source was a mat of uncovered insulation fastened to the front of the fire wall, probably to reduce noise.  What could be more convenient for our invaders?

 So, we went into full war mode, complete with deep research and many traps, poisons, bought and hand made potions, noisemakers, lights, and changing parking locations.  So far we are holding our own against the enemy.

One thing I learned, is that we are certainly not alone, although people seem to be a bit reluctant to talk about this problem.  Maybe they feel kind of stupid, as we did since we had been through it before. A check of the internet by putting something like “rodent damage to car wiring” in one's browser results in an explosion of outrage and advice.  As an example, look at this thread.  The people who are writing to it are probably nice gentle family folk, who have been driven to say things such as “I want these little f***ers to stop chewing the wires in my car. Ideally, this would be because they are dead, with their bleached skulls posted on stakes around the driveway as a warning to the next generation”. The thread shows an interesting contrast between people who love rodents (they are small, cute, and fun to watch —I even got my daughter a pair of white rats as pets when she was small) and have not had their wiring eaten, and those who have.

 Apparently some rodents have teeth that continually grow and they must gnaw to keep them in control.  Also, apparently some car wiring insulation is made of soy, and is very tasty to rats. But although there are many commercial products available, and much advise on what to do to your automobile and cute fuzzy animals that all of a sudden have become “pests”, the problem continues.

 Of course, being a simplistic engineer, I wonder why automobile manufacturers do not make cars with wiring that is repellent to rodents.  It would certainly make for good advertising, and if one manufacturer did so, the others would probably be pressured to follow.  Maybe rodent damage is a boon to the repair part of the automotive business.  And it probably would take a bit of research to figure out what to do, since looking at the ground squirrel population in the local hills, the tree squirrels leaping happily from branch to branch, and the amount of rat and mouse poop that builds up in unused, and especially warm nooks and crannies, the rodent population is wide spread, and in parts of the world, growing.  And probably rodents have been around longer than people and will continue to be here long after we are long gone.

 But I consider the appetizing nature of wiring to be a serious quality flaw in at least some automobiles.  I have always loved Honda (the mother of Acura) products, and in fact my wife’s car is fun to drive and a great success in all other aspects that are important to her.  But we have other vehicles around, and rodents seem to give them less attention, so this may be a factor for us in determining future purchases.  I asked my son who works at Tesla whether they were worrying about this problem, and he assured me that they were.

Flaws in Complex Systems

As systems become more complex, flaws tend to appear.  A few weeks ago, the lining began to peel in our microwave oven, exposing a worrisome expanse of metal.  It was old and we clearly needed a new one, so we ordered one from Amazon, a usually straightforward action.  We promptly received an acknowledgement, saying it would arrive in two weeks, which seemed a surprisingly long time.  In a week or so  we received a message from “Tempus & Co. – Amazon Marketplace”, telling us that our oven had been packed and shipped, and it arrived soon after, and we walked out of our door one morning to find a large box with our new oven.  But strangely, although it was brand new and made by a different manufacturer than our old one, the lining was also peeling off of it.

 The shipping/billing receipt in the plastic envelope on the side of the box showed that it came from Home Depot, with no mention of either Amazon or Tempus & Co., so we called the local Home Depot store customer service people to find out what to do.  They were not sure but told us to bring it into the store and they would refund our money.  But we had paid Amazon, and there was no shipping order for them to get back to either Amazon, or Tempus & Co., nor any of the usual Amazon return literature.  So they started phoning, and could not find any way to connect the faulty oven we had brought them, with the Amazon payment.  Finally, after an hour or more (seemed like three) of phoning (difficult if you have ever  have tried to phone Amazon) and the participation of the store manager, they made some kind of connection, found the original shipping number and figured out how to refund our money.  Apparently the oven had been purchased from another Home Depot store (not specified on the paper work), they guessed by Tempus & Co.,who when I checked on the internet, looked like a toy store, so none of us were sure what “Amazon Marketplace” meant.  I think we all ended up confused, and my wife and I had no fun at all cooling our heels in the Home Depot store and not knowing how and whether we were going to get a refund on a damaged  piece of merchandise.

 We had returned items to Amazon before, and had no trouble.  But I got the distinct feeling from this interaction and some of the comments made by the Home Depot store people that Amazon's operation has become so large and complicated that it is perhaps picking up more problems associated with size and complexity.

 As an interesting similar experience, our washing machine failed at about the same time, so we bought a replacement at Best Buy, a store at which we had always had good experiences.  The one we bought was discounted, since it was not in the box and had a couple small dents in the side, but otherwise appeared brand new.  Best Buy contracts out the delivery of their large appliances, and not only does one have to wait several days for this to happen, but the delivery people have the policy of calling the evening before the delivery and giving a four hour window when they will appear the next day, and someone over 18  years of age must be at the delivery point to receive the merchandise — kind of inconvenient for a younger working couple.  But we are retired, so were there to meet the delivery, but the back of the washer had been brutally smashed in.  The truckers explained that this happens occasionally in the warehouse, and that if they were us, they would not accept the washer.  Not a hard decision for us to make.

 So back we went to the store and bought a new one, went through the ritual again, and are happy with our new washer.  But we spent a great amount of time waiting for the delivery day, the truck to appear (twice) and driving to the store and back (tough to buy and exchange washing machines over the phone or from the information on the internet).  The people in the Big Buy store apologized for delivering the smashed-up one, and not only returned our money but gave us a discount on the new one, so we still like them, but it seemed to me that they should have a bit closer control on their warehouse and delivery schedule.  Are large chains, now that they are selling over the internet as well as from stores, suffering from operating with too few humans, forgetting that humans and computer systems are fallible, and tending to lose a bit of control over contracted and non-computer aspects of their business such as warehousing and delivery?  Not surprising if it is happening.  The more parts there are to fail, the more likely there will be failures.

Bye Bye Tank

I recently sold a small British army tank I have had for some time.  To be formal, it was a British armored reconnaissance vehicle—CVR(T)— Scorpion.  It was classified as a light tank, built in the 1970’s, and at that time it held the speed record for the fastest production tank in the world (51.10 mph).  Photograph at left.

 I acquired this tank perhaps because I had never  owned one, and always thought it would be fun to drive one around, and because this one is light (9 tons – made of aluminum to be air-freighted), small (17 ft.long. 7 ft. wide, 7 ft. high) easy to work on, and equipped with all the bells and whistles available at the time  periscopes, lights, tools, antennas, lots of electronics, equipment boxes all over the place, and even a boiling vessel for making tea (British).  It is also fun to drive, being equipped with a Jaguar engine (I do know Jaguar engines), a centrifugal clutch, and a motorcycle-like foot gear shift.  And lest you worry, it was part of a collection and legally de- militarized (the cannon is not operable, the machine gun had obviously been removed – this is California).

 I also was probably influenced  to buy it because at the time I was on the board of the foundation that owned this collection, the largest private collection in the world of beautifully restored military tracked vehicles, which belonged to a man named Jacques Littlefield, one of my all-time favorite students.  The collection was a magnet for tours, kids, my students  (I taught a course on the historical relationship between technology and war), ex-tank crew people, and generally people who were interested in machinery and military history , and I finally could no longer fight the urge to own one. The collection, incidentally has joined the Collings Foundation headquartered in Stow, Massachussetts, which has an outstanding collection of vintage automobiles and aircraft.

 Other favorable factors were that Jacques  sold it to me for an excellent price, his people were a source of knowledge and extra parts, and my kids and grand kids thought that it was wondrous..  The only slight downside was that my good wife considered that it was symbolic of violence, and should not be in our yard, and might not even be welcome on the Stanford Campus.  So I located it  at my friend's farm up in the Sacramento valley, comfortably covered by a barn and surrounded by lots of dirt roads and open fields.

 But many years passed, my kids were no longer fascinated by it, I was not going to my friend’s farm as often and beginning to worry about it not being looked after, and then the major factor— I could barely get into it and move around any more.  So one of my friends (who took on the responsibility for finding a home for the big collection after Jacques died a few years ago), found a person who was looking for a tank like mine, and who would obviously give it an excellent  new home, so I sold it to him.

  The photo on the right shows it being packed ready to  go.  In a sense, I am glad I sold it, because I wasn’t really using it and don’t have to worry about it any more.  But it is the only one of my hobby machines I have sold—and it was the only tank I owned.  Maybe a little seller’s remorse.

 My wife is not unhappy at all.

 

 

Resistance to Change:

Anthropologists sometimes speak in terms of generations (25 years) and in those terms, our species (homo) has been around some 240,000 generations (6,000,000 years), This is plenty of time for us to evolve a la Mr. Darwin.  But we did not have the advantage of stone tools until the Paleolithic period which began about 100,000 generations (2.5 million years) ago – 140,000 generations with no tools, probably no fire, definitely no athletic shoes, roaming the land in small groups (probably extended families )for our food and shelter, but plenty of time to evolve into tool users.   

 The Neolithic Revolution, when we discovered agriculture and began living in fixed areas, was about 500 generations ago (12,500 years). This period of time since we began farming and building towns and cities is a bit shorter, and we are obviously still involved in working the wrinkles out of such activities. 

 But think of what we have done to ourselves since the industrial revolution which occurred in Europe only about 10 generations (250 years) ago—or for that matter since transistors were invented some 70  years ago (three generations)—a major change in our life style with little opportunity to evolve to match it.

 I have been expecting a back lash against the recent high rate of changes in our lives, much of it resulting from developments in science and technology, over the past few years, but so far it has not happened.  In fact, we seem to be fascinated and entertained by these changes, providing that they don’t inconvenience us too much as individuals.  But there are signs that a backlash is beginning, ranging from mutterings of people being forced into “upgrading” their computer software, to the increasing worry about job loss, traffic, scarcity, and environmental degradation, to the increasing gap between the rich and poor, and the loss of the essential middle class.

 An example is an angry article in the October 25^th issue of the New York Times written  by Mark Lynas, and entitled Europe Turns Against Science.  It is here.  The article criticizes the 17 countries in Europe that have announced bans on the cultivation of genetically modified(G.M.) crops.  The author feels that this will not only be extremely costly, but even though the bans do not include research, will cause these countries to fall behind those who are including genetically modified plants in their agriculture (the U.S.?).  These European countries have great influence in the world, and apparently much of sub-Saharan Africa is also forbidding the growing of G.M. foods.  This is in spite of a great amount of research showing that G.M. foods are safe, and strange inconsistencies, such as the importing of some 30 million tons per years of soy and corn based animal feeds by these European countries, much genetically modified, and much from the U.S.  And since many G.M. foods are designed to be immune to many pests and diseases,  the use of pesticides and other polluting and expensive chemical agents will continue to increase in these countries.

 And then there is the problem of sufficient food production in the world.  G.M. crops  often are more productive.  The United Nations, which keeps track of  population trends in the world, has for some time predicted that the world population would peak at  9 million by the end of this century.  We are now at 7.3 billion (the last billion of which happened in only 12 years).  The U.N. has now upped its prediction for the end of the century to 11 million, a large portion of which will be in Africa.  In fact, one prediction is that by 2050, Nigeria will have a larger population than the  U.S.  Where is the food going to come from to feed everyone?  Lynas has a couple of quotes in his article to back up  his argument about some extreme African attitudes toward G.M.foods.  One is by Tobaiwa Mudede, described as a crony of Robert Mugabe, who singles out G.M. food as the cause of the “huge problem of sexual dysfunction in the U.S”. , where “males become impotent around the age of 24, at the prime of life”. The author also mentions being interrupted while giving a talk in Tanzania by a farmer who said  he would never grow biotech crops because “they would turn my children into homosexuals”.

 I blame resistances such as these on changes happening too fast for the comfort zones of our species.  We don’t seem to be that bothered by the much slower ongoing activities in “improving” plants through cross-breeding. There is some value in this typical  human resistance to change, because it results in thorough study of secondary effects of new developments. And I am expecting the next resistance to appear either in the area of associated with computers and the internet, or to extreme and very expensive developments in medicine oriented toward immortality .  But the downside is that many people who could benefit from these developments are deprived of them. The undernourished in Africa?

The Adventure of Fixing

As I have told you in previous posts, I live in a wonderful 110 year old house (old for California) with original plumbing and wiring.  Since I do like to make, fix, and tinker with things, I apply this convenient urge to my house—convenient because most contemporary builders are used to being guided by modern codes, and 110 years ago, there were not such things.  Therefore my house is a giant puzzle, of great importance to Marian and me.

 Usually when “fixing” part of it, I go through a period of great frustration, and then extreme happiness when I succeed.  Is this some mental disease, that I enjoy pain because I know I will feel good when it stops?  Am I the possessor of some kind of masochistic personality disorder?   I do not worry, because it only applies when I am working on a very hard problem or am in a seriously annoying situation—and it feels so good when I escape.

 Minor example:  Our relatively ancient washing machine finally needed replacing, not only because too many parts were failing, but it was using an embarrassing amount of water, energy, etc, and not getting clothes very clean.  So we bought a new super-efficient one.  But as often happens to us, new appliances,  pieces of furniture, and other household objects are larger than the old ones, because new houses often have larger rooms in them , and people seem to like big things with lots of features (can you believe the ad here?—from MoMA, for God’s sake— only approximately $8,000—  click on the red version—tasty, huh?).  So I had to move the plumbing for the washing machine to a different location.

 The excitement of working with 110  year old steel pipe is that it thoroughly rusted, so that it is much more fragile than new pipe, and is usually rusted solid to things such as elbows, tees, couplings, shut-off valves, and other such devices.  When taking it apart, it may unscrew (good), or the pipe may break (bad).  In an old house, where the pipes wander randomly through the structure, a pipe that has twisted in two inside the structure can be very bad news.

 When I began to take the old pipe apart, I instantly found that it was thoroughly rusted together.  So I got a larger wrench and pulled harder.  I began with the valves, and sure enough, the nipples (short pieces of threaded pipe) twisted into pieces of rust, barely visible from the elbow that was next in line.  Since I could not get the wrench on the fragment of nipple,  I twisted the elbow, and sure enough, the longer pieces of pipe it connected to also twisted into two pieces.  I then followed one of the pipe assemblies further into the structure, becoming more and more worried, until finally one section cleanly unscrewed from the next—victory, I could put a new piece of pipe on it and rebuild the assembly as I wanted it to be.

 But the other pipe assembly was more resistant.  I became more and more depressed as I piled up pieces of rusted pipe, and as I began to have to work within wall structure.  I finally accepted the fact that I might have to do some major wall surgery, which might take days.  But just as I accepted defeat, A length of pipe not only unscrewed within the wall, but in a location where I could push a new piece into the into the wall and attached coupling and happily tighten it up.  Within a very few minutes I passed from utter defeat to complete victory.  That is one of the finest feelings available to the human (give or take minor things like sex, food, and good weather). 

 That was yesterday and I am still high today.  So the answer to “The Joy of  Fixing”, is dependent upon a high degree of challenge followed by success?  Not exactly a huge insight, and I certainly knew that from experience in everything from professional work to interpersonal relations, But somehow, I had never directly connected it to my love of doing things like repairing 110 year old plumbing.

Intelligence and the Computer

Intelligence is a broad word.  If you want to check it out in Wikipedia, it is here.  Of note is that although usually applied to humans, it is also used in conjunction with animals, plants, and increasingly to machines (artificial Intelligence.)  If we consider the word “smart”(perhaps a subset of intelligent), we seem to include everything with a chip in it (smart cars, smart houses, smart thermostats, smart toys, etc.)

 Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, there seems to be increasing confidence that the computer and related information systems will continue to become more intelligent as time passes.  In fact, a few hard-core folk believe that computers will surpass humans in intelligence. There is an educational venture in the Silicon Valley area that calls itself Singularity University and which studies innovation and so-called exponentially accelerating technologies. Singularity in this case refers to digital technology, and is defined in Wikipedia here.   One of the co-founders, and now Chancellor of the  University, is Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and technology visionary..  He has written a book entitled Singularity is Near, and believes this singularity will occur in 2045, and that we should prepare for this time when computers become more intelligent than humans and continue to advance more rapidly than we can.

 Admittedly, I do not have the technical reputation that Kurzweil does, but I do not believe this at all. Computers have steadily taken over activities that humans used to do—calculation, recording and organizing information, controlling machinery, making decisions based on input, and so on.  But I see no way they can take over the ship.   For one reason, we humans, not computers, define intelligence, and we do so selfishly.  Think of how much faith we place in the I.Q. test, which˙ after all merely measures how well one does on a traditional “test”(according to traditional questions) rather than overall intelligence.  Nevertheless we believe in it, But should should computers out perform us at taking the test, we will change the test. As computers do better than humans at various tasks (Big Blue beating Kasparov at Chess, once thought to be a game requiring great intelligence, and speed at calculation, which got me good grades at Caltech), we seem to change our minds as to how much intelligence is necessary to accomplish these tasks. And there is always Dave’s approach to HAL, his misbehaving AI computer, in the 1968 movie A Space Odyssey—shut it down.  

 I first encountered the then large mainframe computer in the 1950’s when I worked first in the Air Force, and then at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  I was fond of these machines because they could do complicated and involved calculations that I really did not like to do, and practically never could have, by hand.  I have worked with computers ever since, and like most people, I consider them not only immensely useful, and wondrously capable of speeds and data handling with which humans cannot compete.  But I don’t think of them as particularly intelligent, any more than I thought of the Library of Congress, adding machines or telephones as Intelligent.   I know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches are being applied in an increasing number of ways. And the role of computers will change a great deal by 2045, which after all is 30 years from now. The digital age is still quite young. The invention of the internet was approximately 30 years ago and of the World Wide Web only 24 years ago. Computers will continue to amaze us , until we take the new miracle for granted, but we humans will continue to lead the movement.

 I am a believer in artificial intelligence when humans are in the loop.  When I joined the Stanford faculty, I worked a bit with the then Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, headed by John McCarthy, one of the early pioneers in AI.  One of the graduate students was working on computer vehicle control ,  and was using a remotely controlled cart I had built for my Ph.D. thesis (remote control by a human with time delays in the loop) a few years before.  It was clear to me then that computers would take over an increasing number of information processing tasks that people had traditionally done, but even then I was skeptical about how far they would go at being truly intelligent.  At some level, we humans have always had to tell digital devices what to do and how to do it.

 In the early days, AI was very interested in the workings of the human mind.  But the human mind is beyond complex.  Yesterday there was an article in the New York Times entitled “Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain, by Kenneth Miller, Co-Director of the Center for Theoretical Neurosciences at Columbia University”. It is here. He wrote it because of the attention being paid to an increasing number of people who seems to want their brain frozen and stored until science has progressed to the time when someone can thaw it out and start it up again. His answer is “maybe centuries from now”.  I have another reaction, and that is “who would want to”?  But the article does give an insight into how far away we are from truly understanding the human mind, despite a great amount of brain and behavior research.

 AI researchers no longer think of duplicating the human mind on silicon, but the search for computer based intelligence that mimics human intelligence is alive and well. In fact, as computers become better and better at crunching numbers and handling “higher” mathematics, and as they are equipped with better sensors and actuators and integrated into more and more nets, they become more and more useful to us (with a few exceptions, such as handling “big data” for marketing purposes and being involved in pranks and crimes). But the more time I spend screwing around with such things as new operating systems and applications, handling the increasing number of people who want to send me e-mails or texts, find things on the ever-increasing internet, or become my friend or contact on social networking sites, the dumber my computer seems at handling information for me,  and I have never considered allowing it to make decisions for me.

 The good news is that I don’t have to worry about Mr. Kurzweil’s singularity, because I will be dead by then.  The bad news is that computers may hasten my death, but only through frustration, and not because they are more intelligent than I.

Job Loss and Support for New Directions

There was a passionate article in last Sunday’s New  York Times by Paul Theroux, a prolific writer of books, and in particular travel books,  He is noted for spending major times in local areas and writing about the lives people live there.  This article was written after he had spent a great deal of time traveling in the U.S. deep south working on his latest book, “Deep South.  Four Seasons on Back Roads”.

 The article was about poverty resulting from the loss of jobs due to the closing factories, which in turn Theroux blames on outsourcing, which he in turn blames on the greed of companies.  This is not a new problem, but Theroux writes with the emotion of having spent time with people (in his words)  “towns with their hearts torn out of them” from factory closings.  This is not a new message, but to read Theroux at this level of anger is unusual.  You should read the article, if you have not.  It is here.

 Among other charges, he delivers blasts at various foundations and wealthy people in business and government in the U.S. who advertise the help they give to poor people in developing countries, but have not helped poor people in these towns he visits in the U.S.  I am a believer, having followed the bankruptcy of San Bernardino California (where I went to high school) from the closing of income producing activities ranging from an air base (Norton) to train maintenance shops (Santa Fe), to a nearby steel mill (Kaiser, which ironically was carefully taken part and moved to China, where it was re-assembled). An article about the collapse of the city is here.  Among other San Bernardino statistics, during the 2012-13 school year, 33,274 students (8.1% of the total) experienced homelessness.

 A large number of people who lost their jobs in San Bernardino have families,  little cash or credit, probably house mortgages, and may not have had  the training or education to easily find other jobs. I was discussing this with a colleague earlier today, and we agreed that somebody should help people in such a situation (and the deep south), because it was not their fault that the income base of the city collapsed. But we could not figure out who.  Should businesses insure their employees against a collapse?  Not much precedence for that, and probably not a lot of support from businesses.  Should the government do more in the way of offering training and education?  But that would possibly result in more tax on businesses, who are already screaming that taxes are too high, and outrage people who think that government aid is already too profligate. 

 And this might only be a preview of future problems.  Although most of the attention has been paid to blue-collar workers, computers have already taken over many tasks formerly done by white collar workers (CPA’s, lawyers, administrators, medical workers, clericals, etc.).  There is a great debate going on as to whether this will cause new work opportunities for white collar workers (“The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies”, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee ) or whether the white collar job loss will eventually be larger and noisier than the blue collar loss.  We will find out, and perhaps the white collar workers will be able to more easily slip into new jobs, but once again, many of them may need help, and who will pay if they do not have the resources to learn new skills, or are at a stage of life where it is extremely inconvenient to re-locate? Or do we thoughtful and sensitive U.S, citizens just say "tough luck"?

Why The Mighty Fall?

I am still depressed over the Volkswagen debacle.  If you have not been following it, the Economist issue of September 26^th-October 2^nd, 1915 explains it well in the leader, entitled Dirty Secrets, which is here,  and the lead article, entitled A Mucky Business, which is here.  I was hurt because I loved the company.  It seemed to not only have reliably produced wonderful cars, but was a symbol of Germany’s recovery from being bombed to pieces in World War II;

 In short, Volkswagen desperately wanted to become the largest automobile business in the world, and in order to do so needed a larger slice of the U.S. market.  Their strategy included a big emphasis on “clean diesel” engines, which sell well in Europe because of their low fuel consumption, and therefore low carbon dioxide emissions.  But unfortunately, diesel engines emit a large amount of other unhealthy substances, such as nitrous oxides. The Volkswagen engines seemed to produce much less of these.  But the engines that they have on the market in the U. S. were found to include mechanisms to turn on the smog control when they detected that a test was being run, but otherwise to leave it off. 

 This is not only cheating, but from what I have read, must have involved a large number of people in the company.  The company is now not only in deep trouble, but has strengthened the calls for identifying  individuals in companies responsible for such things and punishing them accordingly.  Typically large companies found guilty of unacceptable acts are fined up to billions of dollars (BP, General Motors), but also typically can spread this across their customers and stock holders. Also typically the president resigns (often with golden handshake).  I don’t know the fiscal arrangements, but the president of Volkswagen has resigned, and probably will face neither personal bankruptcy nor a jail term.  In my opinion,  the people who actually designed and produced the “cheating subsystem”, should all spend a bit of time in prison,  and Volkswagen should suffer – a lot.  I feel like I discovered that my junior high school girlfriend was sleeping with the janitor.

 Unfortunately, humans seem to be subject to this problem—that of striving for more and more until they get into trouble.  One of our chief motivations and problems in life is hubris—thinking we can do anything.  An example is in the present U.S. preparation for the next election, in that two people with business credentials and no political experience to speak of are among the present Republican candidates for president, and doing  quite well.  In the last election that description fit Mitt Romney, who definitely did not win.  A nicely written short article about the reason for this is the Schumpeter column in the same Economist mentioned above, entitled From Corner Office to Oval Office.  It points out the vast difference between the two jobs, and the fact that neither of the two candidates this year, although good television draws, have been that outstanding in the Corner Office. It is here.

 It seems to me that the larger and more successful organizations become, the more hubris seems to accumulate.  It is partly due to past success, the amounts of money involved , and the media coverage they attract.  It is perhaps because at least and the upper managers of large organizations depend on high-quality attorneys for advice, and such people may tend to think that laws and regulations are more debatable than the rest of us  ( Donald Trump refers to “using” the law to make money).  But I think the main problem is that we are all equipped with potential hubris as individuals. Most of us benefit from having this pointed out to us in memorable ways (often by a spouse that loves us), but there are times when this may not happen.

 As an example, I had the good fortune to get to know John Ehrlichman after he had served his prison sentence for his role in the Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration.  If you have no knowledge of this, look it up on Wikipedia.  He was president Nixon’s domestic advisor and a member of his “inner circle”, and due to the scandal, lived through  his reputation traveling from very high (next to the oval office ) to very low (prison).  I met him initially because I was leading an executive program at Stanford for which I had invited Pete McCloskey, a popular member of congress to talk about government/business interaction.  He asked whether he could bring an old friend who had a lot of experience in the executive branch to add his view.  I said sure, sounded great, but when it came time to print the program, we found out that it was John Ehrlichman, who at the time had the same reputation in the academic scene as Satan.

 But he turned out to be a very likeable person—suffice it to say he had received the Distinguished Eagle Boy Scout award as a youngster, and the Distinguished Flying Cross as a lead bombardier in the Eight Air Force (many casualties) in World War II.  He still had many aspects of the Boy Scout—he knew he had done wrong and in fact was the only one of the Watergate group to serve his two year prison term without  appealing it.  Furthermore, he had made a study of why he went wrong, and why people who were advisor to the president often did.  His explanation had to do with both coming to see their  duty as protecting the president, who they were becoming increasingly close to, and taking the status and perks of their office as reality.  During the talk, one of the participants in the program asked him why he had had gotten in trouble and Pete McCloskey had not.  They had been room mates in law school and were lifetime friends, so he could be a bit facetious.  He said that each morning McCloskey had been picked up by a limousine and brought to work. So had he. But, he explained, the flowers in McCloskey’ limousine were artificial, and his were real. His point was that if you are treated like you are above the law, you may start believing that you are.

 I saw him quite a bit afterward and we would often discuss the fall of  the high and mighty.  He obviously retired from public life, and since he was a felon and no longer could practice law, wrote a few interesting books and worked as the Vice President of Human Resources for a large firm in Georgia.  He died in 1999, and I only knew him as being a wonderful human—no hubris to speak of.   Perhaps it is good to rise to the top, spend a few  years in prison, and then live in infamy.  It does cut through the hubris.  Perhaps not a bad plan for the managers who were responsible for the cheating at Volkswagen.

 

 

 

Product Quality, Maintenance, Service, and Standardization

In his now classic paper “Competing on the Eight Dimensions of Quality”, Published in 1987 in the Harvard Business Review, David Garvin included serviceability as one of the critical eight.  This service must sometimes be performed by experts (the Boeing airliner), but often can be accomplished by the customer (oil level in a car, a bent prong on an electric plug, maybe replacing plumbing or getting a recalcitrant gas engine or your furnace to run).  People like me prefer servicing everything possible ourselves, for reasons ranging from economic to satisfaction.

 Products become more complex over time, as more features are added and technology becomes more sophisticated, and it seems to me that manufacturers are paying less attention to the owner’s ability to service the product.  The incentive for them to improve serviceability is offset by the profit to be made by being able to convince people to throw away the malfunctioning product and buy a new “upgrade” , and by the money to be made by the professional service people.  A clear example is Apple, whose products are very difficult to maintain, and who obviously don’t mind people taking their ailing equipment to the Apple store, so that Apple “geniuses” can try to sell them new equipment and while they are there, add-ons such as cool cases and new apps.

 But I am personally fed up with what appears to me a strong emphasis on designing for manufacturing (good), but less on owner service.  As a minor specific example, let me say a few words about the proliferation of nuts, bolts, and screws in the world.  We in the U.S. are somewhat guilty, since we insist on refusing to join the metric system, even though all nations except for Myanmar and Liberia have ( I think a wonderful example of U.S. arrogance ), and because of our major dependence  on  and participation in trade, have caused the world to use both systems, even though the metric system is far more straight forward and much easier to use. 

 But beyond that, although sizes and thread dimensions seem to be standardized, people continue to invent new geometries, and granted that many have advantages (especially in manufacturing), the tool requirements on the owner are getting ridiculous.  If you want to get an idea of the diversity in screws, nuts and bolts, run down the several pages of a table that might interest you here.

  The photo shows some of my own “standard” (slotted and Phillips head) screwdrivers.  Granted there is some duplication here, caused by defending against the normal response of borrowing but never getting around to returning screwdrivers, but due to modifications I have made on various ones to fit various odd screws, I use them all.  And of course I have a complete set of “Allen” hex (six sided)  wrenches (metric and U.S.) and a complete set of sockets and screw drivers for Torx screws (invented by the automobile industry but spreading widely).  But still I run into developments that amaze me, like the alternate screws developed by Apple to prevent “tampering” (which includes changing a battery,etc.)  The good news I suppose is that it opened up a new market for tools ( see the Amazon offerings here), and I have already participated by buying a battery kit over the internet, (but not without major resentment).  The bad news is that it is difficult for the average tinkerer to keep up with the tool requirements needed to use the expanding array of fasteners.

 So my plea to the manufacturers of the world is “Pay more attention to the ability of your customers to service your product”, because even the best of commercial service is an convenience and typically slow and expensive.  And my  plea to the rest of us to be more aware of the real cost (including resources and environmental damage) in throwing away a dishwasher because a new control panel plus a visit from a professional costs almost as much as a new one.

And there are many other reasons for making services simpler.  When I was younger my friends and I loved to “work on our cars”, and therefore were a natural market for well-used and cheaper ones, and came to love cars in general.    Nowadays, cars are much more difficult to “work on”.  Also the interest in cars among young people is plunging.  Suppose there is a correlation, auto manufacturers?  Kids don’t have as much money, but they are your hoped for future customers.

 

 

Creativity and Control, Innovation and Tradition

 I recently read a book entitled The Innovators, by Walter Isaacson, (see recommended books) who attracted a lot of notice writing a book about Steve Jobs after his death, and is an excellent writer with a good ability to deal with technology, science, and the people involved (although from my viewpoint as an engineer who has put in my time in industry and in academia I think he is a bit biased toward the sciences, although he recognizes the need for the “faceless” engineers, as he calls us, and often confuses engineers with technicians, machinists, and other worthy people). Since I have spent much of my life living and working in Silicon valley and teaching at Stanford, I have had a chance to get to know and work with a few of the heroes and many of the “faceless”, and am very familiar with the truths and myths.  I feel that Isaacson does a reasonably balanced and interesting job of telling his stories and drawing conclusions on the necessary qualities needed to innovate in what is called “high” technology (I am never quite sure what differentiates “high” technology from “low” technology).

 I apologize for not sending this post out at my usual Sunday or Monday time, but like many people, my wife and I took an end-of-the-summer vacation trip around Northern California, and a vacation to me includes severing as many links as possible with the internet.  During our trip, I couldn’t help but consider how much the many miraculous innovations described in Isaacson’s book (the internet, the smart phone smart phone,  computers, and all the features the digital age has brought to me through appliances, entertainment, etc.) have  improved my life.  The conclusion I kept coming to, is that there is good news and bad.  Certainly technical work has been greatly aided by the computer’s ability to calculate and simulate and provide information, although I suspect that one’s understanding of the assumptions and uncertainty in such things may be impaired.  I have much easier access to information, communication, and entertainment although it is all becoming seriously less fun through ever increasing use as a marketing tool.  I also have to put up with expectations of instant response (texting) and endless messages from people I don’t know who want things I cannot or don’t want to provide.

 But to me, the computer and the internet have always been tools to accomplish things I want to do, and like most tools, when I acquire a facility at using them, I resent them being changed, unless there is a major benefit to me.  And here we get into the conflict between the new and the known, because a great amount of the profit in and excitement about digital hardware and software is about creativity, innovation and change.  But as the title of the post implies, these can clash with control and tradition, and effort is needed to accommodate to the new—and time, which is becoming more important to me as I get older,  I am no longer amused by changes in software and hardware because some designer or manager, or entrepreneur has a “better” idea which I am forced to incorporate into my life even though I don’t need or want it.

 In a previous post I think I mentioned my ongoing problems involved in changing from Apple’s operating system 10-6-8 and associated applications, which I had used for years and was very familiar with, to 10-10-5, needed because a major hack had convinced the Stanford University computer people to encrypt all of us.  This, of course, resulted in my need to upgrade many  applications and deal with information such as  a great many photographs that had been re-arranged because Apple (not me) thought they should be.  The more time passes, the more annoyed I become at the time I am still putting into this change.  It is as though one manages to learn to juggle five balls, and then someone changes one of the balls.

 I understand the cost of backward compatibility in software, but when one already has as much capability as one needs/wants, can’t someone figure out how to preserve that?  In the case of Apple going from iPhoto to Photos, since I had not been upgrading my iPhoto (I preferred the older format), the “upgrade” (means change even if it a negative one) included in the new operating system happily re-arranged my images and put them in Photos (the new version that I don’t like as well) and informed me that I could no longer use  iPhoto because my iPhoto software was not the latest issue.  When I tried to download this latest version of iPhoto, I found it was no longer available at the Apple store, and I could not find it anywhere else on the Web.  With the help of a friend, I managed to find the iPhoto upgrade, so I can now access my old iPhoto files, but iPhoto and Photos are not easily compatible.  So I am still up to my neck with re-arranging images, getting information where I want it, and fears of future moves from Apple that will attempt to force me to use Photos, or worse.  The result is that I am going to go through the pain of getting the photos off of my Mac, and am even considering leaving Apple products because it seems to me that they are sacrificing a lot to make operating systems of desktops more compatible with smart phones and their other "portables", and I don’t want to go through endless iterations in which they strip things down so the desktop operating system is compatible with an Apple shirt button, or whatever else will follow their watch.

 I built much of my professional reputation promoting, teaching, practicing,  and consulting in things having to do with creativity and innovation.  I am a believer.  But unless they are properly balanced with control and tradition, over time the loss may be bigger than the gain.  Over time, new goodies tend to become boring, and one should not overlook the costs of change to users. 

 

 

Swell new old tractor

As I told you in a previous post, I have been working on the restoration of a 1929 Caterpillar model ten
tractor.  The last photo I sent you is shown at the left.  At that point I had the the running gear working, and some of the parts painted, but  had removed the sheet metal to convince it that it should be flat and have fewer bumps in it. 

 This particular tractor had been painted grey with red trim when it left the factory.  But many old caterpillar products over time had been painted the familiar Caterpillar yellow.  In fact that had happened to this one, and much of the yellow and old grey had chipped off, as can be seen from the photo.  I removed the worst damage, sanded it, put a rust neutralizer on the spots that still showed rust, and returned it to grey. I also reworked or replaced several parts that were either missing or unsavable, and had the seats re-upholstered in official Caterpillar vinyl. 

 The model ten was the smallest tracked tractor that Caterpillar ever produced (the ten stands for ten horsepower), and is particularly fun to drive, since tracked tractors pretty much turn on their own length, and the ten is not that long.  If you are interested in details, it is approximately 100 inches long, 51 inches to the top of the seat back, and 52 inches wide, overall (37 inches between the centers of the treads).  It weighs approximately two tons.  As a contrast, the D-11, one of Caterpillars largest modern tractors, which is mainly used as a bull dozer in the mining industry and other applications requiring moving large quantities of dirt, is powered by a 770 horsepower engine and weighs approximately 100 tons with blade.  But one of them would not fit in my yard, and my Cat 10 will, although I will probably not get permission to keep it there because Marian believes (wrongly) that there is already too much machinery in her (as she sees it) garden. 

 In any case, the finished product is shown here (tin can temporary in case it ever rains in California) .  Needless to say, I am most pleased with it. It is particularly important to me because its previous owner was a wonderful man named Chuck Whitcher, who was a close friend and mentor in the old machinery line, and who recently died.  He had never gotten around to restoring this tractor, and I am proud to have done it for him.

 

People, Products, and Quantities

People, Products, and Quantitities.

 The  U.S. “k through 12” educational system is presently burdened with many expectations — to get us more highly ranked internationally, make the sometimes less than brilliant children of wealthy and powerful people smarter, equip people to escape poverty and lead clean and rewarding lives, etc. etc. etc.  This is a far cry from teaching the ABC’s with a little arithmetic thrown in.  But to add my two cents, I wish our kids were being given a better feel for quantities than we were.  I am not talking about more calculus tricks here, but rather the ability to make order of magnitude estimates, handle probabilities, and deal with quantities with which we have little experience.

 Every time elections approach I become aware of the pleasure candidates get from throwing around large numbers (the national debt, the cost of Obama care, the number of immigrants in the country, and so on).  They do this knowing that most of the electorate has little experience with or feeling for such numbers, and will agree that we are in bad shape and should vote for the candidate dropping words like billions and trillions.  In a sense, their tactic is a good one, because we have not been trained to process such numbers.

 We are first exposed to quantities by learning to count our fingers and toes (probably the reason we use ten-based numerical systems and why parents did not appreciate the “new math” introducing digital and octal systems).  As we grew we picked up experience with thousands (car and house prices in the old days),  and have now grown used to millions (the population of large cities, and the net worth of well-off people.  But we are now being bombarded with quantities that we can’t handle with our intuition. We are cramming a billion transistors on a silicon chip, communicating with the Voyager spacecraft over 12 billion miles, and buying two terabytes (billion bytes) of computer memory for less than 100 dollars.  Bill Gates is worth 70 billion dollars. On the other end of the scale, we are fascinated with nanotechnology (the manipulation of material on a molecular or atomic scale)—the nano refers to a billionth of a meter, or the order of  10^-9 .   meters, (If  you are uncomfortable with this notation, you should be even more uncomfortable if I wrote 0.000000001 meters.  The total number of particles in the universe has been estimated at 10⁸⁵ You want to see 85 followed by 85 zeros? I doubt it.)

We also have difficulty thinking about long time periods.  The government usually defines a generation as 25 years.  The so-called Neolithic revolution, when we became hooked to agriculture and quit being nomad, was about 10,000 years ago, or about 400 generations. During that time, we have learned to do serious harm to our resources and environment.  We are not going to repair the damage or even quit causing it in one generation.  Yet we seem to have difficulty thinking and acting beyond our individual deaths.

 Part of our problem is the U.S. refusal to completely adopt the metric system.  We cling to our strange units such as inches, miles per hour, British Thermal  Units, ounces, pounds, and so on. At present, Myanmar, Liberia, and the U.S. are the only countries in the world that have not adopted the metric system, and we are the only so-called developed one.  In 1971 there was a major government study entitled “The Metric System, It’s Time Has Come”, led by Daniel DeSimone.  The government accepted it, but it didn’t take.  Can you imagine the price we pay in trade and travel for this, as well as needing to constantly figure out things like how many cups are in a gallon and how U.S. times in the 440 yard race compares with 400 meter times?

 But the problem mostly stems from lack of experience with very large and small numbers, and being taught methods of gaining perspective on them.  Orders of magnitude are important.  My older son has some land on which he sometimes raises tomatoes. Modern machine-raised tomatoes can produce on the order of 50 tons per acre.  Probably not too meaningful.  Better we should think of 100,000 pounds.  That’s a lot of trips to the store. If you have a spare one tenth acre on your lot, you should be able to raise 10,000 pounds of tomatoes.  That get your attention? I used to have fun asking students to quickly tell me how many hairs were on their head, or how many blades of grass were on the football field.  Over time they would get much better at order of magnitude guessing —not exact numbers, but a feeling for quantity.  In 1977 Charles and Ray Eames produced a short film entitled “Powers of Ten”, which gives a feeling for what happens when one adds or subtracts a zero from a number.  It’s still available, and worth watching if you have never seen it. It is here.

 We all need to become more familiar with quantities. The probability of dying in a car accident in the U.S. is on the order of one in 10,000 per year.  The probably of dying in an airplane accident is one in millions.  Why do people sitting in airplanes seem more worried than those sitting in cars?  There are approximately 12 million Mexican residents in the U.S.  That is about one per each 30 non-Mexican residents.  Is that too many?  I sure don’t think so, since the ones I know are hard-working, non-complaining, fun loving people, and after all quite a bit of the U.S. was taken away from Mexico by armed force.  Let’s not let ourselves be convinced that Mexico is taking us over. And let us face the fact that providing first class healthcare and education for everybody and keeping our  highways in good order  is very expensive, and someone will have to pay for it.

The Enigma of Success

I was recently talking with a few other faculty elders at Stanford, and we were reminiscing about the changes that had occurred in the University since we had arrived (1958 for me as a graduate student, 1966 as a member of the faculty).  They have been many.  Stanford in 1958 had begun its climb to its present size, wealth, and justified fame, and was a wonderful place to be because of its smaller physical size, its relative lack of red tape and rules, the excitement of rising in prestige, and its more informal physical plant and personal interactions.  During my time as a graduate student I not only carried a large teaching load and was responsible for a research contract, but was given the job of re-building (with student help) the upper floor of a large building, where we were building a new academic unit. In fact, I repeated this— studs, drywall, and paint— in the 1980’s when I was tasked with chairing a struggling program and allocated unusable space. I came to love the place through building my offices to suit my desires, and being able to move walls around at will.  No longer.  My present office has concrete walls and a building manager, and I must be very clever even to be able to drill holes in the wall.

 In 1958 there was no faculty club, so many of the professors would bring their lunches, eat them together, and socialize.  In fact the faculty members of one very academically successful group in my department was famous for playing loud and boisterous games of hearts during the lunch break.  Since there were many fewer Ph.D. students, there was less overhead in the funding and maintaining of laboratories.  Now successful faculty members in the Engineering School often have a much larger number of Ph.D. students, visiting faculty members, fellows, lab space to accommodate them all, perhaps an executive director with industrial experience to keep the whole thing running, several administrative assistants,  etc. etc. etc.  Faculty members are more likely to be entertaining visitors at lunch than playing hearts, and tending their mini empires rather than interacting with each other.

 An even larger change has been in the overall feeling of the place.  The 8000 acres  owned by the University was originally Governor Leland Stanford’s horse farm, and was in fact called the Farm, as it still is by many alumni. The academic center was developed but most of the land was not, and even the academic area was equipped with somewhat wild growth and nicely worn buildings.  Lake Lagunita on campus was generally full during warm weather (no perception of water shortage then), and just before filling, was sometimes used by the students to stage the Lagunita Seca road race, run by vehicles built by the students with no rules and driven by students with no training!  When I was a student there was one policeman on campus.  I don’t know how many we have now. It was possible to park one’s car next to one’s office.  It is a challenge to park on campus at all now, and probably will cost money.  We have tour busses, traffic circles, and stop signs for bicycles, and the construction going on seems to be never ceasing.  The university seems more like an airport every year.

 But as you know, Stanford has become an educational power house.  The university sits high on all ranking lists, attracts an increasing number of outstanding applicants, does research that affects us all, and becomes ever more successful at hiring world famous scholars for the faculty and raising money for everything from funding research and endowing professors to expanding the facilities.   There are certainly more conveniences, money, and prestige attached to being to being part of the university now than there were when I first arrived, and Stanford is even becoming a force in athletics But as one alumnus said on a recent visit.  “What happened to the Farm?  This is a research city—an extension of Silicon Valley”.

 And is the plant going in the same direction as the people?  Stanford is becoming larger than human scale and  a show house of cleanliness and landscaping. But people who work in universities are supposed to be creative.  My background includes a great deal of study of creativity.  Creativity requires room to think and experiment and an environment that is consistent. Faculty members and students in universities often have neither the time nor inclination to follow the dreams of architects and administrators.  Life in the university  consists of overlapping and seldom finished work, which can seldom be tucked away, leaving clean desks and shelves.

Below are two photos taken in the new Engineering Quadrangle at Stanford.  The next three show the  work space of an outstanding professor, an IT expert, and a  program manager.  These are a far cry from the interiors shown in the architecture renderings and blessed by the Trustees.  

The next photo shows the exterior of the Clark center for bio-engineering. It is a striking piece of architecture, with its glass walls opening onto a central atrium.  But if you look closely, most of glass walls have been obscured from inside, because the people working inside neither want to be watched by passers by (oh look honey, there is a professor), nor have the sun shine on their computer screens.  The next photo shows some actual student work space.  Happily, the students have overcome the architecture!

 The final photo shows office space for Ph.D students in yet another building.  But Ph.D. students are not willing to sit in rows with tidy desk tops, no space to store their work, food, and projects, and with people staring at them through glass windows. Therefore, few of them are in these rooms. 

In my opinion, many of our new buildings smack a bit too much of control and fantasies of how professionals should conduct themselves, rather than showing an understanding of the actual lives of students and others employed in the rather messy educational process . Alumni from many years ago speak fondly of the feel of the more poorly maintained, but informal physical campus.  The new buildings are impressive, but where’s the fun?  What’s to love?  Institutions have to learn better to grow and maintain the feeling of informality and smaller size.

 Of course, this progression in size, wealth, and fame is typical of fortunate organizations, and is in a sense a reflection of the American way.  And I am proud to have played a small part in it in the case of Stanford.  But there is much to be said for smaller organizations that can exist with less control, and therefore less overhead and reporting.  I am hoping that Stanford will continue to improve and enjoy the long success of universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, and even Harvard.  But individuals, organizations, and even nations seem to go through a cycle of climbing to “greatness”, and then going through the process of slowly declining and being forced to watch others take over leadership.  I sometimes think it would be nice if so much, including most economic theories, did not depend on growth.  But it seems that most of us are not strong enough to put limits on ourselves in favor of an environment that we can easily control—the human condition.  So I will continue to enjoy the ride.

 

 

 

 

Big Shows of Outstanding Products

I am a fan of huge shows —the kind that leave you sure that you haven’t seen everything  no matter how much time you spend.  I have been to many of them—the War and Peace Show and the Farnborough Air Show in England, the Tri State Gas Engine and Tractor show in Portland, Indiana, COMDEX, the AACA annual antique car show in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the Iowa State Fair, the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and so on.

 But strangely enough, for years I have been neglecting one in my own back yard – the annual historic car races/show in Monterey California. Many people I know are regular attendees and participants, but they tend to possess rare and valuable show cars, and lots of money, so I figure it would be a playground for extreme show car snobs.

 But I was wrong.  It does have a few of them, but the very large attendance is mostly people like me (car fans, but drivers of several year old usually dirty Toyotas and such things). I do like cars. I grew up and lived in Southern California and  during the 1950’s and 60’s I was a fan of all sorts of automotive competitions, from oval track racing, to road racing, to destruction derbies, to drag racing. I have also put my time into “sports” cars.  I have owned 1956 Austin Healey, a 1960 Triumph TR3, a 1959 Porsche 356a, a 1975 Alfa Romeo Spider, and a 1970 E-type Jaguar. I bought them all used and needing a bit of work, and they were all fun. I still own the Alfa and the E-type (definitely not ready for Monterey), and put in my allotted time nursing them.  In fact both of them need work right now, so I will probably renew my intimate acquaintance with them in a week or two.  I must admit that I like to work on ailing cars, and cars like these give one the opportunity.

 If you like cars, and people who like cars, and can visit this event, it is well worth it, although you should be prepared to bite your lip when you pay the admission price (you need the "pit" pass).  I was motivated to attend the show by a friend/ex office partner/ex student, named Matt Ohline, who is a serious car buff, and always drives responsive machinery.  He has a wife, two kids, and a good job as an engineer, but no fortune that would enable him to own the cars he drools over.  He contacted me and invited me to be his guest at the show  and was clearly the best of all guides, since he attends each year.   I drooled with him.   Suffice it to say I will be there next year, because, guess what, when we left at the end of the day I felt that I had not seen everything.

 The photos in this post are of swell cars that were at the show.  The first one is Matt's choice for the most beautiful car in the world. The final one is a huge racing machine outfitted with a Hall Scott engine (also huge).  I was particularly interested, since I own one of the engines, which saw its original service in a fire truck.  I could build a ………………….. No Jim, don’t go there—just go to car shows with Matt.

Good Product: The Portable Pressure Washer

I have had a small portable pressure washer for many years, and finally completely wore it out.  I decided to try living without one, and soon realized it had become part of me. If you do not have one, these machines use a small gasoline engine (or electric if you prefer) and a pressure pump to propel  a relatively small stream of water at very  high speed, as opposed to that available from a garden hose nozzle.  The result is tremendously increased cleaning ability – a stream of water that can quickly cut through not only dirt and dust, but baked mud, flaking paint, hardened grease, and many other stubborn types of filth, using nothing but water (and a bit of detergent in case of stubborn resistance).  And not only that, as a good Californian I appreciate the fact that it does so with less water than I would waste with a hose, scrub brush, etc.

 I probably especially appreciate it because of my hobby of rescuing old machinery, because alternate approaches to cleaning keep me drenched in toxic liquids, depressed from endless scraping, and disappointed with the end result.  The photo below shows my new washer —nothing special— a sale at Lowes. 
  But it is even better than my old one and comes complete with four nozzles ranging from gentle to “don’t get your hand in the stream.  These are tools, not toys, and not to be used for water fights or cleaning the mud off of one’s bare feet.  The next photo shows most of the mechanical portion of my McCormick Daisy reaper restoration project, which I have mentioned in past posts.  Through its stay on a friend’s farm, it became covered with mud, clots of grease, dust, and leaves.  I timed how long it took to clean it until it sparkled again—under a minute— and it required less water than flushing a toilet or the amount of cold water that has to be run before the hot water appears in the upstairs shower of our 110 year old house (being also a Californian, my wife collects it, hauls it down stairs, and puts it on her garden.)

Homemade "Popsicles*", an Outstanding Product

My brother John is still growing fruit and vegetables on the remaining acres of the family farm in Rialto in Southern California.  In fact, he seems to be living on the last orange grove in an area that at one time was totally planted in citrus.  When I occasionally visit him, I always bring home a large amount of produce, in particular fresh oranges.  These are oranges straight off of the tree, and have a much different taste than oranges that have been processed for sale in grocery stores, and especially from concentrated frozen orange juice.   Having grown up on an orange grove, I obviously ate them and drank their juice in all known forms.  In the process I learned much about them, and am highly skilled at peeling them, segregating the parts without getting orange juice all over myself, and the gentle art of poking a hole through the rind with my finger and squeezing the orange to extract the juice.  In fact, I enjoy eating part of the peel when I eat one.  And I make frequent use of a high quality juicer (Philips).

 I seem to have a great liking of cold things to eat and drink—ice cream,  margaritas, “slushies” of various sorts, frozen fruits, gin and tonics, ice tea, sorbets, or just straight ice cubes, which to the horror of my wife (and dentist) I happily chew up when my drink is gone—a sin I inherited from my mother,  so it is in my gene pool, rather than a bad habit.

 When I was a kid, I loved popsicles, and the habit still exists, but now I make my own (simple because the world is full of “molds”, sticks, and other such equipment).  When I was a kid there was usually frozen fresh orange juice in an ice cube tray in the refrigerator, which I used to eat constantly, and even better, fresh orange juice popsicles —easy to make, given the many molds available in the world—just pour the juice into the mold and stick in the freezer. See photo below of a tacky plastic mold that produces “modern” ones with easily washable plastic stick complete with drip holders (useful for young grandchildren).   And above, of course, the final product above. And unlike many child-hood treats I have given up (cotton candy, cookie batter, licorice), I still make them –

 But part of the fun, if one likes icy things, is experimenting with the limitless numbers of flavors available by not only using varieties of juices fruits, and flavorings, but also reaching out to unlikely combinations.  Some have escaped me (chicken, salsa), some are difficult (chocolate), but I become even more challenged, rather than discouraged, and my failures can usually be melted, or even heated, leading to interesting taste experiences.

 If you are not addicted to this food form, I recommend it, especially in the summer in California.

 *Popsicle is probably a trade name, so I should probably be using “frozen juice on a stick” or something like that, but hey, having your trade name used generically is the big time.  Do you have a Kleenex?  Where can I Xerox this?  Who made your iPhone?  

Good Show and Challenging Task

I just returned from one of my favorite antique machinery shows—— The Oregon Steam up, held on the last weekend in July and the first weekend in August in Brooks, Oregon, north of Salem and South of Portland at Antique Powerland just off U.S. highway 5.  There are a very large number of such shows in the world each year, but this one is outstanding for the breadth of old machinery there and in operation, the well-done museums on the land (which are open during the year), and the swell and knowledgeable people who put it on, and who show and demonstrate their stuff.   For me, it is also of a nice scale and convenient because it is on the West Coast of the U.S. in one of my favorite states.  If you are interested in antique machinery you will especially enjoy this gathering, because of its emphasis on both steam and gas equipment and the in-place large engines, sawmill, etc. If  you are not interested in antique machinery you should be.  Don't you wish you had the vehicle in the photo above to go shopping in?

 But I had another reason for my visit.  Some years ago I began restoring a McCormick Daisy reaper, a machine that is in the American history books, and is fascinating to watch, as after it cuts the hay, it has arms that sweep it off of a deck onto the ground in piles, which can then be tied together and taken to the next stage of the harvesting process.  The six  arms can be controlled so that every arm sweeps the deck each pass, every other sweeps, every third arm, etc. My problem is that the very critical part that controls all of this is missing from my machine.  So I need to make one.

 There is one of the few complete Daisy reapers like mine that I know of at the Brooks show.  A photograph is below.   The part I need is sort of contained in the red outline in the photo below (apologies for the photo— the white blur at the bottom is my hand), although many weird curves and shapes are not visible.  The part includes the pivot. A complex curve hidden in the photo, the hook at the top, a curved rack of gear teeth that must engage the worm gear inside the main casting as the part turns upon its pivot, and a contact pad at the top of the rack.

I have several problems in re-creating it.  First of all, it is difficult to make, since it is a casting with no symmetry, no “parting lines” which would allow a mold to be separated, and critical and strange alignments between the parts which interact with the surrounding parts.

And, don’t say 3d printing —been there.  Three dimensional printing is not as easy as the media makes it seem, especially if scanning is involved,  and I want a steel part.  Sure I could make a mold from the part and cast it, but not surprisingly, the owner and museum were not eager to let me take the machine apart (also difficult) and take the part 400 miles away to use as a master while I copied it in my shop and Stanford’s foundry.  Had I been them, I would have felt the same.

 So I went to Brooks to take many photographs and make measurements (which I did) to work from.  Even with them, it will be a challenging job, as there were no base points on the part or machine to measure from, so I will have to cut and try and weld and curse until I get a prototype that will do the job, and then make a finished version from the prototype. But strangely enough, I love to do that sort of thing.

 I will write a post on the process and the finished part, but don’t hold your breath.  I am guessing several weeks, since my life is beautifully endowed with many other things to do, many higher on Marian's priority list than my making this part.

The Vanishing Machine Aesthetic

I really miss being able to see the details of machines.  Not only are they exciting, but often beautiful.  I am suspect, of course, being an engineer, but so be it.  When I was a kid, I used to love standing too close to steam powered railroad locomotives, not only for the emotional thrill of their size and sounds, but also to try to figure out how they worked (possible for a kid in those days).  I don’t stand too close to modern train locomotives, or in fact, even notice them.

 Something happened many years ago (1920’s and 30’s) to start us hiding the workings of machinery. 
The photo at the left shows a caterpillar 30, probably built in the 1920’s, with the usual kid playing on it.  The next photo shows a restored caterpillar 10 manufactured a few years later, but with a more “modern” approach to design.  Note that the workings are shrouded in sheet metal.  The third photo shows a beat up caterpillar 10 without the sheet metal (I am restoring it and straightening out the sheet metal).  To me, it is more interesting without the sheet metal, but I will put it back on so it doesn’t bother people.

The final tractor photo shows a caterpillar tractor manufactured in 1995.  Certainly looks faster (it is) and more powerful (it is) and more technically sophisticated (it is), but what is inside of its sports-car body panels?  Give or take a bunch of electronics and a steering wheel rather than clutch/brake levers, it is similar.  But I’ll bet the reaction of most people (not farmers) is not to care—they just like the exterior. (I do admit it is a great tractor and I like the exterior also).  But this tractor is perhaps more difficult to understand and to maintain than the Caterpillar 30, as well as not as much fun for kids to play on.

 

I think it is worrisome that we are no longer paying as much attention to how things work.  Personal computers are a good example —no clue as to what is in the package.  In fact, most of us are perhaps happier that way.  But the role technology is playing is increasing so that hiding it may delude us, especially if covered with modern marketing. The “Cloud”, being touted by companies with enormous server capability (Google, Apple, IBM, Amazon, etc.) is causing massive ignorance.  Traditional clouds are beautiful, especially close to sunset, the weightlessly drift through the sky, ever changing, and hopefully in California promise eventual much needed rain, and in summer cooler weather.  They are almost magic.

 The “Cloud” being sold by computer companies is another example of intentionally hiding technology that our society should better understand.  It consists of access to the company servers (not all servers), and is an attempt by the company to function as our digital memory and provide our operating systems, applications, and other software (conveniently allowing them to charge us a monthly fee).  This cloud consists of glass fibers and other conductors under ground, on the ocean floor, and occasionally in sewers, feeding massive number of digital devices in anonymous , windowless, extremely hot  buildings that suck  huge amounts of electrical energy not only to accomplish their function, but also to prevent themselves from overheating.  Some time ago I mentioned a book entitled Tubes, by Andrew Blum.  An excellent read if you think the “Cloud” is either beautiful or magic, or if you don't understand the physical components of the internet.

 What’s happened to us?  Many things, but the directions of technology and the strengthening of the design profession have certainly had large inputs.  The realization of the advantages of low-drag aircraft, beginning with the evolution of fighter planes and the design of airplanes such as the DC-3 in 1934 was certainly instrumental.  The photo at the right  shows a famous pencil sharpener prototype designed by one of the leading designers of the 1930’s, Raymond Loewy in 1933.  It never hit the market.  But granted that it would only sharpen one size of pencil, it does look like it could move through one’s office rapidly, and would have probably sold because of the then love of “streamlining”.  I have opened the hood of a few “luxury” cars only to find that the engine is almost entirely shrouded, although it represents a high level of craftsmanship.  And I can tell long and now amusing stories of putting a new battery into my admittedly sleek Apple iPhone.

 I am for unwrapping and better understanding how things work.  Not only is it interesting, but we can better evaluate what we are doing to ourselves.

 

Cyanoacrylate, CA, “Super Glue”, or Whatever. A Wonderful Product

Some people are dependent on alcohol, some on heroin, but I am addicted to cyanoacrylate (industrial nickname CA).  It has saved me huge amounts of time in my life, enabled me to impress my family and friends by my ability to perform instant repairs, allowed us to keep fragile items in our house within reach of children and then grandchildren, secure in the knowledge that I can fix them when they are broken, and been critical to various strange hobbies I have.

 It has been a part of my life since soon after it became available in the late 1950’s.  I first met CA while working in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.  It was sold by Eastman Kodak, where it was invented, and was called Eastman 910.  At JPL it was first used by the test engineers, who needed to rapidly place accelerometers on prototype spacecraft to measure the effects of simulated launch vibrations—these vibrations being perhaps the most severe portion of the launch environment.  Since CA adhesives in their pure form set in seconds, make strong bonds, and are immune to high temperatures and most solvents, they were perfect for attaching these accelerometers.  And conveniently, CA is not immune to acetone, which softens the set glue and allowed the accelerometers to be removed and attached elsewhere if desired.

 I first discovered CA as the result of a common prank played on new employees (those were the days of pranking, which I sorely miss).  Lubrication of mechanical components is always a problem in space, because most lubricants will “outgas”, and spread a thin layer of themselves on neighboring surfaces.  Not good, since such surfaces are critical for temperature control, and one would like the lubricants to stay where they are needed. Eastman 910 came in small bottles with a pouring spout, and the prank was to find an innocent engineer (me), tell them that there was this amazing new lubricant that would not outgas, and which was a superior lubricant to any others available.  “Try it”, the prankster would say. “Put a couple of drops on a finger, and rub it against another finger, and  you will be amazed”.  Amazed we were, because the fingers instantly glued together, and tightly enough that if not told about acetone, would have required slicing apart with a razor blade.  As you can see from the Wikipedia information here, one of the uses of CA is to glue skin together in cases of wounds, surgery, and other applications.  I later found out that in three or four days they could be separated even without acetone, but life is somewhat less convenient with two fingers glued together for even a short time.

 Although at this time, the glue was rare and expensive, it is now common and very affordable (a little goes a long way).  It is sold under various trade names, such as Super Glue and Krazy Glue, and often tricked up with other components so it can be marketed more easily.  But I am a purist, and stick to the straight stuff.  I usually buy it in the model section of hobby shops.  The small bottles (1/2 ounce) are often enough, since over time it is almost impossible to keep them from terminally plugging up.  It usually comes in three thicknesses.  The “thin” sets within a few seconds and makes the strongest bond if the joint is in good contact.  The “gap filling” is the middle one, takes longer to set, but does not require as tight a mechanical joint.  I never use the thickest version, which can handle even more “gap”, because part of the magic is the very rapid setting time, compared to other glues.  Clamping is rarely needed.  It is usually possible to apply the glue, hold the parts together a bit, and voila – mission accomplished.

 The skill, strangely enough, is to use it without gluing your fingers together, gluing parts to your fingers, getting it on your clothes or your best furniture, or otherwise losing control of the magic fluid.  But a few embarrassing accidents will help you learn.  One of my early ones resulted in my gluing a finger of each hand to a small pot that had broken into several pieces.  I was so intent in holding the pieces together I neglected to realize what was  happening.   I was working in the garage, but  looking around, I could see no acetone.  I remembered that my wife had finger-nail polish remover (acetone) in the house, so I went to find it.  But unknown to me, she had gone on an errand and locked the doors of the house.  Since the glue had set and the pot was repaired, I did not want to re-break it.  But ever try to get a full key ring out of the pocket of tight Levis with both hands glued to a pot?  No cell phones in those days, and even if there had been, at that point in my life I would have been reluctant to give my colleagues, friends,and  neighbors, the tasty story that hot-shot Ph.D. rocket scientist Adams had glued his hands to a pot.  Fortunately I was more agile in those days, got the key free without re-breaking the pot, opened the door, found the finger-nail polish remover, and managed to apply it to my attached fingers (and a bit on the floor and bathroom counter) before my wife returned.

 A professionally valuable result of my early exposure to CA, was that I became fascinated with glue, and how it works.  In fact, in retrospect I was becoming annoying at JPL, because I could see no reason why most of the spacecraft was not glued together, instead of using such archaic means as nuts and bolts, rivets, and welds.  The knowledge I acquired has served me in good stead all of my life.  Thank you, Eastman Kodak. 

 Incidentally, while you are in the hobby shop, buy yourself some 5 minute epoxy and hardener if you don’t have any.  Not as strong a joint as regular epoxy glue, but you probably don’t need that much strength, and 5 minutes is better than 5 hours. 

Bondo—An Old and Outstanding Product

Bondo, is a two component epoxy putty, originally developed in 1955 by Robert Spink, a car repairman in Florida.  Although it has changed in composition, it is still the foremost body putty used to repair irregularities in sheet metal auto body parts.  I first discovered it soon after it came on the market while involved in repairing minor damage to first my, and then my family cars.  It has a bad reputation with some people (a short cut and plastic), but certainly helps even out the surface after the sheet metal is pounded out to near its original shape.  Although there are many other epoxy based putties now, Bondo still holds its own.

 Since that time, I have found a multitude of uses for the material, from repairing damage to wooden porch floors in our 100 plus year old house, to stopping sewer leaks.  I sometimes think that the reason the Roman empire collapsed was because they did not have Bondo.

 But now I am worried a bit about the product.  The company was bought in 2007 by 3M, a large and successful company, that is using the Bondo brand on a variety of consumer products.  But I recently bought a new can of Bondo, and found that it was labeled as a “body repair kit”.  The kit part apparently refers not only to the body putty, but also a tiny (2 inch square) plastic applicator, and two so-called self adhesive patches made of a metal mesh.  I assume these are intended to bridge a hole in the sheet metal until enough Bond iss applied to seal the hole—but you don’t want to do that.  You want to weld, or at least rivet in, a metal patch and go from there.  And a two inch applicator?  The “kit” part was downright insulting. Bondo is obviously fishing for the DIY (Do It Yourself) market, but it takes a bit of experience to use Bondo well, and probably more than a two inch applicator.  I would suggest at least a reference on the can to one of the many excellent instruction videos on using Bondo available on Youtube . A fully set mishapen, lumpy mass of Bondo on his/her car would take the fun out of any DIYer's day (I incidentally am a veteran DIY person).

 And I noticed the can was not full —  hopefully not the grocery store game (keep the container size and the price, and cut the contents).  Maybe Bondo cans were never full, but I do not remember that being the case. The attached photo shows the freshly opened can, the crème hardener and the “patch” folded around the tiny applier.

 I also recently began using a wood filler now provided by Bondo, also a two component putty, that seems to set a bit softer, is more compatible with sanding and drilling, and can be stained to some extent.  But it sets at least as fast (3 to 5 minutes after mixing). On a car, Bondo’s fast setting time is a benefit, because usually one smears it onto the sanded sheet metal over a fairly large and reasonable even area. Then one planes it (with a so-called cheese grater) and sands it with increasingly fine paper as it sets until one gets the desired result. But in repairing wood, especially in a house, it is not always possible to place the mixed putty in the proper place and smooth it as one might want to in such a short time, since house repairs often require a bit of acrobatics and forcing the filler into  nooks, crannies, and crevices.  But hopefully the manufacturers will realize that car body repair and the repair of wood products are often two different things, and at least come up with an option of a slightly slower-setting wood filler— how about ten minutes instead of five?

I am praying for the continued high quality of Bondo products.  Hopefully, the long established reputation (brand) is not being  used mainly to rapidly improve the cash flow of 3M.  But marketing and potential quick profit have stolen the mind of many well meaning and venerable companies. 

 

 

Brains and Minds

There is an increasing fascination,  at least among  media folk, with brains/minds.  I write brains/minds, because brains are the approximately three  pound pieces of complex meat that adults have in their skulls, and to many people, minds are more.  The fascination has to do with how they work, and  is a reaction to the many new insights from instruments (functional MRI scans, Pet scans) and insight into the structure and chemistry of brains.

 There are several problems involved with understanding how brains/minds work.  There is a perhaps cynical view (which I at times hold) that it will take something more powerful than a human brain to understand a human brain.  But to be more charitable to the neurologists, psychologists, computer scientists, and other people who are engaged in this task,  a major problem exists because the various disciplines involved are often not comfortable with each other.  There was an article  in the June 28^th issue of the New York Times entitled “Face It, Your Brain Is a Computer”.  It was written by Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology and neural science at NYU, who has just written a book entitled “The Future of the Brain”.  The article is here,  Happily, the article is not saying that the brain is a computer, as computers are commonly thought of.  Rather the author  is saying that thinking of the brain  as a computer  is perhaps a good way of structuring brain research.

 The magazine section of the same issue of the newspaper contains a section entitled “Head Trips”, which speaks of brain/mind function as seen by people ranging from a talk therapist to a person with a history of bipolar disorder, to a person doing research on the effects on the brain of microbiota that grow in the gut.  There seems to be agreement that  brain research must involve many disciplines, since the brain does seem to exhibit some “digital” behavior, certainly involves chemistry, electrical signals, and biological processes, and is strongly affected by behavior, experience, and emotion.  But many outstanding specialists are biased toward their own discipline.  When I read the article by Professor Marcus, I wondered how many of his friends were bio chemists.  I was very interested in the description of Mark Lyte’s work on the influence of microbiota, but he seemed far from the traditional talk therapists, who seem to be losing ground to the people in the “hard” sciences. In my opinion, theory that does not impress all of the intellectual camps involved, is not adequate.  We need a giant AHA, that sets all parties dancing—the equivalent of the double helix insight.

 Most of the brain/mind theories I am aware of are thought provoking and explain certain aspects of  thinking, responding, interpreting, predicting, and other things brains/minds do. But can the theories be integrated into a satisfying model?  That we shall see.  In the interim, I think brain research is one of the more entertaining things on which to stay current (except for the Golden State Warriors, of course).   

Shadow Work, by Craig Lambert

  This is a short, easy to read, and provocative book by Craig Lambert (more info. at recommended books column at the left), that claims that our leisure time is being eaten up by doing work that used to be done for us.  The reason for this is partly technology (the computer), partly because business has discovered that by off-loading work to customers it can cut its payroll (pumping our own gas), and partly because we honor work in our culture.

 This book got my attention because everyone I know seems to be bemoaning the loss of leisure time, even though supposedly the information revolution is helping us by taking over increasing amounts of work, and because I have just blown away a ridiculous amount of time in first of all, going to an outrageously complex multi level password system needed to use the Stanford server (the university was badly hacked a while ago), and having my computers be encrypted (which of course required "upgrading" the operating systems, which required "upgrading" apps, etc. etc. etc. ) 

 Lambert defines shadow work as work we do without labeling it as work, and for which we are not paid.  One example is the constant mucking around we do with our computer(s), as manufacturers keep “upgrading” them to sell us even more features we don’t want (and remove some we do).  I hate Apple’s new “Photos” program, a supposed improvement over IPhoto.  To me it is a step  backwards enshrouded in meaningless changes and crowned with the loss of useful features.  Even worse, once one allows one’s computer to make the change (mandatory with OS 10-10-3 on), one can’t go back unless one has the latest version of iPhoto on the machine—apparently not known by my favorite IT person who knows everything.  Dumb move by Apple.  And lots of Shadow Work upcoming for me, as I am going to bail out of their photo organization software so I can organize my photos the way I want them, not how Apple thinks I should. In fact, maybe I'll bail out of Apple.

 The book has many examples of this phenomenon.  The replacement of travel agents by web sites, for instance.  Granted one has the ability to compare endless flights, hotels, rental car deals, etc., but the time and effort spent as contrasted with letting a travel agent do this (at one time paid by airlines, hotels, etc) can be huge.  Another is shopping, especially in big box stores, or even large grocery stores, in which it sometimes seems impossible to either find what one wants (especially if everything has re-arranged to be compatible with the now popular marketing technique of forcing the shopper to pass by everything in the store) or find a person to give one a helpful clue.  Another is the time spent figuring out all of the non-standardized kiosks, credit card readers, and other digital “aides”, all slightly different.  I just had a brand new-looking gas pump consistently refuse my credit card, and upon complaining to the one attendant, was told that I had to withdraw the card slowly.  Interesting after years of being told to withdraw it rapidly.

 Lambert also goes into topics such as doing one’s own taxes, legal work, and other activities formerly done by others.  And the time we spend filling out medical forms, and providing information on ourselves to internet vendors so that it can be sold in the Big Data world.  He agrees that many of these activities are cheaper and maybe faster than hiring professionals, and perhaps our time is less valuable than that of the doctor who wants the information, but his main point is that we do an increasing amount of “work” that used to be done for us, without realizing it, and the result is perhaps more frantic lives and less human interaction.  Definitely describes me.

 He also talks about the incredible time and effort spent by parents outside of the home that did not used to occur.  When I went to school in the dark ages of education there were no organized kid athletics, no summer camps, no parents driving  us to school or helping us with our homework (not much homework), no PTA or other volunteer groups, or parents organizing campaigns against teachers and administrators (too much homework—not enough homework).  I look at my children and the time they spend chauffeuring their kids around and attending events, and I think Wow.  I learned to play sports and did well in school without parent involvement, and it worked.  In fact, we would have been uncomfortable if parents were hanging around our ball games and attending out school productions.

 And finally, his argument again reminds the reader of the loss of paying jobs awaiting us in the future.  I went through a divorce many years ago.  It did not include large estates, criminal behavior, or anything that would result in a novel.  In fact it was even called a routine divorce by the judge, who chided the two attorneys for making it into a war and not coming to an agreement.  But they did earn money for a whole year.  An example where computers could have done better, but we do have a lot of attorneys to support.

 I recommend the book.  It is an  easy read and will make you wonder how much “Shadow Work” you are doing.

When Most People Were Makers

I grew up in a time and place where people made and maintained a large amount of their stuff.  It was in the 1930’s, the depression was on, and I lived  on a small orange orchard in southern California.  In those days it was possible for a family to live off of the income from 10 or 20 acres of oranges, but there wasn’t much cash around.  But all people needed was enough cash to buy necessities they couldn’t grow, and there was no incentive to buy luxury cars, live in huge houses, or wear expensive clothes.  In fact, such things were considered in very poor taste.  And people were proud of their ability to make what they needed and fix it if it broke.

 I was born in my grandparent’s house, which my grandfather had built, and my grandmother decorated and maintained, in addition to cooking, making clothes, taking care of kids and other "traditional woman’s work".  This was before the massive shift in occupational expectations among women, and what she did was essential for the family, so although an extremely bright and strong woman, she seemed more than satisfied with her role. In addition to building the house, My grandfather also built a large garage/shop, a barn, and an auxiliary building for their occasionally exploding gas generator, and was also the area blacksmith.  And he planted ten acres of orange trees and installed the irrigation system. When they were first married my parents also lived in the house.

But after I became mobile as a small child, they clearly needed a house, so  they signed up my grandfather and built one.  I was allowed to think I was helping.  The photograph shows me doing so.  Note hammer, also note I am not actually working on the house structure.  It was a separate structure designed to keep me amused and out of the way.

 I recently was visiting this house, since my brother now lives in it, and was reminded of how much building and making stuff had occurred in that spot.  When I was six, it was decided that I needed my own room,  The photo below shows it newly constructed,  (again by the family), lived in by me, and outfitted by furniture (the desk,bed, shelves, drawer chest, and even the boat model) built by my mother.  She had become the family furniture maker. 

Toys were home built.  The next photo shows my brother as a kid and a horse he built (with a little help from mom).   And then she really took off as a maker and fixer.  Mom had always made her own clothes, and now branched out into clothes for all of us.  My father liked to fish, and I remember her making him a pair of waterproof hip boots from old tire inner tubes.  I became tall early, and could not keep my shirt tucked in.   She designed a shirt for me that did not need tucked in and made them for me until I was well into my forties, by which time I was adequately equipped.  They don’t wear out, and I still wear them.  The photo below is  a back view of one she made me from the sacks of the pulverized sulfur that was then used as a pesticide. Her shirts were not always flamboyant, but mostly were, and they were partly responsible for forming my  persona in high school—I needed a little more extroversion.

 And on it goes.  When I was in high school I built myself a swell bedroom/bathroom addition to our
house with my grandfather’s supervision, as well as helping him build other additions and upgrades,  When my grandfather died, I became family carpenter and maintenance person, and happily retained those positions when I married and became the owner of my own house, which I could radically improve. Also I went to college and studied engineering and spent enough time in industry and in my shop that I could build and maintain more sophisticated things.

 When my brother and I went off to college (a first in the family) Mom became a water colorist.  She took a few classes from an excellent water colorist (Robert Wood), loved them, and away she went.  The photo below is an example.  She became very good, and broke the family tradition by selling her work.  She won a number of awards (one from the California Historical Society for a series she did on old houses, several in art shows), all the while trying to hide from notoriety.

 My grandfather was a metal worker, carpenter, plasterer, concrete guy – the whole works. My father less so, and was more interested in farming and the orange business.  My grandmother was more into “traditional” tasks.  But on recently visiting the family house, I was again amazed by my mother's work.  She died only a few years ago, in the house at the age of 97,  from falling down while carrying a stack of her paintings down a stairs and breaking her neck – a fitting ending for her—quick, at home, and with her work.  She was a quiet and humble lady, but the breadth of her interests and abilities would be astounding these days.  And whether it was cooking, sewing, painting, making furniture, mending, working with concrete, fixing the sink,or teaching me to make model airplanes (from scratch), play the piano, or type, she was always trying to improve her work (and me). She was after quality. I think I was encouraged by my mother and her father to do the same.  But did I inherit something?  Was it nature or nurture?  Probably both.

 Whatever happened, as you know I am a believer in the importance of working with the hands.   I do it not to make money, but rather for pride and sense of accomplishment- and once in a while to keep from going nuts.  Except for Mom going commercial with her  paintings, the rest of my family, and most of the people I knew who were drawn to growing oranges in my home town were the same.  I miss that aspect in the area in which I live, where most (but not all) of my friends seem to tend toward buying things rather than making them, and hiring other people to maintain them and do their manual work. They seem to think that their time is too valuable to do such things. Perhaps this explains why even though I don’t want to grow crops, I am drawn to rural areas, where it is more common to see welding equipment in people’s garages.  They remind me of my early days when most people were makers, not because being a maker was cool, but rather because people could not afford to continually buy new stuff and making and fixing things and tinkering with them was satisfying.  In my opinion it still is.

 Incidentally,  I have given many talks, courses, etc. using the title “Making, Fixing, and Tinkering”, and am well into a book on the topic, so you will occasionally hear more about it in this blog. I am writing the book not only because I am a believer, but need something to defend myself against attacks from my friends who fervently believe I am wasting my time when I could be thinking or touring the world instead of tinkering.  Been there, and you have to think to write a book.

Polluting the Internet

There was an interesting article in the magazine section of the New York Times, June 8, 2015.  It was written by Adrian Chen, entitled  The Agency, and is here.  It is about the major effort going on in Russia not only to use the internet to spread positive feelings about the country and its activities (Putin, the  Ukraine, etc.), but also to spread confusion in “western” countries such as the  U.S., and in general, dilute the credibility of what is referred to as the “U.S.” internet.  It focuses on a fairly secret organization named the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, which hires large numbers of young  people with computer skills at relatively high salaries to put information on the internet that will accomplish these aims. No particular knowledge of the world, politics, economics, or sociology is needed.  The employees work hard (an example was a woman who worked two twelve hour days in a row followed by two days off), and in the two days was expected to file five credible political posts, ten non-political posts, and 100 to 150 comments on other people’s posts.

 The article gives examples of their work —building carefully orchestrated, but fictional hoaxes (Columbian Chemical Explosion in Centerville Louisiana, Atlanta Georgia Ebola epidemic) and disinformation of all sorts.  Although the article focuses on the one agency, which is modeled after a corporation, the author implies that there is a wide effort to do such work, and the workers seem to be challenged and rewarded for their work.  After all, this is a chance to do mischief for money.  What could be more fun to young people than writing negative material on all candidates for U.S. president, and not being at all inhibited by the truth.

 The  article is well researched, well written, and not surprising.  The Internet is heavily dominated by the U.S. and annoys at least the leadership of many countries.  TV is continually degraded by advertising, but is not targeted toward particular interests or beliefs, because it wants as large an audience is possible.  But the internet is consciously/unconsciously selling U.S. values (superiority of Christian capitalistic democracies, easily available porn).  It is  only natural for leaders of countries who are not interested in having their country be like the  U.S. to attack the internet.  What better way than to hire kids who like to play with computers to do so, through pumping into it information that is seen as positive by these leaders, and random information that is not based on truth ? 

 In a sense, this is an attempt to lower the quality of the internet by injecting junk and biased information into it.  I am usually doing things in which gains can be made by increasing quality. As far as I am concerned the internet already contains plenty of junk and biased information.  But it was interesting to me to read this article and realize that there are situations in which perceived gains can be made by lowering quality, and that people can earn good salaries by helping do so.  

Computer Hype and Reality

I was glad to see a column in the New York Times by Paul Krugman, entitled “The Big Meh”.  It is here.  Krugman is a prolific writer and a major force in economics, having won the Nobel Prize, and having been named the second most influential economist in the world by The Economist.  He points out that despite all of the hype about the information economy, the computer revolution, social networking, computer games, smart phones, and other digital marvels, the U.S. economy is and has been sluggish for the last ten years, and in his mind, except for a few spikes, has been disappointing for the last 40 years. 

 But the hype in the media grows, and here we are, waiting for our virtual reality kits and lining up to buy the latest expensive Apple miracle.  True, Apple, Google, Facebook, and such companies are boasting extraordinary cash flows, but, how much are we actually benefitting from all of these digital miracles? Krugman, in looking for reasons that our dazzling new technology does not seem to be strongly affecting the nation’s economy, states that perhaps the new technology is more fun than fundamental.

 Certainly many Stanford students want to start a company and make a fast pile of money, but most of them won’t.  And how about those unfortunate young people without college training who can’t find jobs —see the last Economist magazine. The cover features a drawing of a young white male sitting in a crashed male symbol, under  text reading “The Weaker Sex; No jobs, no family, no prospects” .  The lead article is entitled “Men Adrift”, and is here.

 We are realizing that there is a social cost from automating work that was formerly done by humans, and will realize it even more when CPA’s, attorneys, truck drivers, and others capable of making more noise begin to be displaced.  It seems to me that driverless trucks make at least as much sense as driverless cars, but clearly the media is a bit shy about taking on the teamsters.  We are also realizing that there is a cost to us in changing our lives to meet the demands of being “connected”, and having our habits known in increasing detail so that we may be more efficiently bombarded with more marketing material, as well as having our attention fractionated in many ways. Psychologists are having a field day with the latter.

 So far new technologies have taken on the order of 50 years to mature.  Tim Berners Lee, a British scientist, is given credit for having invented the World Wide Web (the basis of the internet) in 1989.  That is only 26 years ago.  We have a long way to go before it reaches anything close to maturity.  To me, it is presently becoming more difficult to use, and requiring more and more time to handle features that used to work, but are now overwhelming (e-mail), and more and more time to separate, as they used to say, the wheat from the chaff (ads, gripes, and baseless opinions).  And as a tool, I find that the time I spend using it is highly compromised by the time I spend trying to keep up with changes in the software associated with operating systems, apps, and programs that by now should be mature, but are constantly showing up with new (and to me unnecessary and sometimes negative) bells and whistles.  But I am an optimist, and believe that eventually it will settle down, take its place in our lives (although it will cost us to get rid of the distractions and trash bult into it), and the hype will go away.

 So I agree with Professor Krugman.  Let’s can the hype, figure out what we have and what we need, and make it serve us, instead of us serving it.  Incidentally, I just ordered a book entitled Shadow Work; The Unpaid Unseen Jobs that Fill Your Day, by Craig Lambert.  I'll give you my reactions after I read it.  It concerns work that used to be done by others for you, that you now have been tricked into doing through partial automation and cleverness on the part of companies through digital electronics.  Think of shopping in big box stores.  Remember when there were people to help you in stores?  I, and many of you,  even remember when people didn't  pump their own gas.  When I grew up, working in a "service station" was a sought after first step into the economy.  Now these jobs have gone away, along with the service.

 

 

 

 

Do It Yourself

Within the last week I have done the following things, none of them important to society in general.

1 . Cleared out our kitchen sink drain  – a long and dirty job in our 100  year old house, equipped with iron pipe and many right angle bends that do not like snakes.  The coagulated grease, garbage disposal residue, and other miscellaneous material clogged about 12 feet of this. (plumber)

2.  Solved a tricky problem in my wife’s car – would not start even though battery would turn the engine over (mechanic).

3.  Repainted a number of yard chairs- even though they could have been cheaply replaced (painter)

4.  Re-potted some plants – I am in charge of all cactus in our garden (gardener).

5.  Re-wired the lighting in my shop (electrician)

6.  Worked on another tractor I am restoring – (lots of skills needed)

 The media has been making much of the DIY (do it yourself movement), and I am a living example of a long-time member.  I  have enough money to hire people to do all of the above-mentioned work and more.  And in fact, for most of my life people (including my wife) have suggested to me that I should do so, because that would give me more time to do what in their mind they think I should be doing.  But I won’t, until I become too old to do it (my wife some time ago revoked my roofing license after I slipped with no safety line and almost came off of the three-story part of our house— I couldn’t argue with that one.)

 I won’t (can’t?) because I was brought up to do such things and I get great pleasure from doing and having done them.  I grew up in an area of small farmers, who although not considering themselves poor, did not have much cash.  It was routine to make and fix most things themselves, including houses,  yards, equipment, and so on.  I learned much about doing so as a kid, and added to that with my education and career as an engineer and engineering teacher.  I have good hands, know how to use them, and somehow find rewards in doing so —even unplugging the sink, and in fact, perhaps the more difficult the job, the greater pleasure I get from doing it.  My wife has somewhat the same instincts.  She is the sole proprietor of a large and complex garden and has no interest in hiring help to take care of it—perhaps because the gardeners retained by all of our neighbors, seem to have been overcome by machinery, with the result that surrounding gardens seem to all look freshly blown and mowed, and very similar to each other. Ours seems to be the only house that has leaves under the trees —a natural and attractive phenomenon.

 So it is not the money.  It is the satisfaction of doing the job well and having it done.  My very influential grandmother said it very well:  people who have homes, (gardens, automobiles, etc.) who don’t take care of them themselves do not deserve them.  Unlike  my grandmother, I don’t judge other people, but it certainly applies to me, even though Marian points out the seemingly long time (to her) it takes me to get such work done. But she is not very familiar with the hassle and delay of hiring other people, and can’t quite appreciate the importance to me of doing such seemingly mundane things myself, especially when I want her to steady the ladder.