James L Adams—People and Products: People

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Jim Adams

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Homo Sapiens and the Things They Make

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02/21/2016

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.

Posted at 08:13 PM in Craftsmanship, Design, Education, Engineering, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/09/2016

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.

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.
Door too wide to be fully opened in tight parking situations.
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?
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.
The step on the back bumper enabling you to easily get into the back is covered by the tailgate when it is open.
And more

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

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.
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.
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.
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.
Get one that is easy to get in and out of, because that seems to be a primary activity with a pick up.
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.

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.
I put running boards on it, just like in the 1930’s
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.
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”?

Posted at 05:49 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/01/2016

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!

Posted at 12:49 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/24/2016

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).

Posted at 06:00 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Design, Engineering, Internet, Management, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/14/2016

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.)

Posted at 12:18 PM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/07/2016

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?

Posted at 09:48 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/30/2015

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.

Posted at 02:06 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/24/2015

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

Posted at 11:20 AM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/17/2015

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.

Posted at 10:12 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Global Constraints, Management, People, Problem Solving, Science, Technology, and Society | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/09/2015

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.

Posted at 12:36 PM in Books, Design, Education, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

11/28/2015

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.

Posted at 10:51 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

11/15/2015

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.

Posted at 02:23 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

11/09/2015

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.

Posted at 01:17 PM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

11/05/2015

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.

Posted at 07:27 PM in Design, Engineering, Human fit, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/28/2015

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?

Posted at 09:42 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Global Constraints, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/19/2015

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.

Posted at 07:33 PM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/12/2015

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.

Posted at 03:42 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/06/2015

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"?

Posted at 07:28 PM in Books, Current Affairs, Education, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/29/2015

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.

Posted at 02:10 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/22/2015

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.

Posted at 09:24 AM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/17/2015

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.

Posted at 01:17 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/31/2015

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.

Posted at 09:27 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/25/2015

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.

Posted at 08:25 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/17/2015

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.

Posted at 10:06 AM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Product Quality, Symbolism and Cultural Values, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/03/2015

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?

Posted at 09:46 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/20/2015

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.

Posted at 03:22 PM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/13/2015

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.

Posted at 08:23 AM in Craftsmanship, Design, Engineering, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

07/06/2015

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.

Posted at 09:41 AM in Craftsmanship, Design, Engineering, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/30/2015

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).

Posted at 08:16 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/22/2015

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.

Posted at 11:27 AM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/17/2015

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.

Posted at 08:47 AM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/08/2015

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.

Posted at 01:27 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/01/2015

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.

Posted at 07:12 AM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

05/18/2015

No Wonderful One Hoss Shays

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote a poem entitled “The wonderful One Hoss Shay”, about a shay (buggy) belonging to a minister, that when it finally failed, completely fell apart — all parts broke at once. It is here. It was given quite a bit of notice when I was in engineering school, because one goal of designing a good product is to ensure that it does not contain weak components that cause early failures. The last stanza of the poem is the punch line.

The challenge to minimize weak components in a product is a worthy one, and my experience is that it is not receiving enough attention these days. As an example, I have had problems the past few years with actuators (the components that convert electrical signals to mechanical outputs) in my cars. Due to emphasis on reliability in the 1980’s and 1990’s, manufacturers have done a good job on the drive train (engines, transmissions, etc.) and body. But cars have acquired more and more remote and automatic features. The integrated circuits and wiring harnesses are quite reliable (until rats, mice, or squirrels chew on the wiring insulation— a common occurrence). But many of the features (electrically operated door locks, windows, trunk lids, climate control systems, etc.) must at some point turn the electrical signals into a movement, and here the problem seems to lie.

A common way to perform this function is through a solenoid, a device that uses an electro-magnet to do the needed work. But the last Ford pickup I owned had so many solenoid failures, typically in actuators that were difficult to replace, that I bought a Toyota because I could get one with old fashioned mechanical window cranks, door handles, and other features. So far, so good, but as I write this I am feeling pressure because the front door lock actuator on my wife’s beloved Acura TSX has failed. Viewing the internet and talking to a mechanic friend, I find that is not unique. Looking at a photo of one, I am not surprised, because the exterior is a very complex plastic injection molding, and I would bet that inside there is a plastic gear or two that has simply worn out. But to replace this, I will either have to order a replacement from the internet and spend several hours cursing and dropping fasteners inside the door where they are difficult to retrieve, or take the car to a mechanic and give them several hundred dollars for doing so.

I was perhaps overly trained when I worked at JPL, since there are no mechanics in interplanetary space, so failures of components before the mission is complete are very bad news to everyone except the media. So attention is paid to all components to ensure that they will not fail and compromise the mission.

I know from briefly working in the automobile business that the major components of automobiles are thoroughly life-tested for reliability, and much attention is paid to the design and manufacturing quality of them. But how about things like door lock actuators? Or if for some reason (cost or whatever) they are of shorter average life, how about making them easier to replace? Instructions on how to do almost anything are on the internet, but how about ensuring their quality in the case of diagnosing and replacing components of complicated products that are likely to fail? And how about having nuts and screw heads visible like in the old days with some attention to allowing the use of traditional tools, rather than special plastic body panel removers, Torx-head drivers, and custom clips? Arms with extra joints and tiny hands would help also, if maintenance is not better considered in design.

Posted at 12:22 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

05/11/2015

The Engineer's Lament—Malcolm Gladwell

The May 4, 2015 issue of The New Yorker magazine contains an article by Malcolm Gladwell entitled The Engineer’s Lament, with a sub title of Two Ways of Thinking About Automotive Safety. It is here.

Like many people, I am a fan of Gladwell, because he is both a terrific writer and capable of focusing on important and provocative topics. As an engineer, especially one who has witnessed controversies resulting from differences in the viewpoints of providers and consumers, I very much appreciated this article.

My experiences have included working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratories during the early days of space exploration in which failures of the first Ranger missions were greeted with a Congressional Investigation; working at Stanford when a difference in viewpoints as to the purpose of overhead on government contracts lead to a Congressional Investigation; and working in a start up when differences in opinion between the founder and the venture capital firms as to the pricing of the product (help the needy or maximize profit) caused a great deal of strife. In all cases, from my viewpoint as an engineer, the critical parties, although clearly trying to do good, just didn’t understand. I am sure they returned the favor. As a consultant, I have seen this situation occur time and time again both between and within organizations.

Gladwell’s article is focused on the process of deciding whether or not automobiles should be recalled for reasons of safety. Recent examples have included the recall of Toyota products because of potential “sticking” accelerators, recall of General Motors products because of ignition switch problems, and the older, but very significant recall of some 1.5 million Ford Pintos (suspected exploding gas tanks in rear-end collisions). I am sure you saw the plentiful media coverage of at least the more recent ones.

From the point of view of the companies, and admittedly many if not most of the engineers, the products delivered to the public are the best they can do within the monetary and time constraints demanded by competitive pressure. Automobile companies (I briefly worked for one) are extremely sensitive to issues of safety because they are staffed by humans , aware of their large liability exposure, constantly challenged by the shortcomings of drivers, and brutally attacked by the media when one of their components fails and kills innocent people. But being part of one is also to be aware of the very large numbers of components in an automobile, the numbers of automobiles delivered in a year, and limited time to ensure that no “bugs” exist in the final product. After all, the Curiosity explorer now on the surface of Mars has proven to be an extremely reliable product, but required 12 years and 1.8 billion dollars to produce. Granted that the environment it has been asked to survive is challenging, but so is that in which automobiles operate. And engineers do not have 12 years and 1.8 billion dollars to develop a single automobile.

Also, as Gladwell points out, the causes of automobile accidents are primarily due to such things as driver distraction (texting, talking, eating), alcohol, and poor skills, rather than automobile equipment failures. But victims of such failures (and their eager attorneys) see things very differently. Most people expect their equipment to be 100% reliable and safe, but not willing to accept the associated penalties. As near as I can tell, at some level of complexity and change, people (and robots) will screw up and things will fail. But it is possible to improve the situation by striving for simplicity, spending more money, and taking the time to do more testing. But we don’t want that. We want spiffy new stuff now with more bells and whistles at low price.

I am not putting Gladwells’ article in the “recommended book” column at the left of this page, but certainly would if it were a book. The good news is that it takes much less time to read than a book, and a link to it is in the first paragraph of this post. And it touches on a critical problem where product quality is concerned. Take a look at it. My wife loved the engineer jokes.

Posted at 09:16 AM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

05/04/2015

Sherry Turkle and Alone Together

Sherry Turkle, an excellent writer, is a clinical psychologist and a professor at M.I.T. and has spent her career examining the effects of technology on society. She has written three books focusing on computers, the first, The Second Self, written in 1984, was dedicated to the interaction of computers and people. The second, Life on the Screen, was written ten years later and devoted to the use of the computer to form online identities. Both were quite positive about the potential of the computer to help us develop. Her last one, Alone Together, subtitled Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. was published in 2011, when her daughter was in college, and shows much more worry about the effects of computers on us, particularly on the young.

Her research subjects for this book ranged from young children through college students, and being a social scientist, she interviewed and interacted with a large number of them. Her findings and associated information about trends in computer application are covered in the very readable book. I read it when it was first published, but I just re-read it, and found it even more thought provoking, perhaps because my grandchildren now range from 3 years to 17 in age, and I have been able to compare the effects of computers on them with that of my own children, and on my brother and me — three generations of drastically different usage.

The first section of Turkle’s book talks of robots – computers and computer controlled devices intended not only to serve us, but to evoke emotions in us. A sizeable business exists in computer controlled toys for both children and adults that do so, ranging from simple toys such as Tamagotchis, Furbies, My Real Babies, AIBO’s, and Paro’s through the much more “human” appearing and acting products being experimented with at places such as M.I.T. Turkle discusses the ethical and practical issues associated with machines designed and built to stimulate love and other emotions in humans through such mechanisms as neediness, communication, and aesthetic appeal. She delves into such issues as their use in caring for and interacting with the aged in nursing homes and with children. In the case of providing companionship for lonely elders, she points out the value in providing them with something to love and care for, but also questions as to why real humans are not doing this instead. She also responds to an apparent increase in desire for robotic mates on the part of extreme computer believers, by pointing out that robots themselves have no emotions and even though they may seem to love you, they do not care for you at all.

The second section is about communication and interaction over the internet, and nicely overlaps the first, since although they do not have three dimensional bodies, there is certainly an essence of robot in the avatars we design for ourselves in many games and in the role that social networking can play in our lives.

Turkle goes into great detail on the positives and negatives of internet communications, and in her usual style tells many stories, good and bad, as examples of what is happening. Since I still mix with college students, it has been interesting to me to see the progression from telephoning to e-mail to instant messaging to texting. What next? More and more messaging of shorter and shallower character? She tells stories of students texting each of their “friends” 20 times a day and staying away from telephone conversations for fear that they will let their friends know more about them than they would like; of hurt feelings and misinterpretations; of overly controlling parents; of treating people more like things and things more like people; and finally of the tremendous amount of time and energy devoted to social networking.

When our children were young, my wife liked the analogy of tree people and phone people. When tree people had problems, they would climb a tree and try to figure out what to do to solve them. When phone people had problems, they would instantly get on a phone and call their friends to discuss them. Now it seem we have progressed past phone people to tweet/text people, and trying to communicate with more and more people by saying as little as possible. Why do we seem drifting toward huge quantities of shallow statements? Is a sound bite mentality the natural defense to a surplus of information?

In the March issue of The Atlantic magazine, there was an excellent article by Graeme Wood entitled What ISIS Really wants. We subscribe to The Atlantic, and I had read the article, which was very thoughtful. But in the May issue, they printed several reader responses, and then, to my amusement they put in a “Tweet of the Month”, which was “Disagree w.parts, but @gcaw’s new Atlantic essay on ISIS is the rare, genuine must-read. I felt challenged, even provoked, through it all”. The tweet was from @shadihamid, who is a Brookings Institute Fellow, and undoubtedly an expert in this area. But was I not a subscriber to The Atlantic, and even if I was and had not read the article, Mr. Hamid’s tweet (if I read it, which would have been unlikely) would probably not have convinced me to. Granted that he is good at restricting himself to 140 characters, I would bet he deserves a few more, and if he had them could convince more people to read the article.

If you have not read Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together, I recommend it highly. It is even more pertinent than it was when she wrote it. If you did read it when it was published, you might find it interesting to read it again.

Posted at 12:41 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Symbolism and Cultural Values, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/26/2015

My Cup Runneth Over

I figure that I have enough projects to keep me happily busy until I am 150 years old. But judging from my friends and my body, I may not live to be that old. Clearly trying to complete them more rapidly doesn’t work, because I am becoming slower. I am still moving reasonably well. I am well into becoming better organized (my wife will snicker at this), becoming more embroiled in writing my mythical two books, and catching up on my reading (difficult because excellent new books seem to be coming out faster than I can read). And I am moving along at restoring stuff . The photos below show the before and after condition of the McCormick mower I mentioned in a previous post. It is now working well and I am about to take it up to my son’s farm and let him test it with a couple of his huge horses.

The photos below show the before photo of the high-pressure water pump I included in my last post, and the finished restoration, ready to pump.

But I am still acquiring outstanding old hardware faster than I can restore it. And the hardware I have restored drastically needs more attention. And of course there is my growing family, my old and needy house, my failure to succeed in completely cutting my ties with Stanford, and frequent assignments from Marian.

What to do, what to do? I am going to devote the next post to a book entitled Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, by Sherry Turkle, one of my favorite authors (Basic Books, 2011). I read this when it was released, but re-read it when I ran across it recently, and it spoke more directly to me now that I am further behind and my grandchildren are older. Turkle is a psychologist on the M.I.T. faculty, and specializes in the interaction of technology and society. This is the fifth book she has written during the “information revolution”, the previous ones being quite positive about computers, the internet, and so forth. Fifteen years had passed since the last one when she wrote Alone Together, and her daughter was now in college. This book discusses many worries about what the internet is doing to us and our children, and I will recommend it highly if you haven’t read it.

In particular, it got me thinking about the increasing chunk of time my computer and the internet are requiring from me. When I wrote my Good Products, Bad Products book, also released in 2011, my publisher talked me, an innocent, into entering the social networking scene in order to publicize the book. With some reservations I joined Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in, and started this blog. I enjoy writing this blog, because it makes me think, but have never really felt comfortable with the social networking sites, with the result that I have neither tried to increase the size of the pool of people who I presumably interact with, nor have I done a good job of interacting with the people in the pool.

And like many people, my e-mail has gotten out of hand. I seem to be showing up on lists faster than I can make filters to stop it—probably partly because of my Stanford connection, the exploding number of overseas students looking for financial aid and admission to college in the U.S., an increase in technical meetings and consulting opportunities, and just plain marketing.

So during the next week I am going to think hard about my interaction with the internet and digital communication in general. Some years ago, Don Knuth, author of the set of classic book entitled “The Art of Computer Programming”, informed his friends that he was quitting e-mail, in order to have more time to think deeply and work on writing projects. Since he is a god in the computer field, this attracted a lot of attention. I am not a god, but I am feeling the same way right now, especially toward social networking. I am fortunate in that I have a large number of real friends I love, and am not looking for cyber friends or contacts. And my computer is demanding an increasing and already far too much of my time. I am certainly not alone in this feeling. People are waking up to the downside of all of these digital miracles. More about this in my next blog.

Posted at 08:51 PM in Books, Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Internet, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/19/2015

A Very Good Day Indeed

Today was a wonderful California spring day, despite the drought, and in fact thanks to day light saving time and the month of April, it was a long one (sunrise at 6:29, sunset at 7:48). Being Sunday, it began with Marian and my traditional religious service, performed by staying in bed reading the New York Times, drinking coffee, and eating coffee cake. Upon finishing that, I decided to do something with a relatively small incredibly rusted high pressure water pump I had rescued from a junk pile a bit ago, and that was sitting on a hand truck in a place where I was sure I would receive encouragement soon to do something with it. The photograph below shows it in its rusty splendor.

The first thing I decided to do, was to take it apart. But to my amazement (and pleasure), that required the entire day. I have been reading a book I enjoy a lot entitled The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt, subtitled How the World Became Modern. It is beautifully written (Pulitzer Prize) and is a wondrous combination of history, philosophy, and stimulating thinking (Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, and does not screw around—41 pages of notes and 26 pages of “selected” bibliography, all in fine print, of course). So I got to think about stimulating concepts while I took apart my pump, and since a baby shower was occurring in the house (for a friend of our daughter’s, not us ) and males were not invited, I could stay outside and play all day, except for sneaking in and making myself lunch.

The rusting on the pump was so advanced that I had to heat the “moving” parts of the pump to a red heat to get them to move, and the piston was stuck so thoroughly in the cylinder that I finally reverted to not only heat, but a small sledge hammer (not recommended practice, but I ran through all of the alternatives, and none worked). Heating rusty joints is a powerful method of breaking them loose, since the metal expands, and the rust layer seems to weaken. But if not carefully done, the process may result in them never coming loose, so I took my time on the project, and finally got the pump entirely apart just in time for dinner, which was outstanding because it consisted of left-over goodies from the shower, in particular crackers, dip, cookies, cupcakes, ice cream, and other types of health food. I’ll send you a photo of the finished pump when I am done.

Now I am catching up on my e-mail, and writing this post, and will soon return to bed and read more of The Swerve. Looks like tomorrow will be a beautiful day also. Can’t hardly beat this.

Posted at 07:26 PM in Craftsmanship, Design, Engineering, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, People, Problem Solving, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/14/2015

Matthew B. Crawford, and the Issue of Manual Skills.

In 2006, Matthew Crawford, (equipped with a Ph.D. in philosophy, an obvious fan of working with his hands and proprietor of a small business of restoring/maintaining vintage motorcycles), wrote an essay entitled Shop Course as Soul Craft, which was published in Atlantis magazine. A friend of mine, Dave Beach, (who has built and is responsible for a very successful and large activity in the Stanford Engineering School called the Product Realization Lab in which students design and manufacture products), and I found out about it and spread it all around the local community. It covered the advantages of manual skills in life and the importance to individuals, schools, and organizations of encouraging them. I am one of a large number of people who are believers, and who take great pride in their ability to make and fix things and I have seen the positive effects of doing such things on the lives of many other people. I depend on such activities for keeping me from occasionally becoming less likeable from lack of quick feedback and an overdose of mental activities seemingly divorced from reality (yes I am a professor). Dave and I are also both believers, along with many other people, in the contribution of such activities to producing products of high quality.

Crawford's "Shop Course" essay was later developed into a book of the same name, which made a large splash because it made its way to many people of like mind, and coincided with a time of much worry about the inroads computers were making into skilled jobs. If you haven’t read the article or the book, you can find the article here.

Now Crawford has written another book entitled World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, N.Y.). This one is somewhat broader in reach, having to do with our mental attention in an age in which large numbers of individuals and organizations, backed by powerful media, are competing for for this attention, to the point where we may be paying a cost in individuality and in the ability to focus as well on our main interests. His “Shop Class” book was broader in reach than his Atlantis article of the same name, and this book is broader still. I read it and loved it, but it is a more difficult read. Crawford is now a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, as well as being a fabricator of components for custom motorcycles, and I think he is showing the signs of immersion in an academic scene . It is difficult for academics to write books that are easy to read, because in a university, life consists of communicating with people in similar disciplines and assuming they have similar backgrounds and familiarity with material—in this case philosophy. The result is an understandable tendency to refer to people and works that the general reader has not met or read, nor will probably ever do so. After 50 years of fighting this problem, I know it well. I even run into it at home because I occasionally find myself trying to explain something that is interesting to me, like quantum computing or the working of make-and-break ignition systems or the physical portions of the internet to my wife, who is brilliant, but was trained as an historian, and seems to have little need for techie jargon and details.

But the message in Crawford’s book is straight forward and powerful. He again makes an argument for hands-on contact with the world, He begins with the attack upon our attention from all sides, from advertising to internet communications and seductive digital toys. He then goes into the problems resulting from handling an overload of stimulation by seeing it in terms of broad representations and generalizations rather than reality (“the public”, “government”, “farmers”). He talks about joint, or group attention, its importance, and the increasing difficulty of obtaining it. He worries that we are losing the “real”, by dealing with these generalities and stifling our true nature and individuality in the process. He finishes the main portion of the book by presenting what he considers an example of good focus—an old and traditional pipe-organ company, in which people learn from the experience of others and gain their pleasure from attaining expertise in the building of their products. Once again, the shop.

This book is especially timely since many college students now seem to be trying to stay in contact with an ever increasing quantity of people and changing information and are planning to start companies even though they are equipped with little experience and with a minimum of skills learned through practice. Even some devotees of creativity seem to be swinging away from experience and the learning of skills. I wish them luck. These are invaluable tools in life.

If you are interested in things controversial and in modern trends, I recommend you read this book and that you discuss it with your friends, especially if you are neglecting hobbies or work you love that allow you to get your hands dirty. Dirty hands for me seem to result in a cleaner mind. I recommend them to all.

Posted at 04:56 PM in Books, Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Internet, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

04/06/2015

Nostalgia

My oldest son has some farm-land in the Sacramento valley in California. He works at U.C. Davis and is very involved in sustainable agriculture. He also grows vegetables a well as usual crops such as wheat, tomatoes, etc. A year or so ago he acquired four work horses (Belgians – about a ton each) and set about integrating them into his farm. It is close to the farm where I fiddle with old machinery, and yesterday I took a visiting friend up to check out the area. Bob was spreading manure with his horses (who had produced it) and we stopped by to say hi and maybe give him a hand. We could not stay long, but it was long enough to help him load a few loads into the manure spreader and ride around with him.

My grandfather worked 20 acres of oranges with horses in Southern California jointly owned by my parents and grandparent when I was a little boy, but I was so young I don’t really remember much about the horses. But visiting Bob with his horses made me remember much about farming when I was a kid.

Work horses have some similarity to huge dogs. They like to be scratched and petted and talked to, eat, and be around people. But they have differences. They have been bred to be unflappable, love to pull heavy loads, and are extremely well trained (they have to be, or the owner not only would have trouble doing his/her work, but would probably spend quite a bit of time recovering from bruises, broken bones, and other such inconveniences).

Of course the pace of horses is far slower than that of modern tractors. As a result, the pace of farming when I grew up was much slower and simpler than modern farming. Not only do horses move more slowly, but horse drawn equipment is straight forward to understand and repair should it need it—no panic calls for the repair van. And riding on the spreader behind the horses on a beautiful day was in many ways the opposite of working inside in a university. Plenty of time to look at the scenery, think, listen to the birds, soak up the sunshine, and feel like something worthwhile was being accomplished. Although I was too young to become involved with my grandparent’s horses, I did get lots of chances to help spread sweepings from Santa Anita racetrack stables onto the grove from the bed of the family Ford Model B 1-1/2 ton truck. Same thing – no critical deadline, no interruptions from one’s cell phone, no need to be highly visible in the world or have a great deal of money.

I certainly do not want to be a farmer, horses or not. I fled the bucolic life as soon as I was able. But I very much like farmland, farmers, and now work horses (although I have no use at all for riding horses). And it is interesting to me to recall how two families could at one time live off of 20 acres of citrus (a beautiful, fragrant, easy-to-raise crop that tasted good) when now 1000 acres is considered a small farm. True, my parents and grandparents had little cash, shared one very used car, and were without such things as TV, computers, micro-wave ovens, air conditioning, and central heating. And since I did not live in town, I was not surrounded by people my age. And I was definitely expected to do my chores. But there were advantages to traditional country life, and I am glad my son can experience some of them. And I have to say, horse-drawn equipment was so simple and so well tested, that to me much of it is downright elegant. I finished restoring my McCormick mower (red machine in photo), and it is an example.

Posted at 08:29 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Design, Engineering, Human fit, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/29/2015

The Forklift—A Good Product

When I began my hobby of restoring old equipment, I realized I needed to lift heavy parts and sub assemblies. So 40 years ago or so I restored a 1950’s Clark Yardlift 40 forklift, which was free to me, since it belonged to a farmer friend, was not in running condition, and no longer had the performance he wanted. It is a relatively small machine (capable of lifting a load of 2000 pounds ten feet in the air, tilting its forks over a range of 15 degrees, traveling 9 miles per hour forward or backwards, and weighing about 6000 pounds plus load. Although it has inflatable tires up front, it is unhappy on rough or soft ground, and the forks have no sideways motion)

But of course, like most fork lifts, it is extremely maneuverable, and since it is only 42 inches wide and 11 feet long with forks attached, it is consistent with my yard and other spaces where I work. It also has the advantage of being fueled by Propane, so it does not mind being unused for long periods of time. When I want to use it, it reliably starts and does its thing.

What do I use it for? More and more as my wife and I age. The photograph (taken by a fascinated neighbor) shows my wife at low elevation and I attacking our front hedge. We hide behind ten foot tall hedges, which are a pain to trim from ladders. However, with my wife on the pallet, along with a small generator and an electric clipper (in her capable hands), no mere hedge can slow us down. Similarly I can carry anything weighing up to two tons wherever the forklift can go, and I can’t remember ever being able to lift two tons myself. In fact, I can probably do more aided by my forklift now than when I could leap tall buildings with a single bound, but was trying to live without a forklift. And, of course, it has unlimited kid-entertaining potential (see next two photos.

Unfortunately, forklifts are considered an industrial product and not designed for people messing around in their yard. And perhaps there are not that many people doing so any more. But I would think there would be a market for a cheaper, lighter, yard model, at least for those of us who are aging but still like to move heavy loads around, trim smaller trees, and work on second stories of houses. Of course, there are many boom lifts (cherry pickers etc.) used by painters, tree trimmers, utility people, and other “professionals”. But they are expensive, limited in load lifting ability, and one can get into trouble lifting large loads too far from the base. And worse yet, for people like me, it is very difficult to find one that is free because it is broken. (I am under pressure go find one again, since my foot slipped on the clutch in our last hedge trimming session, almost dumping my wife in the hedge – cherry pickers are controlled by the person in the air)

So I consider my forklift, even thought it is now 60 years old, an outstanding product, which has become a friend that helps me live the life I choose.

Posted at 09:44 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Human fit, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/24/2015

Work Is About More Than Money

In the March 22 edition of the New York Times, there is an article entitled “Why Not Utopia”, by Mark Bittman . It is here. Much of the article is about the loss of jobs due to more and more work previously done by humans now being done by computers. This is a message that has and is being made constantly these days. Bittman goes further and hypothesizes that this adds to the increasing economic inequality that bothers us. He finishes by suggesting we go to another economic system in which the robots work for “us” (by which he must mean those who are not wealthy).

Granted, there are more employment problems coming, although probably more about the quality of work than the quantity, but while everyone seems to be worrying about the effects that the “information revolution” may have upon the economy, we seem to be forgetting that jobs are about more than money. Jobs, are a chief source of satisfaction to many of us. My wife and I have worked to support ourselves and our family, but in addition we have worked, and still do work for the satisfaction we get. In fact much of the work we do now does not pay at all.

There is still work in the world that is stultifying, and even painful. Agricultural stoop labor is an example, especially for older people in hot weather. Miners in many parts of the world must work bent over in dangerous conditions, and such work is an excellent opportunity for robots. Some work requires constant repetition, and would drive one mad if done alone. But I remember when I was young, oranges were packed for shipping by hand. This involved a large space full of women grabbing the oranges from bins that were constantly being refilled, wrapping them with a couple flicks of the hands and fingers, and tucking them neatly into the shipping boxes. I used to watch them with awe, because of the speed with which they filled the boxes. And they did it all day long, day after day. One would think they would have gone crazy, but instead they seemed to be having a wonderful time telling bad jokes, gossiping, singing, whistling at me, and generally carrying on. The packing had obviously become completely automatic, and the day became a large social gathering.

I have held many jobs that contained elements of what might be called drudgery. I grew up on a farm, and did the usual shoveling of dirt, hoeing of weeds, trimming of deadwood, smudging, and irrigating. But it was necessary, and probably added to the pleasure of being surrounded by the growing crops.

When I was relatively young (probably 9 or 10), I had a job mowing the lawns in front of the orange packing house where my father worked and the fore mentioned women packed. It happened to be on the main street of town. The mower was hand pushed, and the grass grew fast, so it was a fair amount of work, especially in the summer (no shade, Southern California) and took several hours. The work was tedious and physically hard at my tender age, but I was fiercely proud of the results. I would go out of my way to ride my bicycle past it and realize that those were “my” lawns looking beautiful for all the passers by. Did I get paid? I don’t even remember, but certainly not enough to be considered a fair wage —that was often the circumstance when I worked at something in which my Dad was involved. But later I have worked in oil fields and in machine shops, and built a barn and several additions to houses, and served a tour in the Air Force. I found it all to be rewarding.

I have also done hard mental work, as a student, an engineer, a professor, and a consultant and loved it. Now that I am retired, I am still working on writing books and restoring antique heavy equipment. The photo at the left is a classical McCormick horse drawn mower that is completely restored except for the pitman stick, which converts the circular motion of the crank wheel into the linear motion of the cutting teeth, and which I will build from scratch this weekend. I began this project with an incomplete rusted, twisted wreck, and have done a lot of work straightening it out, making the missing parts, getting it to run, painting it, and so on. I am not going to sell it, and even if I did I could not rationalize the time I have put into it from the profit. But I very much enjoy the process and the result. I am proud of having the skill it takes to do such things and enjoyed learning about McCormick, reapers, and related subjects. A hobby? Maybe but it causes me to sweat a lot.

My wife is fortunately also a fan of working. After her Stanford career, she started a consulting company. She is now doing research and writing books on historic houses at Stanford and on her family. She is also taking an enormous number of continuing education classes at Stanford, and doing all of the assigned work even though she is not taking them for credit. I am also working on a couple of books, and if you think writing books is not work, try one. She also does all of the work in her larger-than-necessary garden and I repair everything that breaks in our 100 year old house. We must love working, because we have enough money to hire help to do such things—of course they would not do as good a job as we do.

So as to Mr. Bittman’s article, digital equipment will continue to take over work that has previously been done by humans, and I say good riddance to work that is not somehow satisfying, but I do not want digital equipment to do things for me that I enjoy, and challenging and stimulating work is one of them. When all automobiles are autonomous, I will be proud of converting one to manual drive (myself) and being ticketed for driving it. Finally I will be able to be a curmudgeon.

Posted at 08:01 PM in Craftsmanship, Design, Engineering, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/16/2015

Products and Engineering Education

Products and Engineering Education:

In an article in the June 15, 2015 edition of the New York Times, Frank Bruni, a columnist, wrote an article entitled “Accepted? Rejected? Relax" It is here. The subtitle is "The obsession with elite colleges distorts reality, hurts kids, and perverts education”. I couldn’t agree more, even though I spent my teaching career at Stanford, which is one of them. I particularly think this is true in the case of engineering.

One thing that caught my eye was his mention in the article of the engineering school at Waterloo University, a public school in the province of Ontario, Canada, which is known for student and institutional innovation and the production of fine engineers, but not as an “elite” school. Last year I was a member of an advisory board to the government of Chile in conjunction with their “Engineering 2030 project”, which is an attempt to update their engineering schools and move them more toward work that will benefit Chile. Waterloo was often mentioned as an example. One of my sons is a long-term employee of Tesla Motors, a highly sought employer. They are very high on Waterloo. In Bruni’s article, he quotes Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, one of the best-known providers of seed money for technology start-ups. When asked for the name of one school that stood out in terms of students and graduates whose ideas took off, he answered with Waterloo. Since Altman attended Stanford, and since it has a high reputation for producing entrepreneurs, Bruni had expected him to come up with Stanford. But Waterloo students had launched eight successful ventures with Y Combinator money. “To my chagrin”, said Altman, “Stanford has not had a really great track record” (of course Stanford students may make more use of other sources of funding, such as Kickstarter or venture capitalists)

What is Waterloo doing right? I think it is trying to produce engineers, not applied scientists, and perhaps not worrying as much about where it stands in the ratings of universities. An example is their use of paid co-op programs to allow their students to learn in the context of industrial experience—a great help, since engineering schools tend to give an incomplete and somewhat misleading view of engineering. Another is their emphasis on design and creativity as well as analysis and theory—both central to engineering, but perhaps not as high in academic status.

I was an undergraduate majoring in engineering at an elite school (Caltech), and probably would have changed schools had I not worked in a machine shop, and later as a junior engineer and finally as an engineer before I got my college degree. This was in a company at the time named Hunter Engineering, later to become Hunter Douglas, maker of upscale venetian blinds. When I worked there, the engineering department consisted of a dozen people or so, all of whom had shop experience, and none of whom had a four year engineering degree ( The chief engineer had a degree from a two year college – I was called an engineer after my freshman year) . Yet during the time I was there, among other products, the company developed the machinery necessary to continuously cast, form, heat treat, and paint venetian blind stock at a very high rate. This was an extremely difficult problem, which included a great deal of work to which the type of material stressed in engineering schools did not apply. Schools teach material that is essential to an engineer, and add to one’s comfort with and understanding of mathematics, science, and engineering theory, but engineering also requires the sort of judgment and intuition resulting from experience. Caltech emphasized math and science, rather than such things. The industrial experience I had allowed me to view my Caltech courses in context, as is probably the case with the co-op programs at Waterloo.

Science and engineering definitely overlap, but if you are interested in the differences, I discussed some of them in a book entitled entitled Flying Buttresses, Entropy and O-Rings published by Harvard Press in 1993.

Engineering schools in many elite colleges had moved heavily to science, and maybe away from engineering, in the 1930’s, and then moved even more in that direction after World War II. The result has been a boon to engineering faculty members, who have been able to do research that attracts more money and is more prestigious to other academics, and in fact paves the way to new materials, processes, and approaches. But they often short such things as the importance of cut-and-try approaches, testing, creativity and innovation, experience, and life in an engineering group. The tie between academia and industry can be good in areas where the theory is more directly applicable, (Electrical Engineering, perhaps Chemical Engineering and Computer Science), but a gap remains in many fields such as mechanical and civil engineering.

Engineering schools in the so-called elite universities are obsessed with breakthroughs and have gleefully accepted the academic value systems of applied scientists —theory, rigor, mathematics, increased emphasis on the Ph.D. degree — with faculty status determined heavily by refereed publications and visibility in their specialty. But during my years as a professional engineer (including my J.P.L. time) I never saw engineers that were involved in project work publishing in refereed journals, or even reading them. Professional engineers certainly tend to use theory when it works, but are usually forced to augment it with experience and testing, and tend to use theory with which they are comfortable.

The swing back toward application in the elite engineering schools is underway, but it is very slow. I was involved in attempts to cause this to happen by the government and in the American Society of Engineering Education in the early 1960’s, and was hired onto the Stanford faculty in 1966 by Joe Pettit, a dean who cared deeply about education, and Fred Terman, the god of Stanford Engineering School, who had decided that the pendulum had swung dangerously far and a few people should be hired who had experience working as an engineer. I was one of them. But 30 years later, I was asked to spend a couple of years as “Associate Dean of Special Projects” and see what I could do to get Stanford’s Engineering School more involved in manufacturing, which was then a hot item in the U.S., and is in fact a central engineering activity. I put an outstanding team together between the Graduate School of Business and the Engineering School, and we produced what I thought was an excellent plan. But since industry knew much more about manufacturing than the School of Engineering, it included a co-op element. Strangely enough, to us, that seemed to insult many of the influential members of the faculty, who apparently considered co-op programs, and perhaps even manufacturing, intellectually beneath them and beneath the engineering school. R.I.P. good study, and hello China.

Posted at 09:17 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/09/2015

Life and the Distractions of Technology

In 2006, Matthew Crawford wrote an article in the New Atlantis magazine entitled “Shopcraft as Soulcraft”. It is here. My friends and I who are believers in the benefits, if not necessity, of working with the hands on tangible objects, loved it. He followed with a book of the same title in 2008. I have never met him, but think I should because I have been working on a similar book (working title Making, Fixing, and Tinkering) for several years. I am far from a full time writer— partly due to necessary hobbies involving working with my hands— so I don’t know when I will finish. But I have suspected since I saw his original article in the New Atlantis that we think along similar lines.

Now I am sure of it, because I just encountered an article he wrote in the Sunday Review Section of the March 8, 2015 edition of the New York Times entitled “The Cost of Paying Attention”. The article was based on another book of his that is forthcoming entitled The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. The article from The New Atlantis is here. I am excited about reading the book when it appears, and will comment on it in a future post.

The article in the Times has to do with the constant distractions we have from such things as television, print, digital devices, and marketeers. He uses the example of the difference in feelings and ability to think or focus on specific activities in the lounges associated with upper class flying, and the general waiting areas, which are papered with advertisements and filled with noise and other distractions. His final short paragraph summarizes his thoughts: “I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed. This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face to face as individuals, but to those who never show their faces, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested”

To me, an example of distraction is social networking.. When I retired from active professoring in 1999, the internet and mobile phones and computers were not nearly as central to life on the campus. But realizing that I was not yet dead two or three years ago, I figured that I had better catch up to our culture, and that social networking was a part of it. So I joined Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in. I linked to a few close friends, and was immediately overwhelmed. I had not realized the capability of these “services” to find people I knew in the world and harangue me about linking to them. Neither did I realize the number of people I did not know in the world who wanted to link to me for reasons of possible employment, support for graduate study, a source of contacts, or simply to better brag about their number of “friends”.

I enjoy writing posts to this blog, and sending it to a relatively small number of people by way of twitter and facebook, because it keeps me thinking about issues in which I am interested. But I do an embarrassingly poor job of responding to comments, adding information to my sites, accepting new “friends” and “contacts”, or otherwise following the etiquette of being linked to hundreds of thousands of people. I am impressed with people who do so, although at some point it seems to require an assistant, if not a staff to keep up with all of this communication. But I have more rewarding projects to do than I will ever finish, am constantly finding new activities that are rewarding, and I certainly don’t want an assistant or staff. Social networking, although seductive, I consider to be an attention pirate. And even e-mail has joined the list. I seem to be spending more time making filters to trash information I don’t want than I do dealing with messages of value to me.

Advertising is another evil. There are of course the ads that interrupt TV programs, and the pop-up ads on the internet. And I should apologize to the New York Times, because a couple of weeks ago I wrote a gentle rant against their “new” format for the Sunday magazine. I could not stand it. It was mostly advertisements for the usual luxury goods, and almost impossible to read because of out of control graphics —distractions. To my amazement and delight, the very next issue had moved back toward its traditional format —back to a reasonable weight, articles whose continuation could be reasonably easy to find, graphics that did not disrupt the flow, and a reasonable amount of advertisement. Perhaps the New York Times was simply making a quick chunk of money by selling ad space to the people who usually advertise in their ridiculously thick supplements on such things as Fashion and Travel, which consist most of ads. Hopefully they were influenced by a large number of readers like my wife and I (and friends) who were thinking of canceling their subscription because of the issue that contained their “new” magazine format.

And what’s with grocery stores? Next time you enter a “super market” pay careful attention to the advertisements. The good news, is that your mind will soon refuse to do so. The bad news is that if it did not, you would undoubtedly run into a shopping cart containing a couple of babies and being pushed by a shopper on their smart phone, either communicating with their spouse on what to buy or texting their friends, and end up in a hassle.

I am eagerly waiting for Matthew Crawford’s new book. Meanwhile I will re-think my interaction with social networking.

Posted at 02:17 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Global Constraints, Internet, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/03/2015

The Perfect Gift —An Old Rusty Tractor

The photograph shows another project that will keep me from getting in trouble. It is a model K 20 Cletrac tractor, probably manufactured about 1930. It was given to me by the family of one of my best friends, Chuck Whitcher, described here, who originally hooked me on the hobby of restoring old farm machinery, and who sadly recently died. Chuck had wanted to give it to me but I resisted because my cup is overflowing with projects of this sort.

However, I finally could not resist it, because it so perfectly fulfilled my requirements, such as:

I have had no hands-on experience with Cletracs, a very successful run of machines made by the Cleveland Tractor company. I grew up around Caterpillar tractors, and my oldest son and I have several older models. But Cletracs have fanatic and organized fans and fan clubs, and the owners of them delight in pointing out the advantages of them over Caterpillars of the same age. Obviously a chance to learn something here.
It is in my favorite condition – completely, but not terminally rusted, seemingly complete, and although not running, and probably not run for many many years, boasts an engine that with a large amount of effort, can be turned with the crank.
In its present state has low value (except to me), and therefore I can happily accept it as a gift.
It has that “Cletrac” look, from its Snoopy-doghouse engine compartment to its steering wheel (can you believe a steering wheel for a track layer?). Also lots of track wheels, which will help make up for the local loss of Jacque Littlefield’s tank collection.
In restoring it, I will meet large numbers of very likable people, who are not only owners and restorers of these machines, but know the way to replacement parts, if necessary.
It was owned by Chuck who was both a wonderful man and a mentor of mine.

The photograph to the left gives an indication of its present patina, and I plan to give the tractor special treatment to preserve it. Ordinarily, I tend to de-rust old machines and paint them in original colors. For this one, I will get it running well, figure out how to smooth out the rust, and give it some kind of coating to retain it. I want it to be proud of its age, just as I hope Chuck was when he died at the age of 91.

Posted at 08:41 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Symbolism and Cultural Values, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/22/2015

A Plague Of Advertising—More Is Not Necessarily Better

I may be a bit unusual, in that I don’t think my purchasing habits have ever been much influenced by advertising. In fact, I have always been suspicious of products that have unusual advertising exposure, because I figure that the makers of the product are desperately trying to get people to pay more for the product than it is worth. Neither have I thought that if I use the coffee maker that Roger Federer promotes I will be a better tennis player, or that if I buy a heavy duty pickup that I will be tougher. Even more interesting, I now find myself avoiding products because I am tired of being constantly exposed to their ads. Am I alone?

There seems to be an explosion in advertising going on. This is partly due to developments in media (the internet, TV,) which make it possible to “reach” huge numbers of people cheaply, partly because of increased competition to find and influence potential customers, and partly because of growth and increased sophistication of marketing and advertising as business activities.

But what goes up usually comes down. Is advertising really worth the money it costs? Do companies realize that people “tune out” ads if there are too many of them? How many consumers, like me, are tired of being constantly hustled? And what is it doing to the aesthetics dimensions of living? As you may be aware, I quite often refer to the New York Times Sunday edition in my posts. This is partly because my wife and I for years have spent much of Sunday Morning in bed reading it while we drink coffee and munch on various unhealthy pastries. We have been particularly fond of the Sunday magazine section. We noticed some months ago, that the Sunday edition began including large slick-page “travel” or “style sections”, which consisted mostly of advertisements for expensive tours, or strangely unflattering and expensive clothes, typically modeled by young anorexic women and men. We instantly recycle these tomes, but I still cannot help but mourn the number of trees executed each week so that I will be able to receive these huge volumes that I never even open.

This dependency on full, or even double page ads, seems to be a survival strategy for newspapers and magazines. Some (New Yorker, The Economist) have held the line, but many (Architectural Digest, Wired) have succumbed to the temptation of big bucks. But to my horror, today we received the much heralded redesign of the Sunday New York Times magazine (February 22, 2015), and guess what, from the three full page Cadillac ads in the front to the one on the back cover, it contains 220 pages, including some interesting articles, but also an incredible number of full color and often full page ads for everything from Carnegie Hall to jewelry, to kidney beans, to Miami hotels. As a comparison, I just picked up a copy of the magazine from a few weeks ago, and it contained 48 pages. Do you suppose that much of the difference consists of ads? Well, yeah!

Hopefully, this Sunday’s edition was an attempt at a spectacular launch, and since I have been a regular reader of the magazine, I admit the new version is a bit of a shock. Will I get used to it? Some, unless I simply quit reading it because I don’t want to spend the time trying to find the content buried in all the ads. But it also suffers from graphic designers running wild. How about two full pages for the title of an article (The Great Divide), turned sideways, yet.

This is an obvious attempt to modernize the magazine, and there are some good points in what they are doing, but I am saddened if modernizing means that content should be overwhelmed with ads. Hopefully they can decrease the number and increase the quality of the ads and the products they represent . And I love exciting graphics, but not at the expense of readability.

Posted at 09:28 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Internet, Management, People, Product Quality | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/17/2015

Products Bigger than a Bread Box*

Back in the late 1950’s. I was involved in the beginning of the Product Design program in the Stanford School of Engineering. The chief instigators were Professor Bob McKim (degrees in mechanical engineering and industrial design), Matt Kahn, a professor of design in the Stanford Art department, and Professor John Arnold (recently hired from M.I.T. to “modernize” the design courses in mechanical engineering. I was then a Lecturer and my credentials were degrees in engineering, a year’s study in art school which included several courses in industrial design, a love of design, and experience in industry. As I remember, Bob McKim was the person most influential in naming the program “product” design, instead of “industrial” design. I thought this a bit strange, since I had been exposed to a lot of conversation with Henry Dreyfuss, an industrial designer (one of the founders of the field with large and influential offices in Pasadena Ca. and New York) who used the same words as Bob. But “Product Design” it became, and many years were spent teaching the university faculty,industry, and the world what these words meant when applied to products requiring an interdisciplinary approach.

Now, “product design” and “design” seem to be favorites in engineering and business, and more and more universities are moving in that direction. Students are very interested in invention and innovation, and courses and projects having to do with such things are cropping up in many parts of these universities. But they often focus on clever, relatively simple products with potential high profit and large potential market. Many start ups are also often based on such things. Certainly such products as Tesla cars, DaVinci surgical robots, and Lockheed spy satellites are not simple, but such things as new apps, software for the internet, and digitally enhanced existing tools and appliances seem to outnumber them.

The lead article in the February 15^th New York Times business section is entitled The Invention Mob, and concerns Quirky, a start up that seeks inventions and provides the necessary design, manufacturing, and marketing to get them to market. The article is here. Quirky keeps 90% of the sales, with the rest divided between the inventor (s) and other contributors. Typically the inventor(s) get 4 %. The company seems to be doing well so far, having raised $185 million to date, including $30 million from General Electric, as well as investments from venture capital firms. As to its future, who can say?

But much of this seems to be focused toward clever products that can be thought up and designed by one or a few people, and do not require a large amount of complexity or sophisticated technical sophistication. There is a reason for this, since many would-be entrepreneurs are looking for quick success and ownership, and developments in software and hardware (computer-based design and manufacturing, available software modules, more sophisticated marketing information) have drastically simplified the process of coming up with clever new gadgets with consumer appeal. Clever new products mentioned in the Quirky article include a device for separating egg yolks, a plastic device that inserts into a lemon or lime and becomes a push-button spritzer, a corkscrew that cuts the foil off of a wine bottle and doubles as a pour spout, and a drinking fountain for dogs.

Cute, but perhaps not likely to have large impact on the quality of human life. Quirky is aware of this, and according to the article, is trying to think more at a system level by focusing on the smart home—an anticipated large market. But the example of a smart-home product in the article is an attachment to the motor of a garage door motor allowing it to be controlled by a smart phone. As the article explains, the inventor was growing weary of the hassle of using his garage door opener (poor man). He did not want to take the clicker with him when doing such things as running and taking his kids to the playground, so since he always had his smart phone with him (while running and playing with his kids?), Why not be able to open the door with his smart phone. This is a system?

I am personally very fond of working on products that do involve complexity and many people. I loved working on spacecraft design, testing, and manufacturing at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Hundreds of people were necessary, no one “owned” the products, and no one became rich from them. Nor could single individuals or small groups be thought to “design” them. I worked in design at General Motors a bit, and enjoyed the essential, if sometimes grudging, cooperation between the “engineers” and the “designers”. I was involved in testing at The Air Force Flight Test Center when in the Air Force, and again liked mingling and arguing with a wide range of specialists. When I came to Stanford I was involved in teaching systems engineering and have consulted a lot in connection with product design and development necessarily involving large numbers of people, many disciplines, and continual interactions between functions. I am a subscriber to the viewpoint that to best enjoy Silicon Valley these days, one should have a job in a large organizations (Stanford University in my case), and watch it, rather than experience it through working 24/7 on a start-up developing a highly specialized product . I must admit sometimes I do feel like a member of a minority.

To me, the products that are needed now in the U.S. have to do with transportation, energy, resource management, affordable and uplifting housing, medical care, and other such things that most of us realize need improving, but seem to be neglected with respect to building the “information revolution”. As an example, The U.S. lags terribly in trains. The BART system in the San Francisco is a good system, but needs extending, and upgrading so that one does not need to wear ear plugs. A north-south high-speed train is an obvious need in California, but is being held up by political wrangling. I no longer take U.S. highway 5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles, because it is two lanes each direction, and often both lanes are occupied by trucks heroically attempting to pass each other, even though they are both going as fast as they can. And flying? If you are lucky, four hours for one hour in the air.

Were I graduating from college these days, knowing what I now know, I would not try to start a company based on an app or a widget. Nor would I try to become incredibly wealthy (if I did, I might consider lottery tickets). Nor in fact, would I move to Silicon Valley. I would go to work for a reasonably large company in a nice and more affordable area that produces complicated and much needed products that will increase the quality of life for the human race. And the products would be bigger than a bread box.

*For those of you who have never encountered a bread box, they were once a standard fixture in kitchens in which two or three loaves of bread would be kept to minimize the moisture loss (maybe 20 inches square and eight inches high. Bigger (or smaller) than a bread box used to be a commonly used rough magnitude measure. I like the expression and continue to use it around students, even though I pay the cost of explaining what a bread box is.

Posted at 12:05 PM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/09/2015

Quality for Free

In my book, Good Products, Bad Products, I briefly discuss cost (to maker) and price (to customer). These often relate to overall product quality, but not necessarily in a logical or linear manner. But it is definitely the case that we are all sensitive to price when acquiring products. But how about products, even reasonably high quality ones, that can be obtained for free? To many of us, especially those of us who do not have the benefit (?) of great wealth, these have a particular cachet.

I used to like to read Wired magazine, but it has over time become such a promo-piece for expensive products (full page add for Gucci on the back of the Feb 1,2015 issue) and the digital industry that I no longer subscribe to it. But like many Conde Naste publications, it still comes to my house, probably either because they think I will subscribe again, or because they can keep me in their circulation count (attractive to advertisers).

This issue has an interesting editorial by Scott Dadich, the editor in chief, which starts out with a mea- culpa on his addiction to “shiny new gadgets”, followed by raves about Microsoft’s Project HoloLens . But then he brings up the fact that the rapid turnover in new gadgets results in great numbers of still usable devices ending up in landfills. He then mentions an article in the issue by Randall Sullivan about a person named Matt Malone, an expert in corporate security and a professional dumpster diver, in that he finds products (often new) that have been discarded and resells them at a lower cost. In fact, he states that if he was to do this full time, he could make at least $250,000 in the Austin. Texas area alone. The editorial is here, and the article is here.

I resonate with Matt Malone, even though I have never met him. First of all, he is adding to the world’s recycling effort, and secondly, I am an amateur dumpster diver and finder of fine objects in trash piles. I don’t sell them for profit, but rather I either give them away, or keep them because I love them— they appeal to me and they are FREE.

The photo at the left shows a “free swap” book box I built for my wife for Christmas. She loves books, and since the area in which we live is full of academics, who in turn have and read lots of books, it gets a heavy trade. But it is a miracle to my wife and I, because it is an ever-changing source of free books right next to our house (sorry Amazon).

When I first arrived at Stanford it was "upgrading" and discarding many "old" items. As an example, they were re-doing teaching spaces and filling dumpster boxes with captains chairs that had been used in the old rooms. I snagged a half dozen of them for my house, because they were comfortable and showed the patina of history. Ironically enough, some years later, Stanford was putting brass plaques on the few that were left. and awarding them to major gift donors. And people were so eager to acquire new and "modern" equipment that they did not value the beauty and historical value of some of the old.

The two photos below show an old medical instrument that was used for examining tissue sections, and a few rescued objects that are in my office. The adding machine is of great value because none of our present students have the faintest idea of what it is. The two instruments are there because I like them. And I’ll bet you don’t have as good a whiffle ball container as the one in the photo below them.

And I do not restrict myself to dumpsters. My wife is a compulsive gardener, and has a constant need for pots. The photo below shows her pot supply. We never have to buy them, because Stanford has a free trash pickup for all campus homeowners twice a year, and I have a pickup, with which I can easily keep her in pots, as well as miscellaneous yard furniture, shelves, garden tools, and other goodies.

I must admit that she is somewhat embarrassed that we will be seen by the neighbors as we go through their trash, but I am proud to be helping the ecosphere and our budget, as we acquire objects of high quality that are no longer appreciated by their former owners.

Posted at 01:00 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Engineering, Global Constraints, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, The nature of technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/02/2015

Horn of Too Much Plenty?

Today I went shopping. One of my land line phones had had a sick battery for some time and finally gave up, so I decided to go to a large local electronic supply outlet and get one rather than buy one over the web and wait for it to be shipped. I had gone there often, and was pretty sure they would stock the battery, and while I was there I realized I could pick up a couple or USB hubs, since both my wife and I were out of slots, and another external drive.

BUT, the resulting trip took much, much longer than I had planned , because (1) as many stores tend to do, they had re-arranged their stock, and (2) I was simply overwhelmed by choices, and had the common store experience of not being able to find anyone who knew much, if anything, about the options I had.

As to batteries, there were yards of them displayed in a section labeled something like “Battery World”, and many, many customers standing in front of it agreeing that there should not be so many of them. While old-line battery equipment makers seem to do fine with the traditional letter sizes (AAA, D, etc) and numbers (6 volt, 9 volt), makers of digital equipment have gone wild in configurations, sizes, voltages, and connectors. Standardization time?

After looking through the whole mess, and squinting at the fine print, I could not find a match, so I ran down an actual employee, and taking my dead one he disappeared, (telling me the usual “give me a second”). After 5 minutes he came back with a big smile, and told me that since it was a telephone battery, it was undoubtedly in the telephone section.

So I set forth for the telephone section, and initially discovered that the batteries were not in the aisle entitled “Batteries”. I found them after looking through the section, but couldn’t find any numbers that matched the old battery. The first employee I hunted down could not solve my problem. The second one did.

Then off to find the hubs and the drive. After I found the locations in the store (they had moved), I encountered an overwhelming number of each, at a variety of prices, each boasting of their superiority on the box. I once again found the rare employees, and asked them questions such as “what is the difference between them”? and “why shouldn’t I just buy the cheapest one"? Once again, no satisfactory response, and in defense of the employees, probably because there was no way that the relatively few of them could understand the details of the overwhelming number of products in the store.

Incidentally, on the same trip, I found the same result in the drugstore in which I was looking for more products. It was a big store, but not a “big box” store. The staff seemed to consist of a woman at the cash register and a pharmacist in the back, with long lines at each location. I was looking for eye-drops, and the choice was over whelming, Looking at the ingredients, there seemed to be much more similarity between them than the packages suggested, but once again, no help available. Remember “floor walkers”? No more.

I enjoy owning high quality products, and some are better than others, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to discriminate between products in these days of overwhelming marketing, packaging that does not let you get your hands on things, and decreasing numbers of informed store employees and trustable web sites that could help. I sometimes think that many times there is less easily available usable information in the "information age", than there was before.

Posted at 08:54 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Engineering, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/26/2015

Minimalism,Organization, and Stuff

I seem to have become the home maintenance person for not only my own home, but for several of my friends and neighbors. I also have several hobbies that require large amounts of materials and numbers of tools (new restoration project in photo at left). To make matters worse, I grew up in a small-farm area at a time when the “great depression” had removed the little cash that was around, and was firmly taught that one never ever even considered throwing anything away that might have some use in the future, even if that use required modification. So I have a lot of stuff.

I often get subtle and well meaning advise from people who love me that I should have less stuff, and that I would profit from better “organizing” it. I thank them, but I am happy with my stuff, and “organization” varies from person to person. I have probably mentioned my favorite theory which states that there are at least three approaches to organizing—by subject (what is it?), date (when did it happen?), or spatial (where is it?). I am a spatial type, but “what is it” (filing cabinets, labeled boxes) people seem to dominate, especially if their stuff is not visible to the eye. There are even consultants who help their clients dispose of stuff, and I am happy for them if they are successful, but they are not welcome in my life.

This photograph shows the radial arm saw in my shop. Notice that the table for the saw is clean. That is necessary. But the space behind the wall and the wall itself are simply full of things such as tools, tape, etc. People who approach situations such as this by such things as painting outlines on the wall with hooks placed so that the tool, or whatever, can be placed on the outline think I could improve the organiztion of my shop. I thank that is admirable. But this is my shop, and I don’t want to take the time to place the tool exactly where its outline is. I just want to get it off the table, and hanging it on a nail is easy, and I can find it rapidly because I can see it.

This approach of being able to see stuff does perhaps require more space than if it is put into labeled boxes (drawers, etc) that are stacked. But a tiny bit of thinking can help with this problem. Take plumbing fixtures and associated pipes,
hoses, etc. Since my house, and its sizeable yard, are equipped with 100 year old plumbing and wiring that tend to like frequent repairing, and since I mess around with old steam engines, orchard sprayers, and such, I have lots of pipe fittings and related objects around. So I have taken to storing them by temporarily putting them together into hopefully interesting combinations and finding various places to keep them. When I want something, I can instantly see what I want, remove it, and put it to use. A few photos at right and below show some of these, which tend to be in corners either in my home office, my Stanford office, my basement, or my yard.

The final one, with the hoses attached, is my favorite. It is in my yard, and almost always stops people who are walking around the yard, so that they can try to figure out its function and how it works. It’s function, of course, is to act as a place for me to store pipe and hose fittings. That’s all it does.

I have found that I can smuggle great amounts of stuff into my house yard, and shop in a way that causes many people (including me) to think that it is “interesting”, instead of thinking I should either get rid of it or put it in a box. If you need/like large quantities of objects,and people you love are bothered by that , keep them off balance by making the objects more “interesting”. One person who loves me is Marian, my wife. She also loves to make mobiles. I am subtly encouraging her to make mobiles from some of my stuff. Then it will hang around, be considered art, and I can cannibalize her mobiles if I need it (although I may have blown my campaign if she reads this post).

Posted at 01:30 PM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | Permalink | Comments (0)