Jim Medding’s Blog

I had a coworker who had had a very bad day; kind of like my day a few years ago. I pointed her to my blog posting thinking it might cheer her up, but when I received “How horrible” as comment back from her, I realized that that it hadn’t.

I also realized that my original posting might not have quite caught as much of the retrospective humor that I was hoping for. And there were some very humorous moments. One of the things I didn’t put in the blog is that I had Greg call my wife to let her know what was going on. The conversation went something like this:

Greg: “Hi Mom, were down here by the overpass”
Cindy: “So, you’ll be home soon”
Greg: “No”
Cindy: “Why not?”
Greg: “The van’s on fire”
Cindy: “What?”
Greg: “The van’s on fire”

I regularly glance though a lot of RSS feed headlines looking for subject matter of interest but rarely do I find an article that overlaps my interest quite like Jack Ganssle’s article on his visit to Bletchley Park. . In addition to having lots of photos, the article includes a pretty fair description of the historical significance of the place and the equipment itself.

Enjoy.

Here’s a tongue-in-cheek quote from Raymond Chen:

Bloggers are just idiots with a web site.

As a child, I believed there was no better food than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I could not imagine life without at least one sandwich every day. I remember this because, much to my shock, I discovered my best friend, Earl, could not eat them. He was allergic to peanut butter. I remember the conversation with Earl when he revealed this hideous fact; it was the first time in my life when I felt complete and utter disbelief.

Jim - “What?”
Earl - “I’m allergic to peanut butter.”
Jim - “But it’s really, I mean, really good.”
Earl - “I can’t eat it.”
Jim - “You need to go talk with your mom, that can’t be right.”
Earl - “It won’t do any good.”
Silence

To this day I still pity Earl for missing out on all of those PB&J sandwiches.

So far, I’ve read two books which were truly disturbing – Sheriff David Reichert’s Chasing the Devil and James Bradley’s Flyboys. I mention this to provide context for the following quote from Bradley’s book:

Few people reflect now that samurai swords killed more people during WWII than atomic bombs. WWII veteran Paul Fussell wrote, “The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war.”

A few years ago, I had, shall we say, an unusual event occur. On a Saturday I was shuttling my sons and a couple of their friends to and from a local event in between doing my usual weekend projects. After dropping one of their friends at his home, I pointed the van towards our home. We were coming up the hill towards our house when all of a sudden things started to happen. Cars were honking their horns and my son, calmly, says “Dad, there’s smoke coming out of the vents.” I pulled the van over towards the curb, open the door and as I put my left foot on the ground, a Good Samaritan yells “There are flames coming out from under your van.” That’s about all I needed to know, bless his heart. I simultaneously turned the van off and told the boys to get out of the van and move away. Then I called 911. OK, your standard van fire, no big deal. The fire trucks show up and put the fire out; what’s so interesting about that?

Well, the interesting part, at least to me, is that as I was talking to the 911 operator, waiting for the fire truck to come, I watched traffic continue to squeeze by my van as it was spewing smoke and flames. At this point I realized that…Saturday’s are busy times and people are not going to be put out by the threat of death and destruction. Places to go; things to do; no time to wait for some rube’s silly van fire.

Senator Joe MacCarthy is reported to have said, about George Marshall, “If Marshall was merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve America’s interest.” I bring this quote up, not because I agree with the statement, but because I find it an interesting assertion concerning incompetency. The assertion is that an incompetent decision maker is not likely to “never get it right” where as a destructive decision maker is.

While my grandfather, Walter L. Medding, was stationed in Japan in the early 1950’s he apparently made a couple of trips over to Korea. This news came as surprise to my father because when I asked Dad about it, he said “Grandpa was never in Korea.” The reason why I asked Dad is that I found three slides which had to be taken in Korea – they are of the negotiating tents at Panmunjom. And they were, most likely, taken by Grandpa. I’ve include two of the slides here.

All three slides are undated; the two here have legends, hand lettered by my Grandfather. The first appears to be in a very primitive setting – no road to be seen, a little gravel out in front of a standard army canvas tent. This slide is titled Panmunjom; Chinese guard at Panmunjom, Korea.

The second slide shows a bit more refined tent and surroundings. This slide is titled Panmunjom; Armistice tent Panmunjom. Two additional things about this second slide I find interesting- it was taken from, apparently the Chinese side and in the background, off to the right of the tent, appears to be a US solder using either a camera, or surveying equipment. Surveying would, conceivably, be a reason for my grandfather to make a trip over to Korea since this would be a service provided by the Corp of Engineers.

In Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things, he defines, I think quite eloquently, the process of product evolution:

The evolution of form begins with the perception of failure, but is propagated through the language of comparatives. ‘Lighter,” “thinner,” “cheaper” are comparative assertions of improvement, and the possibility of attaching such claims to a new product directly influences the evolution of its form. Competition is by its very nature a struggle for superiority, and thus superlatives claims of “lightest,” “thinnest,” “cheapest” often become the ultimate goals. But, as with all design problems, when there is more than a single goal, the goals more often than not are incomparable. Thus the lightest and thinnest crystal can be expected also to be the most expensive. But limits on the form of artifacts are also defined by failure, for too light and too thin a piece of crystal might hardly be usable.