Jim Medding’s Blog

Having cleaned up a few messes myself during my career, I can really identify with this quote.

A lifetime in engineering gives you a very good antenna. It also cures people of any self belief they cannot be wrong. You clear up a lot of messes during a lifetime in engineering. I could be wrong on global warming – I know that – but the guys on the other side don’t believe they can ever be wrong.

David Holland in The Telegraph

There is no theorem that says the interesting things in the world are conserved, only the total of everything.

Richard Feynman, Cornell University lecture “The Conservation Principles” (#3), 1964

It’s Pi day!

“How does one celebrate Pi Day?” you might be asking.

Put Pi on your socks, obviously.

Recently, a date encoding in an auto-generated e-mail subject heading caught my eye. It was an interesting pattern. Being the type of person to see the street number of a house and think “I like that number” before realizing that it’s my birth date, I decided to treat myself and ruminate on the pattern. The curious date encoding was almost a binary number; next year it would be a binary number. But there’s a date code next year which is binary and it has a repeating pattern – 101010. Repeating patterns are even better.

“Nice to look at, but is there anything else about this date pattern which is interesting?” I thought.

“Hmm, I wonder what that is in decimal.”

The Answer is – 42.

So, we don’t have to wait 7.5 million years for a supercomputer to calculate the meaning of life. It has its own date which comes around every 100 years. Spread the word.

10/10/10 is the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything Day. Don’t miss it.

Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

John von Neumann

In a recent conversation with my son, Greg, he was telling me about a processor with 3 cores. We both agreed that there was something wrong about having 3 cores, but couldn’t quite figure it out. Then it came to us – you can’t have a processor with 3 cores because that’s a prime number. And furthermore it’s not a power of two. Geeze, why didn’t they think this through before they brought it to market?

I’m amazed at the number of times I’ve heard someone say “if we were to only invested in…” and named some renewable, or “green”, energy source like solar. Having worked, for a semiconductor company, I’m well aware that “we” have invested in renewable energy for many years. And, if you believe in the free market system you would come to the same realization. What company wouldn’t invest in the ability to generate cheap, clean energy?

What most people don’t realize is the massive scale of energy needed for modern society to function. Think for just a moment about what you know about the industrial revolution. It didn’t begin when we were able to domesticate livestock even though they were able to do a multiple of the amount of work done by a single human. It began when humans figured out how to harness significantly larger amounts of energy; enough energy to run a whole factory worth’s of equipment.

The average person, however, thinks on the scale of a sixty watt light bulb. A sixty watt light bulb provides sufficient light to light a room but it gets far too hot to touch. A fifteen watt compact florescent light bulb provides the same light and is a good bit cooler. You feel as though you’ve done well to replace your lights with compact florescent. But we don’t think about the energy consumed to broadcast our evening’s entertainment or to make the television we’re watching it on. Replacing an incandescent light bulb with a compact florescent is akin to a butterfly beating its wings; it doesn’t change much on the global scheme of things. Solar panels, and even wind turbines, just don’t compare on scale to the large power plants which supply the vast majority of our energy needs.

To understand this better, I like to refer to an illustration provided in the August 2005 issue of National Geographic. On page 28, as part of their exposé on alternate energy, they took a satellite photo of Manhattan Island and overlaid a one square mile grid. They then assigned a number of the squares to three alternate energy technologies based on how much land mass would be needed to supply power for the whole 128 square miles shown. Nuclear power would require 2 square miles, or about 1.6% of the land mass. Wind turbines would require about 10.6 squares or 8.3% of the land mass. Solar requires a whopping 74 squares which is 57.8% of the land.

Land Mass Requirements

Yes, nobody wants to live next to a nuclear plant. And people are beginning to realize that they don’t want to live next to a wind farm. But solar just won’t cut it; remember that 58% of the land is the total land mass and doesn’t account for the fact that some of the land can’t be utilized for solar energy collection.

If the land mass comparison doesn’t resonate with you, how about this one:

One solar panel (64”x32”) = 175 watts

One nuclear power reactor = 1,000,000,000 watts

Still can visualize? Most residential houses have a 200 amp service and even though few of us consume this maximum amperage, it would take more than 100 panels to supply just one half of this service. It’s not unusual for a modest office building to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of watts of service provided.

There may come a day when we can use solar energy on a massive scale, but it won’t be until we find a way of achieving significantly higher conversion efficiencies that the 12 to 15% solar panels we have today.

A book that I would highly recommend is The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Although the framework of this book is Taleb’s life and professional career in the financial markets industry, the applicability of the concepts within the book are wide sweeping. Taleb explains a Black Swan as follows:

Before the discovery of Australia, people in the Old World were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence…One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird…

What we call here a Black Swan is an event with the following three attributes.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

A Black Swan can be either negative, e.g. 9-11, or positive, e.g. the Internet; negative Black Swans tend to occur quickly while positive Black Swans unfold over a longer period of time. Because Black Swan events can occur in all endeavors in life, traditional statistical sciences can’t always be trusted as a predictor. This, fundamentally, is why I don’t believe in “technical analysis” in stock investing nor do I believe in “six sigma” in engineering.

My daughter mentioned recently that a total eclipse of the moon will occur soon. After a quick web search I found not only information about the coming eclipse, but also a great resource for this subject -Mr Eclipse.com

Here’s what it will look like here on the west coast:

For novices, like me, you might what to check out Lunar Eclipses for Beginners. There’s also a companion Solar Eclipses for Beginners, but it doesn’t look like there will be a total solar eclipse visible here in the NW for a while.