Jim Medding’s Blog

I was fresh out of college with no more than a few weeks of employment under my belt when a really weird guy called out to me from over my cubical wall, “Hey, I need blah, blah, blah.” I didn’t really catch what this guy, who I later learned was named Marvin, was asking, but my cubical mate, Tim, said he knew how to do this and would help me do it. Tim, having a couple more months of professional experience than I, had taken me under his wing to show me the ropes. Our days had been filled with equipping our desks with supplies and walking the halls of the facility. Even though I was a bit timid, Tim assured me that this was a task I could accomplish. He furnished me with a stack of forms and showed me how to fill them out using the information Marvin had supplied. When I completed the forms, I handed them back over the wall to Marvin and went home that evening feeling like I had earned my salary.

A few weeks later, a gentleman named Max walked into my cubical with a stack of, vaguely familiar, forms and asked me “What’s the reason for this change you’re making.”

I looked at Max with a blank expression.

Max insisted, “You have to have a reason for change.”

At this point I blurted out “I’m making a change?”

Max fidgeted with noticeable exasperation so I said I would figure it out and took the stack of forms back. After Max left, I began studying the forms. After a few trips to get copies of various drawings (all that walking around had paid off) and studying them intensely, I realized that I was, indeed, making a change. I was changing the dash numbers of a handful of capacitors used on each drawing and the only difference between the old capacitors and the new capacitors was their reliability rating. The new capacitors had a higher reliability rating. So in the Reason for Change block, I wrote “Higher reliability parts.” I was pleased with myself as I proudly presented the stack of forms back to Max. That was the last I ever saw of those forms.

Fourteen years later, after I had moved on to numerous other projects, Mike, who was still with my original project, approached me and asked me if I remembered a bunch of capacitors I had changed many years ago. Apparently, the higher reliability capacitors were no longer readily available. Because the Engineering Change Notice had specified that the reason for making the change was reliability, they had been unable to change the drawings back to the originally specified capacitors. In retrospect, if I had asked Marvin, using the time honored professional method of letting it roll down hill, what was his reason for making this change he would have said “Parts availability.” But if I had done this, Mike would never have been compelled to stop by and have a conversation with me. Mike’s wife and kids were doing fine.

Anybody who knows me well, or reads my blog, knows that I enjoy reading history books. I especially enjoy military or science history books. Given the number of these books I’ve read, which I’m sure is far too many, it’s a bit surprising that one military history book and one science history book stands out way beyond all the other. It’s not that I haven’t read some very good books; for example, I would say that Steven Ambrose’s Nothing Like It In The World is an excellent book. However, these two other books transcend all the others because they epitomize the phrase “truth is stranger than fiction.”

The military history book is Commander Eugene Clark’s The Secretes of Inchon. This book also includes an introduction & epilogue by Thomas Fleming since Clark never intended his memoirs to be published. His memoirs read like a John Wayne movie- spies, pirates, young tragic love story, chase scenes. When I got to the end of Clark’s memoirs, I’m thinking “Is this guy for real?” And then I started reading Fleming’s epilogue and I say – “WOW, why didn’t Clark write about these adventures?” Now, I’m flabbergasted as to why Hollywood hasn’t made it into a move.

Robert Whitaker’s The Mapmaker’s Wife is, unfortunately, destined to never be a best seller because the publisher doesn’t know how to market the book. The subtitle for this book is “A true tale of love, murder and survival in the Amazon” reads like promotion for a romance novel yet the description on the back cover compare the book to Sobel’s Longitude and Alder’s The Measure of All Things. The book is, in fact, two stories with the first half very comparable to the referenced books (IMHO, Whitaker’s book provides a better description of the methods used and the challenges faced by early cartographer’s than Alder’s book). The subtitle better describes the second half of the book. This second half, however, is not to be skipped and is the reason to purchase the book; for science history buff, the first half is a bonus. All I can say is that this book is incredible!

I plucked the following quote from John Keegan’s A History of Warfare. John had the good fortune when early in his career as a military historian he obtained a post at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. While at Sandhurst he had the opportunity to observe the officers of the British army up close. John’s conclusion as to what motivated these men -

Officers, of course, hankered for advancement , but it was not the value by which they measured themselves. A general might be admired, or he might not. Admiration derived from from something other than his badges of superior rank. It came from the reputation he held as a man among other men and that reputation had been build over many years under the eyes of his regimental tribe. That tribe was one not only of fellow officers but of sergeants and ordinary soldiers as well. ‘Not good with the soldiers’ was an ultimate condemnation. An officer might be clever, competent, hard-working. If his fellow soldiers reserved doubt about him, none of these qualities countervailed. He was not one of the tribe.

My grandfather, Walter Lyman Medding, left behind separate memoirs of his service during both WWI and WWII. Soon after his arrival in France in 1918 he was sent to Camp St. Menge for more training. He describes his arrival and training in the section of his memoirs titled Raspberry Camp. One of the vignettes in this section explains how coffee was made for the trainees.

The method of making coffee seemed to be that induced by a desire to expend the least labor upon it. A large GI can was set on the field range, coffee dumped in it and the can filled with water. As the liquid coffee was consumed, more water was added until the overworked grounds could no longer produce any semblance of coffee, where the can was emptied and a new brew started. The cycle was about a week.

This must explain my tolerance for anything slightly resembling coffee

Occasionally I read something that, well, explains so much. Such was the case when I read a Reuters story reported by Deborah Zabrenko in January, 2000. The gist of the story, reported in the first sentence, is that the “truly incompetent never know the depths of their incompetence.” This humbling revelation was the conclusion of a study conducted by, presumably, qualified social psychologist Justin Kruger and David Dunning. The underlying cause is explained as follows:

Incompetents lack the basic skills to evaluate their performance realistically. Once they attain those skills, they know where they stand, even if that is at the bottom.

True ineptitude, which I have seen firsthand, is not having the ability to attain a skill.

In Stanley Weintraub’s 11 Days in December, Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 one story stands out, for me, more poignant than all the others. Weintraub retells the tale of Roscoe “Rockie” Blunt’s Christmas celebration from a fox hole.

“Hey, Blunt,” someone whispered from the next fox hole.

“What?” he whispered back.

“Merry Christmas.”

He hadn’t remembered what day it was. “Why bother keeping track of the date, for you had long resigned yourself to the fact you were going to die that day anyway. Of this you were always certain.” But he had stashed in his pack a four-inch artificial Christmas tree from home. He dug it out and struck it in the snow at the lip of his frozen foxhole. Then he extracted some candy bars he had saved, a can of C ration pork and beans, and a small can of fruit cocktail from home, which had come from his sister June with crackers and peanut butter. He shared it with Joe Everett in the next hole and they had a frigid yet festive party.

Rockie Blunt’s memoirs, Inside the Battle of the Bulge: A Private Comes of Age were published in 1994.

Given the difficulty I have finding a watch with the features I want, I have to conclude that I’m just not “with it.” It doesn’t matter what price range I look at, I just can’t find the ideal watch. It’s not as if I’m too demanding, every single feature I desire is available on the market. All of these features, however, are just not available in a single watch. So here’s the list, roughly in order of importance:

Actually, it’s the final feature on this list that is so difficult to find. To quote the Spanish channel soaps – “Por qué, Maria?”

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 grandfather, Walter Lyman Medding, served his entire professional career as an officer with the Army Corps of Engineers. His career began in the spring of 1917 when he earned a BS Engineering degree, a few months early, from MIT and joined up to be part of the American Expeditionary Forces. He retired 37 years later having served in Europe during both World Wars and the Far East during the Korean War. During his time in Japan, he was amused by the frequent language misunderstandings between the Japanese and Americans. The following tale, as retold by my mother, is a typically example of these miscommunications.

The US Army wanted to honor the students in the schools for U.S. dependents during Fire Prevention week. There were 3 of these schools. So they devised a contest for each school. In each, the winner would receive a badge ‘Fire Chief’ with the name of the school underneath. There would be 5 badges for the assistant fire chiefs for each school with the name of the school underneath.
The Army let out bids to several Japanese manufacturers. The U.S. contract read:

1 Fire Chief Badge – School #1
5 Ass’t Fire Chiefs Badge Ditto
1 Fire Chief Badge – School #2
5 Ass’t Fire Chiefs Badge Ditto
1 Fire Chief Badge – School #3
5 Ass’t Fire Chiefs Badge Ditto

Thus, the badges for “Assistant Fire Chief” all came back reading:

Rare book hound (and my brother-in-law), John Jenkins, tells me that the book Buena Vista’s Part in the World War, One Iowa County’s Record of Service and Sacrifice is very rare. He was able to uncover copies of the book in only seven libraries and none for sale in the rare book network he regularly uses. So here’s his list, in case you would like to peruse a copy yourself.

Sioux City Public Library, Sioux City, IA 51101
Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA 50112
Loras College, Dubuque, IA 52004
University of Iowa Library, Iowa City, IA 52242
WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY, Madison, WI 53706
Wisconsin Veterans Museum Res Center, Madison, WI 53703
New York Public Library - Research, New York, NY 10018