Choose from the middle of the range

(Of course this isn’t really about motors.)

Designing machinery, it’s a rule of thumb to choose components from the middle of each supplier’s range. Say MoCo offers industrial motors in 0.5hp, 1hp, 2hp, 8hp, 10, 12, 16, 20, 30, and 50hp. You want to stay away from the far ends of that range. Probably their motors from 8hp to 20hp are pretty good, but those at the far ends are pushing the limits of their design. Here’s how that happens.

“Make it just like the smaller model, only bigger.”

There’s an original design, say for a 12hp electric motor, that works well. The company sells a lot of them, and they make other models from 8hp to 20hp on the same design, and those are good products too. Then a customer wants a 30hp motor for some application. MoCo doesn’t make one of those, but this doesn’t stop the salesman, who promises one right away. So the engineering department has to design a 30hp motor right away. They take the 20hp design and embiggen it.

The original design relies from parts in the middle of the range of MoCo’s own suppliers. To get 30 horse power, MoCo’s engineer should use different product lines, maybe from different suppliers. There’s never enough time, people, or money for that (if there was, MoCo would lay people of until there wasn’t.) Just doing the paperwork to get a new supplier into the system would take more time than the engineer has. Instead, he has to choose parts from the far ends of existing suppliers’ products. Remarkably this works, and they put 30hp into their product line. What happens when they need a 50hp? The engineers enlarge the 30hp. This process only stops when a product fails dramatically.

The same thing can happen at the low end, as engineers try to cram stuff that doesn’t fit into a package that won’t hold it. Now sometimes you do get lucky, and the 2 is a cut-down 8. It’s over-designed, solid as a rock, won’t wear out, and never needs attention. It seems like this has become less and less common, but maybe that’s just me getting old and bitter.

So whatever you’re choosing, choose from the middle of the range.

American vs. English

The Guardian says one in nine adults has no qualifications. I’d have estimated the fraction significantly higher. The good news is, every career in America is open to the unqualified, and they don’t seem any less successful than the highly qualified. Should I be worried for my country, or hopeful for personal success?

The advocate

“We live in an age in which advocates do not believe in their own advocacy: A ‘planet is doomed’ Al Gore refuses to fly economy; a statist John Kerry won’t pay taxes on his yacht unless he is caught; an anti-war Barack Obama won’t honor the War Powers Act he once deified; and the liberal congressional and media establishment will not put their children in the D.C. schools that are the reification of their own ideology.” — Liberal Frankensteins, by Victor Davis Hanson

True enough, but to be fair there are plenty of conservatives who’d be thrilled for their kids to have good government jobs.

Magic Highway USA, 1958

This imagined highway system of the future has turned out to be mostly stunningly wrong. Instead of enumerating all the things they predicted that we don’t have, here’s what they got right.

• Some cars have rear-view television cameras, I think. Mine does not.
• We do more with pre-fabricated bridge components and precast concrete box culverts, so they got that kind of right.
• There’s GPS, and that is pretty neat.
• There is way more containerized cargo and inter-modal shipping.
• And there is the Oresund Bridge, certainly an impressive feat of engineering.

In math, the answers are not simply right or wrong.

They can go beyond wrong

I was going to describe some specific errors in students’ work, but it was making me feel bad. If I taught history I’d ask the students when George Washington crossed the Delaware. Most would reply correctly. Some would say August of 1914, because it was on the board incompletely erased. One would say “The Delaware is a mountain in Kansas.”

On the other hand, someone would correctly answer the question about Washington crossing the Delaware, and then writes in the margin, “The unicorn is a mythical beast.” Why? Just in case, apparently.

Without getting into the math, some of the mistakes are so wrong in so many ways it’s hard to know where to begin. They’re like saying the phoenix is the seven-headed dog that guards the Rainbow Bridge to Nirvana.

If we were South Pacific cargo cultists, the smart students, though they thought it was all boring and stupid, would diligently put their coconuts over their ears and shout into the stick to summon the cargo. They’d get their B and move on to bamboo radar operation. One student would put half a coconut on top of his head, arbitrarily discard the other half, wave the stick back and forth, and then ask to borrow my calculator. He’d have to take the class again.

They can be entirely irrelevant

Do most of the cargo cultists think some of it’s kind of dubious, but they go along with the group? I mean, most Christians aren’t very good Christians. Maybe most of John Frum’s followers aren’t really all that into it. They take in a breakfast casserole, or go with the men’s group to help build the new bamboo control tower, but only to be sociable.

Someone told me about the Ku Klux Klan around here back in the day. They were nominal racists, but this was a pretty homogenous area. They were nominally for keeping the county dry, but a man likes a drink once in a while. They were nominally anti-Catholic, but, you know, live and let live. In other words they weren’t very good Klansmen. By 1978, they were just a handful of old men who would dutifully put on their robes at midnight and sneak into the graveyard for a grave-side rite when one of them died.

If someone had asked them for the quadratic formula, most wouldn’t know, but one old fellow would answer that the square on the hypotenuse is the sum of the squares on the sides. “Cletus always did good in school,” the others would say.

Progress

or slower regress anyway

It’s a warm sunny day in late September. Out in the country, windmills are going up at an astonishing rate. Here on the State U campus we’re wasting energy as fast as we can. The boilers are running, the air conditioners are blasting, and we peons without AC have the windows open. At that, I’m lucky to be in an old building with actual working windows.

The radiators are hot because that’s the state of the art in 2010. Just like in grade school forty years ago the boilers come on three weeks early, just in case. They’ll make up for it at Christmas, when they turn off the heat in November, and everyone who has one plugs in a space heater. Never mind the flying car, why can’t they make a thermostat?

It could be worse. Long ago and far away (gotta be vague here…) a need was felt to demonstrate to visiting dignitaries a commitment to green energy. It was a nice breezy day, but the wondrous device designed to extract energy from the pressure gradient was not visibly operating. The powers-that-were commanded, “Make it go!” The engineers complied, turning the device into a giant mechanism to generate motion in the working fluid. The dignitaries, all either drunk, clueless, or cynical, could not have cared less.

There has been progress though. When I was in second grade there was a transom over the door of our classroom. It was operated with an enormous wooden pole that only the teacher was allowed to touch. Finally, this year, I have my own transom. The architects have not yet covered this one with beige particleboard, so I can open whenever I want. And I do.

Tax advice

1. Don’t take tax advice from sarcastic old men.
2. If you made less than $250,000 in 2009, don’t pay any more tax than you did last year.
3. If line 12 is equal to or more than line 11, enter the amount from line 7 on line 13 and go to line 14. If line 12 is less than line 11, divide line 12 by line 11. Enter the result on line 10 as a decimal (rounded to at least three places).
4. If it’s less-than, divide. Always.

Newsies

Never mind competition from bloggers. This is why I gave up on newspapers – for whatever reason, the paper often wasn’t delivered. Finally, it wasn’t worth the hassle of calling to complain. Although I didn’t renew the subscription, for a couple of years now some guy has thrown a roll of paper on my porch every afternoon. He’s delivering some kind of “free newspaper.” Like Pavlov’s dog, I throw it in the recycle bin.

I’ve been suspicious of that recycle bin for some time. The directive from our city commissioners say to rinse and segregate, #3 here, glass there, HDPE on top, yadda yadda yadda. The trash men handle it like trash – they dump the contents of the recycle bin into the back of the garbage truck. If it turns out they’re burning it all out at the town dump, that’s a waste.

It would be more satisfying if this was what happened to the recycling: at the central reprocessing activity place, cub reporters fresh out of Columbia select newsprint for next-day delivery, under the gimlet eye of the crusty old veterans. The marketeers add coupon circulars. Pressmen in special hats roll it all up, and bright-eyed urchins deliver the the “paper” at 4:00AM, tossing it in the recycle bin by the door, not in the bushes.

There: Less waste; useful work for those who need it; I get coupons; and the paperboy gets a tip at Christmas.

A party in name only

The Republicans have lost their way. Today’s party is nothing but a boring fund-raising apparatus, instead of the Grand Old Party it should be. We need to return to our roots, rediscover the foundation of legitimacy. We need to be a party again – a real party, with a club house, beer, and hot wings.

It all went wrong during the Roosevelt administration, when we let the government define what a party should be, instead of the other way around. We put the cart before the elephant, and now the donkey is pulling the bandwagon.

Rebuilding

First, we need membership cards. How can anyone be a card-carrying Republican with no card to carry? Negotiate a deal with some local merchants so the card gets the bearer 10% off chicken wings and pistol ammunition.

Next, buy the old Ungulate’s Club. Charge modest dues, and have steak night on Tuesdays. Get local businesses to subsidize it in exchange for good will. “All you can eat for $4.99, thanks to the guys at Megatrode, who hope you’ll vote for Smith.” What’s the point shaking down the corporations if we just spend it all on ads to persuade the rank and file to vote? Just spend it on the rank and file.

Taking money from corporations and giving it to other corporations is a fool’s game. Leave it to the Democrats. Corporations don’t vote at all, and when they move production to Malaysia, the former employees vote Democrat. The money needs to flow from the Corporations to individual Americans, not the other way. The reform politician will lie and betray us, the new tax-subsidized plant will move off shore, and the shareholders’ equity will be lost in the bail out, but at least we’ll have the free beer.

Finally, sports. Nobody cares about policy debates anymore. It doesn’t matter if they promise us gay Marines or secure borders, because we know it’s a lie. How excited can anyone get about the next talking point? We need to expand the leagues so every town can have a team. It won’t really cost anything, because the budget is already busted.^* Building the arena will employ people. After they finish the job, they can sit there and watch a game where the outcome makes a difference. And a little sports hooliganism encourages party solidarity.

The path to victory

The payoff comes when we translate this grass-roots organization into electoral success. Having secured the beer and hot wings, we have built a clubhouse and stadium, and we’re watching the game. Now as we map the value stream, it’s essential to keep the focus on gembutsu. But the andon is flashing – we need to make kaizen everyone’s job. As volunteer overtime squeezes out muda, Ohno’s continuous improvement cycle starts. Spinning up to speed, centrifugal force drives out operations that don’t add customer value. The kanban system functions just in time. Certainly 5-S is the key, but how does all this translate into electoral politics? No idea, but we got beer, wings, a clubhouse, and a stadium.
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^*“It won’t really cost anything, because the budget’s already busted.” This is insufficiently recognized, and absolutely awesome. We’re borrowing and China’s lending; both know there’s little chance of it ever being paid back but both are afraid to do anything else. We should use the opportunity to build up national infrastructure instead of blowing it on plastic junk, but if we were able to do that we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Bad business

Scrooge was at least competent

“Arrow has a pretty bad reputation – a simple web search will find a lot of bad info on forums and the like. It’s one thing to go belly up, but to strand their drivers just before Christmas? Arrow actually dispatched drivers with loads knowing they were going to shut their doors and kill their fuel cards. Their management has known of this for quite some time, so one can only infer what sort of benefits they received by keeping this quiet until the last second. I’m quite sure ‘they got theirs’ out before the walls came crashing down.” — Chicken Hauler Goes Belly Up

• h/t