What happens when you misuse a scanning electron microscope (SEM)?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can badly misinterpret what you see. I saw an article by Mick West at Metabunk on August 12, 2025 titled “Self-healing” Ceramic Material from Skinwalker Ranch – SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) Analysis. A YouTube video at the History Channel on August 14, 2025 titled High-Tech Materials Discovered Deep in Mesa (Season 6) | The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch shows what they thought they saw - that holes were changing (beginning at 4 minutes and 40 seconds). Mick’s article has an excellent discussion with a reply from Arnold Kruize.

 

What they saw actually is a well-known imaging defect: the charging of a nonconductive specimen. Charging is discussed in a reference book by Joseph I. Goldstein et al. titled Scanning Electron Microscopy and X-Ray Microanalysis (Fourth edition, 2018). The preview at Google Books shows the table of contents discusses charging starting on page 134, and coating the specimen with a conductive material to solve the problem is discussed on page 463.

 

I began using an SEM many decades ago, and continued to use it as a tool for failure analysis. Seeing one being badly misused was appalling.

 

An image showing an SEM came from Wikimedia Commons.  

 

 

Be sure to follow Hoot's Law in a crisis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been enjoying reading a 2023 book (I got from the Meridian Public Library) by Mike Massimino titled Moon Shot: A NASA astronaut’s guide to achieving the impossible. Chapter 5 is titled You Can Always Make It Worse, and it tells all about Hoot’s Law for dealing with a crisis. There is a brief discussion by Stephanie Vozza at Fast Company on December 7, 2023 in an article titled An astronaut shares his 30-second trick for boosting productivity.

 

Mike describes having trained for a space walk in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) which is a 200-foot long by 100-foot wide by 40-foot-deep pool. He got his safety tether hopelessly tangled up – between his legs, around his helmet, and around his tools. Finally, he asked Jim Newman, his spacewalk partner for help. Beginning on page 82 of the book (or here at Google Books), Mike says:

 

“In the battle of Mike vs. Tether, the tether had definitely won, and I spent the rest of the exercise kicking myself. Once we were out of the water, Jim took me aside and asked how my snarl got so bad. It was one of the worst he had ever seen. I told him it started out not so bad, but then I rushed, didn’t ask for help, and made it steadily worse and worse until I was totally trapped. Jim nodded and said, ‘Mike, you need to remember Hoot’s Law.’

 

‘What’s Hoot’s Law?’ I asked.

 

‘It’s something ‘Hoot’ Gibson used to say during his astronaut days: No matter how bad things may seem, you can always make it worse.’

 

‘Wow,’ I said, ‘Hoot Gibson was a wise astronaut.’

 

‘He was,’ Jim said. ‘There’s something else Hoot used to say that you might find helpful, too. ‘Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.’  

 

Hoot’s law was sound advice. When my first snarl occurred, it wasn’t that big of a problem. But with my rushing and panicking, I made it worse. It would have been better to slow down, take a minute, and appraise the situation before acting. In other words, it would have been better to do nothing until I figured out what had happened before I rushed to action. I could also have asked Jim or the control team to help me see where my safety tether was caught, since it was hard for me to do so myself. Hoot’s Law was one of the most important lessons I ever learned.

 

Robert ‘Hoot’ Gibson was a naval aviator and test pilot who’d been selected as an astronaut in 1978. His flying skills and leadership qualities were legendary. Everyone liked him. During my first selection board interview in 1994, he was still on staff, serving as chief of the Astronaut Office. During my interview, he sat not far from me, smiling the entire time. I’ll never forget that. At a time when I was nervous, he gave me this wonderful smile that seemed to say, ‘It’s okay, buddy. You’re doing great.’ It was a huge comfort to me at a very stressful time.

 

Hoot left NASA in November 1996, soon after my classmates and I showed up, but his mantras and advice continued to be passed on from generation to generation. One of the men who made sure those lessons got passed along was Charlie Bolden. In his long and legendary career, Charlie Bolden had served as a naval aviator, a test pilot, a NASA astronaut, a United States Marine Corps general, and the head of NASA from 2009 to 2017. Even with the talent to amass that kind of experience, Charlie Bolden had suffered his own embarrassing lesson in learning Hoot’s Law. For his first spaceflight in January 1986, Charlie was assigned to be the pilot of space shuttle Columbia. Hoot was his commander. During one of their early training runs, they were doing a shuttle launch simulation – a sim – with the rest of their crew. Charlie, being the rookie, wanted to show everyone how competent he was, just like I’d done with my tether in the pool. The second they lifted off, an alarm sounded due to an electrical failure. Charlie got out his checklist an determined they had an essential electrical bus failure that had taken down one of the shuttle’s three main engines. He told Hoot what the problem was and that he would take care of it. Charlie then ran the necessary procedure, which called for flipping a switch to shut down the failed part of the electrical system to take the bad electrical bus offline. So he reached over and flipped a switch – the wrong switch, taking down the wrong electrical bus.   

 

‘Suddenly.’ Charlie described to me, ‘it got really quiet in the simulator.’ They had already lost one engine from the first electrical failure. Charlie had now lost a second engine by taking an essential electrical source offline, which meant they were trying to get to space on one engine. Which is not possible. As the simulated gravity slowly overtook their simulated shuttle, they fell back down to the simulated Earth and crashed in the simulated ocean, dying their fiery, simulated deaths. Charlie just sat there as embarrassed as he could be, and that’s when Hoot Gibson looked over at him, put his hand on his left shoulder, and said, ‘Charles, have I ever taught you Hoot’s Law?’ “

 

Mike concludes the chapter:

 

“So, when you’re faced with what seems like a hopeless situation that can’t get any worse, remember: YOU can make it worse. Don’t let that happen, instead I suggest the following:

 

Remember Hoot’s Law. Think of how things could be worse if you make another mistake, and don’t create a second problem while hastily trying to solve the first problem.

 

Remember Joe LoPiccolo. Go slow and resist the temptation to act too quickly.

 

For critical corrective actions, if possible, get a second person to look over your shoulder to mke sure your action won’t lead to a worse situation.”

 

Charlie Bolden’s NASA oral history from 2004 has a slightly different statement of Hoot’s Law:

 “No matter how bad things get, you can always make them worse.”  

 

Right now there isn’t a Wikipedia page for Hoot’s Law, or a discussion of it on the page for Robert L. Gibson.

 

On December 20, 2019 I blogged about The joy of safety interlocks. In that post I referred to an article by John A. Palmer and David A. Danaher in EC&M on November 1, 2004 titled A series of preventable events leads to a power plant explosion. They describe how it began with a toilet line backup spewing sewage on control equipment. That led to hasty and botched repairs which defeated interlocks and allowed an explosive mixture of air and natural gas to develop – and over a half billion dollars of physical damage and lost revenue.   

 

The cartoon of an owl came from Openclipart.

 

Wicked Problems and Engineering a Better World

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been enjoying reading a 2024 book by Guru Madhavan titled Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World. It also has a preview at Google Books. For two decades I conducted failure analysis projects to solve what he describes as hard problems.

 

In the book he discusses four types of problems: hard, soft, messy, and wicked. Beginning on page 7 he says:

 

“Call the first type ‘hard problems.’ They are bounded and boundable, and scientific principles, market pressures, and sponsor requirements neatly specify them. The outcomes are directed – even dictated- by customers, consumers, and clients….Such problems can be mathematically manipulated, chemically configured, and materially improved. Ultimately, they can be ‘optimized’ by applying available knowledge and experience with the idea that the best possible outcome exists and is achievable.

 

The second class, call it ‘soft problems,’ is in the area of human behavior, which is complicated by political and psychological factors. Because their endpoints are unclear, and thorny constraints complicate their design, soft problems cannot be solved like hard problems; they can only be resolved. There are no easy fixes to a problem like traffic congestion….Since soft problems fuse technology, psychology, and sociology, resolving them yields an outcome that’s not the best but only good enough. As Ackoff characterized it, the results are based not on optimizing but on ‘satisficing,’ an approach that satisfies and suffices.

 

The third class, ‘messy problems,’ emerges from differences and divisions created by our value sets, belief systems, ideologies, and convictions. A disease outbreak may involve hard problems with solutions such as barcode-tracked supplies or antibiotic deliveries. The outbreak’s soft problems might require resolutions like mapping infectious disease spread or retooling the indoor environment to prevent the propagation of infection. Neither resolution is exact, but both are good enough. By contrast, a messy problem can involve a pathogen gaining antibiotic resistance or intersecting with delicate religious rituals, as we’ll see with Ebola…..Messy problems can be reframed out of existence not by optimizing or satisficing but by ‘idealizing.’ In Ackoff’s words, this entails getting the matter ‘closer to an ultimately desired state, one in which the problem cannot or does not arise.’

 

If they were works of art, hard problems would be photographs, offering clarity and directness. Soft problems are like blurry brushstrokes of impressionism, and messy problems are spilled and splattered abstractions. A wicked problem emerges when hard, soft, and messy problems collide. Think of them as a cubist collage where the truth is simultaneously sharp, shaky, and squiggly. All three are required for wickedness. Hardness is nestled in soft problems, and hardness and softness reside within messy problems. By extension, a solution can be within a resolution, and a dissolution might contain resolutions and solutions.”     

 

Chapter three of the book discusses the failure of a fifty-foot tall, ninety-foot diameter steel molasses tank that occurred on January 15, 1919 – when it had been filled for the first time. It killed 21 and injured 150. Wikipedia has an article about it titled the Great Molasses Flood. On page 114 Dr. Madhavan says:

 

“Based on the technical manuals of the time, the Purity tank’s safety factor should have been at least four times the strength chosen. The tank’s thin walls, selected as a cost-savings measure, proliferated a rapid fracture. Since the 1850s, when steel production ramped up, low-temperature brittleness has been a problem. Microscopic analyses from the Boston Navy Yard showed that the tank’s fractures were herringbone, a zigzag damage pattern. The breakdown of riveted constructions remained common well into the mid-20th century; during the winters of 1943 and 1944, World War II Liberty ships literally broke in half, embrittled.”  

 

But he is wrong about the Liberty ships, which were welded rather than riveted. The textbook example for failure was the tanker SS Schenectady, which broke in two on January 16, 1943 while she was moored at a dock in Portland, Oregon. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another tanker, the SS Pendleton, broke in two during a gale south of Cape Cod on February 18, 1952. 32 sailors on one half were heroically rescued by four men in a 36-foot Coast Guard motor lifeboat from Chatham, as depicted in the 2016 film, The Finest Hours and above in a sign at the Chatham station. You can watch a nineteen-minute YouTube video titled The Daring Sea Rescue That Shocked the World.

 

There was another horrible failure involving a tank storing liquified natural gas in Ohio. The Cleveland East Ohio Gas Explosion on October 20, 1944 killed 131 people.

 

A ten-pointed image from Openclipart represents a wicked problem.  

 

A series of three succinct articles by civil engineer Kenneth H. Rosenfield on building presentations

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Engineers don’t waste time. There is a series of three succinct articles on building presentations from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) at their ASCE CIVIL ENGINEERING Source web site by Kenneth H. Rosenfield. The first appeared on June 26, 2023 and is titled 7 tips to help you prepare to speak publicly. Those tips are:

 

Know your material

Plan visual aids

Arrive early

Dress appropriately

Exude a positive presence

Manage podium etiquette

Address nervousness

 

The second appeared on July 24, 2023 and it is titled 6 errors to avoid in public presentations. Those errors are:

 

Don’t forget to impart meaningful information

Don’t speak too quickly

Don’t forget to engage your audience

Avoid filler words

Avoid unfamiliar jargon

Avoid nervous hand gestures

 

The third appeared on August 21, 2023 and it is titled 5 Tips for answering post-presentation questions. Those tips are:

 

Allow everyone to share

Treat each query as an opportunity for a meaningful dialogue

Confirm the question

Maintain your composure

Follow up if necessary

 

ASCE also sells a book by Christopher A. (Shoots) Veis from 2017 titled Public Speaking for Engineers: Communicating Effectively with Clients, the Public, and Local Government.

 

The image of a construction crane was adapted from this one at Openclipart.

 

A great video course on Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a couple decades much of what I did as a metallurgical engineering consultant involved failure analysis – figuring out why things busted or rusted. Recently I saw that The Great Courses had a new one (released in 2022) by Stephen Ressler titled Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach. I put it on hold from the Ada Community Library, and greatly enjoyed watching all 26 lectures on 5 DVDs. Professor Ressler is a great storyteller, and uses excellent simplified working models that show how the structures were meant to work, and how they instead failed. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For example, on July 17, 1981 in Kansas City, collapse of the walkways in the atrium of the Hyatt Regency Hotel killed 114 people. A design detail change (shown above) that doubled the load applied to steel support rods hanging the beams was not caught, due to a series of failures of both communication and coordination.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How the process of structural design should work is shown above via a chart (adapted from one in the course). The structural response was tragically underestimated.

 

What the structural engineer had designed would have been very difficult to build. The steel fabricator proposed a change, and spoke with the structural engineer’s project manager. He asked them to put it in writing, but they didn’t, and he forgot to follow up on their shop drawing. Then the steel fabricator hired an outside engineering firm, who assumed the hanger connection already had been analyzed, and never checked it. The fabricator sent the completed drawings to the structural engineer. Drawings instead were reviewed by a senior technician who hadn’t previously worked on the project. He was unaware of the changed configuration, and didn’t raise concerns about it. It also was missed in a design review by Kansas City Public Works.

 

Each of the 26 lectures could be the basis for a speech about failure analysis. Titles for those lectures are as follows (with dates and links to the appropriate Wikipedia pages from their List of structural failures and collapses):

 

1] Learning from Failure: three vignettes [Hurricane Katrina, the Hyatt Regency Walkway Collapse, and the Dee Bridge Collapse]

 

2] Flawed Design Concept: the Dee Bridge [1847]

 

3] Wind Loading: The Tay Bridge [1879]

 

4] Rainwater Loading: Kemper Arena [1979]

 

5] Earthquake Loading: The Cypress Structure [1989]

 

6] Vehicle Collisions: The Sunshine Skyway Collapse [1980] and The Skagit River Bridge Collapse [2013]

 

7] Blast Loading: The Murrah Federal Building [1995]

 

8] Structural Response: The Hyatt Regency Walkways [1981]

 

9] Bridge Aerodynamics: Galloping Gertie [Tacoma Narrows Bridge 1940]

 

10] Dynamic Response: London’s Wobbly Bridge [Millennium Footbridge 2000]

 

11] Dynamic Response: Boston’s Plywood Palace [John Hancock Tower 1973]

 

12] Stone Masonry: Beauvais Cathedral [1284]

 

13] Experiment in Iron: The Ashtabula Bridge [1876]

 

14] Shear in Concrete: The FIU Pedestrian Bridge [2018]

 

15] House of Cards: Ronan Point [1968]

 

16] Brittle Fracture: The Great [Boston] Molasses Flood [1919]  

 

17] Stress Corrosion: The Silver Bridge [1967]

 

18] Soil and Settlement: The Leaning Tower of Pisa [1990]

 

19] Water in Soil: The Teton Dam Collapse [1976]

 

20] Construction Engineering: Two Failed Lifts – Senior Road Tower [1982] and L’Ambiance Plaza collapse [1987]

 

21] Maintenance Malpractice: The Mianus River Bridge [1983]

 

22] Decision Making: The [Space Shuttle] Challenger Disaster[1986]

 

23] Nuclear Meltdown: Chernobyl [1986]

 

24] Blowout: Deepwater Horizon [2010]

 

25] Corporate Culture: The Boeing 737 MAX [2019]

 

26 Learning from Failure: Hurricane Katrina [2005]

 

My only major criticism of the course concerns Lecture 17, Stress Corrosion: The Silver Bridge. Failure of a single eyebar, via growth of a hidden small crack, led to a complete collapse because there was no structural redundancy.

 

The Glossary in the Course Guidebook gives the following incorrect definition for stress corrosion:

 

“A phenomenon in which the gradual accumulation of corrosion product (rust) within the grain boundaries of a metal causes tiny cracks to form. Stress corrosion occurs when the metal is subjected to tension stress in a corrosive environment.”

 

For stress corrosion cracking the crack path can be either along the grain (crystal) boundaries or across the crystals (transgranular). For chlorides in stainless steels, it commonly is across, as discussed in the web page at Corrosion Doctors for Stress Corrosion Cracking. Also see the Corrosion Doctors web page for the Silver Bridge Collapse, and the Wikipedia page on Stress corrosion cracking.   

 

Images of the Hyatt Regency Walkway collapse and connection details both came from Wikimedia Commons.  

 

Are there around a hundred miles of wire in a car? No, there only are about three.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I heard part of the first presentation at the Coast-to-Coast AM radio show on December 6, 2022 by James Rickards titled Supply Chain Disruptions. Their web page has this claim:

 

“He forsees a return of manufacturing jobs to America because of global problems….

As an example of a breakdown, he cited the automotive industry, which uses around 100 miles of wire in each car, and these are run through plastic conduits. Such conduits were manufactured in Ukraine, and their unavailability during the war caused BMW and Volkswagen to shut down major assembly lines until they could find a new source.”

 

I’m a retired engineer, and to me 100 miles sounds way too big. Before we try to find a source for how much wire there is, let’s look at that amount as a Fermi problem and make a Fermi Estimate, which an article at Brilliant describes as:

 

“…one done using back-of-the-envelope calculations and rough generalizations to estimate values which would require extensive analysis or experimentation to determine exactly.”

 

According to Wikipedia, a Volkwwagen Jetta (shown above) is 185 inches (15.4 feet) long, 70.8 inches wide, and weighs a maximum of 2970 pounds. The NAPA Know-How Notes: Automotive Wiring Guide web page says typical copper signal wire is #18 gauge, which according to another web page at WireAndCableYourWay has an outside diameter of 0.095 inch, and a weight of 0.009 pounds per foot.

 

A hundred miles is 528,000 feet, and when we divide that by 15.4 feet, we get 32,285 car-lengths of wire for our Jetta. That seems like a lot more wire than necessary for connecting everything we might imagine in a car.

 

When we lay those wires side by side like a ribbon, it would be 32,285 times 0.095 or 3,257 inches wide, or 46 times the width of the car. If we stack them up (at the width of the car), the height would be 46 times 0.095 inches or 4.37 inches tall.

 

What about the weight? 528,000 feet times 0.009 pounds per foot is 4752 pounds – or 1.6 times the weight of the Jetta. That weight makes no sense whatsoever.

 

There is an article by Christina Amann and Nick Carey of Reuters on March 2, 2022 titled Ukraine invasion hampers wire harness supplies for carmakers which instead says:

 

“A wire harness is a vital set of parts which neatly bundle up to 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) of cables in the average car.”

 

So the 100 miles claimed at Coast-to-Coast was over 32 times too high. 3.1 miles of wire would weigh a much more sensible 147 pounds. And there would be 1,063 car lengths of wire – not 32,285.

 

There is another article by Susan Rambo in Semiconductor Engineering on March 12, 2019 titled Shedding pounds in automotive electronics which has the following detailed information:

“…The traditional wire harnessing takes up a lot of space and weight even in compact cars. ‘The wiring harness is one of three heaviest subsystems in many vehicles - as much as 150 lbs in highly contented vehicles - and it’s very typical for the average vehicle to have 100 - 120 lbs of wire harness in the vehicle. These vehicles weigh on average around 3,500 lbs,’ said Mentor’s Burcicki. ‘Today’s luxury cars contain some 1,500 - 2000 copper wires - totaling over 1 mile in length. To put that into perspective, in 1948, the average family car contained only about 55 wires, amounting to total length of 150 feet.’ ”

 

The joy of finding an app for simulating my vintage scientific pocket calculator

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the April 28th meeting of the Pioneer Toastmasters club the theme was Love Those Gadgets! I’m a retired engineer so calculators are one of my favorite gadgets. On March 27, 2021 I blogged about The joy of changing to an iPhone. I was not impressed when I looked at the very basic calculator app supplied under the Utilities icon. At the App Store I was pleasantly surprised to find that for $10 I could purchase the RLM-11CX. It simulates an old friend, my vintage HP-11C scientific pocket calculator (shown above). Having that app means one less thing to carry on trips.

 

The HP-11C scientific calculator was manufactured between 1981 and 1989, so mine might be almost four decades old. It has a liquid crystal display (LCD) rather than the red light emitting diodes used previously on my HP-45 and HP-97. Those calculators used rechargeable batteries and came with a jack for plugging in an AC adapter. The HP-11C calculator uses three A76 or 357 button batteries which typically last me for over two years. It has no AC adapter. The 11C is in the Hewlett-Packard Voyager series, which also includes the HP-12C financial calculator that also was introduced in 1981 and is still available as an updated version – the HP12C Platinum. 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My father was a chemical engineer who always had a calculator at home. I grew up using his mechanical Marchant and electronic HP9100A, which I mentioned in a March 27, 2012 blog post titled Do words keep their original definitions? But the very first calculating device I owned was analog rather than digital. For my tenth-grade chemistry class I learned to use a 10” Pickett Simplex aluminum slide rule (shown above), which I mentioned in a November 25, 2020 blog post titled A million times too large.

 

AMPP: A very bad choice for an acronym

 

On January 6, 2021 there is an article at the web site for Materials Performance magazine titled Association for Materials Protection and Performance (AMPP) is Formed, and also a press release. That organization combines two about preventing corrosion - with acronyms of NACE and SSPC. NACE began as the National Association of Corrosion Engineers and was renamed NACE International. SSPC was the Steel Structures Painting Council.

 

But how do you pronounce the acronym AMPP? Is it Ay Em Pee Pee, or Am Pee Pee. According to Lexico PeePee is a child’s word for urinating or a penis. Before the combined organization chose that name and acronym they should have checked with the mythical Office Of Pronounceable Spellings (OOPS), which I blogged about on April 6, 2018 in a post titled Shouldn’t acronyms be pronounceable?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I see AMPP what comes to mind is the famous statue from 1619 in Brussels, known as  Manneken Pis and shown above.

There is no such thing as the optimum design for a bicycle (or other product)

There are different designs for various times and places, each of which has strengths and weaknesses. As shown above, the first popular design was the ‘penny farthing‘ or ‘ordinary’ – which had a large front wheel driven directly by the pedals.

Next came the diamond-framed ‘safety’ bicycle with a drive chain from the pedals to the rear wheel, as shown above via an 1896 model. Later versions added geared hubs or derailleurs and center-pull or side-pull hand brakes on both wheels. Lots of us think that this still-current frame design must be optimal because it is what racers use.

But back in the 1930’s there also was an early recumbent bicycle, the Velo Velocar designed by Charles Mochet, as shown above. Recumbent seating gave it lower drag. After it broke a world speed record, the UCI solemnly redefined it as not being a bicycle.    

In 1967, when I was a junior in high school, my parents bought me a Moulton, which had been imported by Huffy and sold in the Sears catalog. As shown above in a brief Pathé newsreel, it has 16” wheels and a suspension. An ad for it in the October 28, 1966 issue of LIFE magazine crowed:   

“The new bike for adults is the Huffy Moulton, created by English engineer Alex Moulton, and the first basic advance in bicycle design in 70 years. The first thing you notice about the Huffy-Moulton is its nimbleness. You’re up, off and around the corner in a flash. The small wheels give instant acceleration because there is less inertia. It is simply easier to spin a light small wheel than it is a big one. (Spin a roller skate wheel and you’ll get the idea.) The gearing is designed for the wheel size. In ‘high’ one revolution of the pedals carries you forward more than six feet, farther than many regular bicycles. In ‘low’ gear you have the power to take most hills sitting down. Steering is lively. It’s agile when dodging a rut or scampering around a corner. Cycling, a British magazine, says, ‘It manouevres like a dream, and permits a ‘U’ turn in half the usual radius.’ The Moulton actually has shock absorbers. The front wheel has rubber and steel shocks in the head tube. The rear wheel has a cushion between the pivoting rear fork and the frame. The bike has the same seat and handle bar positions as a regular bicycle, with a full-length wheel base. One model fits adults of both sexes and all sizes. The comfortable spring seat adjusts up and down in a jiffy without tools.” 

I rode my Moulton a couple miles each way when I commuted to Carnegie-Mellon University. It worked well on those brief trips. A couple bungee cords secured my briefcase to the large rear luggage carrier. The Moulton had chrome-plated steel rims carrying 1-3/8 inch wide tires, inflated to 60 psi. After two or three weeks rolling resistance increased significantly. Tire pressure had dropped to about 50 psi, and a few minutes of pumping back to 60 psi was required. But side pull brakes did not work well in wet weather. The Sturmey Archer 4-speed rear hub had a long shift cable path, and the cable tended to stretch until only three speeds were obtained reliably.

During the 1970s mountain bikes were developed in California. I remember seeing ads for mountain bikes with a combination of wide tires and derailleurs on the back pages in Sunset magazine, long before they went national. Eventually, as shown above, mountain bikes were produced with suspensions. Later on ‘fat tire bikes’ with even wider tires (~5 inches) appeared. They could handle snow in winter, or sand dunes in summer.  

This post was inspired by an August 2019 One Hand Speaks podcast (episode #121) from Alejandro Anastasio about his 1968 Schwinn Mini Twinn tandem bike.

Clip-on ties are for when safety is more important than fashion

In Shark Tank at Computerworld on August 23, 2019 there was an article titled Life-saving sartorial advice that discussed an employee beginning a career with a gigantic company who manufactured computer equipment. He was maintaining that equipment, and was advised by an old-timer mentoring him to get some snap -on (clip-on) ties to wear with his uniform of a white shirt and suit. What happened next?

“It only takes a few weeks for fish to learn the wisdom of the old-timer’s advice. He goes on a call to sort out a malfunctioning card sorter, which he does, and then he leans over it to watch it do its thing. That’s when his tie gets too close to the moving parts. It’s instantly ripped from his neck, and then wraps around the rollers and brings the sorter to a screeching halt.”

My first job back in 1977 was in the Ann Arbor research lab of the Climax Molybdenum Company. Engineers were expected to wear ties, and for safety’s sake to tuck them inside our lab coats when working with shop equipment like bandsaws or hacksaws. As shown above, I acquired an assortment of clip-on ties. Police and security guards also wear clip-on ties so they don’t get strangled by any of the angry people they deal with. Public speakers usually don’t have to worry about people being that angry.  

Clip-ons are not the only alternative to regular ties. As shown above in an engraving with five Celebrated English Chemists wearing bowties, chemists traditionally wore them to prevent dipping the end of a tie in the liquids the handled. (My father was a chemical engineer and he also wore bowties).

The Safety First sign came from Wikimedia Commons, and the engraving of Celebrated English Chemists came from the Library of Congress.

Is the glass half full or half empty?

A cliché about optimism and pessimism is that a pessimist says the glass is half empty, while an optimist says the glass is half full. There even is a Wikipedia page.

There are other more creative replies. A physicist says the glass really is half-filled with water and half-filled with air. An engineer says the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. A bartender says for $2 I can refill the glass with orange juice, or for $5 I can add a fifth of a glass of vodka, and make it into Screwdrivers. (That’s a specific version of a Tom Peters quote - that the real question instead should be how do I fill the glass?). If the glass scares you half to death, then you have glassophobia.

Back on January 30, 1997 a Dilbert cartoon had the following clever dialogue:

Ratbert: A pessimist says the glass is half empty. An optimist says it’s half full.

Dilbert: Did you put your lips on my glass again?

Ratbert: And the engineer says…

Dilbert: It’s a good thing I put half of my water in a redundant glass.

On September 1, 2018 another Dilbert cartoon which inspired this post had some less clever dialogue:

Pointy-haired Boss: A pessimist says the glass is half empty. An optimist says it is half full.

Dilbert: The engineer says the glass is too big.

Pointy-haired Boss: The manager says the engineer should shut his pie hole. 

There was an article by Diana Booher on pages 12 and 13 of the February 2010 issue of Toastmaster magazine titled The Link Between Language and Leaders which said:

“As a presenter and leader, you may be called on to deliver bad news. If your audience sees the glass as half empty, you have every right – even an obligation – to help them see it as half full.”  

I looked on Pubmed and found a pair of articles from 2011 in the Canadian Veterinary Journal by Myrna Milani on Half-empty and half-full communication – one in October about the client and one in December about the practitioner. There also is a definitive 27-page article with 320 references by David Hecht in the September 2013 issue of Experimental Neurobiology about The neural basis of optimism and pessimism.

Update on September 19, 2018

Fifteen years ago there was a magazine article by Craig R. M. McKenzie and Jonathan D. Nelson titled What a speaker’s choice of frame reveals: reference points, frame selection, and framing effects that appeared in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review for 2003, on pages 596 to 602, vol. 10 no. 3. Their abstract began [percentages added by me]:

“Framing effects are well established: Listeners’ preferences depend on how outcomes are described to them, or framed. Less well understood is what determines how speakers choose frames. Two experiments revealed that reference points systematically influenced speakers’ choices between logically equivalent frames. For example, [88% of] speakers tended to describe a 4-ounce cup filled to the 2-ounce line as half full if it was previously empty but [only 31% described it as half full or instead 69%] described it as half empty if it was previously full.”

They also looked at glasses one-quarter or three-quarters full, with the results shown above.