“Hello” wasn’t always the first thing people said when they answered the phone. After the first proper phone service was started in the US in 1878, people said “Ahoy”. Hmm… I’ll have to give that a try.
Category: Engineering
Obama and Climategate
I won’t bore you with the details of Climategate. There are plenty of sites to read about the details. Instead, I’ll just reference an article about the Obama administration response: Climate czar Carol Browner on Wednesday rejected claims that e-mails
Signs that You’re a Computer Geek
Signs you are spending too much time on your computer: 1. You check your mail. It says “no new messages”. So you check it again. 2. You start tilting your head sideways whenever you smile 🙂 3. Your spouse says
Email Spam… Now Caller ID Spoofing
Just about everyone is familiar with email spam… Well, it appears the world now has Caller ID Spoofing. This is a technique used by unscrupulous people to make phone calls that display a different phone number (and identity) on the Caller ID of
SAE/Boeing Aerospace Conference
I was in Seattle most of this week at an SAE/Boeing aerospace conference… A usual, Seattle was rainy and cold… I gave a 30-minute presentation on sharing technical data in the supply chain… The photo is a shot from my
Comments about Common Myths
So much of what we take for granted as being true, upon greater scrutiny, ends up being just plain false. Collected here are some of our favorite punctured myths, misinformation and fallacies: 1) Sauerkraut didn’t originate in Germany. It got
The Evolution of Cell Phones
I just recently picked up the Palm Pre, and I am initially very impressed… I was just recalling the quantity of cell (mobile) phones that I’ve owned over the last 17 years. My first phone was one of those Nokia
US Navy Blue Angels
Some really nice photos of the US Navy Blue Angels… courtesy of Joe Knecht. (I’ve just never figured out why the Navy has their own army and their own air force)
Great Adages
Amara’s law — “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”. Gall’s law — “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
The Law of ‘Green’ Unintended Consequences
Engineers always exclaim that there is no silver bullet… just a portfolio of trade-offs. Well, for the eco-freaks, there is a new study that concludes that windmills in California are killing many birds… Oh my, it’s not just a Kennedy