Took some courses as electives as part of a degree in engineering. Let's see.... Algol (which seems to be a direct antecedent of Pascal) followed by PDP8 assembler and then a packaged called GPSS II which was used for queuing simulations.
After that I just picked up new languages as needed for my work including FORTRAN, Pascal, PERL, C, and far too much JCL just to get things to work on Big Iron. Still Going with a bit of Python and of course the newer web things that I don't think of as a general language (e.g. HTML, PHP, CSS, etc) but are useful for specific tasks. Got into Unix/Linux late in my career and I hope this learning curve never ends.
One of the largest exposed Granite lumps in the world is near my house and the "background" radiation near it is higher than whatever the "normal" average background level is supposed to be. It would be interesting to see the same types of photographs taken in the large state park and recreation area that surrounds it. Without any sort of reference values or calibration they are completely useless for any real purpose except propaganda.
I was given a speed reading class as a high school graduation present in 1965. It was the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course and at that time it was a very nice and expensive graduation gift and it was in a class room setting at least once and maybe more often per week for perhaps two months. I was a bit cynical about the techniques taught but I did practice and do all the exercises. About a year latter while a Freshman studying engineering I found myself far behind in some of the required non-engineering courses such as History and Political Science. I had not read most of the assignments and was looking at a complete failure on the final exams. One professor even told me that to even get a grade of "C" in their class I would have to get an "A" on the final exam. Using the techniques I learned the previous summer I read the books two or three times in the week before the final. I got a "C" in the class that required an "A" and I think I got a "B" in the other one.
During my career I used this technique to get up to speed very quickly on a new subject and it did work. It was not fun, I never used it for recreational reading, but the time I was told that management had decided to convert our infrastructure from Token Ring to Ethernet and that I was hosting the bidders conference in a week I was able to learn enough about Ethernet to understand what was being discussed and soon thereafter my BS filters were pretty well tuned to deal with the sales weasels that a large contract always attracts.
As always your mileage may vary, but I found it invaluable for situations such as this.
A quote from the book with the same name, both in print and in audio, by Herman Wouk about his conversations with Feynman while doing research for his two volume magnum opus on WWII. According to Feynman the language is Calculus
I had pretty much the same problem in the late 1990's when management FINALLY decided to give up Token Ring and rewire for Ethernet. The cable troughs in the building were packed slap full of IBM Type 1 and Type 2 cables with no where for the Cat5 to go. Five floors of a 20 story office building had to be stripped of the Token Ring Cables and have Cat 5 pulled at the same time we were transitioning from the IBM MAU's to 100 Mb switches on each floor with Gigabit fiber backbone.
Oh, one more thing.... Management didn't want any down time or overtime either...
And people wonder why I turned off updates earlier last year. When (or if) I decide to check I will research each one before applying. Windows 7 is my last Microsoft OS and I will just give up anything I use that does not have a native Linux version or runs under WINE. My response in summary is not only NO, but HELL NO.
Nobody seems to have mentioned the Silicone Self sealing tape that is used to seal antenna connectors. You stretch it while applying and overlap it with itself and it fuses into one flexible silicone covering. It is better than anything else I have ever used and can be cut off the connectors with no sticky gunk left.
There are several Amateur Radio clubs in this area that have classes in soldering and basic electronics for kids of all ages. In November at the largest convention (we call it a HamFest) in the state there was an area called "The Student Shack" where children from pre-school through junior high and beyond were able to learn to solder and build a simple circuit (LED flasher I think) that they could keep. There were also hands on exhibits of radio and communications technology from old restored mechanical Teletype machines (which were connected so that the kids could send them Text messages from their cell phones) to modern software defined radios and world wide digital communications technologies. The place was crowded with eager kids for both days of the event and was successful way beyond our expectations. Maybe there is some hope.
By the time I was five or six I had an electric train set that my Father taught me how to put together and wire up each time I would use it. I wasn't much, if any, older when I had a chemistry set with chemicals in it that would get you on a terrorist watch list if you bought them today. Before I was ten my Father had taught me how to solder and I got a very nice soldering iron when I was ten and used it to assemble my first radio receiver kit. It used vacuum tubes, which took hundreds of volts to work. What would the parent police think or do today to the parents of a ten year old who was given a 300 degree C soldering tool and left alone to use it to build a radio with high voltages. Yes, I also had an Erector set, and toy guns and latter a BB gun and all of the other things that made kids from the 1940's and 1950's into the engineers and scientists that got us to the moon in 1969.
To learn you have to do and try and sometimes you fail and sometimes things might have some risk but not to try and not to do is a complete dead end for society.
The most hopeful thing I see on the horizon is the Maker Movement, although I think that sometimes it tends to candy coat real learning. Learning is not always easy or fun but LEARNING that is is almost always worthwhile and enriching is one of the most important lessons anyone can have and the earlier the better.
In the real world of physical objects I can't think of any engineering discipline that does not have some type of Quality review and Assurance built into the engineering process. WOULD you like to fly on an aircraft that was never flown by a test pilot first? Would you like to work or live in a building that did not have the design and calculations for its strength and stability checked independently? I am an engineer who began his career working with the Big Iron mainframes of the late 1960's and early 1970's and ended up doing local area network design and security in the early to mid 2000's. For my first 15 plus years I was doing Q&A for very large mainframe systems application programs that were under constant revision. Over that time I was the first person other than one of the programers who touched hundred of programs and not one of them was without major errors when I first saw it.
Once, in the mid 1990's, a new project manager who implemented new methodology and standards for the programmers cut my requested Q&A time from 6 weeks for a major system upgrade to one. He assured me that in the programs created with his new methods I wouldn't find any major problems. During only one hour of testing the very first program I produced over three detailed pages of major problems where the program either did not do things like it was supposed to or did other things that it was not, or sometimes just crashed. When I turned in my results the project manager didn't want to believe it, but I had documented everything and it took the programming team over a week to correct just those problems. Since there were a number of programs in this project and since my experience was the same with each, we did not release the new system to production for about eight weeks.
Accountants and managers hate to pay for testing and quality control, but when they stop doing it it always comes back to bite them in the butt.
Back in the late 1970's and maybe into the early 1980's there was a surplus electronics store on the north east side of Atlanta that I went to many Saturday mornings. It was an amazing place and full of what may have been at that time one of the strangest mix of people shopping for junk. Of course many of the local Hams were there, and often a few engineers from some of the local electronics and computer companies that sprang up in the Silicon Hill area North East of Atlanta, but this particular place also attracted the roadies from several of the fairly popular rock bands that also made their home in the area. Try to visualize the scene with the corporate engineers in white button down shirts (ties were usually off on Saturday morning) and pocket protectors in their shirts, mixed with the Hams in anything from casual clothes to Jeans or Shorts and T-Shirts, and then there were the roadies who stood out from the rest since many stopped by on their way to the biker bar down the street before it opened for the day. Everyone helping everyone else find the part they were looking for or with suggestions and advice on the project they were working on. A wonderful place, a wonderful time and wonderful memories.
One more of many reasons I do not plan to upgrade to Windows 10. In fact I have stopped at 7 turned off automatic updates and am dual booting a couple of Linux distros for evaluation. I don't need or want the stupidity of Windows 10 and I am telling everyone that will listen to me as geek in residence to avoid it. Since many of my relatives and friends have used me as a free PC service tech for decades I first ask what version of windows they have. If it is 10 I tell them sorry they will have to get help from Microsoft.
The level of incompetence in the State of Georgia government has been increasing at an exponential rate for well over a decade now. As a life long Georgia Resident and former employee of this State it is not news to anyone living here. The guiding principle of governance by the last two administrations (and to some extent the one before) has been to outsource anything and everything to the bidder that make the largest campaign contribution. Low bid, high bid, competence -- none of those matter.
The higher paying State Jobs that are supposed to be overseeing this outsource mania have been filled by politically correct incompetents that have no idea of what they are supposed to be doing --and it is getting worse. I was fortunate to escape when I did.
To clarify one point in the article and the comments. The voter data that is mandated to be public record by law is limited to the voter's name and possibly address. The screw up in this is that they included such things as the full social security number, driver's license number, and other sensitive personal information. The Secretary of State (Bryan Kemp) maintained that since there was no security breach, this didn't have to be reported as such under law. I guess that gives is a good clue as to his mental state.
True. With the flight control computer properly working it flew very well. Without the computer it was unstable and difficult if not impossible to fly.
The Russian physics paper was very theoretical and derived the equations needed to show that this technology was possible. The equations could not, and probably still can not, be directly solved. However, this paper was translated by the US Air Force as were many such technical publications and circulated through channels to aircraft manufacturers, and others. It was an engineer at Lockheed who realized that you could implement this technology without solving the equations if you were willing to devote huge amounts of computer resources to doing numerical solutions, which, are great for engineers, but frowned upon by theorists. We had the computer power to do this and the USSR did not. Even then the F117, sometimes called the wobbly goblin, had to sacrifice much in terms of aerodynamics and flight characteristics to implement the first true stealth aircraft.
Exactly! Social Security Numbers were never MEANT to be secret. One alternative solution would be for the Social Security Administration to publish every persons name and social security number and for the law that says that social security number not be used for identification be given some teeth. I am a bit surprised that some enterprising young attorney hasn't made this point in court.
Back in the dark ages (1976-1999) I worked on a large mainframe system that used the Social Security Number of virtually everyone as the primary key in the master database that included all employees and anyone applying for employment. We had about 80,000 employees and got over 100,000 new applicants each year. Duplicate social security numbers were fairly common and were not limited to any one group or class. Some were entry errors or mistakes on applications but at least a dozen or more each year were true duplicates with original social security cards.
We finally moved to a relational database with our own primary key and it stopped being a problem for me. Probably not for those with the duplicate numbers though.
I graduated with a BS in engineering in 1970. In 1973, while stationed at Wright Patterson in the Air Force, I was able to take an "after hours" graduate level electrical engineering course at Wright State University in Dayton. When I went to the first class there were exactly two people (that's 10 people for those who think in binary) who had slide rules. ME and the PROFESSOR. Everyone else had a calculator by then.
Shortly after taking that class the first Texas Instrument scientific calculator became available in the Base Exchange for just under $100. I bought one immediately.
Another example of the very fast change from Analog to Digital happened where I worked. We had a problem that required an APPROXIMATE solution to a number of partial differential equations and the estimates for running it on the large mainframes available to us at that time were way out of our budget. However, we had access to a very nice and large analog computer that was just gathering dust and a few of us were able to set up the problem on it and run a solutions that were fine for our needs in just a few hours.
Finally, engineers who learned the trade on slip sticks had to have a pretty good idea if the answers even made sense or were way out of the ball park. As digital calculations, either on calculators or computers, replaced the three or four significant figures available from a slide rule the wrong solutions were often calculated with great precision.
Unfortunately it was. That's how I voted for it. On one of the infamous Diebold touch screen machines from the early 2000's. Even with those machines it becomes a bit too obvious when the margin is over 90%.
Don't get me started on the voting machines since I fought them as hard as possible when they were introduced in a panic after the "hanging chad" fiasco in 2000. I retired in 2007 after 10+ years as a Network Engineer and the Security Officer for an agency in this state and thought they were a dumb idea then and I think time has shown that to be a correct assessment.
In 50 to 100 years the practice of patient care today will be viewed in much the same way we view leaches and bloodletting and the concept that disease is due to the "humors" in the body not being in balance. Some very simple things could really go a long way to improving patient care and comfort.
During my late wife's final stay in the hospital she had to have what is called an NG (Nasal Gastrointestinal) tube inserted through her nose which kept her stomach pumped since peristalsis had shut down for her entire gastrointestinal tract. The connections between the tube in her nose, and the vacuum system keeping her stomach empty were crude beyond belief. Simple tapered ends to the tubes that were forced together. Disconnecting her for ANY reason was a major operation requiring at least one and sometimes two nurses. Even then there was almost always spillage of the fluids being pumped on her and others in the room.
I am an engineer (retired) and could see half a dozen or more simple and only slightly more expensive ways to connect two vacuum tubes together that would be easier, safer and cleaner to connect and disconnect. The nurses knew this too and we talked about it, but it is virtually impossible to get any changes like this made unless the equipment vendors and the hospitals can all make more money off of it. For NG tubes that is not usually the case since they are usually not used for long as my wife required and then they are gone.
Thank you Sir! Very well said. I am a 68 year old American engineer (retired) who learned his craft using a slide rule and trig tables. During my career I worked with almost every type of computer from Analog behemoths to microprocessors and the one thing I learned is that COMPUTERS WILL LIE TO YOU. You just have to know a bit more than they do to catch them at it.
Also, I wonder if this move is not so much about just loss of GPS but loss of a lot of our electronic infrastructure due to Electromagnetic Pulse, whether man made or from natural events on the Sun. I know of engineers in the US currently working with some of our electric power companies to make contingency plans for such an event. Should we expect any less of the Navy?
I had the same problem with a manager back when the Internet was new and we were beginning to use it where I worked. He called me in one day and wanted to know exactly WHO ran it and how they could be reached if necessary. When I explained that there was no one person, organization or country that ran it an how it was a network or more or less independent networks he really couldn't get his head around that at all. I guess it was kind of mind blowing for him coming from a background in SNA ( IBM System Network Architecture). I guess I got off easy. I sure as hell wouldn't have wanted to be the one that gave that news to Putin.
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Doesn't anyone else remember Lovelock and the Gaia hypothesis? I think his books on Gaia were very popular back in the late 1980's
Took some courses as electives as part of a degree in engineering. Let's see.... Algol (which seems to be a direct antecedent of Pascal) followed by PDP8 assembler and then a packaged called GPSS II which was used for queuing simulations.
After that I just picked up new languages as needed for my work including FORTRAN, Pascal, PERL, C, and far too much JCL just to get things to work on Big Iron. Still Going with a bit of Python and of course the newer web things that I don't think of as a general language (e.g. HTML, PHP, CSS, etc) but are useful for specific tasks. Got into Unix/Linux late in my career and I hope this learning curve never ends.
One of the largest exposed Granite lumps in the world is near my house and the "background" radiation near it is higher than whatever the "normal" average background level is supposed to be. It would be interesting to see the same types of photographs taken in the large state park and recreation area that surrounds it. Without any sort of reference values or calibration they are completely useless for any real purpose except propaganda.
I was given a speed reading class as a high school graduation present in 1965. It was the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course and at that time it was a very nice and expensive graduation gift and it was in a class room setting at least once and maybe more often per week for perhaps two months. I was a bit cynical about the techniques taught but I did practice and do all the exercises. About a year latter while a Freshman studying engineering I found myself far behind in some of the required non-engineering courses such as History and Political Science. I had not read most of the assignments and was looking at a complete failure on the final exams. One professor even told me that to even get a grade of "C" in their class I would have to get an "A" on the final exam. Using the techniques I learned the previous summer I read the books two or three times in the week before the final. I got a "C" in the class that required an "A" and I think I got a "B" in the other one.
During my career I used this technique to get up to speed very quickly on a new subject and it did work. It was not fun, I never used it for recreational reading, but the time I was told that management had decided to convert our infrastructure from Token Ring to Ethernet and that I was hosting the bidders conference in a week I was able to learn enough about Ethernet to understand what was being discussed and soon thereafter my BS filters were pretty well tuned to deal with the sales weasels that a large contract always attracts.
As always your mileage may vary, but I found it invaluable for situations such as this.
The Language God Talks -- Richard Feynman
A quote from the book with the same name, both in print and in audio, by Herman Wouk about his conversations with Feynman while doing research for his two volume magnum opus on WWII. According to Feynman the language is Calculus
I had pretty much the same problem in the late 1990's when management FINALLY decided to give up Token Ring and rewire for Ethernet. The cable troughs in the building were packed slap full of IBM Type 1 and Type 2 cables with no where for the Cat5 to go. Five floors of a 20 story office building had to be stripped of the Token Ring Cables and have Cat 5 pulled at the same time we were transitioning from the IBM MAU's to 100 Mb switches on each floor with Gigabit fiber backbone.
Oh, one more thing.... Management didn't want any down time or overtime either...
Real solder needs lead.
And people wonder why I turned off updates earlier last year. When (or if) I decide to check I will research each one before applying. Windows 7 is my last Microsoft OS and I will just give up anything I use that does not have a native Linux version or runs under WINE. My response in summary is not only NO, but HELL NO.
Nobody seems to have mentioned the Silicone Self sealing tape that is used to seal antenna connectors. You stretch it while applying and overlap it with itself and it fuses into one flexible silicone covering. It is better than anything else I have ever used and can be cut off the connectors with no sticky gunk left.
There are several Amateur Radio clubs in this area that have classes in soldering and basic electronics for kids of all ages. In November at the largest convention (we call it a HamFest) in the state there was an area called "The Student Shack" where children from pre-school through junior high and beyond were able to learn to solder and build a simple circuit (LED flasher I think) that they could keep. There were also hands on exhibits of radio and communications technology from old restored mechanical Teletype machines (which were connected so that the kids could send them Text messages from their cell phones) to modern software defined radios and world wide digital communications technologies. The place was crowded with eager kids for both days of the event and was successful way beyond our expectations. Maybe there is some hope.
By the time I was five or six I had an electric train set that my Father taught me how to put together and wire up each time I would use it. I wasn't much, if any, older when I had a chemistry set with chemicals in it that would get you on a terrorist watch list if you bought them today. Before I was ten my Father had taught me how to solder and I got a very nice soldering iron when I was ten and used it to assemble my first radio receiver kit. It used vacuum tubes, which took hundreds of volts to work. What would the parent police think or do today to the parents of a ten year old who was given a 300 degree C soldering tool and left alone to use it to build a radio with high voltages. Yes, I also had an Erector set, and toy guns and latter a BB gun and all of the other things that made kids from the 1940's and 1950's into the engineers and scientists that got us to the moon in 1969.
To learn you have to do and try and sometimes you fail and sometimes things might have some risk but not to try and not to do is a complete dead end for society.
The most hopeful thing I see on the horizon is the Maker Movement, although I think that sometimes it tends to candy coat real learning. Learning is not always easy or fun but LEARNING that is is almost always worthwhile and enriching is one of the most important lessons anyone can have and the earlier the better.
In the real world of physical objects I can't think of any engineering discipline that does not have some type of Quality review and Assurance built into the engineering process. WOULD you like to fly on an aircraft that was never flown by a test pilot first? Would you like to work or live in a building that did not have the design and calculations for its strength and stability checked independently? I am an engineer who began his career working with the Big Iron mainframes of the late 1960's and early 1970's and ended up doing local area network design and security in the early to mid 2000's. For my first 15 plus years I was doing Q&A for very large mainframe systems application programs that were under constant revision. Over that time I was the first person other than one of the programers who touched hundred of programs and not one of them was without major errors when I first saw it.
Once, in the mid 1990's, a new project manager who implemented new methodology and standards for the programmers cut my requested Q&A time from 6 weeks for a major system upgrade to one. He assured me that in the programs created with his new methods I wouldn't find any major problems. During only one hour of testing the very first program I produced over three detailed pages of major problems where the program either did not do things like it was supposed to or did other things that it was not, or sometimes just crashed. When I turned in my results the project manager didn't want to believe it, but I had documented everything and it took the programming team over a week to correct just those problems. Since there were a number of programs in this project and since my experience was the same with each, we did not release the new system to production for about eight weeks.
Accountants and managers hate to pay for testing and quality control, but when they stop doing it it always comes back to bite them in the butt.
Back in the late 1970's and maybe into the early 1980's there was a surplus electronics store on the north east side of Atlanta that I went to many Saturday mornings. It was an amazing place and full of what may have been at that time one of the strangest mix of people shopping for junk. Of course many of the local Hams were there, and often a few engineers from some of the local electronics and computer companies that sprang up in the Silicon Hill area North East of Atlanta, but this particular place also attracted the roadies from several of the fairly popular rock bands that also made their home in the area. Try to visualize the scene with the corporate engineers in white button down shirts (ties were usually off on Saturday morning) and pocket protectors in their shirts, mixed with the Hams in anything from casual clothes to Jeans or Shorts and T-Shirts, and then there were the roadies who stood out from the rest since many stopped by on their way to the biker bar down the street before it opened for the day. Everyone helping everyone else find the part they were looking for or with suggestions and advice on the project they were working on. A wonderful place, a wonderful time and wonderful memories.
One more of many reasons I do not plan to upgrade to Windows 10. In fact I have stopped at 7 turned off automatic updates and am dual booting a couple of Linux distros for evaluation. I don't need or want the stupidity of Windows 10 and I am telling everyone that will listen to me as geek in residence to avoid it. Since many of my relatives and friends have used me as a free PC service tech for decades I first ask what version of windows they have. If it is 10 I tell them sorry they will have to get help from Microsoft.
The level of incompetence in the State of Georgia government has been increasing at an exponential rate for well over a decade now. As a life long Georgia Resident and former employee of this State it is not news to anyone living here. The guiding principle of governance by the last two administrations (and to some extent the one before) has been to outsource anything and everything to the bidder that make the largest campaign contribution. Low bid, high bid, competence -- none of those matter.
The higher paying State Jobs that are supposed to be overseeing this outsource mania have been filled by politically correct incompetents that have no idea of what they are supposed to be doing --and it is getting worse. I was fortunate to escape when I did.
To clarify one point in the article and the comments. The voter data that is mandated to be public record by law is limited to the voter's name and possibly address. The screw up in this is that they included such things as the full social security number, driver's license number, and other sensitive personal information. The Secretary of State (Bryan Kemp) maintained that since there was no security breach, this didn't have to be reported as such under law. I guess that gives is a good clue as to his mental state.
True. With the flight control computer properly working it flew very well. Without the computer it was unstable and difficult if not impossible to fly.
The Russian physics paper was very theoretical and derived the equations needed to show that this technology was possible. The equations could not, and probably still can not, be directly solved. However, this paper was translated by the US Air Force as were many such technical publications and circulated through channels to aircraft manufacturers, and others. It was an engineer at Lockheed who realized that you could implement this technology without solving the equations if you were willing to devote huge amounts of computer resources to doing numerical solutions, which, are great for engineers, but frowned upon by theorists. We had the computer power to do this and the USSR did not. Even then the F117, sometimes called the wobbly goblin, had to sacrifice much in terms of aerodynamics and flight characteristics to implement the first true stealth aircraft.
Exactly! Social Security Numbers were never MEANT to be secret. One alternative solution would be for the Social Security Administration to publish every persons name and social security number and for the law that says that social security number not be used for identification be given some teeth. I am a bit surprised that some enterprising young attorney hasn't made this point in court.
Back in the dark ages (1976-1999) I worked on a large mainframe system that used the Social Security Number of virtually everyone as the primary key in the master database that included all employees and anyone applying for employment. We had about 80,000 employees and got over 100,000 new applicants each year. Duplicate social security numbers were fairly common and were not limited to any one group or class. Some were entry errors or mistakes on applications but at least a dozen or more each year were true duplicates with original social security cards.
We finally moved to a relational database with our own primary key and it stopped being a problem for me. Probably not for those with the duplicate numbers though.
I graduated with a BS in engineering in 1970. In 1973, while stationed at Wright Patterson in the Air Force, I was able to take an "after hours" graduate level electrical engineering course at Wright State University in Dayton. When I went to the first class there were exactly two people (that's 10 people for those who think in binary) who had slide rules. ME and the PROFESSOR. Everyone else had a calculator by then.
Shortly after taking that class the first Texas Instrument scientific calculator became available in the Base Exchange for just under $100. I bought one immediately.
Another example of the very fast change from Analog to Digital happened where I worked. We had a problem that required an APPROXIMATE solution to a number of partial differential equations and the estimates for running it on the large mainframes available to us at that time were way out of our budget. However, we had access to a very nice and large analog computer that was just gathering dust and a few of us were able to set up the problem on it and run a solutions that were fine for our needs in just a few hours.
Finally, engineers who learned the trade on slip sticks had to have a pretty good idea if the answers even made sense or were way out of the ball park. As digital calculations, either on calculators or computers, replaced the three or four significant figures available from a slide rule the wrong solutions were often calculated with great precision.
Unfortunately it was. That's how I voted for it. On one of the infamous Diebold touch screen machines from the early 2000's. Even with those machines it becomes a bit too obvious when the margin is over 90%.
Don't get me started on the voting machines since I fought them as hard as possible when they were introduced in a panic after the "hanging chad" fiasco in 2000. I retired in 2007 after 10+ years as a Network Engineer and the Security Officer for an agency in this state and thought they were a dumb idea then and I think time has shown that to be a correct assessment.
One more reason that the ethics reform initiative passed by greater than a 90% margin. It seems to be sorely needed
In 50 to 100 years the practice of patient care today will be viewed in much the same way we view leaches and bloodletting and the concept that disease is due to the "humors" in the body not being in balance. Some very simple things could really go a long way to improving patient care and comfort.
During my late wife's final stay in the hospital she had to have what is called an NG (Nasal Gastrointestinal) tube inserted through her nose which kept her stomach pumped since peristalsis had shut down for her entire gastrointestinal tract. The connections between the tube in her nose, and the vacuum system keeping her stomach empty were crude beyond belief. Simple tapered ends to the tubes that were forced together. Disconnecting her for ANY reason was a major operation requiring at least one and sometimes two nurses. Even then there was almost always spillage of the fluids being pumped on her and others in the room.
I am an engineer (retired) and could see half a dozen or more simple and only slightly more expensive ways to connect two vacuum tubes together that would be easier, safer and cleaner to connect and disconnect. The nurses knew this too and we talked about it, but it is virtually impossible to get any changes like this made unless the equipment vendors and the hospitals can all make more money off of it. For NG tubes that is not usually the case since they are usually not used for long as my wife required and then they are gone.
Thank you Sir! Very well said. I am a 68 year old American engineer (retired) who learned his craft using a slide rule and trig tables. During my career I worked with almost every type of computer from Analog behemoths to microprocessors and the one thing I learned is that COMPUTERS WILL LIE TO YOU. You just have to know a bit more than they do to catch them at it.
Also, I wonder if this move is not so much about just loss of GPS but loss of a lot of our electronic infrastructure due to Electromagnetic Pulse, whether man made or from natural events on the Sun. I know of engineers in the US currently working with some of our electric power companies to make contingency plans for such an event. Should we expect any less of the Navy?
I had the same problem with a manager back when the Internet was new and we were beginning to use it where I worked. He called me in one day and wanted to know exactly WHO ran it and how they could be reached if necessary. When I explained that there was no one person, organization or country that ran it an how it was a network or more or less independent networks he really couldn't get his head around that at all. I guess it was kind of mind blowing for him coming from a background in SNA ( IBM System Network Architecture). I guess I got off easy. I sure as hell wouldn't have wanted to be the one that gave that news to Putin.