I think you've got the cart before the horse here.
Pure scientific research is all about finding out why X does Y. You may have some sort of goal in mind (for example, curing cancer, developing stronger steels so you can build taller buildings or whatever) but the research angle is about answering specific questions.
As research builds a knowledge base, you can then turn over the findings to engineers who then find practical applications for them.
There's no reason why this can't be a feedback loop with engineers posing the questions in the first place, but that doesn't have to be the prime mover. Many, many big deal discoveries are the direct result of serendipity or someone walking an untrodden path out of pure curiosity.
And the converse is also true - much pure science may well prove to have no real practical application at all, or the practical aplication may not arrive until a series of other discoveries are made some time in the future, and some enterprising engineer puts the combination together.
The short-term view for scientists should be that of making sure they are actually doing science. If a scientist says he wants to answer why X does Y, then it is entirely appropriate for the administrators of his funding to want to see a plan for how he intends to solve that problem and get regular status updates on how the plan is going. It is also entirely appropriate to have rigor and procedure evaluated and assessed.
I'd even suggest that failure to answer the question is not really a problem, as long as the plan was properly executed. Negative results have value too, so long as the science leading up to the negative is sufficiently rigorous and the results published.
But to require that the question be answered conclusively before a certain date, or that the answer to a question have a commercial application, is to very much situate the estimate.
That phrase "situate the estimate" is a specific one, by the way. When you get to large military formations (brigades, divisions, and the like) the size of the formation and the complexity of planning its operations becomes too large for a single person to manage. Accordingly, formation commanders have staffs who work out plans for them. The commander presents his staff with the effects he wants to achieve and any constraints/restraints upon those effects, and the staff goes out and researches the problem. At the end of this process, they present the commander with a choice between plans, and he picks the one he wants (or sends them back to try again).
The research portion of that process is called "the estimate" and the cardinal sin of preparing an estimate is to presuppose a specific course of action and cooking the research to fit that COA. That is called "situating the estimate" and is very, very bad, as time and battle has proven that it usually leads to pain and loss.
I would argue that what you want is to situate the estimate. That doesn't work. Hold them to a work ethic, yes. Demand work be done rigorously and efficiently as possible, yes. Require that interim results be published frequently, yes. But otherwise, let them go out and answer whatever question tickles their curiosity. You'll get your commercial applications in the end, from your engineers.
Personally, I blame the MBA. As in the "Masters of Business Administration" degree.
The MBA programmes at all North American universities promote this short of short-term, quarter-by-quarter, stock price driven corporate culture. As the MBA increasingly became the price of entry to more lucrative salaries and promotion within an enterprise, that culture became all-pervasive, to the point where it is now the water in which the fish swim.
And along the way, the MBA-trained manager class forgot the hard-learned lessons of their founding fathers - like long-term planning, maintainence of corporate morale, and taking care of employees.
My career arc went military (I was a product of a military college) -> civvi -> military. The military is hardly a perfect institution, but one thing it really gets right is teaching leadership. Actual *leadership*, not just management.
One of the key tenets of leadership is that quality personnel who are properly motivated can overcome shortfalls in pretty much everything else. Crappy materials, shitty situation, odds stacked against you - well led troops can overcome these things and manufacture success.
And so there are a number of principles that go along with providing this kind of leadership: Lead by example. Ask your subordinates to do nothing you wouldn't do (or haven't done). Loyalty up starts with loyalty down. Respect is earned, not demanded. Always tell the truth, no matter how unpalatable it might be. If you have to correct someone (or you yourself are corrected) fix the problem and move on with no grudges. Provide subordinates with clear direction, including the mission to be accomplished and your intent, and then trust them to carry it out. Etc.
Yes, even in the military it is rare for all of these to gel in the same unit, and I can name commanders who I worked for/with who were deficient in one or more of these areas. But even the worst of them (and some could be pretty bad) were still better leaders and ultimately more effective than any MBA-trained manager I ever worked with as a civilian.
Having worked in a variety of civvie companies, ranging from small startups to major corporations (and most of my civvie experience was with US corporations) I've never seen so many people so completely oblivious to the effects of their decisions upon morale and the overall health and well being of their workforce. Decisions were routinely made with no consideration of second or third order effects. Corporate loyalty simply did not exist, with the employees in the trenches convinced (quite rightly) that management was out to screw them as hard as they could - and so it was OK then to screw the company as hard as they could.
And most frustratingly, any attempt to draw attention to problems in an attempt to get them rectified was usually perceived as an attack on the person who came up with the policy, not the policy itself. It was nearly impossible to pass ground truth up the chain because the bearer of bad news was treated as "difficult" and quite often punished or even terminated.
I wonder sometimes if the success of the "greatest generation" who fought in WW2 isn't because so many key people were exposed to military-style leadership and that sense of everybody in an enterprise pulling towards a common goal, and then that carrying on through the rest of their lives. Now, we get the short-sighted, numbers-focussed "leadership" of the MBA and the resulting destruction and misery.
I went back to the Army in large part because I couldn't take it any more. Even a bad day in the Army usually trumped a good day as a corporate wage slave.
Sometimes there is a very good reason for including clever, non-intuitive code in a project. But that clever code needs to be very well documented because the next guy to touch it may not be that clever.
When in doubt, optimize code for future maintainability and legibility. Hardware gets faster. Programmers don't.
You'd think... but that's not what I've found. Instead, I find I treat individual devices more like tools - pull the appropriate tool off the shelf for the task at hand.
And I've managed to find a little storage bag that will happily swallow all my devices and their power adapters for traveling. A "tool bag" if you will.
The problem with convergence is that the more functionality you put into a given device, the more load you put on that device's battery.
No single device - yet - has the ability to power all the various sub-tasks that we use these devices for and still maintain an acceptable level of readiness.
My Palm Lifedrive (which was really ahead of its time) made a great ebook reader, GPS (using a bluetooth GPS receiver) PDA, music and audiobook listener, and a passable video device, gaming platform, and web browser. But all those functions drew on the same battery. And some of those functions (GPS and internet access) require radios to be active (Bluetooth and WiFi) and so they hammer the battery even harder than self-contained apps.
When it is out of charge, you're dead in the water for all those functions.
So now, I have an iPod for audio/visual. I have a Kindle for ebooks. I have an eeePC 901 for internet, general purpose computing, and gaming. I have a Garmin 765 for vehicle navigation and audiobooks. I have a PSP-Go for gaming (xmas present) And I have a phone for communications and emergency web access.
Yes, that is a hell of a lot more devices to manage, and there is a nontrivial amount of mass in power adapters. In some ways, this is a step backwards. But by spreading tasks amongst devices, I ensure that I always have enough battery charge to do whatever task it is I want, when I want it. Or put another way, because I spread the power consumption amongst several devices, the likelihood of.any given device being charged up enough to carry out the intended task for the duration I want is very high.
Another factor (which is related) is that device specialization means the device can be better tuned for the task at hand, and storage requirements aren't a zero-sum. I can have a lot of music and video in my iPod (it's a 160Gb) I can have a lot of books. I can have fully detailed maps of the world and a bunch of audiobooks. I can have lots of games. And I can have a workable keyboard! All this without having to rob Peter to pay Paul in a single device.
Eventually, this will all get worked out. The iPhone unquestionably trumps my LifeDrive as a convergence device. I fully expect the 5th or 6th gen iPhone will have sufficient storage space and mature applications to fully take over the media, ebook, and quite possibly gaming functions, as well as be a serviceable personal GPS. But it will also have to be able to power these functions for at least 24 hours of use without recharging before it can fully replace all the other devices, and I don't think it will ever replace the general computing function of the netbook.
I personally owned 4 different Amigas - including installing Linux on an A3000. For a little while, I sold them. I belonged to CATS. I posted on comp.sys.amiga before the Big Split to all the subgroups. I jousted with -MB- and laughed my ass off at BLAZEMONGER! I even maintained the Amiga Netrek port for a year or so (not that I accomplished much with it)
I own an original copy of the Deathbed Vigil.
The Amiga is DEAD. Yes, there are still Amigas functioning and a tiny core of hobbyists who still get joy out of tinkering with them - and good on ya. But as a relevant component of modern computing... not a chance.
Seriously. Move on. Enjoy your retro-computing hobby, but it is really time to understand that the Amiga era is over.
Put on your body armour, helmet, 10 mags of ammo, your tac vest stuffed full of first aid supplies, a couple of frags, a smoke or two, plus your sidearm and it's ammo, and of course the PRR, your compass, and binos... and you're looking at 60-80lbs of gear on you.
You cannot just go hippty-hopping all over the map geared up like that. 200m of running, and you are TIRED.
I don't always have my camera on me, but I ALWAYS have my phone. The ability to grab a quick snapshot or video clip when something unexpected happens is priceless.
And the further ability to get that shot out on the network, before it can be censored... I've never had to rely on that, but it has done great things for other people.
And while it will never compete with a SLR bodied, pro camera, I've been pleasantly surprised by just how good a RAZR V9 can be. "Cell phone quality" need not mean "horrific".
And it works through the daysight on a TLAV 1m turret. That has proven useful.
All you do to open a V9 is kinda slip your thumb in-between the halves and snap it open, like an old-school Trek communicator. Easily done one-handed, and is an automatic muscle-memory for me now.
And hinge mechanisms can easily be engineered to last; it just takes making hinge robustness a design priority. In fact, all the mil-spec rugged phones I was looking at recently were all flips.
If you want a brick, hey, more power to you. But I want all those smartphone features in a flip.
The flip format is by far the superior design for a phone, as it allows the phone to halve it's length when not in use and simultaneously protects the screen and user controls.
As much as I'd like to buy a cool phone like an iPhone or Blackberry, the "brick" format makes it a non-starter.
Until then, I'm sticking with my RAZR V9.
(Yes, the Blackberry Pearl is a flip - my wife has one - and that's not a bad phone at all. I *might* just jump at the next gen version of that)
The other big selling point for me is battery life. Notwithstanding the decent media features on my V9, I never use it as a music player because that chews pretty heavily into the battery, and a phone's primary purpose is communications first. Maybe make a phone that has two batteries, and separates the "phone" functions from the "media" functions...
As stated elsewhere, I've been to Afghanistan - in fact, this time last year I was there, in Kandahar.
Afghan society has been smashed FLAT. It started with the Soviets, got worse during the warlord era, still worse during the Taliban era, and is now slowly starting to recover.
All the mechanisms of government - gone. No government services. No social programs of any kind. The concept of a policeman being someone you go to when you need help, instead of being a stoned agent of extortion - completely alien.
And it's been like that since 1979 or so.
Average life expectancy is 35 years. **35**.
So you're dealing with a couple of generations of Afghans for whom this way of life is completely normal. That all the wretched poverty and all the rest is how life is lived and how life has ALWAYS been lived.
The whole culture has PTSD.
Not that there weren't individual Afghans who wouldn't leap at something like OLPC. Some of them, for exactly the right reasons. Some of them because they could sell it and buy opium or hash. And the former would run a very real risk of being assaulted (or doused with acid, as happened at a girl's school when I was there) because some dirtbag thought education was unIslamic.
Solving the problem of a failed state like Afghanistan is an enormous, enormous problem with no easy or quick solution. And while I applaud the intent behind OLPC, I think it places far too much faith in both the transformative power of technology and the innate goodness of people. Afghanistan doesn't need OLPC. It needs trained Afghan teachers, regular funding for those teachers, a supply of paper and pencils, and a security situation stable enough so that kids can go to school without fear of being blown up, shot, or sprayed with acid.
Disclaimer: I've actually been to Afghanistan. Lived there for a little while, and, inshallah, will return before the mission ends. So not just idle speculation; actual experience.
The AC above has the right of it: the Afghans had their own Communist revolution. When that didn't go well, the Afghan government of the day invited the Soviets in. Of course, Russia/The USSR had interests in Afghanistan going back hundreds of years, so that decision to invade wasn't exactly pure altruism... but yes, the Soviets were invited in.
And smelling payback for Vietnam, the USA chose to fund a group of religious fanatics ("terrorists" or "freedom fighters", your pick) who then proceeded to bleed the Soviet Union dry.
Not that the Soviets have any right to be proud of their conduct either.... they did some horrific things while they were there.
Following the victory over the Soviets, the USA took their money and left, leaving the country in the hands of men who rather enjoyed killing people and who had neither the skills nor the means to effectively govern. And from that festering mess arose the events of 9/11.
Karma, as they say, is a bitch.
A full reading of recent (last 50 years) of Afghan history is enlightening. Lots of very bad men; precious few heroes.
My boss insisted we built his C5 with a flat-plane crank. It added a metric assload of cost, and the headers we built to maximize scavenging was a bag of snakes and a serious PITA to get on or off. But boy, that car sure sounded nice.
The engine configuration doesn't have much influence on performance. V vs I vs Flat is really much more about packaging than anything else.
There are some small advantages to be found in engine balance (the straight 6 has perfect balance) but these turn out to not be major factors in engine power.
The BMW M3 typically uses a straight 6. This allows the car to be made narrower - M3's are oddly narrow cars and this pays some dividends on slalom speed.
The Toyota Supra was also a straight 6, which made plumbing the twin sequential turbo system easier. Some of the Skylines have been straight 6s for similar reasons.
If you are capped at a specific displacement, you have the money, and you are willing to spend it, there is an advantage to large cylinder counts. More cylinders means less reciprocating weight per cylinder so with fixed displacement you can spin the motor faster. V10/V12 can be spun up pretty high. You can do the same thing with less cylinders, but the materials engineering gets tougher.
If you have access to turbocharging, a straight 4 works plenty well, is small, light, and easily packaged.
My own car has a narrow-angle, transverse, twin-turbo V6 whose primary advantage over my former race car's single-turbo straight 4 is an extra litre of displacement.
But at the end of the day, there really is no ideal cylinder configuration.
For the last decade or so, if you wanted to go stupid fast with a minimum cash outlay and with little driver talent required, you bought a C5 Corvette Z06.
There were cars that were faster in absolute terms (the Viper has consistently been faster than the Vette) but they cost far more and typically were nowhere near as easy to drive. In terms of dollars/performance, the Vette was the clear winner over cars like the 911, the Viper, and various Italian jobbies.
And speaking as someone who literally disassembled C5s down to bare structure and built them back up again, the C5 was an amazing car. Almost everything was done right, and the places where GM had made compromises for street driving were easily convertible to race-spec parts (like replacing the rubber bushings in the control arms with spherical bearings)
There's lots of places where one can safely throw rocks at GM. The Corvette isn't one of them.
As you spin the motor faster, the physical time available to fill the cylinder and light it off gets shorter and shorter.
And at high loads, you need larger amounts of fuel as well. So at high engine speeds and high power outputs, you need to cram in a whole lot of fuel and air and you don't have much time to do it.
Not a problem with a gas motor, because the ignition event is a spark and all the fuel/air mixing is done upstream of the cylinder.
For a diesel though, ignition is through air compression and the ignition event is triggered by the injection of fuel into the superheated combustion chamber.
Because the mixture fires as soon as you start the injection event, high motor speeds require VERY fast injection times. This translates into very high injection pressures.
Until recently, there were practical limits on how high this injection pressure could be - which in turn limited max engine RPM to around 3500 RPM.
Big trucks can get around this by running multi-gear transmissions. If you have 18+ gears, it doesn't matter if your rev range is 2000 RPM. It may take 3 shifts to cross an intersection, but that's not a big deal. Plus you can fine-tune road speed to the efficiency peak in the rev range and save fuel.
But in an automotive environment, you get somewhere between 4 and 6 transmission gears. Depending on the torque curve of the engine and the number and spacing of the gears, something is going to have to give somewhere, and a low-power, inexpensive car is going to use narrowly-spaced gears and less of them. I had an '88 Jetta naturally aspirated diesel (4 cyl, 4 speed) that had a top speed of 110 km/h in a dead fall.
If you turbocharge and spend more money, you can spread the gear ratios out and have more of them, and that helps a lot. My 2002 Dodge Cummins turbo-diesel (500 ft/lbs of torque) has 6 speeds, and tops out at about 125 km/h. It would be even faster, but I specified a low rear gear for towing purposes.
But here's the thing - that motor was a $10,000 option. That truck was $70k brand new, where the gassers were much cheaper.
Here's the thing though - what is going on is not just mudslinging by industries who make money based on incidental carbon dioxide production. Yes, there is some of that going on. But there appears to be equal amounts of mudslinging going on by the "climate doom-mongers".
And the most common mud payload is the claim that anybody who is skeptical of the climate change predictions must be in the employ of the "carbon industries".
There really is a very strong air of religion going on here. Those that claim incipient and irreversible climate change (with disastrous results) based on human CO2 production appear to do so out of adherence to dogma more so than on any sort of hard science.
There's a chain of facts that need to be established:
1. Is the climate changing?
2. Given a preponderance of evidence for past climate changes (little ice age in the middle ages, etc) if #1 is true, is the scale within the bounds of past, natural climate changes?
3. If #2 is true (meaning, change out of bounds of past climate change events) what is the mechanism?
4. Once the mechanism has been identified, is the cause man-made or natural?
5. Independent of the source of the mechanism, is the actual change really all that bad? (I have seen evidence, for example, that elevated CO2 levels could result in improved plant performance - plants breah CO2 after all - and the increased temperate zones (due to a warmer planet) would increase the amount of arable land. Meaning that global warming due to heightened C02 levels could well increase the food production capacity of the planet.)
There is significant uncertainty in all of these areas. And based on all that uncertainty, it is impossible to draw hard conclusions about which way this plays out.
OK, I expect the "pro carbon" people (if we want to lump them with the "pro tobacco" people which I think is very much unfair) to leap to conclusions about their position being benign or possibly even beneficial. There is money involved after all and money is a reality distorter. But I have much higher standards for the "anti carbon" people - and yet they are just as willing to lie and cheat to prove their point as the "pro" people (assuming of course that the "pro" guys are in fact lying and cheating)
There's a real problem here.
Lemme put it this way - when I watch "Thank You for Smoking" there is never any doubt that smoking is bad for one's health, and when they show example of pro-smoking propaganda I can't help but wonder how anybody would ever fall for it, as it is such blatant bullshit.
But when I watch "An Inconvenient Truth" the same bullshit detector that triggers when I see the pro-smoking stuff, triggers. Facts are clearly being managed and distorted to arrive at a forgone conclusion. That's wrong.
And here's the real irony - all that uncertainty about the facts means that the "anti carbon" people could very well be RIGHT - that razor cuts both ways. But all the extraordinary claims being made without the extraordinary evidence to back it up hurts their case.
I am unquestionably a climate change/global warming skeptic. But not because my lifestyle depends on carbon-generating activities or because I am a pawn of the industrial complex. I am a skeptic because the "ant-carbon" people are making outrageous predictions based on incomplete data and knowingly flawed models, and combat argument with PSYOPS techniques, not hard science.
Notwithstanding the somewhat strident tone, the gentleman you are rebutting has the central point of it.
For reasons I don't claim to understand, "climatology" has become rampantly politicized. There is a strong aura - as the whole "climategate" scandal drags into the light - that those doing climate research are no longer doing real science. Instead, the books are being cooked to support a particular result and along with it, a particular political agenda.
And when perfectly legitimate questions are posed, by perfectly reasonable people, the answer tends not to be scientific debate, but rather arguments from authority, personal attacks, handwaving, etc.
Something is very much rotten in the state of Climatology. It is very difficult to trust any claims made by anyone when the waters are so murky and foul.
OK, so if you have a collision, you have kinetic energy that WILL be dissipated. It's is going to go somewhere; it cannot just be swept under the rug.
If you make the car 100% rigid and ensure that the driver is tightly secured - as some NASCAR feeder series cars were in the late 80s and early 90s - then that energy is fed into the occupants. Subject them to 50Gs and you start ripping hearts loose in chest cavities and inducing massive concussions as the front of the skull decelerates the brain. This is suboptimal for survival.
So the car's structure has to be designed to dissipate that energy to a survivable level. Plus street cars don't have the luxury of securing the occupants as tightly as race cars (and putting them in helmets and HANS devices) so secondary impacts within the cabin are a real concern.
A properly-engineered crumple zone not only dissipates the energy of the crash, it crushes the structure in such a way that nothing intrudes into the passenger compartment, that doors remain closed, but yet the door frames remain mostly intact so the doors can be opened more-or-less easily post impact. Granny in the back seat isn't going to be crushed by a flying engine block that winds up in her lap, and little Jimmy isn't going to bleed to death while the EMS crew watches because it takes a hydraulic ram to wrench the door open to get at him.
The crash engineering really is amazing. It is incredible just how well the structures are tuned to maximize occupant survivability.
And pedestrian survivability as well. Almost a third of "Unsafe at Any Speed" (credit the devil, Nader wrote a groundbreaking book) was dedicated to discussing vehicle-vs-pedestrian impacts, and how decorative designs like the "missiles" on the hoods and bumpers of the cars at the time were inflicting horrible wounds on people struck by them. While being hit by a car is always going to be a serious, traumatic event, you are much better off being struck by a modern car than by a "classic".
In every measurable way, modern cars are so much better than cars of just 20 years ago that it is utterly amazing - and cars 50 years ago are, in comparison, steam locomotives.
Notwithstanding the extra weight of the iron-block, iron-head inline 6, the Malibu's motor is still a substantial chunk of metal that can be considered essentially solid. You certainly aren't going to force the I6 motor THROUGH it.
What you will do is load up the engine mounts - which are much, much stronger on the Malibu, and designed to crumple in such a way that the passenger cabin is minimally infringed.
A more likely case in a 100% head-on collision is the Bel-Air's engine coming to rest in the Bel-Air's back seat, having been forced through the cabin by the Malibu.
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I think you've got the cart before the horse here.
Pure scientific research is all about finding out why X does Y. You may have some sort of goal in mind (for example, curing cancer, developing stronger steels so you can build taller buildings or whatever) but the research angle is about answering specific questions.
As research builds a knowledge base, you can then turn over the findings to engineers who then find practical applications for them.
There's no reason why this can't be a feedback loop with engineers posing the questions in the first place, but that doesn't have to be the prime mover. Many, many big deal discoveries are the direct result of serendipity or someone walking an untrodden path out of pure curiosity.
And the converse is also true - much pure science may well prove to have no real practical application at all, or the practical aplication may not arrive until a series of other discoveries are made some time in the future, and some enterprising engineer puts the combination together.
The short-term view for scientists should be that of making sure they are actually doing science. If a scientist says he wants to answer why X does Y, then it is entirely appropriate for the administrators of his funding to want to see a plan for how he intends to solve that problem and get regular status updates on how the plan is going. It is also entirely appropriate to have rigor and procedure evaluated and assessed.
I'd even suggest that failure to answer the question is not really a problem, as long as the plan was properly executed. Negative results have value too, so long as the science leading up to the negative is sufficiently rigorous and the results published.
But to require that the question be answered conclusively before a certain date, or that the answer to a question have a commercial application, is to very much situate the estimate.
That phrase "situate the estimate" is a specific one, by the way. When you get to large military formations (brigades, divisions, and the like) the size of the formation and the complexity of planning its operations becomes too large for a single person to manage. Accordingly, formation commanders have staffs who work out plans for them. The commander presents his staff with the effects he wants to achieve and any constraints/restraints upon those effects, and the staff goes out and researches the problem. At the end of this process, they present the commander with a choice between plans, and he picks the one he wants (or sends them back to try again).
The research portion of that process is called "the estimate" and the cardinal sin of preparing an estimate is to presuppose a specific course of action and cooking the research to fit that COA. That is called "situating the estimate" and is very, very bad, as time and battle has proven that it usually leads to pain and loss.
I would argue that what you want is to situate the estimate. That doesn't work. Hold them to a work ethic, yes. Demand work be done rigorously and efficiently as possible, yes. Require that interim results be published frequently, yes. But otherwise, let them go out and answer whatever question tickles their curiosity. You'll get your commercial applications in the end, from your engineers.
DG
Personally, I blame the MBA. As in the "Masters of Business Administration" degree.
The MBA programmes at all North American universities promote this short of short-term, quarter-by-quarter, stock price driven corporate culture. As the MBA increasingly became the price of entry to more lucrative salaries and promotion within an enterprise, that culture became all-pervasive, to the point where it is now the water in which the fish swim.
And along the way, the MBA-trained manager class forgot the hard-learned lessons of their founding fathers - like long-term planning, maintainence of corporate morale, and taking care of employees.
My career arc went military (I was a product of a military college) -> civvi -> military. The military is hardly a perfect institution, but one thing it really gets right is teaching leadership. Actual *leadership*, not just management.
One of the key tenets of leadership is that quality personnel who are properly motivated can overcome shortfalls in pretty much everything else. Crappy materials, shitty situation, odds stacked against you - well led troops can overcome these things and manufacture success.
And so there are a number of principles that go along with providing this kind of leadership: Lead by example. Ask your subordinates to do nothing you wouldn't do (or haven't done). Loyalty up starts with loyalty down. Respect is earned, not demanded. Always tell the truth, no matter how unpalatable it might be. If you have to correct someone (or you yourself are corrected) fix the problem and move on with no grudges. Provide subordinates with clear direction, including the mission to be accomplished and your intent, and then trust them to carry it out. Etc.
Yes, even in the military it is rare for all of these to gel in the same unit, and I can name commanders who I worked for/with who were deficient in one or more of these areas. But even the worst of them (and some could be pretty bad) were still better leaders and ultimately more effective than any MBA-trained manager I ever worked with as a civilian.
Having worked in a variety of civvie companies, ranging from small startups to major corporations (and most of my civvie experience was with US corporations) I've never seen so many people so completely oblivious to the effects of their decisions upon morale and the overall health and well being of their workforce. Decisions were routinely made with no consideration of second or third order effects. Corporate loyalty simply did not exist, with the employees in the trenches convinced (quite rightly) that management was out to screw them as hard as they could - and so it was OK then to screw the company as hard as they could.
And most frustratingly, any attempt to draw attention to problems in an attempt to get them rectified was usually perceived as an attack on the person who came up with the policy, not the policy itself. It was nearly impossible to pass ground truth up the chain because the bearer of bad news was treated as "difficult" and quite often punished or even terminated.
I wonder sometimes if the success of the "greatest generation" who fought in WW2 isn't because so many key people were exposed to military-style leadership and that sense of everybody in an enterprise pulling towards a common goal, and then that carrying on through the rest of their lives. Now, we get the short-sighted, numbers-focussed "leadership" of the MBA and the resulting destruction and misery.
I went back to the Army in large part because I couldn't take it any more. Even a bad day in the Army usually trumped a good day as a corporate wage slave.
DG
Indeed.
Sometimes there is a very good reason for including clever, non-intuitive code in a project. But that clever code needs to be very well documented because the next guy to touch it may not be that clever.
When in doubt, optimize code for future maintainability and legibility. Hardware gets faster. Programmers don't.
DG
You'd think... but that's not what I've found. Instead, I find I treat individual devices more like tools - pull the appropriate tool off the shelf for the task at hand.
And I've managed to find a little storage bag that will happily swallow all my devices and their power adapters for traveling. A "tool bag" if you will.
DG
The problem with convergence is that the more functionality you put into a given device, the more load you put on that device's battery.
No single device - yet - has the ability to power all the various sub-tasks that we use these devices for and still maintain an acceptable level of readiness.
My Palm Lifedrive (which was really ahead of its time) made a great ebook reader, GPS (using a bluetooth GPS receiver) PDA, music and audiobook listener, and a passable video device, gaming platform, and web browser. But all those functions drew on the same battery. And some of those functions (GPS and internet access) require radios to be active (Bluetooth and WiFi) and so they hammer the battery even harder than self-contained apps.
When it is out of charge, you're dead in the water for all those functions.
So now, I have an iPod for audio/visual. I have a Kindle for ebooks. I have an eeePC 901 for internet, general purpose computing, and gaming. I have a Garmin 765 for vehicle navigation and audiobooks. I have a PSP-Go for gaming (xmas present) And I have a phone for communications and emergency web access.
Yes, that is a hell of a lot more devices to manage, and there is a nontrivial amount of mass in power adapters. In some ways, this is a step backwards. But by spreading tasks amongst devices, I ensure that I always have enough battery charge to do whatever task it is I want, when I want it. Or put another way, because I spread the power consumption amongst several devices, the likelihood of .any given device being charged up enough to carry out the intended task for the duration I want is very high.
Another factor (which is related) is that device specialization means the device can be better tuned for the task at hand, and storage requirements aren't a zero-sum. I can have a lot of music and video in my iPod (it's a 160Gb) I can have a lot of books. I can have fully detailed maps of the world and a bunch of audiobooks. I can have lots of games. And I can have a workable keyboard! All this without having to rob Peter to pay Paul in a single device.
Eventually, this will all get worked out. The iPhone unquestionably trumps my LifeDrive as a convergence device. I fully expect the 5th or 6th gen iPhone will have sufficient storage space and mature applications to fully take over the media, ebook, and quite possibly gaming functions, as well as be a serviceable personal GPS. But it will also have to be able to power these functions for at least 24 hours of use without recharging before it can fully replace all the other devices, and I don't think it will ever replace the general computing function of the netbook.
DG
I personally owned 4 different Amigas - including installing Linux on an A3000. For a little while, I sold them. I belonged to CATS. I posted on comp.sys.amiga before the Big Split to all the subgroups. I jousted with -MB- and laughed my ass off at BLAZEMONGER! I even maintained the Amiga Netrek port for a year or so (not that I accomplished much with it)
I own an original copy of the Deathbed Vigil.
The Amiga is DEAD. Yes, there are still Amigas functioning and a tiny core of hobbyists who still get joy out of tinkering with them - and good on ya. But as a relevant component of modern computing... not a chance.
Seriously. Move on. Enjoy your retro-computing hobby, but it is really time to understand that the Amiga era is over.
DG
Put on your body armour, helmet, 10 mags of ammo, your tac vest stuffed full of first aid supplies, a couple of frags, a smoke or two, plus your sidearm and it's ammo, and of course the PRR, your compass, and binos... and you're looking at 60-80lbs of gear on you.
You cannot just go hippty-hopping all over the map geared up like that. 200m of running, and you are TIRED.
Man am I glad to be Armoured.
DG
Canadian Army: two deep breaths, exhale half a breath, hold breath, shoot.
DG
...is not quality, but immediacy.
I don't always have my camera on me, but I ALWAYS have my phone. The ability to grab a quick snapshot or video clip when something unexpected happens is priceless.
And the further ability to get that shot out on the network, before it can be censored... I've never had to rely on that, but it has done great things for other people.
And while it will never compete with a SLR bodied, pro camera, I've been pleasantly surprised by just how good a RAZR V9 can be. "Cell phone quality" need not mean "horrific".
And it works through the daysight on a TLAV 1m turret. That has proven useful.
DG
Both hands to open? Seriously?
All you do to open a V9 is kinda slip your thumb in-between the halves and snap it open, like an old-school Trek communicator. Easily done one-handed, and is an automatic muscle-memory for me now.
And hinge mechanisms can easily be engineered to last; it just takes making hinge robustness a design priority. In fact, all the mil-spec rugged phones I was looking at recently were all flips.
If you want a brick, hey, more power to you. But I want all those smartphone features in a flip.
DG
Hey, mobile phone hardware designer types:
The flip format is by far the superior design for a phone, as it allows the phone to halve it's length when not in use and simultaneously protects the screen and user controls.
As much as I'd like to buy a cool phone like an iPhone or Blackberry, the "brick" format makes it a non-starter.
Until then, I'm sticking with my RAZR V9.
(Yes, the Blackberry Pearl is a flip - my wife has one - and that's not a bad phone at all. I *might* just jump at the next gen version of that)
The other big selling point for me is battery life. Notwithstanding the decent media features on my V9, I never use it as a music player because that chews pretty heavily into the battery, and a phone's primary purpose is communications first. Maybe make a phone that has two batteries, and separates the "phone" functions from the "media" functions...
DG
As stated elsewhere, I've been to Afghanistan - in fact, this time last year I was there, in Kandahar.
Afghan society has been smashed FLAT. It started with the Soviets, got worse during the warlord era, still worse during the Taliban era, and is now slowly starting to recover.
All the mechanisms of government - gone. No government services. No social programs of any kind. The concept of a policeman being someone you go to when you need help, instead of being a stoned agent of extortion - completely alien.
And it's been like that since 1979 or so.
Average life expectancy is 35 years. **35**.
So you're dealing with a couple of generations of Afghans for whom this way of life is completely normal. That all the wretched poverty and all the rest is how life is lived and how life has ALWAYS been lived.
The whole culture has PTSD.
Not that there weren't individual Afghans who wouldn't leap at something like OLPC. Some of them, for exactly the right reasons. Some of them because they could sell it and buy opium or hash. And the former would run a very real risk of being assaulted (or doused with acid, as happened at a girl's school when I was there) because some dirtbag thought education was unIslamic.
Solving the problem of a failed state like Afghanistan is an enormous, enormous problem with no easy or quick solution. And while I applaud the intent behind OLPC, I think it places far too much faith in both the transformative power of technology and the innate goodness of people. Afghanistan doesn't need OLPC. It needs trained Afghan teachers, regular funding for those teachers, a supply of paper and pencils, and a security situation stable enough so that kids can go to school without fear of being blown up, shot, or sprayed with acid.
DG
Disclaimer: I've actually been to Afghanistan. Lived there for a little while, and, inshallah, will return before the mission ends. So not just idle speculation; actual experience.
The AC above has the right of it: the Afghans had their own Communist revolution. When that didn't go well, the Afghan government of the day invited the Soviets in. Of course, Russia/The USSR had interests in Afghanistan going back hundreds of years, so that decision to invade wasn't exactly pure altruism... but yes, the Soviets were invited in.
And smelling payback for Vietnam, the USA chose to fund a group of religious fanatics ("terrorists" or "freedom fighters", your pick) who then proceeded to bleed the Soviet Union dry.
Not that the Soviets have any right to be proud of their conduct either.... they did some horrific things while they were there.
Following the victory over the Soviets, the USA took their money and left, leaving the country in the hands of men who rather enjoyed killing people and who had neither the skills nor the means to effectively govern. And from that festering mess arose the events of 9/11.
Karma, as they say, is a bitch.
A full reading of recent (last 50 years) of Afghan history is enlightening. Lots of very bad men; precious few heroes.
DG
My 2002 Dodge 2500 with the HO Cummins Turbo diesel is on ~220,000 km right now. It makes ~16 MPG towing a trailer, and about 21 MPG empty.
It also cost $70k CAN in 2002.
DG
Trivia point - those Porsche counter-balance shafts in the 944 were actually designed by Mitsubishi and licensed to Porsche.
Every 4G63 motor (Eagle Talon / Mitsubishi Eclipse / Mitsubishi EVO) has the same setup.
DG
You're right about the sound of a flat-plane V8.
My boss insisted we built his C5 with a flat-plane crank. It added a metric assload of cost, and the headers we built to maximize scavenging was a bag of snakes and a serious PITA to get on or off. But boy, that car sure sounded nice.
DG
The engine configuration doesn't have much influence on performance. V vs I vs Flat is really much more about packaging than anything else.
There are some small advantages to be found in engine balance (the straight 6 has perfect balance) but these turn out to not be major factors in engine power.
The BMW M3 typically uses a straight 6. This allows the car to be made narrower - M3's are oddly narrow cars and this pays some dividends on slalom speed.
The Toyota Supra was also a straight 6, which made plumbing the twin sequential turbo system easier. Some of the Skylines have been straight 6s for similar reasons.
If you are capped at a specific displacement, you have the money, and you are willing to spend it, there is an advantage to large cylinder counts. More cylinders means less reciprocating weight per cylinder so with fixed displacement you can spin the motor faster. V10/V12 can be spun up pretty high. You can do the same thing with less cylinders, but the materials engineering gets tougher.
If you have access to turbocharging, a straight 4 works plenty well, is small, light, and easily packaged.
My own car has a narrow-angle, transverse, twin-turbo V6 whose primary advantage over my former race car's single-turbo straight 4 is an extra litre of displacement.
But at the end of the day, there really is no ideal cylinder configuration.
DG
For the last decade or so, if you wanted to go stupid fast with a minimum cash outlay and with little driver talent required, you bought a C5 Corvette Z06.
There were cars that were faster in absolute terms (the Viper has consistently been faster than the Vette) but they cost far more and typically were nowhere near as easy to drive. In terms of dollars/performance, the Vette was the clear winner over cars like the 911, the Viper, and various Italian jobbies.
And speaking as someone who literally disassembled C5s down to bare structure and built them back up again, the C5 was an amazing car. Almost everything was done right, and the places where GM had made compromises for street driving were easily convertible to race-spec parts (like replacing the rubber bushings in the control arms with spherical bearings)
There's lots of places where one can safely throw rocks at GM. The Corvette isn't one of them.
DG
As you spin the motor faster, the physical time available to fill the cylinder and light it off gets shorter and shorter.
And at high loads, you need larger amounts of fuel as well. So at high engine speeds and high power outputs, you need to cram in a whole lot of fuel and air and you don't have much time to do it.
Not a problem with a gas motor, because the ignition event is a spark and all the fuel/air mixing is done upstream of the cylinder.
For a diesel though, ignition is through air compression and the ignition event is triggered by the injection of fuel into the superheated combustion chamber.
Because the mixture fires as soon as you start the injection event, high motor speeds require VERY fast injection times. This translates into very high injection pressures.
Until recently, there were practical limits on how high this injection pressure could be - which in turn limited max engine RPM to around 3500 RPM.
Big trucks can get around this by running multi-gear transmissions. If you have 18+ gears, it doesn't matter if your rev range is 2000 RPM. It may take 3 shifts to cross an intersection, but that's not a big deal. Plus you can fine-tune road speed to the efficiency peak in the rev range and save fuel.
But in an automotive environment, you get somewhere between 4 and 6 transmission gears. Depending on the torque curve of the engine and the number and spacing of the gears, something is going to have to give somewhere, and a low-power, inexpensive car is going to use narrowly-spaced gears and less of them. I had an '88 Jetta naturally aspirated diesel (4 cyl, 4 speed) that had a top speed of 110 km/h in a dead fall.
If you turbocharge and spend more money, you can spread the gear ratios out and have more of them, and that helps a lot. My 2002 Dodge Cummins turbo-diesel (500 ft/lbs of torque) has 6 speeds, and tops out at about 125 km/h. It would be even faster, but I specified a low rear gear for towing purposes.
But here's the thing - that motor was a $10,000 option. That truck was $70k brand new, where the gassers were much cheaper.
DG
I AM IN UR BASE, STEALIN UR COCONUTS!
DG
(Grr, Slashcode, LOL references have to be ALL CAPS!)
I put the lime in the coconut, drank 'em both up - and all I got was a flipper ache.
I had to call my doctor; wake him up.
See?
DG
Here's the thing though - what is going on is not just mudslinging by industries who make money based on incidental carbon dioxide production. Yes, there is some of that going on. But there appears to be equal amounts of mudslinging going on by the "climate doom-mongers".
And the most common mud payload is the claim that anybody who is skeptical of the climate change predictions must be in the employ of the "carbon industries".
There really is a very strong air of religion going on here. Those that claim incipient and irreversible climate change (with disastrous results) based on human CO2 production appear to do so out of adherence to dogma more so than on any sort of hard science.
There's a chain of facts that need to be established:
1. Is the climate changing?
2. Given a preponderance of evidence for past climate changes (little ice age in the middle ages, etc) if #1 is true, is the scale within the bounds of past, natural climate changes?
3. If #2 is true (meaning, change out of bounds of past climate change events) what is the mechanism?
4. Once the mechanism has been identified, is the cause man-made or natural?
5. Independent of the source of the mechanism, is the actual change really all that bad? (I have seen evidence, for example, that elevated CO2 levels could result in improved plant performance - plants breah CO2 after all - and the increased temperate zones (due to a warmer planet) would increase the amount of arable land. Meaning that global warming due to heightened C02 levels could well increase the food production capacity of the planet.)
There is significant uncertainty in all of these areas. And based on all that uncertainty, it is impossible to draw hard conclusions about which way this plays out.
OK, I expect the "pro carbon" people (if we want to lump them with the "pro tobacco" people which I think is very much unfair) to leap to conclusions about their position being benign or possibly even beneficial. There is money involved after all and money is a reality distorter. But I have much higher standards for the "anti carbon" people - and yet they are just as willing to lie and cheat to prove their point as the "pro" people (assuming of course that the "pro" guys are in fact lying and cheating)
There's a real problem here.
Lemme put it this way - when I watch "Thank You for Smoking" there is never any doubt that smoking is bad for one's health, and when they show example of pro-smoking propaganda I can't help but wonder how anybody would ever fall for it, as it is such blatant bullshit.
But when I watch "An Inconvenient Truth" the same bullshit detector that triggers when I see the pro-smoking stuff, triggers. Facts are clearly being managed and distorted to arrive at a forgone conclusion. That's wrong.
And here's the real irony - all that uncertainty about the facts means that the "anti carbon" people could very well be RIGHT - that razor cuts both ways. But all the extraordinary claims being made without the extraordinary evidence to back it up hurts their case.
I am unquestionably a climate change/global warming skeptic. But not because my lifestyle depends on carbon-generating activities or because I am a pawn of the industrial complex. I am a skeptic because the "ant-carbon" people are making outrageous predictions based on incomplete data and knowingly flawed models, and combat argument with PSYOPS techniques, not hard science.
DG
Notwithstanding the somewhat strident tone, the gentleman you are rebutting has the central point of it.
For reasons I don't claim to understand, "climatology" has become rampantly politicized. There is a strong aura - as the whole "climategate" scandal drags into the light - that those doing climate research are no longer doing real science. Instead, the books are being cooked to support a particular result and along with it, a particular political agenda.
And when perfectly legitimate questions are posed, by perfectly reasonable people, the answer tends not to be scientific debate, but rather arguments from authority, personal attacks, handwaving, etc.
Something is very much rotten in the state of Climatology. It is very difficult to trust any claims made by anyone when the waters are so murky and foul.
DG
OK, so if you have a collision, you have kinetic energy that WILL be dissipated. It's is going to go somewhere; it cannot just be swept under the rug.
If you make the car 100% rigid and ensure that the driver is tightly secured - as some NASCAR feeder series cars were in the late 80s and early 90s - then that energy is fed into the occupants. Subject them to 50Gs and you start ripping hearts loose in chest cavities and inducing massive concussions as the front of the skull decelerates the brain. This is suboptimal for survival.
So the car's structure has to be designed to dissipate that energy to a survivable level. Plus street cars don't have the luxury of securing the occupants as tightly as race cars (and putting them in helmets and HANS devices) so secondary impacts within the cabin are a real concern.
A properly-engineered crumple zone not only dissipates the energy of the crash, it crushes the structure in such a way that nothing intrudes into the passenger compartment, that doors remain closed, but yet the door frames remain mostly intact so the doors can be opened more-or-less easily post impact. Granny in the back seat isn't going to be crushed by a flying engine block that winds up in her lap, and little Jimmy isn't going to bleed to death while the EMS crew watches because it takes a hydraulic ram to wrench the door open to get at him.
The crash engineering really is amazing. It is incredible just how well the structures are tuned to maximize occupant survivability.
And pedestrian survivability as well. Almost a third of "Unsafe at Any Speed" (credit the devil, Nader wrote a groundbreaking book) was dedicated to discussing vehicle-vs-pedestrian impacts, and how decorative designs like the "missiles" on the hoods and bumpers of the cars at the time were inflicting horrible wounds on people struck by them. While being hit by a car is always going to be a serious, traumatic event, you are much better off being struck by a modern car than by a "classic".
In every measurable way, modern cars are so much better than cars of just 20 years ago that it is utterly amazing - and cars 50 years ago are, in comparison, steam locomotives.
DG
Actually, no, it wouldn't.
Notwithstanding the extra weight of the iron-block, iron-head inline 6, the Malibu's motor is still a substantial chunk of metal that can be considered essentially solid. You certainly aren't going to force the I6 motor THROUGH it.
What you will do is load up the engine mounts - which are much, much stronger on the Malibu, and designed to crumple in such a way that the passenger cabin is minimally infringed.
A more likely case in a 100% head-on collision is the Bel-Air's engine coming to rest in the Bel-Air's back seat, having been forced through the cabin by the Malibu.
DG