The social network has fulfilled any need I have to communicate or share my thoughts and feelings with friends, so I’m not going to try to maintain two different communication channels for the same purpose. The main purpose of this website is to just show people things I’m working on. It’s sort of an interactive resume. As such, I’ll be making changes to this site to allow it to better perform in that role. It’s likely this just means finding a portfolio-type WordPress theme, and hiding some of the posts that aren’t really focused on a specific project.

I guess the ironic thing about this post is that I’m doing exactly what I say I won’t be doing with this website. Go figure. Changes shall be made in a sparse and uncommitted fashion as these internet side-project things typically go. :)

Note: Click on the slideshow to go to the Picasa album and view it in Fullscreen mode.

At first it’s interesting to witness something you wouldn’t expect to exist in a first world nation. I’m sure other cities experienced a decline with the downfall of manufacturing and the US automotive industry. But, the scale of the decline, I would guess, is unique to Detroit. I began my day by eagerly taking pictures of the dilapidated properties. Somewhere along the way, the realization that I could spend a whole day taking pictures and not run out of houses hit me, and my intrigue turned to despair. I saw the forest instead of the trees. These kinds of neighborhoods go on for miles. The extent of the decay is so widespread, so entrenched, it seems there isn’t a chance of revival without a massive coordinated community effort. In lacking a community, that chance is pretty close to zero. The only way for these areas to come back is for them to be completely torn down and rebuilt.

I started feeling hungry, so I headed out of the severely decayed areas. I had to drive a little ways out to reach operating businesses. I pulled into a dirty pizza shop. The owner was sleeping behind the counter. It was the first pizza place I’ve seen with bullet proof glass. I made enough noise by scuffing my shoes on the dusty floor to wake him up.  Startled, he jumped up to the counter, “Oh! Hey man, how you doin’ today?” He was some kind of middle eastern. Bald except for the horseshoe of dark hair around the sides of his head. He was very obviously far-sighted as his glasses magnified his eyes.

“Good, good.” I looked at my watch. “Got anything ready to go? Anything warm?”

“Yeah man. I’ve got some slices.”

“Of what?” I replied.

“Pepperoni” he said as he grabbed a pizza box from a counter and angled the open box at me so I could see. Only half the pizza was left.

“I’ll take two,” I said.

“I’ll warm ‘em up a bit for ya,” he said. He snapped off a few pieces of aluminum foil from a roll he had laying on the counter, wrapped the slices in them, and then put them in a big toaster oven. “Ya know, I was wonderin’ if I should even come to work today.”

“Well, I made it all worth it with those two slices, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I’m not from around here,” I admitted,  ”all the houses are burned down or borded up. What happened?”

“Mayor screwed it all up. Believe it or not, it used to be worse. New mayor ain’t so bad. He’s tryin’.”

I nodded my head in a state of uninformed agreement as another customer walked in. In order to avoid discussing anything controversial, I paid for the slices, and noticing there was no place to actually eat in the shop, I proceeded to eat my greasy tinfoil-wrapped pizza in my rental car.

I’m not sure how to feel about what I experienced in Detroit. It’s heartbreaking to see neighborhoods (or the remains of) in the condition they’re in. It’s an expanse of house graveyards and mini-landfills. It felt like watching a wild animal with a broken leg. You know it’s going to die one way or another, and you wish someone would just put it out of it’s suffering.

“I’m waiting.” reads the graffiti tagged on one of the houses.

Check it out!

Who’s with me on this?

I think most people will agree that Deepwater Horizon is a tragedy and an environmental disaster. Not only did eleven rig workers lose their lives, the environment in the gulf has been severely impacted in a negative way, and will be for a substantial amount of time to come. The multi-billion dollar fishing industry in the gulf has been crushed, and as of this moment in time, oil is still leaking. The American people — and to some extent the rest of the world — are growing pretty restless about this and I think a lot of people want someone to blame.

There is a common train of thought about this that bothers me. I see it a lot in casual discussion, forums, Facebook, etc. and other places where serious objective thinking sometimes takes a backseat to emotional venting. It more or less goes something like this: “BP is a big evil corporation because they make a lot of money! They don’t even care about the environment, they want oil to spill! That’s why they haven’t stopped it yet!”

Rest assured, I can almost guarantee that not a single soul at BP or Transocean actually wants oil to spill. It’s true that corporations exist primarily to create value from which they can profit, but I sincerely doubt anyone plainly doesn’t care if oil is spilled. I think it’s reasonable to assume that some key people in a company got so caught-up in increasing profits, they cut corners, and an accident happened. An accident that has cost BP at least twenty billion in an escrow fund to mitigate and reverse environmental and economical damages to the gulf, and cost around half of the company’s market capitalization. This amounts to the order of $120 billion. That’s a lot of cash, so it makes sense that the shareholders, and employees of BP don’t like it happening. Not to mention the PR disaster this leaves for the company.

Another thing people tend to disregard is how difficult it is to actually do work at such extreme depths. OurAmazingPlanet has a great infographic to put things into perspective. For those too lazy to click: it’s really deep. It’s also really cold, there is minimal light, and sub-sea currents are constantly jostling everything around. Delicate work has to be done with remote underwater robots, and trying to hoist or lower any kind of payload, such as a containment cap, is pretty difficult to do when you’re a crane operator literally a mile away. It takes immense amounts of engineering effort to coordinate an operation like that.

To the people who are saying “I don’t get why Obama doesn’t just fix it!” Well, Obama certainly doesn’t know much about oil extraction and deep-water operations. It’s not like he can just throw on some SCUBA gear and plug the hole with a big rubber stopper. If anyone is most qualified to create a plan to stop the leak, it will be someone who is familiar with the environmental conditions at those depths, and with deep-water oil extraction. Likely a BP engineer. See above for why this is difficult.

On a similar note, BP CEO, Tony Hayward isn’t going to single handedly stop the leak either. And unlike others, I don’t think Tony Hayward should be fired. In fact I think he should actually receive a healthy bonus for the work he’s put in. The guy is working around the clock trying to keep things under control, this is a PR disaster for BP, and Mr. Hayward is getting the blame even though it’s clear he wasn’t even a part of the decision-making process involving the blowout preventer. I’d wager that right now he’s working harder than any previous BP CEO has before him. Contrary to what a lot of people would like to believe, Mr. Hayward was likely never presented with a situation like the following:

Engineer: “Mr. Hayward, we think there might be a problem with the blowout preventer, should we just ignore it and try to suck more oil outta’ the well?”

TH: “As the Americans say, ‘Drill Baby Drill!’”

Those are more or less the main points I wanted to touch on. As a closure to this post, I made a Google SearchStories video (Brilliant marketing from Google, by the way). It’s not my intent to undermine or downplay the seriousness of the situation, but it’s also important in life to be able to just take a step back and shake our heads and laugh at the situation, as difficult as it may be.

There is a lot of money to be made in Oil. It’s funny (maybe). Enjoy:

Man, oh man I have been busy. I started my own electronics design company!

Check it out: www.volcanoproductdesign.com

Be one of the first ten to comment this post and they’re yours!

The most annoying nuisance of the system is, by far, wire gauges. For example: A big wire is, say, .5 AWG (american wire gauge) whereas a small wire is maybe 36 AWG. Does it seem completely ridiculous to anyone else that thicker wires have smaller numbers? Yes? good. Now lets say I want to go REALLY big. Like, you know, bigger than zero… guess what bigger than 0 is. Nope, wrong. It’s 00. Going bigger than 00 is 000, then 0000 (see where this madness is going?). To make things easier, you write 00 as 2/0,  000 as 3/0, etc. and pronounce these as “two aught”, “three aught”, etc. After 4/0 it switches completely to a different system. Yeah. You heard me.

From Wikipedia: (shut up, it’s a valid source)

In the North American electrical industry, conductors larger than 4/0 AWG are generally identified by the area in thousands of circular mils (kcmil), where 1 kcmil = 0.5067 mm². A circular mil is the area of a wire one mil in diameter. One million circular mils is the area of a cylinder with 1000 mil = 1 inch diameter. An older abbreviation for one thousand circular mils is MCM.

Well, gosh.

Wait. Lets say I need a very specific diameter of wire. If I’m a brilliant American, I’d just go to my handy equation for AWG using diameter…

Simple!

.. wait.. what? Log base 92. Are you kidding me? Who the hell thought this crap up? Someone had better have lost their job over this.

However, If I go to the magical land of Metric, I’m sure they have a similar system… I mean.. it doesn’t get much more simple than AWG. There really can’t be that much room for improvement. Logarithms just seem so…. intuitive..

The Metric System

In metric-land, the gauge of wire is just given in cross sectional area (mm²). You know, so you could say things like “I need a 1 mm² wire”. Wow! simple! You could even use an equation you learned how to do in grade school, A = πr², to figure out this humdinger.

So what’s the catch? You have to be a terrorist, or look like this guy to use it.

Metric System User

Can we please just switch already? Who’s on board with me?