‘Discovery’ Helped Bring the Universe Home

Posted on May 17, 2012
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Now it’s a museum piece. After 39 space missions and 5,830 Earth orbits, the Space Shuttle Discovery is completing its first month on display in the James S. McDonnell Space Hanger at the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, VA, the air and space extension of the Smithsonian Institution. At least the shuttle’s hanger has an august name – Discovery hasn’t been consigned to an oversized garage.

Gary Cameron/Reuters

John Glenn, who in 1962 was the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth and returned to space on Discovery in 1998, was on hand to welcome the shuttle to the Udvar-Hazy center, which is just outside Washington.

All those lift-offs – of Discovery and the earlier shuttles – from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida thrilled, or in a couple of instances saddened, us deeply. It almost seems a curtailment of our national purpose that the launches won’t be continuing, at least under NASA’s sponsorship.

Yet much has been learned from the initial decades of space flight. And one of our keenest intuitions is that future space travel can most affordably be handled by private enterprises. NASA now seems more like a bureaucracy casting about for a mission than a space transportation company. It’s funding, suggests my Encore colleague, Dennis Owen, “should be limited to hard-core science, such as radio/optical telescopes, robotic planetary surveillance and other pie-in-the-sky missions.”

Dennis suggests that Insights readers visit www.xprize.org to see what non-government organizations, universities, etc. can do with relative “chump change”.

What must continue is that we get, by whatever means, including the space telescopes, a continuing sense of the beauty and extent of the universe, and our role therein, as responsible occupants of our launch-pad planet Earth. – Doug Bedell

Biking On One-Time Rail Lines

Posted on May 1, 2012
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It’s spring and time for engaging in outdoor activity again! There’s a rail trail near us – the Lebanon Valley (Pa.) Rail Trail – that follows the 14-mile length of an old railroad right-of-way from which the tracks have been removed. It’s great for hiking and biking, whether for short stretches or the whole length.

Biking on one-time rail linesBut what about unused rights-of-way where the tracks still exist? If there’s a stretch like that in your area, you’ll likely agree that track-walking isn’t at all the same as walking a trackless path haunted by a railroad of yore. You get to counting the ties, or maybe tripping over a rail. That’s why this technological creation of a rider known only as “Will” on BickHacks.com intrigues us. With some securely attached tubing, and no welding required, this rig looks mighty inviting for a ride on abandoned rails.

Of course, as a comment on Will’s post warns, you need to be sure that traffic on the rail line is indeed defunct, or you might be surprise an engineer and his accompanying train, who have the exclusive right-of-way. But an attractive feature about hiking or biking on unused rail lines is that they have only gentle grades,  which maintain your stamina longer. They also seem usually to cut through attractive, otherwise unmarred countryside.

If the right precautions are taken, we’d love to take a turn with a properly rigged bike on idled trackage at this time of year. It’s sad to read, however, that this particular example came to an untimely end. “Seems I became a bit to confident in my design,” Will reports, “and while traveling at somewhere around 16 MPH I had a derailment.  The guide in the bike side caught a rail tie stopping the bike immediately, and as I was traveling over the bars, the frame bent behind the lugs at the head tube, seat tube and bottom bracket, so the frame is a total loss.”

Maybe Will’s design needs to be revisited. But a bike-to-rail conversion is an inviting concept, given some technical artistry, for a springtime jaunt on a retired rail line. – Doug Bedell

A Book for Patent-Hopeful Inventors

Posted on April 23, 2012
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Now here’s a book that ought to be on technical writers’ shelves, at least if you’re inventive or are working with people who are good at coming up with useful gimmicks. Inventiveness implies trips to the the U.S. Patent office, or at least filings there. And how many of us know reliably how to win a valid patent?

To that rewarding end, James Floyd Kelly, writing on Wired’s GeekDad blog,  recommends John Hershey’s book The Eureka Method: How to Think Like an Inventor. “As a technical writer,” Kelly reports, “I often find myself being introduced to inventors and tinkerers via friends and colleagues.  Sometimes these hands-on folks are looking for help with documenting a design or process, and I try my best to offer up advice or sometimes assistance.”  In the course of “creating instructions or verifying step-by-steps” Kelly often gets asked about patent law.

He well may reach for Hershey’s book, or at least recommend it. Not that it’s an easy read, despite its sprightly cover. “This isn’t a book for light reading,” Kelly notes. “It’s got some complex information in it, mainly through the inclusion of actual products that have been designed or improved and have been in need of proper documentation for the patent process. It’s 230 pages of personal advice from the author as well as careful explanations of the various requirements that a patent submission will require.”

Fair enough. If that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes if you’re close to making a mint from an insight of genius, or at least being on record for it. Hershey’s book has valuable appendices on patent arcana and seems a treasure if you want to get your gizmo officially recorded. – Doug Bedell

Maker Faires Build Community

Posted on April 10, 2012
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Maker Faires look like places where art and technology come together, unless you consider technology an art in itself. But some would find that arrogant. So what’s a Maker Faire?

Many of you may already know, because Make magazine is doing a terrific job of promoting its technology fairs and building community around them. (Building and maintaining a community is an art, too, of course.)  I stumbled upon Make magazine  while surfing the web recently (Dennis Owen, my asssociate, is Encore’s actual technologist).  And besides the magazine, there was a Maker Fair tab and promotions for two types of fairs – big and smaller. Maker Faires are coming up in San Mateo, New York’s Queens,  Seattle, Detroit and Kansas City, while Mini Maker Faires (the smaller ones, obviously) are scheduled for later this month in Lubbock, TX, Westport, CT, and Burlington, NC. If you click on the calendar link, you’ll find both types of fairs all around the world!
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John Muir’s Early-Rising Genius

Posted on April 1, 2012
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We don’t have the space to review the Make blog’s post on “John Muir’s Maker Days” as extensively as it deserves. We’ll simply note that Muir’s youth revealed the ravenous appetite for discovery and application that underlies  a lot of technological gains. (We hope it’s not stretching a point to align Muir with technology, but it seems appropriate in the following context.)

Growing up in Wisconsin, the great naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club (and our National Park System) would get up at 1 a.m., hold a candle to the kitchen clock and find that he had gained five hours. “‘I had gained almost half a day. ‘Five hours to myself!’,’ I said, ‘five huge, solid hours!’ I can hardly think of any other event in my life, any discovery I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly glorious as the possession of these five frosty hours.’”

Working in his frigid basement, Make continues, Muir used his extra time to design a self-setting sawmill (to provide extra wood to heat the house on zero-degree mornings), “speedily followed by a lot of others – water wheels, curious doorlocks and latches, thermometers, hygrometers, pyrometers, clocks, a barometer, an automatic contrivance for feeding the horses at any required hour, a lamp-lighter and fire-lighter, an early-or-late-rising machine, and so forth.”

Part of John Muir's desk clock

Inventiveness may need to be more abstract these days, and who needs to worry about keeping candles lit to stay with it? But the zeal for discovery and application is the key factor that drove Muir and that inspires  anyone with a creative bent.

Learning is the fuse. “‘After the sawmill was proved and discharged from my mind,’ Muir wrote, ‘I happened to think it would be a fine thing to make a timekeeper which would tell the day of the week and the day of the month, as well as strike like a common clock and point out the hours; also to have an attachment whereby it could be connected with a bedstead to set me on my feet any hour in the morning; also to start fires, light lamps, etc. I had learned the time laws of the pendulum from a book, but with this exception I knew nothing of timekeepers, for I had never seen the inside of any sort of clock or watch.

“‘After long brooding,’ Muir continued ‘the novel clock was at length completed in my mind, and was tried and found to be durable and to work well and look well before I had begun to build it in wood. I carried small parts of it in my pocket to whittle at when I was out at work on the farm, using every spare or stolen moment within reach without father’s knowing anything about it.’”

Muir’s Scottish pastor father frowned on anything not directly connected with farm work. And, of course, he discovered his son’s “mysterious machine back of the bedstead” in the spare bedroom where Muir was working on it.

“”John,’ he inquired, ‘what is that thing you are making upstairs?’

“”I replied in desperation that I didn’t know what to call it.’

“”What! You mean to say you don’t know what you are trying to do?’

“”Oh, yes,’I said, ‘I know very well what I am doing.’

“‘What, then, is the thing for?’

“‘It’s for a lot of things,’ I replied, ‘but  getting people up early in the morning is one of the main things it is intended for; therefore it might perhaps be called an early-rising machine.’”

Early-rising – that encapsulates the sprit behind discovery and inventiveness. Keeping ahead of a given day’s realities is what’s necessary to get beyond the present and contribute to the future, your own or the world’s.  John Muir certainly demonstrated that. – Doug Bedell

 

Students Made a Lubbock Report More Readable

Posted on March 27, 2012
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You’ve got to applaud the  graduate students at Texas Tech University who redesigned the City of Lubbock’s annual water report and made it more attractively readable. And you’ve got to wonder why more governmental agencies don’t turn to their local colleges and universities for help on the editorial front.

There are all those students, primed with the latest typographical techniques and many/some of them able to write decent prose. What a help they could be to the busy bureaucrats who may be turning out look-alike redos of last year’s more casually produced reports.

Harrison Ownbey, one of the Texas Tech grad students who helped out in Lubbock, said their biggest concern was that the water report be not only readable, but in compliance with federal and state guidelines. What did the city’s residents want most to know about its water? That it was safe to drink. So the “kids” in the technical writing program spread that right across the top of the front page: “Summary – all contaminants measured within this report were compliant with EPA guidelines.”

That could possibly have been stated even more positively. But, hey, there it was,  a banner statement on the front page. No need to read much further, really. But a couple of color photographs were added there as well, so residents probably read on a bit.

Truly, governing is, or ought to be, a community project. If there’s a school or college nearby, why not call on students who are, presumably, being taught the latest techniques, typographically or scientifically, to help out. That’s good for all concerned, and can give young people a head start on functioning in the messy world they’ll be facing. – Doug Bedell

Video Games as Art, Sometimes Anyway

Posted on March 20, 2012
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So now for the question of the moment: Can video games be considered art?  You think not? Well then, you’re crossing (laser) swords with Kellee Santiago, cofounder and president of Thatgamecompany in Santa Monica, CA. They’ve just issued a new PlayStation game, Journey, that’s been three years in the making and strikes us as having aspects of art. It’s beautiful and apparently soothing, wherever the journey is headed. (Actually, VentureBeat/Gamesbeat notes that Kellee’s company is noted for avoiding violence in its games.)

Kellee feels strongly about the aspirational aspects of game playing. In 2009, she told a Ted x audience that electronic games “will become more powerful in the 21st century than radio, film and TV combined over the course of the 20th.” Wow! There certainly have been failed, truly dispiriting aspects of TV and radio, but movies seem to be holding their own, as creative and beautiful, occasionally, as  Kellee’s ideal games. In the context of sand, Journey’s apparent setting, remember  Lawrence of Arabia?

We don’t mean to get into a debate that’s beyond our depth. The only point we’re making is that virtually any creative activity can approach art if it’s worked at deliberately and energetically enough. Note, though, that we’ve said “approach.” Because it’s true that art involves a magic element of creativity that is either there or not.

From the preview screens, that sort of beauty appears evident in Journey, which means that Kellee is likely to win her debate with critic Roger Ebert, who has said that video games can “never be art.” “Never” is best not to use most most of the time. There’s always someone, like Kellee Santiago and her colleagues, who’s likely to prove you wrong.

Creativity is to be cherished whenever it appears, as art, or less portentously,  as a yearning for meaning or engaging entertainment. In the vernacular, it’s either art or it’s neat. – Doug Bedell

Matinee Movies on Our Desktop Screens

Posted on February 20, 2012
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Recently, I took our grandson to a special Saturday morning showing of an early John Wayne  western movie featuring Gabby Hayes. The film, as it happened, was 68 years old and the sound had deteriorated, making a complicated plot difficult to follow. (But my grandson loved Gabby Hayes, who played a stage coach driver.)

Duncan and I, it turns out, could have stayed home and watched a vintage movie on my desktop computer screen with possibly greater impact. I say possibly, because my home office isn’t a movie theater. Even so, this full-length Superman movie that I’ve stumbled upon on YouTube is pretty gripping, partly because of its flawless sound. Yes, a Superman movie from 1951 plays better at home than the 1943 John Wayne epic did  in the theater.

That, it seems to me, says a good deal about the Internet and the stand-in world it’s been creating for us. You can be seduced into spending increasing amounts of time on the web, and not only on social media. It’s all out there – movies, lectures, concerts and e-mail besides. Two years ago, Google-owned YouTube passed two billion video views per day. And there are now more than 24 hours of video uploaded every minute to the site.

It’s a little scary to realize that “alternative reality” can be embodied in your computer. Superman quelled the Mole Men from underground in the movie, but can we resist our own fascination when technology delivers past, or present, delights so reliably on desktop, or even laptop, screens? We’d best be alert to how alternative reality has been creeping up on us, and leave time for the real world to keep moving us ahead. – Doug Bedell  

Standards Get Us There Consistently and Reliably

Posted on February 16, 2012
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We return briefly to sentiments being voiced at Quality Digest, this time on the nature of standards. We can’t imagine there are too many folks who view standards, in the context of quality control, as annoyances or encumbrances, but William A. Levinson apparently has come across some such dullards.

Levinson, a quality engineer and auditor, feels it necessary to remind us that standards are developed for the efficiencies and reliability they insure, not for their own, annoying sake. (Unless, as sometimes happens, they’re relating to management rules or guidelines that aren’t true standards.)

Standards are meant to express, as Frederick Winslow Taylor put it, “the one best way” to accomplish tasks based on given methods. That’s tasks, mind you, not always aims.

The ISO standards, for example, help make workplaces consistent and predictable, and their output consistently reliable. They are, notes Levison, to be viewed as servants rather than masters.

“Do your own thing” doesn’t apply in workplaces that are expected to yield predictable value, day after day, year after year.

“All human progress,” Levison writes, “depends on written records, and this is why ISO 9001 and other standards require documentation. It ensures not only that everybody does the job the same way, but also does it in the best known way.”

Now, the best known way implies that somebody in authority is paying attention to outcomes and possible improvements. That’s where fresh human insights come into play, and processes get advanced. But once they’re standardized – incorporated into standards – preservation of technique and assurance of outcome are the values being defended.

So standards aren’t, and shouldn’t be viewed as, irritants but tickets to continued competence, safety and success. William Levison took some of his time and Quality Digest’s space to get that off his chest, and we’re glad he did. – Doug Bedell

Quality Principles As Living Ideals

Posted on February 13, 2012
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Question: We have such great tools to make things better, so why do we feel in such a funk? A dismal question like this can apply on any given day to the state of our nation or our workplace, if we’re fortunate enough to have one.

Steven Ouellette is a quality manager and process engineer who is also an incurable optimist. He addresses our dire question of the day with methodology to produce a more upbeat answer than we ourselves may have at hand.

“I’m no self-help guru,” Ouellete writes in a Quality Digest column, “just a process engineer. But I do think we need to change something about our collective software. We live in an age of man-made miracles that would have astounded even our recent ancestors. Yet, as the great modern philosopher Louis C.K. says, “Everything is amazing, and nobody’s happy.”

So what do we do, rebuild the factory? No, make it work better and more reliably, by using proven methods, not raucous rhetoric.

There’s still a big role for the quality movement and the methods it uses to produce noteworthy results. Like, Ouellette advises, measuring inputs to forestall worrying about outputs. That’s the latest iteration in a journey that began with the work of W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran and Arnold Feigenbaum in Japan in the 1980s.

“It is what it is,” isn’t an acceptable answer to the dilemmas of our times, Ouellette feels. We join him in that. We’ve seen too much good accomplished when people determine to do things differently.

“Habits of thought have real consequences….How can something as ephemeral as an idea or thought in one person’s head – nothing more than electrochemical cascades in an isolated bone container – have any effect on reality? And yet it does.”

Read Ouellette, get acquainted with his methods, share them with friends and associates and see where they take you. It’s likely to be to a better place than you might have imagined. – Doug Bedell

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