Four to six hours she sleeps 
ME-303 Advanced Playdo Manufacturing Processes
Today's word is a great arms-related word from waaaaaay back. We associate it with Greece, but it actually predates Greek use of the term. Only the Greeks could take a fairly straightforward concept like armed men in several rows of tightly bunched soldiers and work both a 'ph' and an 'x' into the word for it: phalanx. In the ancient days of combat, somebody recognized that an organized cluster of men providing mutually for the greater defense would work better than a melee of people trying to kill those from the other clan. The premise is that every man uses a large shield and locks it with his neighbors' shields, and then uses long spears to keep the enemy at bay until the bad guys were worn down to the point where a devastating charge could be mustered. Again, it wasn't the Greeks who originated the idea, but they are known for being the first to truly master it. And why not? Their hoplites were militiamen, free citizens, including philosophers, poets, and other non-military day-job types. I imagine that if ancient Greece had male figure skaters, they, too, would be hoplites. Faaaaab-uuuuu-lous hoplites, at that. Anyway, these were volunteers, not the driven subjects of some tyrant king. Recall also that the Greek culture brought us the philosophy of stoicism, which one has to buy into whole hog if you're going to rely on the man next to you to protect 1/2 of your body from the bad guys. Anyway, this organization of highly motivated individuals was earth shattering, or "paradigm shifting" as the corporate weenies would now say. Alas, while the phalanx was overwhelmingly powerful, it was inflexible, and its demise was best illustrated by defeats at the hands of equally motivated, but well trained Roman legions. Although, if all the real Greeks looked like King Leonidas from the movie '300', those Romans wouldn't have stood a chance. 
As I've said before, Americans don't come up with a lot of earth shattering ideas, but we are hard to beat at applying the ideas of others with ruthless efficiency. An impenetrable static shield to keep the enemy at bay? A word with both 'ph' and 'x'? How about a radar-directed gatling gun that we mount on ships to shoot down supersonic and/or sea-skimming missiles... that's named the Phalanx Close In Weapon System. While 3,000+ rounds per minute of 20mm fury is dorktastic, not many of our ships are forced to use this fine weapon. However, I found a video at this location of an adaptation of the Phalanx described at www.warisboring.com. The Phalanx system is being used right now to save the lives of U.S. and British soldiers as a land-based defense against mortar attacks in Iraq. The night footage of the testing at the video link above shows the serious rounds this thing can crank out. Saving lives of our troops is something to be glad for. 
Today's fantastic word is "pantheon", representing the gods of a people or a place to worship those gods. The above picture is from Sweetness's bedroom capturing what I refer to as The Pantheon, a.k.a. The Hall of The Lesser Gods. Puppy (white, at right), must be tucked into the blankets in precisely the proper position, pitch, yaw, and roll for napping and bed time to occur. At left one can see Triceratops (from the Yale Peabody Museum gift shop) and Reindeer. Triceratops sort of performs vital security functions, as far as I can tell, since he joins the family in plastic or imaginary form on most outings. Reindeer is mostly a lookout, I think. Rabbit (seated) is just a pretty face.
AVOID PITY: Don't be a fool, sucka'!
AVOID DEATH: Do not stand close to high windows in the presence of an outraged Protestant mob
AVOID DEATH: Clear muzzle of Sturmgeschutz and GAU-8 Avenger before loading
That's it. The Royal Navy proudly reported that the problem was all taken care of, which is nice. However, Captains of Royal Navy submarines carrying nuclear weapons do not require launch codes for their weapons! It's like they refuse to watch Dr. Strangelove across the Atlantic or something. Mind you, this is the same outfit that brought you the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales.
If somebody needs a reference, post a comment and I'll try to update the post next week with the info.
We were informed that the nuchal thickness was either 2.8 or 2.9 mm, depending on which side of the fuzzy gray pixelated line the tech chose for her measurement. The doctor was called in to review the measurements, and this questionable data was coupled with a quad screen to inform us that the pregnancy was "positive" for Down Syndrome. Some days you eat the bear, other days, the bear eats you.
Discussion: This doctor (hereafter: Dr. Who) was in for a surprise, as most swamp Yankees or NYC socialites referred to him are not (A) educated in statistical sampling and test methods, or (B) of generally dour and dorky disposition. I proceeded to fire off questions about his criteria for test, for evaluation, and how they compared to other accredited institutions. It seems that:
Confused? Don't be. A sample spread (many are shifted, or flatter, or steeper, but this is a good example) of any population characteristic may be illustrated as below:
I do not recall how many standard deviations this doc pulled towards the mean, but the result is this: more "positive" results. I'm roughing the numbers, but if the normal incidence of DS for a lady in her 20's (best case scenario) is 1/1500 (0.06%), you're almost 5 standard deviations from the mean. Given a normal false positive rate of this sort of screening is 5% (see Table 1 here) combined with ratcheting the criteria to, say, 4 standard deviations, you increased the confidence interval by about 0.06%. This means that on top of the existing 5% false positive rate inherent to the testing methods, Dr. Who has DOUBLED the number of ultrasounds reporting "positive" for DS.
Normally, such a move is great for the patient. By invoking greater scrutiny on a borderline or within-sight-of-the-borderline patients, you are more likely to catch conditions and allow treatment to proceed.
Did I mention there is no cure for DS? It gets better.
We were sat down with a "genetic counselor" to discuss Dr. Who's flux capacitor results alongside a quad screen, which is a blood test of both parents. Let me interject that quad screens, per Wikipedia, have a 7.5% false positive rate. Anyway, Wifey & I Tell You What have pretty good health, and a reasonable genetic slate. No Olympians in our clan, but no complaints. Long story short, something like a 1 in 50 chance of our baby having DS. Our options were presented as follows:
I took option 1 off the table immediately, and amniocentesis, which is essentially sticking a needle in to draw off amniotic fluid for direct DNA testing, was never a realistic option for us since abortion was not in the cards. We informed her that we would wait for Round 2 of testing before deciding to keep our baby anyway. The lady was... lukewarm to my approach, but she had no authority to make any decisions. We put our faith in God to give us the strength to handle whatever happened. Now, through no credit of our own, we have our second beautiful, and quite healthy to this point, daughter from that pregnancy.
I Tell You What!: One critical statistic, where I can site the Washington Post, Wikipedia, or Time Magazine, is that over 90% of pregnancies with a DS diagnosis result in abortion. Why is this critical? For doctors to allow a high false positive rate is often benign, because early treatment is a desirable thing and more invasive subsequent testing can correct false positives. With DS, that is not the case. There is no treatment that can help the baby, other than to prepare the parents for the surely difficult task of raising a DS child. Additionally, if the mother is willing to consider abortion as a "cure", then what are the odds she's going to wait for further results, if that means staying pregnant for 2 more months (no cakewalk) or have a needle stuck in a very uncomfortable place? Judging by the 90%+ number, not very likely at all.
But why are false positives really allowed in the first place? Insurance companies (the guys writing the checks for all this testing) are mavens for cost efficiency. Some live, some die, keep cost down, because that's the way it was meant to be. BUT, extra false positives mean MORE testing, MORE doctor visits, MORE screenings. Insurance companies hate that sort of stuff. Unless... they are fully aware of the likelihood of a positive DS screening result. Based on my knowledge of miscarriages, a D&C is an outpatient procedure. It involves an OB, let's say it costs $1,000 to $1,500 (guessing, folks). It is also the coup de main of an abortion. Now, a full term pregnancy, following the decision point of this DS testing, will involve a handful of doctor's appointments, perhaps including a few extra ultrasounds because of the initial "positive" result. This is assuming no additional complications, mind you. Then there is the delivery, which may involve a few trips to the hospital triage room for monitoring before being sent home. When the baby is actually delivered, you're looking at 2 nights in the hospital, a battery of tests on the newborn and THEN 18 years of dependent care, largely covered by... the insurance companies. And I have to assume that if the child really does have DS those medical costs, especially the portions covered by insurance, skyrocket.
Folks, I haven't even touched on the wellspring of material provided by the argument that people with Down Syndrome are, well, people. I may have gotten kicked out of the living room by my mother when I was a kid for making fun of Corky Thatcher, but I never would have denied him his humanity.
Time to wrap this up, it's late. Special thanks for inspiration to Patricia E. Bauer of the Washington Post of Friday, November 16, 2007; Page A33. What have we learned?
If you were valiantly defending an anonymous bridge or other strongpoint in Western Europe in and around 1944, and you saw one of those puppies roll ominously towards you, then methodically and agonizingly slowly train Mr. Thundermaker on your position, you'd need a word to explain this sight before you bought the farm. Let's give a round of applause for that word: STURMGESCHUTZ. It means "assault gun", but in that Germanic way it sounds like "storms and shoots", which is so appealing in English. I cannot and will not be convinced that if Volkswagen rolled out a Sturmgeschutz Turbo Diesel sedan that it would not be the demise of the American market for all other automakers. Anyway, on top of the general menace provided by this vehicle, our beloved Deustche engineers had to go whole hog on a few models, just because. I present to you the Sturmpanzer IV (with a ridiculous 150mm cannon on the front)
And the grandaddy of them all, the Sturmoser. That 380mm (that's 38 cm, or 15 inches!) mortar you see below fails to qualify for ridiculous. It looks like Bowser's tanks from Super Mario Bros. 3.
Therefore, in honor of my obsession, and the commentator to my blog, I am forging a new word to describe myself and any others as messed up as me: STURMOPHILLIAC.
If you're tallying at home, between references to past blogs, World War II, armored vehicles, general vocabulary, and video games, this blog entry has pegged out the Dork Meter.
I played football in high school. I was decent, somewhere in the iron triangle formed by "has-been", "also-ran", and "never was". I at least had the chance to decide for myself whether to go play for a small college, or ride the pine at a slightly larger school. Doing neither was a good call. I've also studied the game a bit, and understand some of the fundamentals that go into coaching. In fact, I'd like the opportunity to do that some day. None of that prevents Wifey from destroying me at fantasy football.
How can I compete against that? I'll tell you: I didn't, suffering a 137-56 shellacking in last week's tilt. No knowledge of the 2-Man Under defense vs. Cover 2 defense, or the minutiae of the 4-wide singleback set vs. the 2-tight, 2-wide singleback set can keep me afloat. If Roy Williams decides to only catch a single pass for 15 yards while his teammate, Calvin Johnson, picks up over 80 yards receiving with a touchdown, then that's that. If you can't beat'em, join'em. I'm not converting to a Patriots fan, but I'll cheer for her fantasy juggernaut when I'm not directly facing her. And I stole Wes Welker for my own roster. Go Peugeots.
I am a regular reader of Time magazine. It's not the greatest, but I think my subscription was 1 year for something ridiculous like $15. I'm not joking. That's barely postage. At that price, I could use the pages to soak up spills around the house and it would be the equivalent of having paid shipping only for a year's supply of paper towels. This week's issue had a fluff cover story (not surprising) discussing the habits of Americans as determined by some gigantic survey. One survey, which can be found in greater detail at this link, discusses job satisfaction by occupation. Of all engineering occupations, mechanical engineers had the smallest percentage of respondents claiming to be "very happy". I enjoy my job, and my peculiar personality seems cast only in the form of a mechanical engineer. Therefore, I find this surprising. I have pondered this for at least 3 minutes, and weigh the following possibilities:
Unfortunately, the Time magazine has separate data on job satisfaction and on drinking habits, but no correlation between the two. Now that would be interesting. Oh, and a final cautionary note: beneath the graphic is the following information. If they cannot spell "survey", I'm not impressed with their research:
SOURCES: Job happiness data is from the General Social Servey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago
Here is a picture of Sweetness teaching me how to play checkers. She has quite a Game Face. She's not here to make any friends, folks, this is strictly business. I was scolded each time I messed up. 
The automatic canon loader has gears. As a mechanical engineer, it's enough to make me giddy.
Nothing about this machine was novel, outside of the extraordinary caliber of the cannon. Even the GAU-8 is a glorified gatling gun, Civil War technology driven by hydraulics. The pilots weren't even equipped with infared target detection (FLIR, fairly common even in the first Gulf War) until quite recently. The US Air Force has tried a number of times to retire the aircraft, but it's just too useful. 
As a result, the fundamental land weapon of the time, the rifled firearm, was given the right size and muzzle velocity to treat the tank like a tin can on a shooting range.
So tanks developed thicker frontal armor, eventually some of the anti-tank guns were put on motorized chassis... it was a creeping, crawling development. Then, somebody had a great idea. "What if we take that glorified pellet gun and make it FLY?" Holy crap, all we can say for certain is that the man was German, which is unsurprising. We can speculate that he was an engineer. The purest form of this idea can be seen below in the form of the Henschel HS-129B3:
A quote from Wikipedia "But for some reason the Luftwaffe decided to skip over this gun for the Hs 129, and install a gigantic 75 mm gun from the Panzer IV. A huge hydraulic system was used to damp the recoil of the gun, and an auto-loader system with twelve rounds was fitted in the large empty space behind the cockpit. The resulting system was able to knock out any tank in the world, but the weight slowed the already poor performance of the plane to barely flyable in this new Hs 129B-3 version."
"That's right, Mr. Henschel, my team doubled the next-size caliber gun, it could sink Gibraltar, and it barely flies, but the specs say it just has to get off the ground, so we're all set. AND it is in a dead tie for the P-38 Lightning as the coolest aircraft on the planet." The man who sold that one is a role model for all engineers.
I need to slow down for a bit, and continue this soon by showing what happens when the Americans get ahold of a really good idea and Supersize it...
I've been checking a calculation of late. It's a bear, 150 pages and every detail has to be correct. Anyway, the engineer and I were spinning in circles on a force that went through three separate coordinate transformations (same force, different perspective), but had to end up perfectly vertical. We just couldn't figure out why we were about 20 degrees off on the vector direction. Equation upon equation, Microsoft Excel, MathCad... it wasn't working but we didn't know why. To muddy the waters, I had made a recommendation a month ago to try a different approach, which changed the answers by only a few pounds. Then, I remembered something that Professor Shapton taught. I drew the vectors... and proved that we were off and by how much. Then, I drew them with the equations I had recommended... and the lines stopped perfectly on the vertical line I was shooting for. Problem solved with a pencil, protractor, and a ruler. We're not always so much smarter than our predecessors as we would like to imagine.What is the thread, exactly? If the military seeks to efficiently develop and procure weapons systems, the commercial sector has to do it. When I say "commercial", I mean less Northrup Grumman and more Caterpillar. The cancelling of yet another LCS just shows that the Navy is horrific at program management. The people who work for the government, generally civilians, overseeing military procurement are not, as a group, lazy. However, there is typically NO incentive for them to make decisions based on cost effectiveness. This leads to kid-in-a-candy-store behavior. "I want a bag full of extra speed. And a box of extra payload capacity. And some more quick reaction. And a bag of the stuff never rusting..." All the while, the contractor is gleefully overheating the cash register ringing it all up, envisioning a 3-for-1 stock split. VERY rarely does the piper come calling on the contractor in the form of a cancelled contract. And, if it does, they may sue the government to recoup cost. This morally slimy hand-shake leads to requirements growth that is unprecedented in the civilian world. The Boeing/Ford cooperative effort is a refreshing use of existing civilian technology to cut development costs. My own efforts to do this at work have been thwarted because too many gov't types have an incentive to not learn anything new or shave any performance margin off one requirement to gain elsewhere.
The third article, though, is the counterpoint. Col. Tibbets dropped a weapon that was developed through a crash program that spent a larger amount of money for each year of progress greater than the GDP of many nations. There was no significant need for fusion power at the scale of weaponization outside of war between nation-states, so it is unlikely atomic weapons would have been made available by commercial research. Here is a specific example of the government overseeing an almost miraculously development of a product orders of magnitude more capable than existing designs.
What to conclude? If the technology is not esoteric or far reaching, the government should just write a contract and walk away. Obviously, some development is needed. In that case, be flexible about some requirements and adjust the money flow accordingly. Obviously, some truly far-reaching technologies must be overseen and pushed by the government to come to fruition. See also: Putting men on the moon (Apollo Program)
But don't forget: The Wright Brothers were independently financed through their bicycle shop. That's right, the first men on the planet to achieve powered flight. Meditate on it.
Another 5.5 tomorrow morning.
Imagine you're innocently walking by a large building, and you see an angry crowd rushing inward. You hear shouts from indside, and you linger. With no warning, a window on a floor above bursts open, and some unfortunate individual is hurled outward quite involuntarily and then falls to their doom. "WOW!" you think to yourself. "I wish there were a word to describe this fantastic yet horrific event I have just witnessed." My friend, there is such a word: defenestration. The English language has many oddities, and even more treasures. "Defenestration" is one of those treasures. Unsurprisingly, it's root is Latin, and, even less surprisingly, that root is fenestra, translated "window". Naturally. 
So I fire back 3 pages of single-spaced typed disposition saying "a trained monkey can do your job when you just stamp everything 'DISAPPROVED' without even thinking about whether it's really a problem, or HOW MUCH YOU ARE CHARGING THE TAXPAYERS, of whom I am one. My 3 page response is best summarized below:
The Government comes back at me all "BLAH BLAH BLAH and STUFF and we are scared of independent thought and change frightens us and upsets our delicate constitutions. Furthermore, we could not care less about the noble taxpayer and would like to invoke as much pain as possible on you and your cohorts while minimizing the inconvenience to our lazy rear ends." That's actually a direct quote, can you believe it? OK, that's a bit of a stretch. So, after doing some homework, I found a way to prove that their lack of effort and diligence was actually going to cause them to do about 10 times the amount of work they expected, which just proved that we were right all along. If an artistic genius summarized my battle with the Government of this issue in a painting, it would like this:
In case you were wondering, I'm the one still standing. 
I have spent just over 6 years in the field of mechanical engineering with a major defense contractor. During that time I have learned many lessons regarding how to think critically and how to conduct myself. In other words, knowing what questions to ask and when to ask (or more often, NOT ask) them. This process essentially was figuring out how to manage myself. Coming out of college in 2001, I had the intellect and moxie to do any task that an employer would ever ask, but my act was not... together. Over time, I was managing my own little corner of the military-industrial complex with reasonable skill (trivia: Eisenhower originally wrote his speech decrying the military-industrial-congressional complex, but that's a whole separate blog entry). Eventually, I started making independent decisions and, occasionally, making decisions for other people. This didn't mean any particular authority had been specifically conferred on me. People would meet to discuss something, and for whatever reason no supervisor or other responsible adult was present, and some issue would cause deadlock. Eyes would stare at the ceiling, sometimes people would argue, but it equated to the same thing: nobody can make a decision. So I would. There is no problem with an ongoing debate over a complex or monumental problem, but simple fear of being responsible for making the call disgusts me. My own internal statistics and polling bureau has reviewed my decision-making prowess and found that I made the right decision about 50% of the time. Another stunning fact the bureau unearthed: I NEVER was punished for making a bad decision. I had to fix a few things, but in no way has my reputation or potential for advancement been damaged. Remarkable.
This leads me to last week. My supervisor took a week of vacation. Not normally a problem. However, my group's experience level is so low that I am one of only two engineers in our group with over 3 years of experience. That means I got tagged with filling in for him, along with carrying my normal workload. THAT made for a rough week. Our toilet was leaking, as well, but that can be discussed another time. Anyway, the inevitable late Friday problems popped up right before the Boss Man left, which meant that I would have that waiting for me the next week. I was in working on a report on Sunday, trying desperately to finish some of my own individual tasks before the flood arrived, then worked 12 hours Monday dealing with the craziness. And you know what? Things worked out just fine. I credit the support of my wife, who knew that it would be a tough week for me and was very understanding. It left me convinced that I am really not enthusiastic about being a supervisor. At least where I work, it requires the mental agility to hop from one topic to the next, which are often on completely unrelated systems. Couple that with the inability of inexperienced workers (no knock on them, just a fact) to work independently and make decisions (see above), and it makes for a draining day. I can only conclude that I would prefer to remain in a strictly technical role, where I can immerse myself deeply in a single problem, or more realistically a set of related problems, and work them out.
