Pictured is Brian Holcombe's Camaro frame, which he's been working on since about the time this blog was started. He says "I've started doing some advertising," as this particular version of the frame was for a client's car -- not his own, as I'd previously written. (Dummy me.) So I asked him if he was doing up an info sheet to use with his promotion (and such info goes into any press releases that should happen to go to the trades). Here is the info we've gotten:
the frame has removed 70 lbf from the front end of the car -- very important for a drag racer's acceleration
it allows for much better suspension geometry then the factory frame
We have also seen Mary Anne Bitetto throw in her expertise (considerable for one so young) in the frame manufacture. The business will begin to take off now. :-)
I was approached online by someone who named herself Stacy (artist's conception shown here), saying she was from Brooklyn, but after traveling to Nigeria her parents were killed in a car wreck, and her passport was confiscated. She claims to be 31, (incredibly) single, (even more incredibly) white, and (still more incredibly) looking for her "soulmate," who will (of course) help her return to the USA.
(I listened to this for educational purposes, being oh, so intimately acquainted with most previous incarnations of the Nigerian Scam.)
But she has major ESL issues, even for someone raised in Brooklyn. :-) :-) :-) Consider this excerpt from the "background" she sent me:
Furthermore,after the death of my parent i wish to come back to states but the people i thought they can help me denied me when i called them for help that is why i decided to used the little money they left to send myself to school of nursing where i have just finished as last two month.Now that i have finished as nurse i thought i can get job here but its a pitty that there is no job here ,then i started going to the embassyoffice just to seek for there help but there is nothing come out of all what i have been looking for, so i made up my mind to splitted the money left with me into two, i used one to pay for the hotel where i m living now cuz i have no place to stay and no one to stay with and used the rest to deposited for the flight ticket with aim that i can get job so i can pay it before i can get someone to stay with in the states but ordinary persona to stay with i mean solumate man to lean on forever .
I'm posting this as a public service: this Stacy is most likely a black Nigerian man, looking to scam stupid Americans, as did "Miriam Abacha" before him. He may also be a Muslim, though I think that's neither here nor there -- I just heard the other day that Nigeria was mostly Muslim. The difference between this scam is that it is targeted at chatters rather than e-mailers. There have, of course, been any number of other scams pointed at chat rooms and the like, but this one is aimed at those who may not only be stupid, but vulnerable as well. A word to the wise, assuming I have any readers at all, much less wise ones. LOL
Youtube is a totally viral mechanism for entrepreneurs like CAPW to get the product out to the public -- though an aggressive approach is required to get viewers to choose the entrepreneur's product over thousands of other weirdo videos out there. So I wrote JT Lightning, the CAPW booker, and gave him these comments:
You oughta have links to at least some of the best videos embedded in the CAPW Web site. I don't know how I would've found out about them from the CAPW site alone -- I found out about these videos completely by accident. You might make better use of them by linking up on purpose. And you personally oughta be on more of those videos.
There's a guy out there called Jay Stryker, who's got Youtube videos where he says some unkind things, in particular about you. This might all be a work, but whether it is or not doesn't matter: there is no such thing as bad publicity. If he wants to call attention to you, it's all good, and you can take advantage of that.
Small Business Magazine is one publication is but one of many publishing a list of guidelines for cell phone etiquette. That's a worthy effort, but it's just not enough. There are too many rubes out there using cell phones, and it's a good bet none of them are reading Small Business.
I propose something a bit more radical: deny service in public places to anyone using a cell phone. That includes restaurants, doctors' offices, and grocery stores. These places all deny service to anyone not wearing a shirt or shoes. Are those sins worse than a cell phone with a high-pitched beep every time its user speaks into it? I ask you.
I wonder how it is that Forbes can estimate these guys' incomes? I mean, does Malfoy even talk to Muggle magazines? And wasn't Stark nearly broke a couple years ago when the Avengers imploded? The lesson: wealth is fleeting; wealth is fickle. Measure yourself some other way!
One way you can tell the citizens are curious about technology
This is a history of Engineer as Hero movies, based on my reviews. As you can see, the frequency of movies spotlighting engineers and technology has skyrocketed since the early 1990s. This is an indicator to me that the movie-going public, at least, is curious about technology, and more interested in engineers than at any time since the term "engineer" was invented.
We're only a bit better than halfway through the first decade of the 2000s; at this rate by 2010 the same graph will look like it's increasing exponentially.
Why was there so little interest in this subject in the 1970s? Movies are a product of their times. American society was moving away from technology, not toward it, in the 70s.
Some people think the slogan is lame, but there is no doubt that "save the cheerleader; save the world" was more of a memory jogger for Heroes that almost any other tagline in recent memory. The story arc features Hayden Panettiere's cheerleader Claire Bennet (pictured), who possesses a mutant healing factor a la Wolverine:
Wolverine is a mutant who possesses the ability to regenerate damaged or destroyed areas of his cellular structure at a rate far greater than that of an ordinary human.
...and who was saved from super telekinetic bad guy Gabriel Sylar (played by Zachary Quinto) by some of the other title characters.
The genius of a tagline is seen when people remember it. If we remember it, it serves as a cue to watch the show. It's of course analogous to a slogan from a commercial -- and some of those have more value than others. The tagline "save the cheerleader" is, right now, among the most valuable in television -- as evidenced by the People's Choice Award given to Heroes -- despite our knowledge that the cheerleader has been saved already. I guess now it's on to the world, right?
Oh yeah, here is Masi Oka's Hiro's Blog. Hiro Nakamura, who can stop time and teleport, is enough of a geek that he really should be an engineer. :-)
Students ask me all the time how they'd use such skills in "real life" anyway. And I think that's part of the problem. We're used to having it done; we're not used to doing it. We're used to computer assistance; we're not used to getting our hands in there. We're used to having it ready to go right now; we're not used to taking the time to see something's done right.
And then we wonder why things don't turn out the way we want 'em to. Didn't we hire a professional? Didn't we use a computer? Here's a hot news flash: we fell over ourselves to find ways to get the wrong answer sooner. To have a wrong answer that's more precise. Our inability to understand, much less construct parallel lines is a symptom.
And the beauty of the world is less than it was. <sigh>
Someone I work with wanted to know about broken axis graphs (like the one pictured) -- where you put what I call "the zigzag" on the axis. Is there a name for that zigzag? Are there special cases where you use it? How in the name of GTFW do you create one of these things?
You've got data that doesn't fill the entire data range. If you show the entire data range, there is a chance that you won't be able to see interesting features the data contains. So I posed the question to the Rhetoric for Engineers mailing list and got the following responses:
Lisa Henn broke out her old drafting book (Giesecke is the author) and found that
[C]ertain circumstances require special consideration to avoid wasted space. For example, if the values to be plotted along one of the axes do not range near zero, a 'break' in the grid may be shown... [W]hen relative amount of change is required... the axes or grid should not be broken, and the zero line should not be omitted. If the absolute amount is the important consideration, the zero line may be omitted.
And Lisa herself adds,
On graphs, you'd want to put breaks such that there is still a gap shown in the data. In other words, you wouldn't want the data points crowding the break too much.
She finally points out that Edward Tufte probably addresses the issue.
Glen Hadley argues that it's not just that we want to ignore empty parts of the data range, but that we may want the data range to appear fully populated as well. This is an appearance issue, meaning that we might not be interested in an axis break for analysis. It's for presentations. So there are several sites where educators and consultants have found ways to fool Excel into creating axis breaks (why wouldn't Microsoft make that a standard option?) -- this is a long and tedious process, and you can be sure most engineers will never bother with it. I did it myself with the graph above, to make sure I could follow directions, and it took me 20 minutes. I also added a trendline to the original data, something the people writing on this subject didn't add to theirs. Here are the sites where they work this issue:
It's too bad the financial world doesn't read this. The economic, stock, and such graphs (almost) always show the top 0.1% of a curve which magnifies the miniscule noise into major ups and downs making it appear that the noise is significant when it isn't.
It's at my local public library. You can't use it for a search. If you enter two search terms, it will search on the first one and ignore the second, meaning it will never find anything requiring two terms (in my case, books on the #1 Ladies Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith). Forget that. The only terms among those which will yield any results at all are "detective" (several hundred) and "smith" (thousands). And of course, you can't page back -- the previous page is nearly always expired.
I asked the librarians about these phenomena and they told me (a) their interface to their database is different from what's presented to the customers, and (b) they can't find anything on the customers' search engine either. So. Why even bother to have it? Why not use those terminals for the Internet instead? And ask the librarian to help you find a book?
NOTE: Ann deserves credit for her analysis. (I was only kidding about the "paltry" thing.) Her favorite, GoodSearch, channels advertising dollars to charitable organizations -- Ann's favorite is Save Darfur. I just entered as a charity September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. :-)
You see periodic ads for "mystery shoppers" -- ostensibly these are the people who pretend to fulfill a shopping list at some store, but are really hired by the store (or a parent company) to monitor customer service. Here's what I think they do at the local ShopRite: they hired the elderly lady in front of me at the checkout line who paused after her order was rung up, so that she could look over her receipt and argue with the checkout clerk over a quarter. I listened to this argument (the checkout clerk having no control whatsoever over what her register says the item costs) for five minutes before I butted in and offered the lady TWO quarters if she'd just move on, so the rest of us (five in line by this time) could be checked out. Too bad mystery shoppers can't monitor customers. :-)
And here's what the mystery shoppers do at the local Stop & Shop: first, they hired the couple purchasing $100 dollars worth of produce. The couple engages in conversation while the checkout clerk (being trained) finds herself unable to identify a green cabbage and, after trying unsuccessfully to gain the couple's attention, rings it up as "Boston Lettuce" (pictured). Five minutes later, the wife indignantly shouts "this isn't Boston Lettuce!" Ring it up again, this time correctly. Five minutes after THAT, the 16-year-old clerk encounters another unrecognizable vegetable and, after several attempts to get the couple's attention, finally succeeds in getting the wife to sniff impatiently, "can't you recognize a rutabaga?" Yes, indeedy: our mystery shoppers are highly effective at telling 16-year-olds they should recognize vegetables they never have eaten and most likely never will.
That's not enough for Stop & Shop, however: second, a customer buys $200 worth of groceries (same clerk's aisle -- where do you think I get this info?) and proceeds to enumerate which items are to go in plastic bags, which in paper bags, which in double plastic bags, and which in paper bags INSIDE plastic bags. Whew! By the time this order is fulfilled, an empty line has five people waiting.
Hey, it's not the store's fault: it's whoever hired these megalomaniac mystery shoppers!
The Sci-Fi Network is having its usual Twilight Zone marathon for New Year's Day. But I have seen the episode "He's Alive," starring a very young Dennis Hopper, for the first time. Serling's closing narration, for which he earned a bucketload of hate mail, was as follows:
Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare - Chicago; Los Angeles; Miami, Florida; Vincennes, Indiana; Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there's hate, where there's prejudice, where there's bigotry. He's alive. He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He's alive because through these things we keep him alive.
Science fiction is progressive in more ways than in its handling of technology. Guess who Serling was talking about. And remember it next time "diversity training" comes up.
I must face the fact that I have become the world's foremost authority on a subject few people care about: movies which feature engineers and engineering. How do you get expertise on something so obscure? By watching a couple hundred movies. LOL
Well, you also have to think about them, and you have to have standards to which movies can be compared. I evaluate "engineer as hero" flicks this way:
The movie has to be watchable.
An engineer, or a group of engineers, or someone who is doing the work of an engineer, must be in a prominent role, or roles. (There is one exception on my site for a snake.)
There must be some technical content. The more there is, and the more it can be understood, the better. The best "engineer as hero" movies have lots of technology, and the average moviegoer's eyes won't glaze over to see all of that.
My son and I will work this summer to expand what's now a single page evaluating over a hundred movies into a full e-book, which you can download and argue with my ratings in the comfort of your living room. :-)
Michelle Faustin (left) has a consulting agency specializing in assisting entrepreneurs -- it's a noble calling. And she writes well, too. Consider what she says in her latest newsletter:
Because an entrepreneur's mind is always going, there is often an endless supply and generation of ideas. Thinking outside the box is not a problem. However, this very stellar attribute that contributes to an entrepreneur's success is the very thing that can cause entrepreneurs to fail or postpone the level of success that they should have in their business. Why? Because a key aspect that's needed for sustainable success, but what most entrepreneurs currently lack, is FOCUS.
Michelle, in the event you see this, I can tell you why this is. A fair number of entrepreneurs have attention deficit disorder (ADD). That's nothing to be ashamed of: every entrepreneur I've ever dealt with has it, to varying degrees, and they all display the above attribute of idea generation. I have it myself. And I'm an idea guy.
My favorite entrepreneur was the robot creator, when I was with GreyPilgrim Inc. This was a guy who had ideas so often, and so quickly, the rest of us couldn't keep up, not even as a team. He'd scrawl these ideas down on Post-It notes, and the notes would be left in his wake as he moved to the next task. I used to say we should hire an intern, just to collect the Post-Its and summarize the results for the team. Who knows? If we'd have done it, maybe that company would still be alive today. Though this idea guy is still around and (I think) doing well.
To Michelle I say, familiarize yourself with more of the characteristics of adults with ADD, and you'll enhance your own already formidable effectiveness. :-)
My specialty is start-ups, especially those run by students. I am a micropatron, purveyor of sweat equity, prognosticator of and speculator on future fortunes, and reservoir of multifaceted experience.
You have just discovered the world's foremost authority on Holcombe Chassis Works, Juterphusion Recording Solutions, the IMET Corporation, and GreyPilgrim Inc., as well as several other start-ups and really small companies. Apart from their employees themselves, that is. :-) :-) :-)
I have just finished a compilation of four years of blogging on these subjects, and you can have it for FREE! Just contact me!
I also write about writing, quality, failures, customer service, and the creative process. Start-ups tend to care about these issues.
Pictured is Brian Holcombe's Camaro frame, which he's been working on since about the time this blog was started. He says "I've started doing some advertising," as this particular version of the frame was for a client's car -- not his own, as I'd previously written. (Dummy me.) So I asked him if he was doing up an info sheet to use with his promotion (and such info goes into any press releases that should happen to go to the trades). Here is the info we've gotten:
I was approached online by someone who named herself Stacy (artist's conception shown here), saying she was from Brooklyn, but after traveling to Nigeria her parents were killed in a car wreck, and her passport was confiscated. She claims to be 31, (incredibly) single, (even more incredibly) white, and (still more incredibly) looking for her "soulmate," who will (of course) help her return to the USA.
This is a history of 
Some people think the slogan is lame, but there is no doubt that "save the cheerleader; save the world" was more of a memory jogger for 
Someone I work with wanted to know about broken axis graphs (like the one pictured) -- where you put what I call "the zigzag" on the axis. Is there a name for that zigzag? Are there special cases where you use it? How in the name of GTFW do you create one of these things?
You see periodic ads for "mystery shoppers" -- ostensibly these are the people who pretend to fulfill a shopping list at some store, but are really hired by the store (or a parent company) to monitor customer service. Here's what I think they do at the local 
Michelle Faustin (left) has a 
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