10 January 2012


Playlist for Dan's birthday included: The Beatles' "When I'm 64" (of course! Thank you Daniel S. for the mp3 version) and Jimmy Buffett's "I'm Growing Older But Not Up." He rarely seems to want frivolous stuff, so its been cool to see that while we've been here, he's been pretty excited about pirate history (blog post coming!). We've been to the pirate museum, gone on the pirate ship, and now, for his B-day, bought pirate costumes and signed up for (are you ready?) swordfighting lessons.

After we got home, we were sitting in the cockpit (dressed as pirates!) and almost immediately some dockwalkers came past and begged for a photo. Its kind of a kick, posing with swords with random strangers. (Who knows how many facebook pages we'll be on?) These people were from Russia, Israel, and Columbia, and were having a blast! So now we're St Augustine cultural ambassadors. Playing is good!

A Holiday Thought

Originally Posted in the Annapolis Capital: December 25, 10:43 am | (permalink) | (0 comments)
 [photo: starfish instead of snowflakes complement this garland seen on one of our daily walks around downtown St Augustine]

I can’t help it – plastic icicles hanging from palm trees just don’t get me into the holiday mood. Maybe it’s because we spent so many years in government service assigned to snowy places like Michigan and Wyoming before coming to Annapolis; or maybe it’s just the cliché images we’ve been bombarded with. Whatever, but songs like “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow;” or “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” have been running through my head, jarringly incompatible with the 80-degree sunny days we’ve been having. Day before yesterday, we took the dinghy to the beach for a picnic, waded along the water’s edge picking up seashells and watched dolphins playing in the harbor. A lovely day, but not a lovely “two-days-before-Christmas-catch-the-spirit” kind of day. For me, that means coming home to a crackling fire in the fireplace, not coming home to wash off the salt and turn on the air conditioning.

And then this morning I woke up next to the one I love, safe and well-fed, on a boat, in an interesting new city, and realized another holiday image that doesn’t depend on snowflakes or reindeer. It’s the image of gratitude, and the realization that the greatest gifts aren’t the ones that come in packages wrapped in shiny paper. Cliché? Maybe. But maybe it’s a cliché because it’s repeated often, and it's repeated often because it’s very, very true. The greatest gifts are not those that you can touch with your hands; they are the ones that you touch with your heart.

Wishing you all peace, love, joy … all the things that matter most, this holiday season.

09 January 2012

I Loved This Story

Reads like a fairy tale, but if the website is to be believed this is history, not fantasy. Cool!

Alvilda

Alvida (aka Alwilda, Alfhild, Alvild) was the daughter of Synardus, the king of Gotland. Her parents kept her locked in her room, and set two poisonous snakes to keep away all but the most ardent of suitors. The most persisant and brave fellow turned out to be Prince Alf of Denmark, and though he passed the test Alvilda's parents were none too happy about the match. Deciding she wasn't ready to be wedded to some stuffy Prince, Alvilda took advantage of her parents' irresolution and hightailed it out of there. She joined a crew of cross-dressing women, but had barely got started in a career in terrorizing the Baltic coast when they came across a crew of pirates that had lost their Captain. They were so impressed by her capable skills that they voted unanimously to elect her as their new leader. With these fresh reinforcements beneath her ruthless guidance, this formidable woman became such a nuisance to the merchant trade that her former betrothed, Prince Alf, was dispatched to bring the troublesome pirates to justice.

Alvilda and her crew fought back to the best of their abilities, but in the gulf of Finland they were bested at last. Prince Alf and his men boarded the pirates' ship, where hand to hand fighting ensued. After sustaining heavy casualties, Alvilda's crew succumbed and she herself was taken captive. With her beauty concealed by a face covering helmet, she was taken prisoner, and it was only when this helmet was removed that Prince Alf realized who the scourge of the seas had been. For her part, Alvilda was so impressed by how Alf had fought in battle that she married him on the spot. She went on to share his wealth and throne as Queen of Denmark, and together they had a daughter, who they named Gurith. Whether little Gurith followed in her mother's ocean going ways is not known.

My Dad Would Have Loved These

He used to keep multiple xerox copies of funny engineer jokes in a special folder, to share with friends. Thanx to Ed B. for showing me this one.

Akin's Laws of
Spacecraft Design*

Space Systems Laboratory - Department of Aerospace Engineering - University of Maryland

Home

1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.

2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it's a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .

3. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.

4. Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.

5. (Miller's Law) Three points determine a curve.

6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

7. At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.

8. In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point.

9. Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.

10. When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.

11. Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.

12. There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.

13. Design is based on requirements. There's no justification for designing something one bit "better" than the requirements dictate.

14. (Edison's Law) "Better" is the enemy of "good".

15. (Shea's Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up.

16. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.

17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.

18. Past experience is excellent for providing a reality check. Too much reality can doom an otherwise worthwhile design, though.

19. The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you've screwed up.

20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.

21. (Larrabee's Law) Half of everything you hear in a classroom is crap. Education is figuring out which half is which.

22. When in doubt, document. (Documentation requirements will reach a maximum shortly after the termination of a program.)

23. The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.

24. It's called a "Work Breakdown Structure" because the Work remaining will grow until you have a Breakdown, unless you enforce some Structure on it.

25. (Bowden's Law) Following a testing failure, it's always possible to refine the analysis to show that you really had negative margins all along.

26. (Montemerlo's Law) Don't do nuthin' dumb.

27. (Varsi's Law) Schedules only move in one direction.

28. (Ranger's Law) There ain't no such thing as a free launch.

29. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Program Management) To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.

30. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.

31. (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development) You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.

32. (Atkin's Law of Demonstrations) When the hardware is working perfectly, the really important visitors don't show up.

33. (Patton's Law of Program Planning) A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.

34. (Roosevelt's Law of Task Planning) Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.

35. (de Saint-Exupery's Law of Design) A designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

36. Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective.

37. (Henshaw's Law) One key to success in a mission is establishing clear lines of blame.

38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.

39. The three keys to keeping a new manned space program affordable and on schedule:
1) No new launch vehicles.
2) No new launch vehicles.
3) Whatever you do, don't decide to develop any new launch vehicles.

40. Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there's no partial credit becausemost of the analysis was right...)


*I've been involved in spacecraft and space systems design and development for my entire career, including teaching the senior-level capstone spacecraft design course, for ten years at MIT and now at the University of Maryland for more than a decade. These are some bits of wisdom that I have gleaned during that time, some by picking up on the experience of others, but mostly by screwing up myself. I originally wrote these up and handed them out to my senior design class, as a strong hint on how best to survive my design experience. Months later, I get a phone call from a friend in California complimenting me on the Laws, which he saw on a "joke-of-the-day" listserve. Since then, I'm aware of half a dozen sites around the world that present various editions of the Laws, and even one site which has converted them to the Laws of Certified Public Accounting. (Don't ask...) Anyone is welcome to link to these, use them, post them, send me suggestions of additional laws, but I do maintain that this is the canonical set of Akin's Laws...