An Engineer's Guide To Raising a Kid

Beth will turn 7 months just a few short days from now, and I thought it would be neat to look back and share some of the things we have found particularly useful and handy over that time.  Note that television isn't anywheres near this list.  :)

Caveat Emptor: Every kid is different.  In discussions with friends and family, it has become very apparent that what works well for one kid and one family does not work at all for another.  My publishing of this list is in no way trying to influence the values, mores, habits, or style of your child's upbringing.  People start bristling with rage pretty quickly if you try to do that.

1.  The Happiest Baby On The Block.  More than any other book we read, this one gave us the most confidence that, yes, we might actually have a chance at soothing a crying newborn.  It's not perfect -- nothing is and we still had our share of late nights and early mornings -- but it sure helped.  Also consider searching for videos of how to do some of the steps mentioned here on YouTube.

Chillin' in her Boppy.

2.  A Boppy.  This horseshoe-shaped pillow has been instrumental in countless feedings, naps, and general soothing sessions.  Other pillows could probably serve the purpose, but we have consistently reached for this one.  Also useful for safely "stashing" the kid when you want to securely place her in one area.

3.  Moby Wrap.  This clever contraption is really just a 25 foot long, extra-wide scarf.  But some fairly clever people (resourceful mothers, perhaps?) have found interesting ways to fold and wrap the thing around you so that it can securely hold your newborn, infant, and toddler in a variety of ways.  This was very helpful for us for the first few months; it was great once you got her loaded up and you had both hands free to do other things.  Babies usually sleep peacefully in this thing because they're all swaddled up and secure.  Fair warning, though: they get hot, and I wouldn't want to wear this thing in the dead heat of summer.  We have used ours a lot less since Beth turned about 4 months.

En route to the Farmer's Market.

4.  Baby Backpack.  You can pay a lot of money for these, so I recommend asking for these as a gift.  We inherited an old Kelty brand backpack from my sister, and have used it on many day hikes, walks to the Farmer's Market, and even while vacuuming.  It's great to put the kid back there so your hands are free, and she often falls asleep.  Two small warnings: it's slightly unnerving knowing you have your baby back there and you can't see her (is she falling over? can she still breathe?), but after a few minutes you learn to trust the things.  Also, she now has HER hands free, and can grab and pull your neck hair at will.

5.  Baby Einstein Take-Along Tunes.  We call this her "radio," and it's like crack.  When nothing else will soothe her, the flashing light and upbeat classical music will usually lull her for 10 minutes of blissful peace and quiet.

Before our first 5K with Beth.

6.  A BOB Stroller.  Okay, we splurged on this one.  And even then, we bought last year's model on clearance sale from REI. (And looking at the prices of this year's model ... holy moly ... it's not worth $450.  Look on Craigslist or eBay.)  Initially, I thought I would never spend more than $100 on a stroller -- and to be honest, you probably don't need to.  But a high quality, easily-foldable, great-to-run-with stroller has allowed my wife and I to maintain an active lifestyle by jogging with Beth (and the dog!) frequently.  And the stroller is super maneuverable, and will easily navigate just about anywhere.  We've even taken it with us on trail hikes, although that was probably a less-than-brilliant idea.

6.  Interlocking Floor Mats.  This was last weekend's project, where we converted a room into Beth's playroom, so the verdict isn't quite in yet, but it sure looks like fun.  I wish I had a room like this when I was 6 months old.  Sam's Club had a great deal on 0.56" thick, interlocking foam mats, and it was really easy to cut them to size to fit perfectly in the room.  Now we can place her in the playroom and she can romp around all she wants.

All in all, it can result in one cute kid.

Beth, happily surrounded by toys.

The engineer's fascination with adjectives

In multiple former jobs, many of our latest products were adorned with the modifiers "Advanced" or "Next Generation" in order to make them sound sexy, cool, and modern.  The folly of this was recently brought to my attention while reading about RSA's woes from a cyber attack.

The latest form of cyber attack now goes by the moniker "Advanced Persistent Threat."  Described in detail in Wikipedia, the APT is distinguished from the previous forms of cyber attack, such as "Distributed Denial of Service."  The big thing about APT is that it usually involves multiple people (although DDOS's usually do, too), it's "advanced," and it seems to last for a while.

My problem is that everything is advanced these days.  So, what adjective do we reserve for the next form of cyber attack?  The Very Advanced Persistent Threat?  Oh, I know -- we'll call it the Next Generation Persistent Threat.  Look, the things that make an "Advanced Persistent Threat" today are going to be commoditized and brought to the masses within a year or two, and are going to become commonplace.

I think you see where I'm going with this.  Calling something Advanced is short sighted about the future, as today's "advanced" is tomorrow's "obsolete."  Or, worse yet, today's Advanced is tomorrow's "No Way Do I Have To Be Backwards Compatible With That Piece Of Crap."

If I'm ever a project manager, developing a cool new technology, I will be sure to stay far away from calling anything "advanced" or "next generation" or "new concept."  Instead, I think titles and project names should simply be descriptive:  Widget 2.0, Multi-Peer Sharing Algorithm, or Shiny Plastic Toy (to distinguish it from the previous Dull Plastic Toy).  The next generation of engineers can thank me fore it.

Coolest Job In America this week

Not that this is a regular feature of the blog, but these guys have the coolest job in America right now:

(image courtesy of the Washington Post)

If you have the guts for it, I have got to think it would be pretty cool to rappel down the Washington Monument.  The view from up there is pretty cool, and you'd also be the first person in quite some time to inspect the world's first large casting of aluminum (100 ounces!), which adorns the very tippy-top of the monument.  When it was finished in 1884, aluminum was a very new and novel metal that was crazy expensive.  New processes made aluminum much cheaper to manufacture, so the novelty of the cap became less cool just a few years after it was dedicated.

And if you haven't seen the video taken from atop the Washington Monument, it is well worth the 30 seconds of viewing.  It's pretty impressive how much things rattle and shake.  Here, I've even embedded it for you; just click.

The Loan Guarantee Program Gets a Bad Rap

I've been planning this post for months, but the recent Solyndra press (and the negativity that it's bringing on the whole program) has spurred me into getting off my duff and actually writing about it.

Initially, the government gave a $535 million loan guarantee to a company called Solyndra, which needed additional funding to help start up its innovative new way of making solar panels.  The term "guarantee" is important here, because the government is just providing a guarantee -- it's not actually loaning out any money.

So, on the face of things, the Loan Guarantee Program is a great program:

• It doesn't cost the taxpayers any money up front,
• It has the potential for making money through the credit subsidy cost that the government charges in return for the loan guarantee,
• It supports innovative, new technologies for making electricity, and
• It creates jobs.

The federal government isn't on the hook for any money unless the company defaults and goes bankrupt.  And -- even if the company does go belly up -- the government usually secures the right to be "first in line" for grabbing any leftover assets that the company may have had.  So, if the unthinkable does happen, at least the government can go in, collect all the inventory, and hopefully auction it off and salvage some of the money.

Initially, the reports on the Solyndra case were very negative.  "OMG!!" they reported.  "A government funded program went bankrupt!!"

This really upset me.  The whole purpose of the loan guarantee program is to promote risky, high tech industries that can't get funding elsewhere.  From the 2005 Energy Act language that started the whole program:

Section 1703 of Title XVII of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 authorizes the U.S. Department of Energy to support innovative clean energy technologies that are typically unable to obtain conventional private financing due to high technology risks. [Emphasis added]

No matter how you slice it, higher risk == higher potential of failure.  At first, I thought people were unwilling to accept this.

But then things got juicy, when it appeared there may have been a connection between Solyndra, one of its financiers, and the Obama Administration.  And then the Solyndra executives are going to plead the 5th amendment when they have to testify? Yeesh.

It also appeared that, back in May or so, the government re-structured the loan guarantee so that it no longer had first-rights to the assets in case Solyndra went belly up.  Giving up these first rights was apparently a last-ditch effort to raise more funding for Solyndra.

So, who is to blame for all of this?  Did the Obama administration really reach in with its Noodly Appendage and skew the loan towards benefitting one of the administration's donors?  Perhaps.  But there's an easy way to figure this out, and satisfy everyone:

MAKE PUBLIC THE INDEPENDENT ENGINEER'S REVIEW.

For every loan that is granted (and for those that are not), the Loan Program Office brings in an independent engineering firm to review the project from top to bottom, soup to nuts.  The Independent Engineer writes a (sometimes exhaustive) review to characterize the risks and the likelihood of success.  It should be readily apparent from this review (along with any follow up reviews that may have been done) whether the Solyndra business venture was really viable or not.

The fact that it hasn't been released is somewhat concerning to me ... I have a suspicion that if that independent review was a glowing one, then it would have already been released.

Taking a Step Back

I decided to take a step back, and thought, "What else has the Loan Program Office been up to, and what investments tend to have the biggest payoff for the taxpayer?"

Conveniently, the Loan Program Office lists all of its projects funded to date, the amount of the loan guarantee, and some other stats about the project.  Most notably for me, the total expected number of megawatt-hours (MW-hr) each project is supposed to produce, annually.

In layman's terms, the annual MW-hr figure is the amount of JUICE the plant can crank out per year.  So, which projects crank out the most juice for the lowest investment cost?  I copied the data as published on the DOE site, and compiled it into a table.

Wow.  Geothermal is cheap.  I was surprised at that.  Right after that is nuclear, which I was pleasantly surprised to see.  And solar, no matter how you slice it, is still pricey.  Wind is somewhere in the middle.

I was, however, encouraged to see that the rooftop solar project (putting solar panels on rooftops, and in this case at military installations) was the most affordable of the solar bunch.  Personally, I have always liked that idea -- we're not using our rooftops for anything else, so we might as well stick some solar panels up there and use the energy productively.

If I had more time, I would color-code the bars based on what technology each one is, but it's getting late and this post is getting long.  Please support your local engineer.  :)

Chess, as Life

I sheepishly admit that I continue to get creamed by the chess program on my phone, even at the easiest level.

But, even though I suck at chess, there are important parallels with life and lessons to be learned.  Some of these have been brought home to me in recent days.  The biggest one, and the one I think others should learn, too, is:

Your Opponent Has a Strategy, Too.

I've sat through more than a few "business planning meetings" or "strategy sessions" and even a few reviews of other people's proposals.  In many of them, people's winning strategy, or method for getting the desired result, can basically be boiled down to, "We're gonna win!  Yeah!"

Sigh.

To continue the chess analogy, it's like saying, "We're going to advance some pawns up the board!  And then we're going to push up a knight or two, and maybe place our bishop near the center where they have lots of scope!  And then we're going to bring out THE QUEEN!  We'll be unstoppable when we pin the opponents' king in the corner, and it'll be checkmate then."

To the uninitiated, this might all sound very convincing.  The strategy is to use a variety of pieces, who have different abilities, then use a fancy word (like "scope") to imply that we really know what we're doing, and lastly to bring in something REALLY powerful (like THE QUEEN) -- and victory is "assured" in this hazy grayness of uncertainty.

This all sounds convincing until you actually play chess, and you realize that the opponent has the exact same pieces you do -- and, in fact, is trying to capture your king just as much as you're trying to get the opponent's king. Your Opponent Has a Strategy, Too.

It's not good enough to have a winning strategy in the absence of an opponent.  You have to be better than the other guy.  And that other guy is going to try to thwart your moves and your initial strategy.

Thus, since the other guy is likely to fight back, or at least put up some resistance, it leads me to my second lesson:

You Need To Think More Than One Move Ahead.

This is the one that consistently trips me up in chess, but I like to think I'm getting slightly better at it in life -- and one that many people (but certainly not all) just don't seem to grasp in real life.

I always craft these great traps in chess to snag a rook, or put the opponent (my phone, in this case) in check -- only to be put in check myself because I didn't see how it would make my king vulnerable.  Gah ... too many moving parts in the game of chess.

But in life, it can actually be a little simpler: so you want to chew some person out at work.  Or you want to send a nasty email.  Or you want to trash some other person's work as baseless and without merit.  That's great.

But wait a minute: how do you think the other person is going to respond??!?  Are they just going to roll over and take it?  Are they going to say, "Gee, you know what, you're absolutely right!  I hadn't thought of that.  All hail the genius person that you are!!"

To go back to the chess analogy, if you throw your queen at the opponent's king recklessly, chances are the other guy is going to capture your queen.  And then your life just got a lot harder.  I wish people would think about how they want the other person to respond before they launch off on some denigrating tirade.  In real life, people get pissed.  They don't just quietly take someone else's tirade; they push back.  They argue.  And the whole thing just spirals rapidly out of control, and everyone ends up worse off for it.

Dale Carnegie said it really well in his book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People": The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. Despite our initial desire to really unload on someone when we get steamed about something, it's just not productive.

The Other Guy Has A Strategy, Too, and You Need to Think More Than Once Move Ahead.

It would make the world a hell of a lot more productive.

Is it the end of the world?

The last few weeks have seen some usual events befall the Washington DC area; notably, the earthquake (where in the heck did THAT come from??!?) and Hurricane Irene.

Irene was potentially a biggie, but in terms of damage, it didn't bring nearly the water that Hurricane Isabel did in 2003.  I remember that vividly because I was living on a boat at the time in Southwest DC at the Gangplank Marina.  To this day, I'm still upset that I didn't document that event better -- there's nothing quite as surreal as waking up one morning to see someone riding their dinghy across Hains Point.  It was completely submerged.

But anyways, we've had a rash of seemingly nasty weather come DC's way recently.  Is this a sign of something taking a turn for the worse?  Are we all doomed?

I decided to run some numbers.  Let's take seven natural disasters:

• Earthquake
• Flood
• Hurricane
• Tornado
• Drought
• Snow / Blizzard
• Fire

Of course, some areas are more prone to these than others.  What are the chances that, in some small period of time, you get at least one of these at the hundred-year level?  As in, "Hurricane Isabel was the worst flooding in DC in 100 years."  Or, "the earthquake in August in DC was the worst in 150 years."

For each of these seven events, there is a 0.99 chance that it won't happen this year (for the once-in-a-hundred-years event).  So if you multiply the 0.99 for all seven events, there is a 93% chance that none of them will happen at the 100-year level.  Then, if you hang around DC for ten years, that's

0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93 x 0.93

= 0.495

That means, chances are that if you live in DC (or anywhere, for that matter) for 10 years, there is a better than 50% chance you will experience a once-in-a-hundred-year event of one of those seven catastrophes.

For the statistically minded and rigorous folks out there, I admit this is somewhat contrived.  I arbitrarily picked 7 events.  If you pick 12 events (maybe throw ice storms, hail storms, heat waves, continuous days of rain, and locust swarms in there), you'll get to the 50% level in 6 years.  And since the news media is always looking for the headline, "WORST [SOMETHING] IN 100 YEARS," you could say that they're casting their net pretty wide and looking for anything.  If your event database is 70 items large, you're likely to get a 1-in-100 year event every year.

So, no, I don't think the world is coming to an end.  We're just better at looking for it.

Sunflowers!

From an engineering perspective, sunflowers are an awesome plant.  About 2 months ago, I dug a few holes, dropped in a few seeds, and then more or less forgot about them.  I forgot about them so much that I even killed a few with RoundUp the following week.

So they're hardy, they grow impressively fast, and they're freaking huge.  The label on the little packet of seeds said "12 feet tall" which I initially dismissed as marketing mumbo-jumbo.  But, no, some of them really do grow to 12 feet tall in less than 2 months.  And the leaves track the sun in their thirst for more juice from the sun.

And the flowers (actually, technically, they're flower heads, as the big yellow thing is actually a bunch of small flowers crammed together) are a marvel of engineering.  According to the wikipedia article:

• Each floret is oriented next to its neighbor by the golden angle, 137.5 degrees;
• The orientation gives rise to a series of right-handed and left-handed spirals within the flower head;
• The number of left spirals and the number of right spirals are successive Fibonacci numbers;
• The pattern yields the most efficient packing density of seeds in the flower head.

All of which combines to form one really cute picture:

Awwwww.

One last note: May 1st is the International Guerrilla Gardening Day, where people surreptitiously plant sunflowers hither and yon.  Hilarious.  I might just be an active participant next year.

The Internet Just Had Its Doors Blown Off

A few weeks ago, the "Powers That Be" that control various aspects of the internet decided to do away with perhaps the most defining piece of the internet: .com .

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the organization that is ultimately in charge of distributing internet names and IP addresses.  They are the ones that enforce the use of .com, .net, .org, and everything else.

And so, on June 20th, ICANN announced that it was opening up the internet to almost anything.  For the first time, an internet address doesn't have to end in ".com" or ".net" or ".au".  Instead, it could end in ".john" or ".smith", if an enterprising John Smith wanted to pony up the $185,000 to register his own top level domain.

At first, I was "meh" about this story.  Who's going to sign up for this, and what will it do for them?  Take a prior example: the small western Pacific country of Tuvalu was given the country code of ".tv" in 1998.  (Each country gets its own country code for country-specific things on the internet: .au for Australia, .uk for the United Kingdom, .ad for Andorra ... there's a whole list here)  Businesses lined up behind Tuvalu to "rent" some of their .tv space, with the thinking that it would be really cool to have sites like www.cheers.tv or www.jeopardy.tv -- that all your favorite tv shows would have a .tv address.

But it hasn't really turned out to be all that popular, and Tuvalu appears to have gotten short-changed in the process.

So, at first, I was pretty "meh" about the whole thing.  A nice idea, a $185,000 price tag to keep out spammers and the lowly bloggers like myself, and a limit of 1,000 new top-level domains per year.  Who would sign up for this?

The answer: almost every tech savvy company out there.  Think about it:

• ipod.apple
• search.google
• www.movies.sony
• mickey.disney
• www.HugeOilSpill.bp

You get the point.  Big businesses will have the opportunity to closely align the company name with their product on the internet.  And, depending on how ICANN sets it up, you may even be able to dispense with the www stuff -- simply type in "twitter" in your browser, and you'll be taken straight to Twitter's home page.

The era of ".com" will seem quaint in 5 years.