Shop Truths, Phrases, Tales; and Outright Lies

[PJs]

Paul,

I have been on the blessings side with "ask and receive" lately and man did you deliver! Thank You for sharing this with us!! Quite a Journey to say the least and lit so many candles for me it will take days to get through all the rabbit hole diving. Spent about 2 hours after you posted this and barely scratched the surface, and needed some time to assimilate before responding.

It is most interesting to me about the paths and seemingly innocuous turns we take sometimes that turn an underlying goal into an adventure that brings us so much more, as yours obviously did. Those had to be some exciting times working on cutting edge machines and writing 3D vector math into them with a time function. Had a feeling it was FORTRAN as a defacto standard for science back then...still is but morphed to more object oriented. The amazing thing I learned was you were using it in concurrent form way back then.

Here is a link some might find interesting I found on my rabbit hunt around your 1Mips comment. Top 500 The list. I know these are FLOPS but still, We've come a long way is right...now heading toward 10M cores.

It's funny for me with math. In grade, Jr, & HS I was well ahead, doing 3d vectors in my 1st year geometry class freshman year because it fascinated me and the standard stuff was too easy (boring and Another reason your work fascinates me so much). HS Trig was very fun/easy and calculus was ok. However I crashed and burned my first semester college Calc, mainly because the teacher was one of those that wrote with 1 hand & erased with the other and little lecture and no TA. The book helped but it all seemed geared to memorizing the ~220 basic formulas, no why's or basic logic to me. Took it in summer to make up and about three hours into it with a different teacher the light finally came on. I had never got anything less than an A or higher until then but made it through 2 semesters of differentials finally with B's. After that they were laying off Phd. EE and took a different path for quite a while, Retail and turning a wrench so I didn't use much above HS level. Even once I got through some ME stuff and Cad and actually did some engineering for all those years it never got used a lot and by that time we had Spreadsheets & MathCad. Probably the most high level was in the flow dynamics stuff and that was pretty much built in. Another interesting journey on a different path...but still like to do sacred geometry with a pencil, ruler and compass. ;-) and in my graphic work too.

The "reflection seismology geophysics" is so fascinating and only scratched the surface in my dive. It's interesting to me partly because of the sound side with the density issues you would have to contend with...let a lone noise. It's also right up my alley because of my long interests in particle theory...actually talked mom in to buying George Gamow's book on particle physics ($40 at the time) for me in HS. Could you please explain "and lots and lots of dot products"? Just didn't get the reference. 8-)

That was quite a fast track, and here I thought 14 balls in the air at once was a lot. Interesting that you piggy backed SCADA with CC data on VSAT...not sure I understand how that might be accomplished and keep it stable (no delays or crash and burns). I would bet its proprietary, yet very coool! I worked with SCADA and HMI stuff in my latter years and enjoyed being able to have a GUI tied to PLCs and such...a systems guy at heart I think, but for me those turns that led me down the R&D paths were some of the most satisfying...and frustrating sometimes.

I am most grateful for your sharing here, the kindness of personality you have brought to HMT, and your wherewithal! An Honor, Thank You!

~PJ