Shop Truths, Phrases, Tales; and Outright Lies

[Paul Jones]

Very nice indeed TM51. During my management career, I think establishing several self directed work teams was the most rewarding part of my career. Basically cross-function teams of highly skilled people and some are horizontal thinkers (big picture) and some vertical thinkers (specialists), yet they were very much in tune with each others' strengths and weaknesses, and knew how to deliver and receive constructive criticism to continuously or quantum leap improve and solve difficult problems. We had established five criteria for working together and the fifth and most important was "It had to be a fun place to work". On my LinkedIn bio there are several testimonials by former direct reports who mention the great times we had working together.

So, I could image us working together and it would be interesting and fun. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday.

Regards, Paul

P.S. - PJs, I think you would be interested in 3D seismic reflection seismology. In mathematical terms, it is an under determined problem where we have more variables than independent equations to solve uniquely for the variables. In this case the most important unknown variable is the velocity of sound in each rock layer so you guess each velocity and solve through iterative simulations where the velocities can be approximated indirectly by other methods. It is the millions of iterations that require fast computers and kind of like the movie "Ground Hog Day" where you do the same thing over and over with slight tweaks here and there until everything comes into focus in 3D. There is also a lot of signal processes since the hydrophone arrays for marine geophysical exploration are about two miles long towed behind the ship and have many GPS sensors along the 2048 channels or more hydrophone string, use a 0.5 millisecond sampling rate with the sound first penetrating a 10,000' deep ocean column plus another 30,000' of sub-ocean rock strata, with all the reflections coming back up to the hydrophone arrays taking tens of seconds of elapsed time. The sound source is an array of airguns (devices with 2000 psi compressed air carefully released at precise intervals causing a water cavitation bubble and then sound from the water slamming back together to fill the void around 30' below the surface). The initial sound signal looks more like a dampened sine wave so the signal processing tries to massage the waveform back into a single spike and of course there is background noise, ship noise and sea surface noise. It is amazing it even works but it does and it works very well after years of perfecting the techniques. The same technique can be used on land but use Vibraseis trunks with a vibration plate pushed into the ground and encodes a signal that can be detected with a geophone array. The big difference is the ocean column of water is not there but the overburden of unconsolidated soil and surface rock layers plays havoc channeling multiple reflections (kind of like tool chatter) that has to be signal processed out of the data. Luckily the computers and computer programs can do all the housekeeping as compared to teh 1930's through the early in 1950's when these corrections were done by hand with slide rules. In fact I used slides rules until 1973 in grad school when I used an HP 35 calculator shared by others in the department.

[Toolmaker51]

Just when I'd forgotten all about LinkedIn...Signed on during its infancy tracking my illustrious niece in Europe. Maybe OK for the professional crowd and administrative types - no deal for the blue collars. The dingy connections it drew here made me nuts. Especially when distasteful managers from former employer would list me as a reference!