I didn’t learn the techniques I’m now using from Moonwalking. The book just gave me an intriguing overview and taste. Then I dug in and learned most of what I know now from a few books and an audio training series.

For just a short taste of the taste that got me inspired, watch Josh’s 20 minute Ted talk below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6PoUg7jXsA

If you can get to Hartford, CT on May 31, 2012, plan to attend a free 1-day seminar covering all the main theories around design for vibro and aero acoustics. Dr. David Burd will be your guide into the exciting world of acoustics engineering and simulation.

Does your lift truck need to meet acoustic noise limits?
Do you have a motor shaking the crap out of your assembly?
Are you a speaker manufacturer?
Does “quiet” sell more of your products?

For more details and registration, click here.

See you in Hartford!

Then one day, a fine young engineer said, “Hey boss, we could simulate all that stuff we’re building and breaking out in the lab… right from our 3D CAD models.” Say hello to FEA (Finite Element Anlaysis)… and you thought 3D CAD was expensive!

But, after a few years and lots of virtual successes, that same engineer comes back to you and says, “Hey boss, we need to spend some cash on nonlinear FEA.”

“Hold up… I thought FEA was a problem I already paid to solve?!?” You scratch your head and try to blow the fog away from rusty memories of college math. “I know there was something in there about linearizing complex systems of equations… is that what he means?”

Your son is a producer at the local TV station. He’s always talking about how cool it is to work with the non-linear video editor. Does that have something to do with this? What’s this all about? More importantly, why should you spend any money on it?

Well, your engineer may be correct. Your FEA toolset may be incomplete. It may well be worth your investment to add nonlinear FEA capabilities.

Linear FEA

You probably started down the FEA path with what’s known as simple, static, linear FEA software. Don’t feel bad! That’s what most people do. It’s the best way to get started. This level of software is meant to simulate very small part deflections in materials that aren’t being permanently deformed by forces applied. “Linear” refers to the fact that metal parts bend linearly and proportionally to the load applied… and then spring back to their original shape.

If you stand in the middle of a large I beam, the deflection is probably too small for you to even see. Linear FEA is perfect for these situations.

Nonlinear FEA

Ever see a circus strong man bend a metal bar? You’ve just witnessed what happens when you push past the yield strength of that material. The deflection achieved is no longer linearly proportional to the force applied… and the material may even permanently deform. You’ve just gone beyond the assumptions that make Linear FEA solvers valid. You’re going to need something more sophisticated to simulate these kinds of problems.

What to look for:

• Extreme loading conditions (like a car crash)
• Moving parts
• Non-metallic materials like exotic composites or rubbers
• Contact between components (both planned and unplanned)
• Bolted connections
• Short duration impact loads

In a nutshell, linear FEA is the simple stuff. It will get you pretty far. In fact, if your product can effectively be modeled with the assumptions of linear FEA- you should absolutely use it! Solve times will be faster and the results will be just as good as nonlinear FEA.

But, if you have a lot of contact, nonlinear materials, or forces that push past the yield strength of more mundane materials- it’s time to augment your FEA toolset.

Image by bengt-re

It is surreal to see reporting from my hometown on both the Rhode Island and national news. Henryville is a tiny dot on the map, about 20 miles north of Louisville, KY. I’m sure there are people in other parts of Indiana who had never heard of it… until now.

I grew up in Henryville. It was a classic example of small town America with only 1 stoplight (a blinker) and no fast food restaurants or hotels. The people were kind hearted, hard working patriots. The phrase “Hoosier hospitality” may as well have been coined in Henryville. My mom came up with another term I always loved about the place: “The Henryville elbow.” Basically it means that there are no strangers in Henryville. As you drive around, people are constantly waving at each other… showing their elbows.

The television footage is devastating. Though I’ve been living in New England for a long time, it’s now clear to me that this place is where all my memories live. The school where I cried for my mamma on the first day of kindergarten. The school where I somehow scored my career 4 points on the JV basketball team. The same school where I dreamed of the future me while wearing a cap and gown. It’s gone.

Maybe it’s too soon to assess and report- but I look at this devastation and have to think lives were lost. I am praying that’s not the case. What we do know, however, is that these good people are in for a tough struggle. Long after the news crews leave, houses will have to be rebuilt, businesses will have to make tough financial decisions, and kids will be shuttled far and wide for an education.

Take a look at the image above (taken by an old classmate of mine, Jay Caudill) and imagine this was your reality. These people need your help. And they need it now.

Please donate whatever you can to the American Red Cross today:
Call 1-800-RED CROSS
Go to http://www.redcross.org
Text “REDCROSS” to 90999. A $10 donation will be charged to your phone bill.

I’m in that circle and can count the number of authors on 1 finger who write fun engineering prose.

So, I was excited to find that Tony had stepped up to non-technical literature. TLMSKOH is a surprisingly meaty and satisfying book. It definitely feels like Tony has pulled in many autobiographical elements and stories… I really had no idea what to expect, but was left with a pleasant, warm feeling in the final pages.

There are laughs, surprises, dark human truths, and redemptive releases. I especially like (without giving too much away) the revelation that your pit of despair may actually turn out to be a just a few inches deep.

Loose Meat follows a middle aged, out of work, Mechanical Engineer’s desperate move from Chicago back to his hometown near Detroit. Though he hasn’t been back in decades, everyone in the town seems to know and love him. Even strangers. Little hints keep popping up that something’s hinky back in Hamtramck.

That’s about all I’m willing to divulge about the story. Just read and fully enjoy it for yourself. I will say that my blog readers will likely cotton to the book because we get to see some brief references to FEA software and fluid dynamics. This is, however, by no means a technical book like Hot Air Rises. Those elements are just normal, background, character building colors. Still, I can’t think of another fiction book that would have mentioned them!

Great stuff, Tony. Can’t wait to read your next!

For example, if you needed to remember “metatarsal” in a list of bones, you might conjure up a visual of yourself shaking hands with a seal that is swimming in a tar-pit. As in “met a tar seal.” Interestingly, the more senses you can attach to this image, the easier it will stick. What color is the seal? Can you smell the tarpit? Is the seal barking? Is it a hot day?

All of these senses electrically activate different areas of your brain. So, the more “hooks” you can attach to the image, the more likely you are to remember it in the future. You might only get an initial, acrid, mental whiff of tar… and suddenly the entire image springs into your consciousness. Or, maybe the seal barking is your first connection on another day. The point is, you are giving yourself a much more robust memory mechanism compared to how we were taught to memorize in high school. What were we trying to save to the old hard drive back then? An image of the word “metatarsal” as black text on a white background? You are probably only electrically tapping a single area of the brain with that. No wonder it didn’t stick.

The next logical question: What about memorizing numbers?

Numbers are inherently abstract. In my previous post on The Rhyming Peg List, I covered one way to visualize the numbers 1 through 10. But, what about a number like 3212? Turns out there are a few different mnemonic systems built for this, but one of the oldest and most popular is The Major System. It relies on a translation of numbers to phonetic sounds in order to build words… words that can then be visualized- as described with our tar-pit seal.

Here are the phonetic conversions:

• 0 – s (z)
• 1 – t (d)
• 2 – n
• 3 – m
• 4 – r
• 5 – l
• 6 – ch (sh, j, zh)
• 7 – k (g)
• 8 – f (v)
• 9 – p (b)

Actually, you’d better think of these conversions by the actual consonant sound, not the letter name:

• 0 – suh (zuh)
• 1 – tuh (duh)
• 2 – nuh
• 3 – muh
• 4 – ruh
• 5 – luh
• 6 – chuh (shuh, juh, zhuh)
• 7 – kuh (guh)
• 8 – fuh (vuh)
• 9 – puh (buh)

Take 3212, for example. You simply string together the corresponding consonant sounds:

muh nuh tuh nuh

At this point, you are free to insert vowels wherever you like in order to form a word or words.

M-ow-N-T-a-N = mountain = 3212

Or, if you are a Jersey Shore fan, maybe you convert it to

M-a-N    T-a-N = man tan = 3212

So, 3212 could be stored in your brain as a very orange “The Situation” or an iconic view of Mount Everest.

Sounds like too much work?

Yeah, that’s what I thought initially, too.

There are a few different strategies for locking in the phonetic conversions. Think of it like learning to count to ten in another language, though. Pretty quickly, “dos” immediately makes you think of “two” with no mental translation effort. My favorite approach (or rather the first one I encountered) comes from Jared Kelner’s Infinite Mind audio series. Ron White has a different method that will result in the same end goal. Yet another path can be found over at the fantastic Mnemotechnics website.

I think this system came easily to me because I minored in Russian Language back in engineering school. Russian is an extremely phonetic language. Westerners trying to learn Russian are often met with quizzical responses from native Russian speakers when asking how to spell a newly encountered word. Take the word “Девушка” (Girl) for example:

• Д = d
• е = yeh
• в = v
• у = oo
• ш = sh
• к = k
• а = ah (or uh without the stress)

So, the word is pronounced d-YEH-v-oo-sh-k-uh

If you ask a Russian how to spell that in Cyrillic, they will slowly and loudly say, “DYEH!… VOO!… SHKUH!” This is kind of like when Americans think they can just speak louder to get a foreigner to understand them

My old Russian studies also helped me with the hard and soft consonant bit of The Major System. Notice that there are a few options for some of the numbers:

• 0 – s (z)
• 1 – t (d)
• 6 – ch (sh, j, zhuh)
• 7 – k (g)
• 8 – f (v)
• 9 – p (b)

This comes from the idea that your mouth and tongue are basically held in the same position to create a family of consonants. There is only a subtle change in the shape of your tongue to produce the “suh” or “zuh” sound. Test it out right now with the consonant families above. See what I mean?

There are numerous examples of this in Russian. The one that bothers me the most shows up in our mispronunciation of Russian last names ending in “ov.” Take Yuri Andropov ( Юрий Андропов), for instance. When the  ”в” (vuh to English speakers) appears at the end of a Russian word, it takes on the hard form of the consonant family. So, most Americans will call him Androp-ov when they should be calling him Androp-off.

Anyway, once you wrap your head around the idea of consonant families based on tongue shape and mouth position, it quickly makes sense.

Yet another area of the brain tapped

I’ve made an interesting observation while mastering The Major System: when I see or think of certain numbers, my tongue and mouth often automatically start to make the shapes associated with the corresponding consonant families. This tells me I’ve created a whole new “hook” to electrically light up a new part of my brain.  A part I’ve never used for this kind of association in my almost 40 years on the planet!  Herein lies the beauty and power of mnemonics. It is quite possible to create and exercise new neural pathways even if you weren’t born an idiot savant! (1 out of 2 for me, by the way.)

How to practice

I ain’t gonna lie. It takes a little work to make these phonetic number conversions second nature. I came up with a little exercise that greatly accelerated my mastery. While driving, I would pick out street signs, house numbers, etc, and try to convert them to words and images before I actually passed them. So, the moment I saw an Interstate 95 sign, I would begin to change it to b-?-l… Bowl! Then I’d get an image of a cereal bowl in my mind as quickly as possible. Start with 2 digit numbers. Then work your way up to 3 and 4 digit groups. If your eyesight is aging, you’ll just have to be faster than the youngsters!

In practice

I’ll share a final example of how I use this technique in daily life. I have been a road warrior for many years. After a hundred hotels, they all start to look the same. It used to be impossible for me to remember my hotel room numbers. Usually the front desk lady writes your room number on the outside of your key-card envelope. I finally took to ripping that section of the envelope off and immediately sticking it in my pocket with the card.

Now, I use The Major System in combination with another system I’ll cover in a future post. I have had 100% success in my hotel stays over the last six months. In fact, I still remember the first room number I tried it on. It was room 1148. I used a black and white image of Toto (the dog from wizard of oz) standing at the peak of a roof and barking. I got there by changing 11 (T-T) to Toto and 48 (R-F) to roof. It was the first thing that popped in my mind (which is always best as it turns out).

Give this a try and let me know if it works for you!

Image by Monica’s Dad

I stumbled upon this unique system for strapping all that digital detritus down in simplified style. Check out the Grid-It! system from Cocoon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQsGiHo32BQ

Grid-It! organizers come in a variety of sizes. I use a long skinny one- fits in the front pocket of my laptop bag and holds just the stuff I need. Check it out here on Amazon.

And, here are a list of my favorite doo-dads packed into it (all pretty cheap):

• Cheap Earbud headset
• USB to earbud headset adapter
• Retractable micro-usb cable
• Retractable aux cable
• Micro-usb to iPod adapter
• Cigarette lighter USB charger
• HTC Incredible wall charger
• iPod Nano (mine’s an old 3rd generation)

If you are putting a system like this together for someone else, pay attention to what connections might be required for their bits and buy components accordingly.

My HTC Incredible cell phone uses micro-USB for charging. So does my Nook ereader. So, for me it made sense to start with the retractable USB to micro-USB cable. If I’m in a rental car, I plug that bad boy into the cigeratte lighter adapter (USB) and right into my phone (micro-USB). Note: you should buy the exact cigeratte lighter adapter I specify above. It’s the only one I found that runs enough amps to let me charge, talk, and use my phone’s GPS simultaneously.

Speaking of being in the car, I use the retractable AUX cable to connect my iPod to the AUX input on the rental car stereo.

When I get to the hotel, I switch the phone over to the wall charger.

My Nook can be charged with the same setup in either scenario… so I’m not carrying duplicate charging cables.

The nifty little micro-USB to iPod adapter lets me connect my iPod to my laptop to charge and download fresh podcasts on the go.

I really dig these cheapo Palm Pre earbuds. The mic is nice and slim (like the iPhone headset, but at a fraction of the cost), sound quality is great, and there are cool little magnets to hold the buds together when not in use. Plus, they work with my cell phone while I’m in the car (I refuse to be that guy wearing a bluetooth headset)- and work just as well for Skype on my laptop using the USB adapter listed above. I can also use them for my iPod while exercising. Buy a half dozen in case they stop making these. At $3.50 a pop, why not?

There you have it.
Go forth and blow the mind of your favorite traveling tech geek this Christmas!

I decided to change up the look and feel 0f this blog. Wanted to go for something clean and simple, so as not to distract from reading the actual content. What do you think? Did I go overboard? Like it, love it, hate it, don’t care? Please let me know.

Also, side note, thanks to my virtual assistants in India for making it happen.

Enjoy!
Jeff

It’s never been my job to deeply understand the coding behind the engineering software I represent. I took exactly 1 masters level CFD course in the mid 90s. Yikes. I was pretty much done after struggling to write my own basic, ugly, hardly useful CFD solver. Pitiful.

My job is to look at a potential customer’s design challenge, relate that to some some sort of solution [hopefully, but not always, one I actually sell], and help to uncover the real business case that [hopefully] justifies the investment in said solution.

Most of the time, all of that information has to be packaged in such a way that the holder of the purse strings can understand. I guess that’s the other thing I’m pretty good at. Usually these people don’t (or shouldn’t) care about the deep details of the solution technology.

Most drivers can’t point out an alternator under the hood. Does that mean they aren’t qualified to make a car buying decision? Of course not. Explaining the high level benefits of CAE for non-experts has always been one of the guiding goals for my blog. Now that I’m digging more deeply into the rich world of structural analysis, I think it’s time for me to create a series of posts explaining the most common aspects of CAE in the simplest terms possible. I’ll try my best to come up with good “fat man” analogies.

When I first got into engineering simulation, I struggled to explain what I do for a living to civilians- er non-engineers. I’d be at a dinner party and someone would say, “Nice to meet you, what do you do?” To which I’d say, “I’m in engineering software.”

Now, I still recommend this approach at dinner parties…. because a deep discussion of FEA or CFD usually won’t create the desired social atmosphere. But, let’s say the person bites and wants to dig in, “Oh, what does that mean?” Don’t start talking about nodes, elements, boundary conditions, stress, and the like. Say something like this instead:

“Imagine you owned a company that makes plastic chairs. Maybe you want to use thinner plastic to cut costs and make more money. In our software, you could create a 3D virtual reality model of that chair, and simulate putting a big fat man on it. It’ll tell you if the chair will break or not… all before ever trying to build and test it in real life.”

image by zorilla

Thomas Richard Waters

My dad turned 70 today. In my mind, however, he’s always been about 40. Which is odd because I’m almost 40 now… and still feel 18. If you meet my dad today, you’d peg him as at most, a vibrant 55. It’s not out of the question for you to meet him, actually. He’s constantly on the move. On any given day, he could be in Colorado, Florida, Oregon, Kentucky, New Zealand, or Rhode Island. Short guy, huge heart, boots, cowboy hat, Southern drawl, conversationalist, doesn’t believe in strangers… that’s him.

I don’t get to see my dad often. But, I still hear his voice every day. When there is hard work to be done, others are giving up, and I’m thinking about letting up, I hear a disapproving grunt and, “Ain’t nothin’ worth doin’ that’s easy.”

While other kids were couch bound, my dad had me building endless barbed wire fences, splitting wood, digging ditches, cleaning horse stalls, throwing hay bales, popping blisters, and growing callouses. He didn’t just send me off like a slave- he was always right there with me, shoulder to shoulder, leading by example.

Dad worked at a cigarette factory for 26 years. He worked long hours, and never missed a day. As supervisor of the materials section, he was under constant pressure to make sure that an incredibly high volume of production was never delayed due to paper, tobacco, filter, or chemical shortages.

My dad busted his hump… and had to manage a lot of people who didn’t have that drive. Dad used to occasionally let me tag along with him as a kid. It was so exciting to walk into this huge, bustling factory. On one visit, I remember going into the breakroom and seeing a guy leaned back with his feet up on a lunch table. A few hours later, I walked by and noticed the same guy in the same position. Near the end of the day, I saw the guy taking it easy yet again. After we walked by I asked, “Daddy, does that man work here? I only see him in the breakroom.” Dad just chuckled and mussed my hair. I think he knew at that moment that he’d done his job as a parent.

High school was easy for me. I never studied- and graduated 1^st in my class. Then, I went to a prestigious engineering college and got my ass handed to me. The classes were tough, and the competition was fierce. I had to learn how to study. I got used to all-nighters. Though I wasn’t as smart as my classmates, I did well (and often better) by simply working harder.  I’m convinced that I would have failed without those endless hours of post-hole digging in my youth.

I’ve forgotten more math than most people have learned. I’ve spent my career helping companies implement complex computer aided engineering simulation tools that my dad marginally understands- yet he’s helped me every step of the way.

I want to wish you a heartfelt happy birthday, dad…
…and thanks for giving me a gift that will serve me for life.