Reality Engineering Archives - Page 4 of 5

The Linoleum Press Job and the Meatball: A Cautionary Tale

It rolls out in acres and covers millions of square meters of the planet. It is shiny and it is matte, it is gaudy and it is sublime, it is cheap and it is expensive, it is laid in homes, offices and schools an... Read More...

A Wreck of a Story

When I was a kid and found out that my dad was an ‘engineer,’ the vision of him driving a train popped into my head for the word engineer was firmly associated with the word locomotive. It was a few years u... Read More...

The Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers: A Timeless Treatise

This month’s In Compliance Magazine features the 2014 Reference Guide, a compendium of resources for engineers, labs, vendors and like-minded professionals with a bent towards a world more in-tune with product ... Read More...

Frying the Flight Data Recorder: How Not to Impress

In this month’s In Compliance Magazine the focus is on military and aerospace topics. Along those lines, we worked on a project for an aviation company some years back. In mining the archives, so to speak, ... Read More...

A Jungle Survival Story

Long before EMC was his interest and, I daresay, his passion, Dad flew airplanes for a living. It was during an era unto its own. Norm had a load of stories and loved to tell them, throwing in an occasional emb... Read More...

The Ringing Rocket

Gimbals & Gimballing Ships’ compasses are mounted on gimbals, fixtures that allow the needle to stay steady against the pitching and rolling of surging seas. Sailors know that a steady compass helps to s... Read More...

Timbuktu (or Bust)

Bamako, a tattered town on the Niger River, is the home of the US embassy in Mali. It being the capital, the city has offices for various aid agencies (IMF, World Bank, etc.) as well. Embassies and these other... Read More...

The Scale of Shaky Things

We examine the size of things that move and shake, from the whisper of a lover to the crunch of tectonics. Barely audible, a whisper at the threshold of human hearing produces a “zero dB” sound pressure lev... Read More...

The Big Inch

The days are lengthening and daffodils are only a month away, but this challenge remembers another winter when thick sheets of sleet enveloped the ground and wipers froze to windows. It was a brutal winter ... Read More...

Clash of the Titans

Engineering, like physics, involves solving problems using algorithms subject to boundary conditions. In electromagnetics, equations are evaluated subject to boundary conditions such as conductive surfaces, in... Read More...