On the Road with the Manufacturing Tour

All this week I’m traveling with the “Manufacturing Makes It Real” tour, which the NC State University Industrial Extension Service is running to showcase and celebrate the state’s products and the people who make them.

My job, leading up to this, was to plan the route and make sure the bus and tractor-trailer get from point A to point B to point C to … the end. “There and back again,” as Bilbo Baggins would say.

Yesterday we traveled to RLCB in Raleigh, Thomas Built Buses in High Point, and Polychem Alloy in Lenoir. I’m typing this from my hotel room — isn’t technology marvelous? — in Fletcher, where this morning we’ll visit ArvinMeritor before heading down the mountain to National Gypsum in Mount Holly and Tyco/Scott Health & Safety in Monroe.

It’s already been quite the adventure, between miscommunication on where to meet yesterday morning, a flat tire on the bus that had to be swapped out at RLCB, and extra cars that blocked our entry to one factory. (That, in a way, is a nice problem to have: so many people showing up that we had to ask some to move their cars!)

Our industry hosts have been fantastic, especially considering the much-needed rain that forced all our events yesterday indoors. And the manufacturers who have come seem to relish the opportunity to show off their products and praise their employees.

We’re traveling all over the state, so if you’re anywhere along our route or near one of our stops and you have a little extra time, stop by and see what’s going on! A quick walk through the display trailer will surprise you, in terms of the variety of different things manufactured here in North Carolina.

Hope to see you on the tour!

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So Much for That Idea

Last month I posted my thoughts on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and particularly my opinion that a brute-force method should be used to stop the leak. In response to my friend David’s comment, I sent the idea in for evaluation and the other day I received the boilerplate response:

> Dear Gray Rinehart,
> Thank you so much for taking the time to think about and submit your proposed solution regarding the Horizon incident. Your submission has been reviewed for its technical merits. Unfortunately, the team has determined that your idea cannot be applied under the very challenging and specific operating conditions we face. All of us on the Horizon Support Team appreciate your thoughts and efforts.
>
> Sincerely yours,
> Horizon Support Team

In the publishing world, this is known as a “form rejection,” with the only personalization being that the system grabbed my name from the electronic form and popped it into the letter. (I know this because I’ve received lots of form rejections for my stories, and have sent out my share as well.)

What amuses me is the phrase “cannot be applied.” I’m aware of “the very challenging and specific operating conditions,” since in 1993 I directed a search-and-salvage operation in the Pacific Ocean for pieces of a failed Titan-IV rocket; based on that experience, I still think my idea is feasible. But because it would render the undersea wellhead unusable forever, it is most certainly undesirable to the powers that be.

I could be wrong; it wouldn’t be the first time, nor the last. Nevertheless, I think the kid gloves should have come off a long time ago. By not making the situation better, the people in charge are definitely making it worse.

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Maybe We Should’ve Been Indelicate

[Grain of salt statement: This is something of a rant. It is my unqualified opinion, as I’m not an oil man and the only floating oil rig I’ve ever been on had been converted to a space launch platform. This post is for entertainment and stress-relief purposes only: primarily my own entertainment and stress relief.]

I fail to understand why British Petroleum hasn’t written off the failed Deepwater Horizon as a total loss and taken steps to entomb it forever in order to stop it from leaking. Instead, it seems to me, they’ve been working hard to save their equipment and preserve this particular access point by trying small-scale, piecemeal fixes. (Here’s a nice article about some of the methods they’ve tried.)

Note that I don’t fault them for their statements to the press or misunderstanding the magnitude of the problem. Long ago I learned from one of my commanders that in the first hours of any major crisis, nothing is correct. Nothing you know, and usually nothing you do, will be correct until the situation begins to sort itself out.

So I understand that the first thing for BP to do was to try to activate the so-called “blowout preventer” — the device that was supposed to keep a disaster like this from ever happening. But once that failed, and especially once the amount of oil emerging from the well was known to be far greater than anticipated, it seems it was time to stop pussyfooting around and squash the thing like an undersea bug.

The nearest metaphor I can come up with is that the Deepwater Horizon wellhead is like a coffee straw sticking out of a Dixie cup at the bottom of a really deep swimming pool, and we’ve been trying to plug that straw by dropping grains of sand into it. The objective should have been to leave the thing sunk and bury it forever.

I understand that forced-in drilling mud (which is a special mineral slurry used in oil extraction) could overcome the well pressure and stop the flow, and I understand that now they’re drilling relief wells (see this article) in order to pump in mud and eventually concrete, but those are delicate operations at a time when brute force seems necessary.

Maybe we — BP and all of us — should’ve been indelicate. It seems to me that we have seen too much footage of smart bombs going through windows, and have forgotten (or no longer believe) that sometimes overwhelming force is required to solve an intractable problem.

Why not drop something big and cylindrical like a farm silo down over the thing, right over the blowout preventer, stand it up on the ocean floor and dump concrete in it until the concrete spills over the top. If that doesn’t stop the oil from coming out — if the oil bubbles up through the concrete as it’s setting — build a bigger cylinder and drop that over the first one and fill it up, and so on until the thing is encased in as many cubic yards of concrete as it takes to stop it from leaking into the ocean. If we have to build a five-hundred-foot-tall mountain of concrete on the ocean floor to seal the thing up, it seems a lot better than hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil spreading across the water.

They could’ve cut their losses, learned a big lesson, and moved on to the next project. Instead, we’re all learning some much more difficult lessons ….

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Economic Recovery Blues

Introducing my second foray into songwriting: “The Economic Recovery Blues,” the 2009 Industrial Extension Service (IES) Song, now available on YouTube.

And now, the story behind the song …

Friends from the Titan System Program Office at Vandenberg AFB may remember that I penned quite a few Titan-related lyrics to Beatles tunes, but “The Economic Recovery Blues” was only the second time I’ve tried to write lyrics and something of an original tune. Back in late 2008, my first attempt was “The I-E-S Song” — I wrote the lyrics and had the basic tune in mind, and Mark Minervino (my Pastor at North Cary Baptist Church) fleshed out the music. He also did all the instruments and the background vocals — his versatility is boundless — and I just sang the main lyrics. Then I put together a video montage and showed it off at our annual Christmas luncheon.

The original “I-E-S Song” was a big hit with the folks at work. Several of us wanted it to go on YouTube, but the humor was a little too sharp — mostly self-deprecating, but it got in digs at some other North Carolina institutions of higher learning. Maybe the powers-that-be will change their minds one of these days.

I had so much fun doing the first “I-E-S Song” that I figured, why not do another one? So in December 2009 the process repeated. I had the lyrics and the beginning of a tune, and Mark figured out (and performed!) the rest. Because I didn’t get started as early as the first one, we didn’t get this song done in time for the IES Christmas luncheon, so at that I sang another song — this one a work-related lyric sung to “Oh, How I Love Jesus” — and then finished up “The Economic Recovery Blues” over the holiday break. The video montage is rougher than the first one,* but the office folks decided to post it “as is.” So this is the first song I’ve done to be posted online. Hope you enjoy it, if you go in for that sort of office-related-silliness thing.

Meanwhile, if you know of anyone who needs some business consulting in lean manufacturing, “Six Sigma” statistical process control, ISO quality management standards, safety and health, or growth services, point them at the Industrial Extension Service — and at “The Economic Recovery Blues.”

Ah-one, and ah-two ….

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*A note on the video montage. For the first one, we purchased some nifty graphics off the web; for the new song, I used Creative Commons images and put attributions in the credits at the end of the song.

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Mississippi Damned

This weekend’s “proud papa” moment: seeing the movie MISSISSIPPI DAMNED — for which my daughter Stephanie was the “Key Set Production Assistant” — at the Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington. It’s a moving and sometimes disturbing portrait of a family trapped in cycles of poverty and abuse, and was filmed in the little town of Ahoskie, North Carolina. The acting was extremely good; for a sample, here’s the YouTube trailer.

The producers are looking for support to get the movie into theaters, but that probably won’t happen until next year. Keep an eye out!

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Blog Link: The Next Dimension

The Next Dimension

To me, “The Next Dimension” is a VIB — Very Important Blog.

To you, maybe, the adventures of a U.S. student studying abroad in Japan may not be so important, but to me it’s a great source of excitement and pride. Then again, I’m always excited about and proud of my children’s accomplishments — what parent isn’t?

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The (Solar) Farmer in the Dell

Here in the south, where the summer sun blazes and bakes man and beast and flowering field, growers often cover their youngest and most delicate plants with shade cloth.

A couple of weeks ago, driving to the Outer Banks, I saw a field full of shaded frame structures, under which appeared to be growing row upon row of young flowers. The shaded frames stretched off into the distance, and it occurred to me that if the cloth protecting those plants was photovoltaic, it could allow enough light through to promote photosynthesis (commercial shade cloth comes different grades, by percent of sun it passes) while generating some moderate amount of electricity. It might produce an appreciable amount by virtue of providing so much surface area.

I found a couple of web pages and recent articles that documented progress in developing photovoltaic cloth. Whether it can be made cost-effective, efficient enough to be worthwhile, and durable enough to withstand years of wind and sun and rain, remains to be seen. But if it could be made cheaply enough, farmers in hot spots around the world could benefit from it. I don’t know if it would generate enough electricity to sell, or just enough to run some of the farmers’ own devices, but in either case it seems like a beneficial arrangement.

If I had money to invest, I might invest in that kind of research.

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Image: “Corolla Sunrise,” by jvader33, licensed under Creative Commons, from Flickr

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Back to Grinding Stones …

… or something like that.

After my closest approximation to an actual vacation in many years (i.e., a trip away from home and Internet, during which I worked very little [on one or two days I didn’t do any work at all]), I’ve found it very hard to get back into the groove.

I’ve got to start turning the grindstone faster. So much to do …

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Lack of Security at the Department of Homeland Security

So the Secretary of Homeland Security announced that DHS would remove the “right-wing extremist” report from their web site.* The horse-and-barn-door metaphor seems appropriate, because it’s a meaningless gesture: the report’s been cached and will continue to be available on other sites (for example, the Anti-Secrecy Society … a.k.a. the Federation of American Scientists).

The real question is, why was it on-line in the first place?

I have a copy of the report, which I downloaded almost a month ago; I don’t remember whether I got if off the DHS site, but I don’t think so. Notwithstanding the other controversy surrounding its contents I was more disturbed by the fact that several of the paragraphs are not marked FOUO, but instead are marked LES. Most people can recognize FOUO as “For Official Use Only,” but LES may not be as familiar. LES means “Law Enforcement Sensitive.”

How sensitive? The paragraph in the report that describes the LES marking says,

This product contains Law Enforcement Sensitive (LES) information. No portion of the LES information should be released to the media, the general public, or over non-secure Internet servers. Release of this information could adversely affect or jeopardize investigative activities.

Let’s see that again: “No portion of the LES information should be released to the media, the general public, or over non-secure Internet servers.”

I got the report over non-secure Internet servers. Who put it there? A reprimand would seem to be in order.

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*According to this report.

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The World Owes Me Nothing

Not too long ago I had a brief conversation on Twitter* about whether the world owes us anything. I say, the world owes me nothing.

I’ve heard people say, “I didn’t ask to be born,” and proceed to demand recompense from the world.

I say, the world didn’t ask for any of us to be born. We owe something for what we have, and get.

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*See http://twitter.com/GrayRinehart.

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