Engineering Judgement

A little update to give some context to the following post(s)

2011-01-07T20:34:00.000Z

I am not a very committed blogger. Sometimes I think of something interesting to write about, but am not near a computer, or I’m too busy with other things to get around to it. Then when I finally do make time, I find that the original inspiration is long gone. I have a couple of unfinished, unpublished posts from way back that will probably never see the light of day, but nothing post-worthy for over a year now.
That’s not to say that nothing has happened, quite the contrary. Since the last post, there have been some fairly exciting changes in my life, not least of which was moving to France for a 9-month work placement, which is fast approaching the halfway mark. Quite apart from the lack of free time that is an unfortunate feature of gainful employment, the first three months were spent in an internet-free flat. Not the most conducive environment for blogging.
However. I have recently enjoyed reading Le Franco Phoney, by a fellow immigrant to this same corner of France, concerning her observations on French life. It’s brought my attention back to my own, neglected blog and so I plan to put a little time into occasional updates from now on, as the mood strikes me.

P.S. I just realised it’s the start of a new year in the popular Gregorian Calendar, and I haven’t made any resolutions, so this might as well be my new year’s resolution for 2011. Enough navel-gazing, on with the show!

Ninjadynamics

2010-05-25T01:05:00.002+01:00

Conservation of Ninjutsu
The first law of ninjadynamics, an expression of the principle of conservation of ninjutsu, states that martial arts skill may only be transferred from one fighter to another. It cannot be created or destroyed.

Thus in a martial arts fight, the total amount of skill available is a constant. This statement is known as the Inverse Ninja Law or The Shinobi Law of Numbers.

Additionally, ninjas can obtain greater power by destroying other ninjas. A ninja usually reaches its peak skill when it defeats its former master.

Although the cyborg had slaughtered most of the attacking ninja army, the law of Conservation of Ninjutsu meant that the last few were very powerful and soon reduced it to a sparking heap of metal.

The Inverse Ninja Law
According to the principle of conservation of ninjutsu, the threat posed by any given ninja (or other hand-to-hand combat expert) in any marital arts fight is inversely proportional to the total number of ninjas involved in the fight. This phenomenon is known as the Inverse Ninja Law or The Shinobi Law of Numbers.

Where: T=Threat; N=number of ninjas.

In real terms, it means that a lone ninja is an unstoppable force that can kill an infinite number of (for example) Stormtroopers before they become aware of his/her presence. On the other hand, ninjas in a large group are ineffective and can be slaughtered by a single well-armed hero. As the ninjas are killed off, the number of active ninjas in the fight reduces and the threat posed by each individual increases.

It is important to note that when a ninja dies, not all of their skill becomes available to the other fighters, some is always rejected into the surrounding environment as waste ninjutsu, meaning that the last ninja standing never reaches full power. Hence the net useful threat of a group of ninjas will always be less than that of a single ninja, and in a ninja-vs-ninjas confrontation, the lone ninja will always win.

The good ninja was fighting over a hundred highly-trained evil ninjas, but the Inverse Ninja Law meant that he was barely scratched as their bodies piled up around him.

The Ninja's Handicap Corollary
The Ninja's handicap corollary is derived from the Inverse Ninja Law and states that if one average ninja possesses T=1/N of the total skill in a fight, then a 'completeness factor' C can be included to represent the 'completeness' of a fighter. A small reduction in completeness can mean a large increase in threat.

Where: T=Threat; N=Number of ninjas; C=Individual 'completeness factor'.

A completeness factor of C=1 represents one average ninja.

Underweight ninjas have a slightly reduced C-factor, whereas fat ninjas are not very useful in a fight because of their increased C-factor. Therefore the best ninjas often tend to be skinny little girls.

A ninja with a missing body part, scar or any other disfigurement must have a C-factor of less than one. Hence when fighting alone, a crippled ninja can pose a threat of greater than unity and defeat an otherwise healthy ninja. This can even happen during a single fight - if a ninja loses an arm or a cyborg's face is blown off and they are not quickly finished off, they can soon become very dangerous indeed.

A fighter's C-factor can be reduced by a number of other surprising means. Some examples are included below.

Because of the Ninja's Handicap Corollary, Altair in Assassin's Creed has a greater than normal ability to murder people silently due to his missing finger.

Pirates, although the antithesis of ninjas, are subject to the same fundamental laws. Hence, pirates with peg-legs, hook-hands, eyepatches, or to a lesser extent, missing teeth, have reduced C-values and are more dangerous in combat than uninjured pirates.

In Serenity, River Tam is not only a waif but also clearly not all there. Hence her C-factor is much less than one and she is able to comprehensively destroy large groups of armed opponents and/or zombies without breaking a sweat.

Both Jackie Chan in The Forbidden Kingdom and Captain Jack Sparrow are permanently legless (on baijiu and rum respectively) and hence have a surprising advantage in close combat due to their low completeness factor.

Lowering the flag

2009-07-01T01:40:00.008+01:00

A great era on the internet is coming to a close. Yesterday Brokep of The Pirate Bay announced that they would be selling the site to a Swedish internet cafe chain, Global Gaming Factory X. The news echoes the final days of Napster (somewhat before my time), when it went legal and soon faded into insignificance. GGF say that they plan to make the site legal by finding a way to pay rights holders for the files downloaded by users.

Predictably, the decision has angered a great many of the users of the site. The Pirate Bay blog has been deluged with negative comments and there already seems to be a boycott movement forming. It seems to me that the rats are rapidly leaving this sinking ship.*
Of course this is hardly surprising. The Pirate Bay is supposedly one of the top 100 most visited sites on the 'net, and their rebellious, underdog attitude has won the crew untold millions of fans around the world. For them to suddenly sell out to a legitimate company is about the most shocking thing they could ever do.

The crew's reasons (at least the ones they talk about) are sound: They were unable to handle the sheer success of the site and the accompanying financial burden of running it. It is clear that the four were never interested in making money (whatever the prosecution would have you believe), and unfortunately it is probably this that led to their downfall. They say that the substantial fee from the sale of the site will be put towards the same kind of pro-internet campaigning that they are famous for. I for one am very interested to see what will happen now that they have some pretty serious money behind them.
Behind the scenes, it is likely that the pressure of the court case and other legal threats were also getting to be too much. It would be unfair to say that they've caved in to Hollywood's demands, more likely they are simply fed up of being constantly hunted. One can hardly blame them for wanting a break!

Now, the future of the site is very uncertain. I don't believe it will survive this change, certainly not in its current form. Like Napster eight years ago, It is doomed to fade into obscurity. Not that it will disappear, after all, legal Napster is technically still a successful business. But its time of influence has passed – in a nutshell, nobody cares.
Whatever its immediate fate, The Pirate Bay will go down in the history of the internet. I just hope that the new owners treat it and its remaining users well enough that it grows old gracefully, rather than crashing down in infamy. That would be an ignoble end to one of the most important places on the internet in recent times.

Whatever happens to TPB, life (and piracy) will go on. The beauty of the internet is that like a population of creatures, it evolves to overcome new challenges. Brokep hints at this in his recent Twitter interview, where he says that it is time for The Pirate Bay to evolve to ensure the survival of Bittorrent as a whole. The brutal fact about evolution is that in order for the species to improve, some individuals must die - The Pirate Bay was once the 'fittest' in the world, but times have changed seems that the time has come for a younger site to rise up and take the top spot.

The next year will be one of big change in the P2P world, but we'll all come out stronger for it. The Pirate Bay has had an inspiring run, but new protocols are appearing that are in many ways superior to Bittorrent, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of leadership battle arising soon.
It is hard to see the end of The Pirate Bay as a positive thing, but in the long run, I think most of us will come to appreciate that it had to go, and this was the best way.

I'll be proud to say that "I was there" during the golden age of The Pirate Bay. I would also like to thank brokep, TiAMO, anakata and the rest of the crew for their awesome work over the life of The Pirate Bay, and wish them every success with their future campaigns. They are ordinary people who rose up to become some of the Internet's bravest defenders, and I don't believe that will change, even though they are leaving this particular project behind.

*The Pirate Bay invites the most wonderful nautical metaphors. Another reason I'll miss it!

Day Two

2009-06-16T22:55:00.004+01:00

Summer Placement - Day Two

I cycled into work today, and found it slightly easier than I had expected. The headwind must have been lighter than when I went out on Saturday. So I arrived a little early, but no matter.

My supervisor's original plans for today were thrown out of the window almost immediately due to some unexpected business requiring immediate investigation. So we got into our overalls and went out to work in the Turbine Hall.

Nuclear Engineers wear only boxers underneath their overalls. Bet you didn't know that! I soon found out the reason why. The Turbine Hall is incredibly humid and the air is uncomfortably hot. My poor supervisor sweats so profusely in the heat that it looks like he's crying, that is no exaggeration!
It is also so noisy that you have to actually leave the building in order to communicate with the person standing next to you. Quite a difficult place to work for a long period!

Being in places like the Turbine Hall is rather unnerving because the conditions impair all the senses you normally use to read the environment and people around you. Your hearing is useless because of the noise and your earplugs. The ability to feel vibrations in the floor is useless when the two sets of giant turbines make the entire building shake. So a person can stand right behind you and shout, and you probably wouldn't notice. It is awareness of this fact plus the sensory overload that makes me keep 'seeing' people behind me and turning around to find no-one there. Then there was the time I sensed nothing but turned round to find two men standing behind me in the tiny space where I was working!
Fortunately, after a while my ears began to filter out the background noise and I was more able to understand people 'talking' (shouting). I imagine that people who have worked there a while are used to this.

For lunch, I bought an egg salad sandwich only to find it had cucumbers in it. Cucumbers are my no.1 most hated foodstuff, so I was not pleased! Tomorrow, I'm making my own sandwiches without any damn cucumbers!

In the afternoon, we spent a long time discussing the morning's findings. I was struck by how much this meeting resembled that bit in House where they write the symptoms on a board and then discuss possible diagnoses. All we were missing was a sick person, a flawed genius and the cool transparent glass blackboard. I must try to persuade them to invest in one!

Yesterday I said I hoped I'd see some real work soon. Today that wish was granted with a vengeance!

PS. Made a nice lasagne for dinner to make up for yesterday's lunch. It's a bit big, it'll last me three days at this rate!

Day One

2009-06-15T20:00:00.004+01:00

Summer Placement - Day One.

Today was my first day at the new job. I had no idea what my job would involve beyond the fact that I would be working in the Plant Efficiency department. I have yet to learn the answers to most of my questions, because I spent almost the entire day filling out forms! The only exception was training on how to undress when leaving a Contamination Controlled Area - a very daunting prospect, but the trainer had an excellent sense of humour and the whole session was quite fun.

In the morning I was chatting to one of the security guards while he was searching me and discovered that his son is a friend of mine from uni. Such a small world!

At lunchtime I sampled the delights of the site canteen, and had a very overcooked lasagne. I think I should make a decent one myself to make up for it!

I hope that tomorrow I might get to see some real work as well as getting a real discussion of my role for the summer.

Bloggy Blog

2009-06-14T19:00:00.000+01:00

Once again, I've been gone a while and lapsed into blog silence (I bet there's a smartarse word for 'blog silence' on the internets).
However, now that uni's out for the summer and I am starting work once again, I think it's time to have another crack at this 'web-logging' lark. Lets see how it goes.

I expect that most of what I write will be somewhat work-related, although I can't post actual details of what I'm doing because of various contractual and legal obligations. It's unfortunate but unavoidable, and besides, I think the technical details of Nuclear Engineering would bore most of the few people that read this.

So expect a bit of random waffling from me for the next three months or so!

Banned from facebook again

2009-04-22T21:54:00.003+01:00

<rant>
For the second time in a month, facebook's censor-drones have disabled my account on the grounds that it is 'fake'. The first time, I grant you, my name had inadvertently been changed to 'Tom Long John Silver', which does sound a little bit suspect. However, now they've got no good reason to do this.
The rule is enforced so that 'people's profiles are a genuine reflection of who they are offline'. So why am I told that I am not permitted to go online under my offline name? Should I use an actual fake name so that I can avoid facebook's meddling? No, because I hate irony. And because nobody would know who I am. And that would be stupid.

My response to facebook is as clear as I can make it:

Real first name: Tom
Real surname: Long
Compare this with the name on my profile: "Tom Long". Notice how similar they are?

Time Machine in the Finder toolbar

2009-03-08T19:14:00.005Z

Hello, internets! Did you miss me? Never mind, don't answer that.

I had just decided that the menubar is a silly place for a shortcut to Time Machine, and that I'd much rather a button in the Finder toolbar next to the QuickLook button.

A cursory Google reminded me that you can drag & drop any Finder item onto the toolbar, and that someone's already made a nice icon so that it matches the Leopard toolbar look. However, the Iconaholic icon is a slightly different shade of grey to the others, and doesn't look right when disabled (such as when actually in Time Machine). Being slightly obsessive about icons, I made my own version which I think is much more 'authentic'.

Click here to download the icon.

Instructions: Open "/Applications/Time Machine.app/Contents/Resources/" and replace "backup.icns" with my version. You can do this easily by dragging and dropping the icon onto the alias I've included in the disk image.

Soc overload!

2008-10-01T14:49:00.004+01:00

Yesterday and Monday were the Socs and Sports fairs and today's the day to sign up/try out a lot of them. But there's just so many! I can't choose!
Here's what I'm looking at:

Social
- RockSoc
- Salsa
- French Flair
- Scandinavian Society
- Welsh Society
- Curry Appreciation Society
- Engineers without Borders
- Gastronomic Society
- Sci-Fi Society
- Film Society
Sports
- Archery
- Canoeing
- Gliding
- Motorsports
- Mountaineering
- Sailing
- Pub Sports

They all sound like fun, but there's no way I can afford the time or money for more than a couple. Plus my weekends are rarely free as it is!

Small World

2008-09-25T01:45:00.004+01:00

In the last few days, I have added over 50 new friends on Facebook, mainly those who live with me at Brendon Court. There are more appearing every day too. Now that I "know" so many people, some very surprising links are appearing.
For example, one of the Fresher's Week crew at Brendon is acquainted with two of the people that I met while on a Year in Industry, neither of whom are currently at Bath.
This is not the only example. The Facebook Application Friend Wheel (created, incidentally, by a current student at the University of Bath), shows the relationships between all your immediate friends. From this I have learnt that someone that I met many years ago at "Chemistry Camp" happens to know someone that I later went to college with!
I find these coincidences staggering. Excuse me while I take a moment to marvel at how small the world has become...

Okay, I'm done.

You may notice that I've not posted at all on the subjects of moving to uni or Fresher's Week (which is happening around me as I write) but I'm sure I'll get round to it some time soon.

Stop Global Warming: Fly Away on Holiday?

2008-09-02T16:58:00.006+01:00

Well it's been over a month since I posted, which isn't a lot of good, is it?

I saw a poster outside a Co-op Travel Agent, making a statement which, frankly, defies comprehension. Here's a photo:

Book your holiday today and help combat climate change

I'm sorry, whut? Tourism and air travel in particular is a huge producer of Carbon Dioxide, so what is the Co-op trying to suggest? That if you book your flight with them, the plane will magically suck up CO₂ instead of pumping it out? I sincerely hope nobody is fooled by this.

Well Co-op Travel, I have submitted the above photo to the FAIL Blog, so lets see what others think of it.

Oh the heat

2008-07-29T00:44:00.003+01:00

The weather has been disgustingly hot over the last few days.

Last week, my bike had some problems that I couldn't fix, so I took it to the shop, but a chain of unfortunate events has prevented me from picking it up yet. So after my driving test, I walked the three miles to work in the baking midday sun.
Determined to avoid repeating the experience in the afternoon, I decided to stay in the office until the promised clouds arrived.
Now I'm normally good at reading the weather, even in Gloucester where it's much less predictable than in Wales. Unfortunately, the windows in my office are not close to me and the glass is tinted, making it hard to tell what's going on.
So I missed the signs, and by the time I saw the sky outside had gone dark, there was thunder and lightning directly overhead. The heavens would open within ten minutes. I realised I was far too late to make it home dry, so I went for the bus instead. Even that was futile, because when I got outside I could smell that rain was imminent. It took me one minute to run to the bus stop, and by the time I got there the rain had started, and it was those huge raindrops you get at the start of an epic midsummer storm.
Anyway, even though I got pretty damp, I've been loving the rain because it's such a relief from the heat.

Driving WIN

2008-07-28T21:00:00.002+01:00

I passed my driving test today, with only one Minor Fault. Wahey!

Hovercraft

2008-07-02T23:46:00.006+01:00

I just want to say, that hovercraft are awesome.
Seriously, what's not to love about them? They can travel on almost any terrain, and they are as noisy and dangerous as motorbikes. That means they are cool.

When I was younger, I was determined to build a hovercraft. In fact, I spent a lot of my school days doodling concepts in the margins of my books. Unfortunately, I lacked the skills, tools and funding to achieve anything more.
It's just occurred to me that soon I might just have those three things, all at once. Uni's looking more exciting every day!

P.S. I was just struck by an urge to find out the right way to say "My hovercraft is full of eels" in Hungarian:

A légpárnás hajóm tele van angolnákkal

I'm sure that will come in handy someday.

Why do spreadsheets suck?

2008-06-27T02:57:00.006+01:00

I had much frustration trying to plot those handy graphs in the post below. What I wanted was a line graph with the points unevenly spaced on the x-axis. Is that so much to ask?

I tried Google Docs to begin with, to find that it can't seem to do scatter graphs properly. And it's slow, because it's an AJAX application.

So I tried Apple Numbers, which can do scatter graphs, but can't put a line between the points. Also it's so slow! Unbelievable. Quad-processor machines shouldn't struggle like this with a simple spreadsheet.

Then I installed Microsoft Office 2008 and tried Excel. This is able to produce the graphs I want in theory, but it crashed when I tried. And, get this, it's even slower than Numbers!

Another thing about Excel for Mac is, in the values for the maximum and minimum values of a graph axis, I can't paste or type anything other than decimal numbers. Which means I can't set the graph to start at "11/06/2008 10:00:00 AM", but I have to enter "39610.4166666667".
How is that useful?

What a crock of shit these spreadsheet programs are.

In the end I had to resort to using Excel 2003 for Windows at work, even though it produces the same ugly graphs it was making in 1995. To slightly un-uglify them, I printed to a PDF and rasterised that, to get the nice anti-aliasing.

Next time, I'll try something open-source like Gnuplot, which should make a good job of it.

Apple, Microsoft: You fail at making spreadsheet programs. Go and stand in the corner.

Bath Accommodation Applications: Nerdy Analysis

2008-06-26T22:46:00.004+01:00

Two weeks ago, on Wednesday the 10th of June at precisely 10:00, the University of Bath opened the floodgates on its accommodation applications system.
If you're going to Bath, you'll have applied already (or should have!), and you'll know that getting a room in the most popular halls is competitive. Popular theory has it that those applying sooner will have a better chance of being allocated the place they want. I don't know if this has ever been confirmed. I intend to ask the staff all about the process when I get there. Regardless, everyone rushes like crazy to get their applications in as soon as it opens.

With the help of some posters on The Student Room, I have managed to plot the progress of these applications. The results are dramatic (if you're a nerd like me).

Around 2,500 applicants make Bath their first choice every year. Within 8 minutes of the form opening, 500 have applied for their halls. After half an hour, 1,000 have applied. By 8PM, the number of applications has reached 2,000. By the next evening, almost everyone has applied for their room.

I have (inexpertly) calculated the rate of applications based on the rough data gleaned from TSR. There is a huge spike, approaching 300 applications per minute, at T+7 minutes. This suggests to me that the form takes an average of 7 miutes to complete, and that by completing it in less, you will get a much better place in the queue.

It is notable that the first few minutes are relatively slow as everyone is filling out their forms. In the first two minutes, only 14 people had finished (one of them being me!). I suspect that most of these 14 had read all the information on the TSR Wiki and were very well prepared! I had a list of all the answers the form asked for, so I could just copy-paste them in.
In fact, I completed the form in about 1 minute, but I missed the opening time as my work computer's clock was wrong! Disappointing, I wanted to be first, (if just for bragging rights on TSR) :P

Gap Year Fair

2008-06-24T22:05:00.007+01:00

Today brought me some more business in Bath - this time, manning the Year in Industry's stand at a gap year fair – a collection of gap year organisations in the hall of a fancy school, all selling their stuff.

Strangely, whenever I come back from Bath, I feel really chilled and elated. I have no idea why. Today, I caught the train back, chatted briefly to a nice Indian lady, went to Asda, bought vegetables, walked home and listened to Northern Kings all the way. Then I ate two excellent cheese toasties and posted some stuff on my local Freecycle group. And it was awesome.

I wonder if Bath's really that nice that just going there gets me high? It is certainly a nice place, and I plan on testing the theory by making excuses to revisit the town.

The gap year fair itself was a bit of a dead loss in terms of getting students involved. I can count the number of students who really sounded interested on one hand.

The Year in Industry are in a difficult position at these events, as they are surrounded by people offering students the chance to spend a year snowboarding, swimming with dolphins or saving starving children in Africa. And along comes the YinI saying "How would you like to get a job instead?" Doesn't sound so attractive now does it?

In order to deal with this, the YinI have started to offer an option called 'YinI Combo', on which students spend part of the year working like usual, then spend some of the money they earned to go off on a typical volunteering project abroad.

That's all well and good, but it's still called a Year in Industry. Countless times today, I heard students saying "Industry?" in a disgusted tone as they walked past the stand. The idea of working on a gap year is not one that appeals to the average 17-year-old.

I think that while the YinI is badly placed to sell its own YinI Combo, its partners that offer the volunteering part of the year are perfect for it. They can say "You can do all this stuff, and over here are the YinI who will help you to work up the funds to do it too!". Not only that, but the YinI looks great on a CV and it will help you prepare for your time at uni. Sounds a lot more interesting now, you see?

I'm not suggesting the YinI should stop attending these fairs. On the contrary, I think it should invest more in its involvement, and also be a bit smarter about how it does it. For a start, they should make sure that the people representing the partners understand the YinI and the Combo option. I spoke to representatives of the four partners today and three of them knew nothing about the YinI, even though they were giving out our leaflets!

I think they should also co-ordinate with the partners to ensure that the stands are physically close together and can refer students to each other easily.

Also, there was a lack of strong YinI branding on our stand. Almost all of the exhibitors had some sort of large-format backdrop with their name and an indication of what they do. Not so with us – we where the second-worst equipped of all the exhibitors there. It turns out that people are scared or simply uninterested to go up to a stand and find out what it is for, if it is not immediately obvious.

So yes, I have a lot of criticisms of the way the YinI represents at these events, but they can improve and I will tell them how!

And I am still in love with Bath!

The Student Room

2008-06-23T22:45:00.004+01:00

I mentioned yesterday that I'm banned from TSR. This is not through any fault of my own, but because TSR is such an addictive forum that my productivity at work had dropped almost to nil.

So I asked the mods to ban me for my own sake, before I was disciplined for missing too many deadlines and abuse of company bandwidth.

I have achieved a great deal in the two weeks since I was banned, but the ban expires on Wednesday… I don't know what will happen then!

Bacon Butties

2008-06-23T00:59:00.008+01:00

I just have to say, that Bath University is home to the best bacon butties in the world. I would post this information on the TSR Wiki, however I am banned from the site. More on that later.

I was there on business (wow, it sounds great to say that!) last week. Anyway, the café known as Dol•c^He Vita (why do café franchises have such pretentious names?) serves a beautiful bit of grilled bacon in a fresh-from-the-oven French loaf that only costs 90p! I have a feeling I'll be eating a lot of these when I get there in September!

Having done a brief bit of research on the topic, it seems some underworked and overfed postgrads at Leeds have done a "serious study" into what makes a perfect bacon butty.

Apparently, the most important variable is the crunchiness of the bacon, and they have developed an equation to evaluate it:

N = C + {f_b(c_m) · f_b(t_c)} + f_b(T_s) + f_c · t_a

Where:

N=force in Newtons required to break the cooked bacon
C=Newtons required to break uncooked bacon
f_b=function of the bacon type
c_m=cooking method
t_c=cooking time
T_s=serving temperature
f_c=function of the condiment/filling effect
t_a=time or duration of application of condiment/filling

Now this looks very dubious to me. There are so many significant variables not considered - for example, the quality of the bread is completely ignored!

Obviously, tensile strength is not a measure of crispness, so the equation is bogus from the start. A bit of deeper searching, and I find out that our own Bath University has produced a study into the perception of crispness, and found it statistically analogous to hardness.

Clearly, the study is incomplete and a great deal of further research is required. I would like to take this opportunity to volunteer myself as a human guinea pig for any further live trials that may need to be conducted. I believe we must all make certain sacrifices for the benefit of society, and this shall be my contribution.

Engineering Judgement?

2008-06-23T00:48:00.005+01:00

If you care why I named this blog what I named it, I'll explain. Well actually I'm going to explain either way, so there!

"Engineering Judgement" is a skill used by pro engineers to make decisions based on a combination of information and intuition. It's a poorly defined and often misunderstood ability - hence why I like it!

When I hear the words “engineering judgement”, I know they are just going to make up numbers.
Richard Feynman, 1988

I thought the term was a fine blog name, because of its double meaning - I am also a Judgemental Engineer!

From the get-go

2008-06-23T00:31:00.006+01:00

Welcome, traveller. How you arrived here is a mystery, but won't you stop for a cup of tea and a slice of cake?

This blog will soon become a receptacle for random thoughts of all sorts.

Some of this will be related to the fact I'm going to uni soon (I'M GOING TO UNI! DID I MENTION THAT YET‽) Yes, I'm ridiculously excited about that.

Some of it will be the type of random thought that occurs to me sometimes when I'm bored; dead interesting but far too geeky to mention in polite conversation. So I'll put it here just to free up some space in my brain.

From the get-go

…is a stupid bit of management-speak that gets thrown around a bit too much in the office.