braxtonlewis

Modeling the PDF of shotgun pellets at a Skeet/Trap range

2015-08-19T10:19:00.001-07:00

Who is up for an interesting intellectual exercise?

Let's model the distribution of shotgun pellets at skeet and trap ranges. I've started developing a model to predict the probability density solely based on the geometries involved.

What is the probability of finding a pellet during a field sampling event?

The image below shows the preliminary output of a single shot fired from each skeet (blue) and trap (red) position. I've also incorporated an algorithm to randomly select the number of pellets to strike the target, thus falling out of the trajectory early in the field.

Distribution of pellets: A unique pellet distribution pattern was built for each shooting position. From each skeet position, I modeled one shot trajectory for each target from the HH and LH. This allowed me to use a Normal (Gaussian) distribution of pellets between the two trajectories, at 125 yards from each skeet-shooting position. This was replicated for trap-shooting at 175 from the position.

How many pellets will drop early after striking the target?

Using a 30" circle at 21 yards, 85% of pellets would travel through. This provides a general spread of the pellets as they travel from the gun bore. Pellet density as a function of radius was calculated based on these parameters. By comparing the pellet density at radius to the profile area of a standard clay target (4.43 in^2), I'm able to estimate the number of pellets to strike the target as a function of the distance from the center of the shot cloud. I've created a random number generator to select the distance from the center for each shot between 0 and 30 inches, which supplies the number of pellets to strike the target.

Then I weighted the number generator to provide more center-strikes than edge-strikes. The histogram below shows that the most strikes will drop 70 pellets. In reality, the number of pellets that will strike a clay target are dependent upon the size, shape, and overall length of the 'Shot String'. Here, I'm developing based on a 2D planar model of the shot string. This complexity of a shot string is not time or cost effective at this time. However, it seems that a range between 0 and 3% of the total pellet count would be sufficient to model the breaking zone due to the inherent complexities of the (football shaped) shot-string.

Where will these pellets land?
It was estimated that 90% of the pellet's kinetic energy would dissipate after striking the target, allowing for approximately 80 horizontal feet of additional travel for skeet-shots fired from positions 1-7, and 125 feet from position 8, and 60 feet for all trap-shots. These distances provided a based from which distributions were developed for pellets that would fall out early from the trajectory after striking the target
The current probability distribution is coming along nicely. I'll continue to develop this model and compare it against field evaluations. The next steps will be to use multiple sizes of shot and incorporate potential PAH exposure from the clay targets. Thank you all for helping to build these pieces. The latest update includes an option for multiple/overlapping ranges. Below is a point distribution of 4 ranges.

The Up Side of Down

2015-01-20T13:30:00.000-08:00

"Write what you know," says Megan Mcardle, in her 2014 book - The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success. Positive growth in both her professional life, as well as the relationships in her personal life, represent gifts from her previous failures. Not just a string of bad-luck, she's talking about the deep, soul-crushing periods of misery that follow the stupid mistakes, leading to sleepless nights, anxiety, dread, and regret.

It's only after these experiences, can the wreckage of previous hopes become the foundation for something bigger and better. We dislike failure, we're trained to by our parents, teachers, coaches, and friends. It feels bad, which gets worse when we think others can see it. That perception is highlighted in the example of public speaking, our collective #1 fear. So we spend a large portion of our daily lives trying to arrange things to keep failure from happening.

The assumption is that a failure means we've done something wrong, when the fact is that a failure is often the first result of doing something right; something we've never done before and maybe something that nobody has ever done before. Focusing on engineering failure from our lives prevents us from embracing it, smartly. There is a 'technocratic fallacy' in that we can remove the risk from our lives. Failures are learning opportunities, not catastrophes.

We can learn to identify mistakes early, so they can be corrected. Some kinds of mistakes require punishment; others are just the natural errors that we'd expect to occur as the result of doing something we're not very good at yet. Mistaking one for the other can be disastrous.

My students will often hide their mistakes, cheat on an exam, or allow someone else to complete their assignments. These are symptoms of a disastrous mechanism in education that provides no-value to our student's academic and future careers. Failure is how we learn. Becoming more risk-averse undermines our ability to cope with life's inevitable setbacks.

I'll be reading this one twice, and handling out a few copies to my students. Thank you Megan for sharing your time with us today.

Megan McArdle is a Washington-based journalist who writes about economics, business, and public policy for Bloomberg View as a full-time blogger on July 15th. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and numerous other outlets. To find more, please visit her website http://meganmcardle.com/ and follow her on Twitter (@asymmetricinfo).

Dead Men Ruling

2015-01-13T13:30:00.000-08:00

To open the 2015 discussion series, I had the great pleasure to meet C. Eugene Steulerle about his most recent book, Dead Men Ruling: How to Restore Fiscal Freedom and Rescue Our Future.

With the gross domestic product per household nearing $145,000 and government spending per household around $55,000 annually, we are not in a time of austerity - but one of extraordinary possibility. We are however, constrained by a disease unique to our time - the culmination of decades of political effort to gain control over an uncertain future. Like most chronic diseases, resources are begin wasted through misdiagnosis and treatment of symptoms: Deficits.

Deficit reduction is not enough. It's comparable to keeping our windows and doorways open, then setting traps for unwanted animals. Isn't it finally time to close the windows and close the doors by limiting the automatic spending increases for government programs that were designed to fulfill the legacy of politicians, now dead or long-retired.

This leaves our newly elected representatives with an increasingly smaller amount of discretionary spending, and a lower capacity to implement the changes upon which they were elected. Let's take a look at the Steuerle-Roeper Fiscal Democracy Index, which depicts the percentage of federal revenues remaining after mandatory spending. Nearly all dollars are spent prior to the start of the congressional session. This fact effectively removes decision-making capability and decreases the flexibility of our government to respond to new issues.

Consistent misinformation, fear, and emotional reactions discourage intelligent conversation. Let's reintroduce ourselves to the concepts of 'money', 'uncertainty', and 'long-term', to grasp a real understanding of the current fiscal climate and the opportunities that lay ahead. Speak with your spouse, friends, colleagues, children, and students - it's their opportunity too.
____________________________________
Thank you for an enlightening discussion today. Please find more by @EugeneSteuerle from his blog, "The Government We Deserve."

Mr Steuerle is the Richard B. Fischer Chair and Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution, and a columnist for the Financial Times. He serves on advisory panels for the Congressional Budget Office, Government Accountability Office, and the Joint Committee on Taxation. An engaging man, and outstanding scholar - thanks for stopping in.

How We Got To Now

2014-11-14T10:21:00.004-08:00

Thank you Steven Johnson for coming by to discuss your latest book: How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World.

• Clean • Time • Glass • Light • Cold • Sound •

I'm seeing a consistent theme of innovation through hardship. That itself is not a difficult idea whereas many of us still claim that necessity, is the mother of invention. But in this case, I'm referring to a more socially tragic phenomenon, where the story of our progress actually requires that good ideas, and the men and women who inspire them, are to expect ridicule and obscurity – only until later when the idea is revived. We then publicly celebrate the revivalist and not the originator. This seems consistent with the narrative of your ‘Sleeper Curve’ (Everything Bad is Good for You).

The path to innovation starts with a desire to know, a curiosity toward an otherwise meaningless result. Meaningless, only to most, but not to those few who would slowly build a misunderstood idea into a revolutionary technology. These ideas build from extremely humble beginnings, and are inconsistently built upon through multiple generations of tinkerers. Each tinker has a blind spot, a direction for the technology, totally clear to you and I today, but unforeseen at early stages. This is what causes the tragedy of ridicule and obscurity. Generation after generation, we're guilty of these same mistakes.

Thank you Steven (@stevenbjohnson) for coming by, this was a wonderfully enlightening discussion. I'm looking forward to your next project How We Get To Next. Please be certain to check out the PBS series to wet your appetite for this text.

Leading Digital

2014-10-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

I just had the opportunity to sit with George Westerman and speak about his new book - Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation.

Throughout our discussion, he introduced and refined the concept of Digital Mastery, which requires both a Leadership Capability as well as a Digital Capability, enabling our businesses to to invest in digital capabilities, and advice toward leading that transformation:
   • Engaging with your customers
   • Digitally enhancing operations
   •  Creating a digital vision
   • Governing digital activities

Thank you Geroge (@gwesterman) for stopping in. This was a fascinating conversation and I'm looking forward to the rest of the text.

Code Halos

2014-10-07T13:30:00.000-07:00

Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and the rise of Google, LinkedIn, and Pandora are not isolated or random events. Today’s outliers in revenue growth and value creation are dominating by managing the information that surrounds us, our organizations, processes, and products - what our guest Paul Roehrig calls a 'Code Halo'. Thank you Paul (@PaulRoehrig) for stopping by to discuss your new book - Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are Changing the rules of Business.

Going beyond “Big Data” and analytics. Code Halos spark new commercial models that can dramatically flip market dominance. In this book, Paul and his colleagues show leaders how digital innovators and traditional companies can drive success by recognizing and bulding solutions around a Code Halo. An explosion of digital information now surrounds each of us. Paul examines the profound impact this is having on individuals, corporations, and societies. With reasoned insight, new data, real-world cases, and practical guidance, Code Halos shows how to master the new rules of the Code Halo economy.

This was an extremely interesting conversation and topic. I cannot wait to contact you again after completing the book. There will be many more questions for you. Thank you for stopping in this afternoon.

The Glass Cage

2014-10-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

What kind of world are we building for ourselves? That’s the question Nicholas Carr tackles in this important and fascinating book - The Glass Cage: Automation and Us. Thank you Mr Carr for opening this series of conversations. I'm truly greatful for the conversation.

Digging behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, personalized software and computerized medicine, Carr explores the hidden costs of the rush to automate our jobs and our lives. Drawing on science, economics, and philosophy, he makes a compelling case that the dominant Silicon Valley design ethic is sapping our skills - limiting our possibilities.

The Glass Cage is a riveting story of humankind’s entanglement with machines. From 19th century textile mills to the cockpits of modern jets, from the frozen hunting grounds of Inuit tribes to the bloody battlefields of video games, this is an unforgettable voyage of discovery. How we can use technology to expand life’s possibilities rather than narrow them?

I'm blown away by this one. A full notebook of ideas, questions, and conversation topics were jotted down while reading. There's so much work to do. Thank you Nicholas for stopping in. More from the author can be found on his blog http://www.roughtype.com/

Re-Engineering: The Value of Design

2011-08-31T09:47:00.000-07:00

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Suggested Readings for any Engineer - (in no particular order)

2011-08-26T05:45:00.006-07:00

Unwritten Laws of Engineering, W.J. King & James Skakoon

The unwritten Laws were first published in 1944 as three articles in Mechanical Engineering Magazine, but quickly became a classic of engineering literature. King observed that the chief obstacles to the success of engineers and students of engineering are of a personal and administrative rather than a technical nature. A wartime engineer with General Electric and later a UCLA engineering professor, he concludes that he and his associates were getting into much more trouble by violating the undocumented laws of professional conduct than by violating the well-documented laws of science. The spirit and effectiveness with which you tackle your first humble tasks as a young engineer (or as a student) will be carefully observed and is certain to affect your entire career.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment. Achieving control over experience requires a drastic change in attitude about what is important what is not. Our human kind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, however it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience. Flow is the state in which a person becomes so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell

A look at why major changes in our society so often happen suddenly and unexpectedly. Ideas, behavior, messages, and products, often spread like outbreaks of infectious disease. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a few fare-beaters and graffiti artists fuel a subway crime wave, or a satisfied customer fill the empty tables of a new restaurant. These are social epidemics, and the moment when they take off, when they reach their critical mass, is the 'Tipping Point'.

Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children's television, direct mail, and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world's greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell

The first time I read this book, I did not enjoy it. It surprised me greatly to have taken so much from it while reading a second time. Perhaps another year of maturation and experience helped to create this difference.

There are three goals of this text:
(1) to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. (2) to recognize when we should trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them. (3) to convince you that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled. Simplification of entirely too much information often leads us to confuse the possession of that information for true understanding.

Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

He who has a WHY to live for can bear almost any HOW. Between 1942 and 1945, a German-Jewish Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, endured Nazi war-camps while his while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife were gassed. The text is based on his own experience in the camp as witnessed through the eyes of a trained psychological researcher. Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose.

Persons facing difficult choices may not fully appreciate how much their own attitude interferes with the decision they need to make or the action they need to take. He describes that the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all can drive human thought toward an existential vacuum; which is described as the mental loss of both instinct and tradition. He concludes that what man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt.

The Secret History of the American Empire, John Perkins

An entertaining but disturbing account of the US governments manipulation around the world in support of American business. Presidents distributing foreign aid to corrupt Third World leaders who keep some and return the rest to US business in the form of unnecessary and unsustainable engineering projects. Leaving growing nations massively in debt, and requiring even more loans than what could possibly be paid back, these governments have no choice but to offer cheap resources and labor to US industries. Perkins' other titles include: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and Hoodwinked.

The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, Frank R. Wilson

People are changed, significantly and irreversibly it seems, when movement, thought and feeling fuse during the active long term pursuit of personal goals. The brain keeps giving the hand new things to do and new ways of doing what it already knows how to do. In turn, the hand affords the brain new ways of approaching old tasks and the possibility of undertaking and mastering new tasks. That means the brain, for its part, can acquire new ways of representing and defining the world It is changed by active involvement; in that sense, it remembers, it learns. It is not content to limit its sampling of the observable world or the intermingling of its impressions.

Warmth Disperses and Time Passes: The History of Heat, Hans Christian Von Baeyer

A must read for the undergraduate about to enter or interested to take a course in thermodynamics. This text offers a background into the development of our modern understanding of Heat Energy, its transfer and dispersion throughout our environment. The author walks us through the evolution of our scientific understanding of thermodynamics, stopping to dwell on the intellectual and societal framework that allowed the physicists of the time to make their respective scientific leaps. From this book, I began to comprehend the concept of Entropy and how a "Demon" will always remain.

The Deming Management Method, Mary Walton

This was required reading during my time in graduate school. How fortunate I was to find it and be able to implement the concept of quality within my work and life. I will argue that Dr Edward Deming has had more impact on business and industry than any other engineer in history, worldwide. After WWII Japan was decimated; unable to develop an industry from which to begin rebuilding. They went from producing the world's worst products, to turning out some of the highest quality precision work, all while US firms ignored his philosophies. I will encourage you to also take a look at other Deming related titles, you will not be disappointed.

W. Edward Deming taught that by adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations can increase quality and simultaneously reduce costs by reducing waste, rework, staff attrition and litigation while increasing customer loyalty. The key is to practice continual improvement and think of manufacturing as a system, not as bits and pieces.

The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

One of the most influential political treatises of all time. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle and to both the historical and modern problems of capitalism, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms. The essential condition for the existence and rule of the bourgeois class is the accumulation of wealth in private hands, the formation and increase of capital; the essential condition of capital is wage-labor, which rests entirely on competition among workers. This work should be read not only as a great work of literature but that, 150 years later, it still has much to teach us for the next millennium.

Security Analysis, Benjamin Graham & David Dodd

This text is a timeless classic in Value Investing. The work was first published in 1934, following unprecedented losses on Wall Street. In summing up lessons learned, Graham and Dodd scolded Wall Street for its narrow-minded focus on a company's reported earnings per share, and were particularly harsh on the favored "earnings trends." They encourage investors to take an entirely different approach by gauging the rough value of the operating business that lay behind the security. Graham and Dodd enumerate multiple real examples of the market's tendency to act irrationally, undervalueing certain securities. A company may be worth more dead than alive.

The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham & Jason Zweig

The hallmark of Graham's philosophy is not profit maximization but loss minimization. He provides guidance toward the adoption and execution of an investment policy. One inherently designed for the longer term and requiring a commitment of effort. Where the speculator follows market trends, the investor uses discipline, research, and his analytical ability to make unpopular but sound investments in bargains relative to current asset value. The Intelligent Investor is a layman's version of his earlier Security Analysis.

Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill

Originally published in 1848 along side of Karl Marx's - Communist Manifesto, Mill applies classical economic theory to policy questions of lasting concern: the desirability of sustained growth of national wealth and population, the merits of capitalism versus socialism, and the suitable scope of government intervention in the competitive market economy. His answers to those questions have profound relevance today, and they serve to illustrate the enduring power and imagination of his distinctive liberal utilitarian philosophy.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nicholas Taleb

Humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.” We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. "History does not crawl, it jumps." I would also recommend his 2008 book Fooled by Randomness or all of this 5-book series.

Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell

The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are. Creating extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity. Gladwell's text shows that success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed, but those 'Outliers' are ones who have been given opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

Added below are more recommendations, only some of which I have read but have yet to formally review. Each of these have been recommended by personal mentors and colleagues that I greatly admire. I look forward to investing my time into these ideas in the near future, thanks go out to many for adding such great value to this list:

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, Robert M. Pirsig
A Man of Judgement, Ralph B. Peck
What Went Wrong? Case Histories of Process Plant Disasters and How They Could Have Been Avoided, Trevor Kletz
To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, Henry Petroski

The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, Samuel C. Florman
The Civilized Engineer, Samuel C. Florman
The Soul of A New Machine, Tracy Kidder
How Round Is Your Circle?: Where Engineering and Mathematics Meet, John Bryan & Chris Sangwin
What Engineers Know and How They Know It, Walter G. Vincenti

What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, And Design, Peter-Paul Verbeek
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson
Stuff You Don't Learn in Engineering School, Carl Selinger
Designing Engineers (Inside Technology), Louis L. Bucciarelli
Flying Buttresses, Entropy, and O-Rings: The World of an Engineer, James L. Adams

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Marc Reisner
Getting Sued and Other Tales of the Engineering Life, Richard Meehan
Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed, Ben R. Rich
The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, Diane Vaughan
Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat: How to Win in the Information Age, Archibald Putt

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, David Weinberger
No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman, Richard P. Feynman
Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time
The Day The Universe Changed (Video Series), (Book & DVD Set), James Burke

Connections, (James Burke, Video Series)
Ethics in Engineering, Mike W. Martin & Roland Schinzinger
A Tour of the Calculus, David Berlinski
The Evolution of Physics, Albert Einstein & Leopold Infeld
The Sons of Martha, (A Poem to the Calling of an Engineer), Rudyard Kipling

The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman
A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
13 Things that Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time, Michael Brooks
Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Kerry Patterson
Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis, Eric Berne

Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, Eric Berne
Dilbert Comics, Scott Adams
XKCD Comics, Randall Munroe
1916 Pub. of Bridge Engineering, (Chapter 2), W.A. Waddell
Nikola Tesla: Colorado Springs Notes, 1899-1900, Nikola Tesla

The Coolest Cross-Sections Ever!, Richard Platt
The Ringworld Engineers, Larry Niven
Slide Rule, Nevil Shute
Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman
The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek
100 Habits of Successful Freelance Designers, Steve Gordon
Why You Don't Fall through the Floor, J.E. Gordon
Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down, J.E. Gordon
The Practical Oceanographer (PDF Book), Rick Chapman
Foxfire 5, Foxfire Fund Inc.

Not so directly in relation to Engineering, recommendations:
The Americans: A Social History of the United States, 1587-1914, J.C. Furnas
Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevesky
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.), Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
Blindness, Jose Saramago
Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy
The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
How To Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
The Power of One, Bryce Courtenay
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
Columnist Archives, Walter Williams
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
On Speaking Well, Peggy Noonan
Bad Science, Ben Goldacre
Good To Great, Jim Collins
Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds
Eat People, Andy Kessler
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee