Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

As an engineering major, I took 5 calculus courses at The University of Michigan. The first required course was covered by AP credit, the next 3 courses were courses that were required for most engineers, the next course was required for electrical engineers, and the last course was an undergraduate/graduate level course for math majors.

What stands out in my mind years later is how inept the engineers were at calculus. The electrical engineers were a little better. The math majors were a whole lot better.

In the courses the engineers took, the mean score on a basic calculus test might have been 45 and I might have scored somewhere between 80 and 100. In the course the electrical engineers took, the mean score bumped up a little bit to around 50 perhaps and I was still getting between 80 and 100. That course was a little harder. In the upper level math course, the mean scores of the math majors bumped up to about 65 while my scores dropped down into the 70s, as that course was a lot harder than the ones the engineers were required to take.

The same basic idea applies to physics and p-chem.

My guess is that if doctors and lawyers were required to take these courses, they would do much better than engineers.

Engineers are smarter because they take calculus, physics and p-chem?

Don't be wowed.

[Higgenbotham]

Finally, I've worked in the engineering field for 13 years in total.

First, I will describe something that will give a non-engineer a flavor for how engineers work. Usually, teams of experienced engineers aren't quite this stupid, but this really did happen and things similar to this, but more complicated, happen quite a lot. There was a situation where the concentration of an effluent needed to be continuously measured but it couldn't be easily reached for that purpose. So someone in a plant proposed that each of the 2 pipes that fed into it be sampled, those sampling tubes combined and that be used for continuous measurement. The problem was the flows in the 2 pipes cycled and, thus, were not equal. So this team of engineers decided they would sample the combined effluent several times and check the result against continuous measurement. Someone passed that by me to see what I thought. The discussion was about how to do all this sampling, how many data points should be taken, and how to do the statistical analysis. It was very complex and actually hard for me to follow, as the team had been working on making this sausage for some time. Like I implied, engineers work in teams and everyone likes to be thought of as a team player. I thought about it for awhile. Then I went back to the lead engineer in private and said, you know, the approximate error is going to be the difference between a weighted average and a straight average. I had done the subtraction and showed him that under certain conditions the difference would matter a lot but the day any sampling was done it might not matter much at all. He got it immediately and the team then went off in that direction making new sausage. I'm sure that by the time the team got done with the new sausage it would have been hard for me to follow and actually a whole lot better than the approximation I had presented to him.

Basically, if you put something new in front of an engineer and they have to use first principles to get on the target it's a difficult proposition because most engineers are not all that smart. That's why engineers need to work in teams and it is important to be a team player. A team will do better in most cases. Once the team is on the target, they will make beautiful, complex, difficult to understand sausage. That's what engineers do best. I've discussed it before and it can be quite impressive.

About 7 or 8 years ago, I sat in on a webinar put on by some consulting engineers in Texas who were discussing strategies for using wastewater effluent (DPR) for drinking water in the event the drought and population increase in Texas continued. These engineers are very dedicated to their field and expert in what they do. It was hard for me as a non-expert in the field to follow all the technical discussion.

As mentioned here, I got a job in infrastructure engineering (civil) back in 2014. My background is chemical. They needed a chemical because the field had added technologies that were more suitable to a chemical background. Despite that, it was still the realm of civil engineers.

So a situation came up where the question was whether a hole of a certain size could be drilled in a pressure vessel. I said it could, that it is done all the time. The head engineer said no, you can't drill that hole in a pressure vessel. He didn't know why exactly, just knew that it couldn't. I decided I had better go back to my desk and figure out why he was right and I was wrong.

What I figured out was that in the industry I had been working in, pressure vessels would cycle maybe 2-4 times per week. They would come up to pressure, reflux for a couple days, pressure would be reduced, and the vessel would go offline for a day or two. In this industry, a pressure vessel would cycle up to 4 times per hour. With a similar hole of that size in a pressure vessel of the thickness in question, that amount of cycling would fatigue the metal and there was a high probability the vessel would explode before end of its useful life.

So I went back and told the head engineer that I was wrong and he was right, and told him what I learned.

This was repeated numerous times. We agreed probably 90% of the time, but the 10% of the time when we disagreed, he was right 80-90% of the time. That put his accuracy rate at 98-99% and mine at 91-92%, which is a huge difference.

The attitude I took when I was right was to go back to his office and explain why I couldn't figure out that I was wrong. I never told him he was wrong because, with this huge difference in accuracy, I didn't consider it likely that he would be. He would say, well, let's take a look, you're right, and he would get very excited because, for him, it wasn't about being right, it was about adding to his knowledge base.

Are engineers smarter than physicians?

No.

But many experienced engineers know a whole hell of a lot and are very dedicated to their jobs.

[aeden]

The cheapest project bid put a man on the Moon. The most expensive project is getting the CEO to stop buy backs options.

Why did you derate the vessel. I did not. The weld was.

[Higgenbotham]

Why did you derate the vessel. I did not. The weld was.

If a pressure vessel inspector doesn't do radiography, the weld joint efficiency can be assumed to be somewhere around 70 percent. The metal fatigue would depend on the size of the hole but would be the failure site in most cases at something like 100,000 cycles. I don't remember all the details but there was a PE who put the work he did out there and it's in a box with the file for that project. Maybe I could find it.

But what comes to mind is most of these engineers are Boomers and they are retiring now. Even back in 2016, one of them was called back out of retirement to straighten out a mess. If a team of 5 experts becomes a team of 1 expert and 4 others who don't have the level of experience of the people they are replacing it's not going to go well. Something like that will be true soon in many areas.

[Tom Mazanec]

aeden, please write in English and not word salad.

[Higgenbotham]

Why did you derate the vessel. I did not. The weld was.

If a pressure vessel inspector doesn't do radiography, the weld joint efficiency can be assumed to be somewhere around 70 percent. The metal fatigue would depend on the size of the hole but would be the failure site in most cases at something like 100,000 cycles. I don't remember all the details but there was a PE who put the work he did out there and it's in a box with the file for that project. Maybe I could find it.

But what comes to mind is most of these engineers are Boomers and they are retiring now. Even back in 2016, one of them was called back out of retirement to straighten out a mess. If a team of 5 experts becomes a team of 1 expert and 4 others who don't have the level of experience of the people they are replacing it's not going to go well. Something like that will be true soon in many areas.

Also, that's provided it's a code vessel (built to ASME codes). As I can best recall anyway. I can imagine a push to get inexperienced regulators to accept non-code vessels. Or maybe it's going on right now. After all, manipulation and fraud are the biggest businesses in America today.

[aeden]

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10. ... T95-A30349
Regional issues to welders are key H.
https://resources.arcmachines.com/how-t ... bital-ami/
Word salad to failure maps is another reason they are not in the field anyways.
Burning the nickel out with root welds gets expensive with online failures.
The one they have to deal with ignore the point we had to learn penetration plasma fields
to pass Xray salad dressers who are ok in other areas with tungsten losses.
As you said correct addition to the knowledge base so let them focus on what they cannot fix or will not anyways.
Metallurgy is not an exact Science and Xray 5 percent as you go with best practice in life cycle data sets.
Million-dollar repairs happen when they do not read the best practice CMMS SAP files.
Trained on gtaw does not mean they did it right. I do not do that anymore and licensed elsewhere for many reasons.

Also the OFR WP 2021-01: Hedge Funds and the Treasury Cash-Futures Disconnect white paper spread note as TLT is cautioned to be in play
for modest addition and reminded as $84 by you to wake up the Bear portion of book 4 add.

[Higgenbotham]

It would be interesting to see if ChatGPT can provide a good answer to what happens if a hole is cut in a pressure vessel.

We asked ChatGPT a question about bear market rallies and it was not able to answer it.

[Higgenbotham]

Lottery Economy Update

I covered my entire short position in the last hour Friday.



On Monday, I will take the third draw of the year out of my account, taking it back to baseline, which is the thin red horizontal line. The draws taken out of the account year to date are marked with the thin vertical lines.

As far as what the market will do the remainder of the year, we are still within a crash cycle, though the market isn't behaving as it typically does when it crashes. The market is not in the 40 percent of the cycle that Crawford has noted all crashes take place in; that starts November 11.

Lottery Economy Update

I'm fully short again and won't be adjusting anything for a few days at least. Average entry is about 4350. Maybe it will finally crash this time. Crawford retired so we can't find an opinion from him.

[Guest eIRe]

I asked about this on the general thread, but I want to ask here too.

Will there be any real push back or will westerners just go the way of the dodo?

This is how it ends?

In Ireland...I 45 year old Irish man working full time but homeless technically I can't afford to rent a place for me and my son who stays weekends I earning less now than when I was in my twenties can't keep up with bills go hungry some days and just miserable...we are heading to a dystopian society and modern day slavery for corporations ...I feel so bad for the younger people because most are so caught up in social media they can't see they being brainwashed and controlled..I don't feel at home in this world anymore.

Like dodos