Inside Job

"Why should a financial engineer be paid four times to a hundred times more than a real engineer? A real engineer build bridges, a financial engineer build dreams. And when those dream turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it."

Andrew Sheng, Chief Advisor of China Banking Regulatory Commission.

Noah's Ark

Lord said to Noah, "There's gonna be a flood."

And the Lord spoke to Noah and said "In six months I'm going to make it rain until the whole earth is covered with water and all the evil people are destroyed. But I want to save a few good people, and two of every kind of living thing on the planet. I am telling you to build yourself an Ark" said the Lord. And in a flash of lightning He delivered the specifications for the Ark.

"OK," said Noah, trembling in fear and fumbling with the blueprints.

"Six months, and then it will start to rain" said the Lord. "You should have your Ark completed, or learn how to swim for a very long time."

And six months passed. The skies began to cloud up and rain began to fall. The Lord saw that Noah was sitting in his front yard, weeping. And there was no Ark.

"Noah," shouted the Lord, "Where is your Ark?" A lightning bolt crashed into the ground next to Noah, for emphasis.

"Lord, please forgive me," begged Noah. "I did my best. But there were big problems. First, I had to get a building permit for the Ark construction project, and your plans didn't meet Code. So I had to hire an engineer to redraw the plans.

"Then I got into a big fight over whether or not the Ark needed a fire sprinkler system.

"My neighbors objected, claiming I was violating zoning by building the Ark in my front yard, So I had to get a variance from the city planning commission.

"Then I had a big problem getting enough wood for the Ark because there was a ban on cutting trees to save the Spotted Owl. I had to convince U.S. Fish & Wildlife that I needed the wood to save the Owls. But they wouldn't let me catch any owls. So, no owls.

Then the carpenters formed a union and went on strike. I had to negotiate a settlement with the National Labor Relations Board before anyone would pick up a saw or a hammer. Now we've got 16 carpenters going on the boat, and still no owls.

"Then I started gathering up the animals, and got sued by an animals rights group. They objected to me taking only two of each kind.

"Just when I got the suit dismissed, EPA notified me that I couldn't complete the Ark without filing an environmental impact statement on your proposed Flood. They didn't take kindly to the idea that they had no jurisdiction over the conduct of a Supreme Being.

"The Army Corps of Engineers wanted a map of the proposed new flood plan. I sent them a globe.

"Right now I'm still trying to resolve a complaint from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over how many Croatians I'm supposed to hire, the IRS has seized all my assets claiming I'm trying to avoid paying taxes by leaving the country, and I just got a notice from the state about owing some kind of use tax.

"I really don't think I can finish the Ark for at least another five years," Noah wailed.

The sky began to clear. The sun began to shine. A rainbow arched across the sky. Noah looked up and smiled. "You mean you're not going to destroy the earth?" Noah asked, hopefully.

"Wrong!' thundered the Lord. "But being Lord of the Universe has its advantages. I fully intend to smite the Earth, but with something far worse than a Flood. Something Man invented himself."

"What's that?" asked Noah.

There was a long pause, and then the Lord spaketh his last Word: "Government."

This is a good one, hahahahahah.........

Engineer and the lawyer

There was once an engineer who found a magic lamp. When he rubbed it, a genie jumped out and said to him, "You have three wishes. But there is a catch - this wish system of mine was designed by a lawyer, so whatever you wish for every lawyer in the world will get double of!"

The engineer replied, "That's no problem, I can live with that." He then said, "For my first wish, I wish I had a Ferarri."

"OK", said the genie, and a Ferarri appeared in front of the engineer. "But remember, every lawyer in the world now has 2 Ferarris," the genie told the engineer.

The engineer remained unperturbed and said, "For my second wish, I wish for a million bucks." So a million bucks appeared in front of the engineer and the genie said, "remember, every lawyer in the world now has 2 million bucks."

The engineer was non-committal and then said, "I always wished I could donate a kidney!"

Moral of this joke: never make an engineer pissed, you will get nothing at the end :)

You know what you're talking or not?

In every project that I handle, I met quite some number of peoples. Some are expert, some are stupid, and some are “sing ka” (con man). I thanks god that so far those peoples that I deal with are quite normal, until recently I met some fucking ego idiots.

Lot of peoples likes to show off their capability in front of their bosses. So they like to talk a lot whenever their boss is there, whether the word comes out from their mouth is logic or not, they just don’t care and start to pluck from the sky and throw it out to show their “intelligent” and “hardworking-ness”.

When these peoples start to talk, the only action I can do is showing the shocking face and I don’t know how to answer those stupid questions which don’t need answer. There are many stupid real life examples that I can share you, and believe it or not, this is the first time I want to become as stupid as possible in order for me to follow their instructions.

1. In order to have “fantastic” control system, I have been asked to on and off the air-cond. unit installed in the manager room. The reason given is that the manager maybe already went back home and he forgot to off the air-cond.
You don’t actually need the control system, what you need is to employ a guy to fully responsible to on and off the air-cond unit for their bosses by pressing the switch in front of their manager room.

2. In order to have a nice look and feel, I have been instructed to take out all the relays from the relay panel. But how I going to split the signal between PLC and indicator light? And guess what, the given solution is to drive the indicator light from a PLC digital out O_o.
PLC is not an item for you to show off; it is a very important equipment to do the complex control sequence. A relay is not an ugly old component; it is a very important and useful component in simple and reliable hardwires logic.

3. Two management level guys stop the welding because they found out that the gap between two pieces of pipe is bigger than the welding rod diameter. The reason given is that the welder can’t weld properly with gap like this.
Bro, you know what you talking or not? If you need welding course I can introduce a cheap and quick welding training for you with my own cost.

Lot of time, people doesn’t realize that how irritating is their stupid question, argument and reason are. If you really want to challenge people’s work, please make sure you have all the proper knowledge and skill before you start fire. Don’t insult people’s intelligent because of your stupidity.

Dinstein teach Chinese

Morning everyone, today I want to teach you a Chinese word.

仙家

OK, everyone please pronounce with me 仙(xian) 家(jia). And in Cantonese we pronounce as "xing ka", and in Dinglish, we pronounce as "xinger"

Now I explain what is the meaning of these words.

仙 mean a legendary celestial beings that have special magic or power and can live eternally, when we put the word 家 at the back of a word, it become a noun. For example, 政治 mean politic, and 政治家 mean politician.

Originally, we use this word on some human beings that have extraordinary knowledge or extraordinary power and most of them are extraordinary long life.

Now we use this word on some so called specialists because they are so legendary that all you know about that person is through some fantastic "successful" story.

Here are some examples from my daily life.

There was a project that build a steel tank inside a concrete tank. Somehow the steel tank is leaking which is a bad news for the builder. Fortunately, there is a specialist in tank leaking detection come to the save the day. The specialist start to present their "successful" stories and the magical way they solve the problem. As usual the builder's bosses are so impressed with the specialist. Therefore, the bosses employ the specialist with some huge amount of fees.

The first time, the specialist came to site and install some instruments, which is look like a mike or sound receiver on the external of the tank and hook up to their old PC (legendary Pentium 1 133MHz), and they start the legendary program which is run on DOS. All the builder's engineers are expecting something like a 3D rendering of a wall that indicate the leaking holes. But somehow the specialist give the engineers some numbers. And as usual, these numbers are just a number, meaningless number. After the unsuccessful try, the specialist give some "reasons" on the failure of their technique and they proposed another method which is similar but this time they have to do it inside the tank. After draining the water and some preparation works, the specialist come to site with their legendary equipment, which is look like a mike or sound receiver that will detect the leaking compressed air sound. And the result, well, I don't want to mention much here. The most funniest story is that all the builder's sohai engineers went into the tank and use soap to detect the leaking air.

The second story is about a project which need to lift a big chiller to the mid floor of a 50++ stories building. As usual the specialist is approach to the bosses on their fantastic stories. As usual the bosses is impressed with their good presentation skill and the specialist come out with a solution that to use a huge crane, about 500 tons, which is few hundred time larger than a chiller, and lift the chiller into the building through the gap of the windows, which a blind also can tell you it is too small. Let see how is the result in the near future.

I was once saw a control specialist that build 2 pages only SCADA, a electrical specialist that replace a fuse with wire, a heater specialist that supply a oversize heater that melt the motor insulation, a pump specialist that supply a wrong size pump impeller, etc.

There are lot of specialists in this world. Some are really an expert, but most are so called a specialist, you can call them a conman but I personally like to call them as xinger. Anyway, they live longer than you think and richer than anyone of us.

Engineer = freak?

Quote from Dilbert comic strip,

You're an engineer, everything you say is abnormal.

I'm not sure how true is this statement, if it's not 100% true, then I think it should not less than 90% :)

Engineer is like detective, we talk based on logic and facts, and sometime we are magician, whether to hide the truth or to amuse the client is not part of this discussion. Therefore, the manager look at us like freak, abnormal person, cause they never know what are we talking about.

We don't know how tell the manger about the thermodynamic, PID control, Reynolds number, Kirchoff's law, etc. For them, how can a person only talk about numbers and dead peoples name can consider normal. A normal person shall talk about money, cars, womens, watches, pub, drink, etc.

The different between an engineer and the manager is that engineer don't lie but manager did.

And don't lie didn't mean will tell the tru :)

Pluck from the sky

When talking about engineering, we deal with numbers. Most of the time, beside formula, we use also constants and factors. For non-technical person, they are wonder where we get the figure, but for us, we know we didn’t pluck it from the sky.

Where we get those figures?

There are many ways. First, from books, research papers, published technical information. Normally we call these kinds of numbers as constant. Like speed of light, c, is equal to 299792458 m/s. How to get this figure is a long story and if you interested, you may read the following wiki.

The other way of getting the number is from experience, rule-of-thumb and common practice. For example, we use 1 pa/m friction loss when sizing the air-cond duct. Why? Well, it just a factor that everyone is practice when sizing the duct. For different application, we use different factor in sizing. There is a math and theory behind it but we are just engineer not scientist, therefore, using a practiced figure shall not be harmful, unless you choice it wrongly.

And the final way to get the number is by trial-and-error. Well, this is a hard way, but when both the two mentioned methods to get factor/constant are not available, we need to do some guessing or a better word is reverse engineering. This is commonly use when study people’s design and when not much of detail information left by the designer. In this case, guessing and reverse engineering is the only way to know the mind of a designer. It needs a wise guy to guess the mind of a genius /wahaha. If you knowledgeable enough, most of the time, you can hit very near to the target.

So, after this, if you saw some numbers pop up from the words, please don’t say we are pluck from the sky, it is not so easy to get all these numbers and we also don’t have time to tell or explain to you how to get these since you may not from engineering stream. And actually, there is nothing left on the sky already /XD