Jane Baumann
My husband and I have been lucky to have two wonderful human children, one who is a mechanical engineer living and working in California and the other is in her last year of college (opting not to be an engineer). My husband is Jim Harris, a mechanism...
Doug Bell
If, like me, you are a fan of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, you may have heard the Spherical Chicken joke in the episode “The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization:”
There's this farmer, and he has these chickens, but...
Brent Cullimore
The field of positive psychology is devoted to making so-called “normal people” happier. A key observation is that people tend to be happiest when they are in a state called...
Doug Bell
My career as a thermal engineer started with balloons.
Not the ones you see at birthday parties or even the big colorful ones full of hot air, but scientific research balloons: 400-foot diameter bags of helium carrying thousands of pounds of scientific...
Brent Cullimore
I like coffee, and when I need it, I need it now.
I have an electric pot that is powerful enough to dim the lights a little when I turn it on. I imagine Homer Simpson snoring with his feet resting on the control panel. When I turn on the...
Brent Cullimore
Being perturbed isn’t much fun if you are a human.
But models love getting perturbed. We don’t perturb them enough, in fact.
OK, perturb has negative connotations. And perturber just sounds wrong in so many ways!
...
Jane Baumann
For much of my career I was fortunate enough to work in the world of heat pipes and loop heat pipes. While working in the Aerospace industry many years ago, I would often get a phone call from a program with a thermal problem. I would walk into their...
Brent Cullimore
This is a story of how one bird drains while another bird drinks.
The bird that drains is a commercial airliner.
The bird that drinks is a toy. Though I really wish it had been this chirpy chap:
...
Mark Schmidt
...and other advances in thermal modeling from our humble beginnings with slide rules to advanced new curved elements developed specifically for thermal analysis.
In days of yore, the world was flat. You...
Brent Cullimore
You are hiking in the Serengeti. A twig snaps in bushes a few feet away from you. Is it the wind, or a lion?
As someone whose ancestors jumped to a worst-case conclusion (and as a result were less likely to become someone else’s lunch), we humans...
