Communications

Making a significant contribution -- Hamming's career advice

While following an entirely different thread, I stumbled on a blog post by Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni which lead me to the transcript of this really significant talk that Richard Hamming gave in March 1986.  I printed it out a few weeks ago and just read it today. 

Wow!

His title is "You and Your Research" and he discusses what it takes to do really great work and what are the differences, among otherwise smart people, that cause some to do great work and others to be forgotten.  Hamming was a mathematician (familiar to EEs for Hamming codes and to DSP engineers for Hamming windows) and this talk is about what he saw among scientific colleagues at Los Alamos, Bell Labs and the Navel Post Graduate School.  However, what he says is broadly applicable to any field of endeavor.

Read "You and Your Research."

Full cycle – Fodder for horses; Fodder for tractors

Among my "toys" is a Ford 9N tractor, originally manufactured in March 1940 and still in service today.

So when I saw a review of Harold Brock's account of his years working for Henry Ford Sr., including his work on the Ford 9N tractor, I had to buy the book.

On an unrelated note, I've been discussing methanol and biodiesel with Wendell Bishop, one of the original co-founders of NMS, now involved in other forms of high tech, including methanol fuel cycles for transportation.  So this paragraph in Brock's book was interesting:

Mr. Ford said that to be successful and cost effective to farmers, the tractor should not cost more than the combined cost of a team of horses or mules, a set of harness, and the ten acres of land required to grow food for the animals.  If the project was successful, this would eliminate the toilsome caring for animals after a hard day's work.  Likewise, farmers could raise foodstuff from the ten acres of land rather than raising fodder for animals.  If we could meet this objective, Mr. Ford was convinced he finally could accomplish for farmers what he did with the Model T car in providing a real value.

I read this aloud to my wife and she replied, "And now we raising fodder for the tractors?"  She was referring to the biodiesel discussion, so I did some rough calculations...

While extremely advanced when it was introduced in 1939, the 9N tractor is only 22 hp and even under load consumes only 1-2 gallons per hour.  During harvest and other peak times, a tractor might be in use 12-15 hours per day, but in off seasons it might not be used at all some days.  Let's say six hours (perhaps 10 gallons) per day and 250 days per year, or roughly 2500 gallons per year.

Biofuel yields per acre are all over the place:  70 gallons per acre for soybeans, 127 g/a for rapeseed, 230 g/a for corn and 600 g/a reported for Brazil's sugarcane.  So depending upon your location and what you use for fodder for your tractor, it appears you need between 4 acres and 35 acres of land for "fodder" – 11 acres if you are using corn.

Of course it's still less work caring for a tractor than caring for a team of horses after a hard day's work...