Peelable shims

Life has been interesting, full of memorable details, like layered aluminum shim stock pieces that could be peeled 1mm at a time to adjust the height of little lens assemblies, 48 lens to be converged, no two of which matched in prototype machining or mounting. I bought magic shop smoke powder to assess what was wrong with the cooling system. Three fans blew into the projector, no air flow, nothing but turbulence. I reversed one of the fans and installed heat dissipating fins on the inefficient glass lamp mirrors, to be upgraded with my parabolic chrome-plated design to throw more light than heat in a commercial production model.

Two Lockheed engineers came by with a section of the L-1011 cockpit windscreen. There was a layer of gold film to heat and defog the thick, curved windscreen, and most of them had to be thrown away, because the gold film ripped top to bottom randomly in the middle of the screen and wouldn't conduct current. I adjusted my 3-D video microscope to examine their defect sample, experimented with fiber optic lighting, and saw the problem. A tiny speck of dirt had created a puddle of resistance that ripped molecule by molecule in a vertical tear. I enjoyed helping them. The L-1011 was my favorite passenger plane.

Sometimes I annoyed people. I was assigned to coordinate a business presentation for LRT, the government agency that operates the London Underground system. It was proposed to install a new PA system with video news bulletins to entertain and inform folks standing on hundreds of platforms, which train was next and why it was delayed, if it was. Existing PA announcements were totally unintelligible. I worked with two other men on the proposal, both of them ruling class dignitaries. The finance guy understood and accepted my budget cuts, but the electronics wizard went ballistic. He wanted to sell LRT pricey TV monitors he manufactured. I vetoed it in favor of cheap Hitachi screens that I could get below wholesale because it advertised the brand. The other idea I pushed was sequential audio delay, so the sound marched along the platform in one wavefront, no cacophonous echo.

I was overly fussy about ethics. In 2009, I became slightly famous for busting the SEC, the oil industry, and two professional associations. Presto, I had 25,000 followers on Seeking Alpha, and Felix Salmon at Reuters publicized the story I told about fake "proved" oil reserves and black box probability modeling. Nice bright feather in my cap, but zero dollars and zero cents in consulting fees. Worse, I called the top on Petrobras, issued a Sell rating. Investors saved tens of millions of dollars and wrote glowing thanks. The rules were exasperating. Analysts have to be pure as the driven snow, no money invested, no short selling. I wrote a few more financial articles, horse laughed at BHP's $12 billion acquisition of Petrohawk, and celebrated a young Irish economist who correctly saw that it was impossible to convert and fuel the U.S. passenger car and light duty pickup truck fleet with natural gas ("the Pickens Plan"). There's not enough natural gas in the ground to do 10% of it. Eventually I got a booby prize for calling bullshit on BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster, monitoring two dozen ROVs day and night. An editor in Abu Dhabi offered me a weekly column opposite Paul Krugman, $300 for 800 words on any topic I cared to discuss. My first target was George W. Bush and a corrupt oil deal in Ghana. Then the problem of critical elements, shortages of rhenium, gold, and cadmium.

Pity that I never made the leap to digital. I was an analog expert, supply and demand curves and spockets and lighting ratios, tape recorders and vacuum tubes. As a child I assembled radio kits, used a slide rule to calculate antenna lengths, and built lightning arrestors.