Concept 1: Ford Model T (2014)

Welcome to the Concepts Division. Here I issue press releases or summaries that reflect some of my less believable predictions and future dreams.

July 26, 2012

FORD MODEL T RETURNS FOR 2014

Ford's recovery efforts since 2008 shocked outside observers who predicted the demise of the company without government bailouts and reorganization as befell the other Big 3 automakers GM and Chrysler. However, pickup truck and SUV sales seem to be unable to recover, and the industry perceives that the emerging generation of car buyers have few loyalties and could be swayed by an effort marketed just to them. The flattening of sales growth and ripening crisis in the European operations led the Ford management to secretly contemplate the solution dreaded by the entire industry: being the first to introduce a monumental change for the entire world market.

Ford's CEO said "We know that there is an increasing number of young folks who are staying out of the auto industry altogether. Cars are bigger and more expensive these days than ever before. When you tell a young person that back in 1923 he could have bought a brand-new Model T for a pittance with everything that was actually needed to drive, that person gets interested and sort of resentful that we can't do it today."

The press information released for the 2014 Ford Model T offers a shocking revelation: the low price is back. Ford has stated its claim to undercut the current cost of all vehicles available on the US market, and offer the basic model for an MSRP of $7,999. Release will be late in the 2014 model year, in December 2013.

No pictures are yet available; Ford has kept prototypes tightly wrapped up and all testing done in the greatest of secrecy. All versions are four-door sedans in the subcompact class. They feature high roofs to accommodate drivers up to 6'5" with comfort, and they have a 4-speed manual transmission, with CVT available at extra cost. No conventional automatic is planned.

The decontented trim model, literally called "Base," will feature wind-up windows, ingenious flow-through ventilation to obviate air conditioning, a hand-cranked engine start, and feature no speakers or radio. In their place, a very modifiable docking station is in the middle of the dash, containing USB slots and connectors of all sizes. An extra-cost option is an onboard engine-mounted inverter which will power a 120V AC plug in the dash. The door panels easily reveal connectors for compact speakers that have been planned in partnership with many of the leading stereo vendors, and available from most electronics stores for 2-minute self-installation.

Ford engineer Herb Marshall was adamant that the changes were a good idea:  "Every dollar saved made this vehicle cheaper to sell, and at the same time made it more reliable and cheaper to keep going. Technology has improved to the point where we can make a hand-cranked electric starter last for no less than 20 years, and given the diminutive size of the V-twin engine, make it extremely easy. It's little more exhausting than turning a big doorknob. And with the freewheeling clutch built into the crank, it's impossible to get engine kickback or cause user injury. Forget what you heard about in the past- this is a manual car-starting device that works. And you'll never have to buy a conventional auto battery again. For the small electric accessory demands of the vehicle, rechargeable lithium cells will suffice for at least 20 years and be cheaper to replace than lead-acid batteries."

As for the basic instrumentation, Marshall laughed it off: "We saved money by fitting a dashboard  with just a speedometer, tach, odometer, fuel gauge, and temp gauge. But that's just the beginning. We have gone to software- and app-based instrumentation when possible. Under the hood we have a pretty robust ECU that will link directly with your smartphone or tablet or laptop when you connect it to the dashboard accessory ports. If you get the free apps Ford provides, you get a trip computer, diagnosis and self-repair tools, and software to link the music on your mobile device with the easily-attached accessory speakers. We have made it unnecessary to run OBD II codes using a scanner, since you can get the same detailed information using a smartphone app.  By minimizing the built-in hardware cost to the vehicle, we could spend more money on effective software interface with the vehicle."

Commenting on the possibilities of the car's onboard computer, Marshall said, "I am a parent of 3, two of them teenagers. One of them isn't such a good driver. If you have a known problem with distracted drivers, software can be bought for the Model T's computer which cuts power to all the accessory ports and emits an RF signal that blocks mobile phone access, making it impossible to use a cell phone while driving. The effectiveness of this technology greatly exceeded our expectations."

Marshall dropped the scoop on the engine with no less enthusiasm: "We have a vehicle that weighs under 2000 lb, so a lot of power isn't strictly needed. Ford's engineering department has launched a 0.8L V-twin version of the Ecoboost technology specifically for the Model T. What we foresee is 65 hp and 65 mpg highway. The original goals of 50 hp and 50 mpg were met with a naturally-aspirated V-twin, but when adding a light-pressure Ecoboost turbo and optimizing it for economy, we got slightly more power and way more fuel economy."

A more grandiose version of the Model T is planned, with industry-standard features like electric start, electric door locks and power windows. The tentative trim level would be called "Hot Rod" and produce 100 hp from its 0.8L V-twin; fuel economy drops to a still-stellar 40 mpg. This model will come standard with speakers, but the user is still expected to provide an accessory source of music. Pricing information is not yet available for this model.

Marshall said, "I can sum up the Hot Rod model in a word: customizability. Every bit of tuning we did to extract that extra power is reversible so you can have the 65-65 balance from the base model if you want max economy. You can lose some fuel economy and up the power somewhat too. Can't give you numbers, but that gutsy little V-twin will definitely give you more than 100 hp. All of the modifications can be made by software that Ford has produced in partnership with Microsoft. For the interested user, we are offering modification of everything through software means."

Despite this incredibly low price, Ford has said that the domestically-sold Model T will definitely be made in the United States. 

Ford has said that the UAW has complied remarkably smoothly with proposed wage reductions on Model T lines and make up the difference between current wages and the proposed lower wages with Ford stock. Union leader Alf Rosenthal said "It was a slam dunk. We were so sure of the success of this program, that we feel that the workforce should make momentary sacrifices in wages for the sake of long-term growth of the industry that employs them. The 5-year benefits to Ford-employed union workers will be twice what they otherwise earn."

But surely, our readers must be considering, the use of a 100-year-old name must be clutching at straws by a company desperate to stay ahead.

An unnamed Ford executive adamantly disagrees: "We have a long history of evocative, popular names at Ford from the Thunderbird through the Mustang and the Taurus. But really, we have never been impressed with the reception of newly named non-SUV vehicles for the past 20 years. The Model T, though it has been gone for 85 years, still graces every history book, and is well-known both in shape and purpose to anyone who went to American school. If you think "Model T", you think 'cheap', 'reliable', and 'liberating.' "

This revelation should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the recent round of Ford press releases that seemed to disavow the gimmicky slant that Ford has tried to infuse with their vehicles. They teased us with suggestions that the reason young people weren't buying cars was because nothing existed to liberate them as it had for the earlier generations of Americans.

Low-cost mainstay Hyundai commented, "We have exited the market for ultra-low cost vehicles since we do not feel the United States market wants vehicles at such a basic level of equipment. Ford's move is curious and we do not expect at this time to release any comparable product." A GM representative laughed when asked if a Chevrolet 490 was planned: "No, we do not plan to match Ford in this 'Tato Nano' inspired market sector. Perhaps they will have more success in the international market than the American one."

With margins so low, how can dealers be delighted with this kind of product? Wisconsin Ford-Lincoln dealer Jon Black told us: "Old-fashioned sales tactics only work up to a point. A customer who knows everything about a vehicle and doesn't want to pay a penny more than invoice is always an annoyance. But Ford has actually given us a lot of support on this one, with great nationwide advertising coming soon. They have released everything to know about the car on a brand new website. They have mandated us to sell them at a flat rate nationwide. And the customer of this kind of vehicle is likely to be very informed and unwilling to negotiate, making it a very quick transaction. Yes, it might make a fifth the margin of an F-150 truck, but if you can move these Model Ts ten times faster, than I'd be happy to fill my inventory up with them. I had reservations at first, but dealers can survive selling mostly subcompacts if the business is good enough."

But nevermind the dealer's perspective. With so much technology to pay for, in such a cheap package, can Ford really bet its entire company on the success of people buying the cheapest cars on the market in unprecedented numbers? Ford's CEO was on hand to suggest, "We have had overwhelming response to the idea of a car which is both technically sophisticated and cheap to buy and run. The economy is bad and fuel costs will stay high permanently. Our product is the first which competently meets the demands of the ultra-low cost market while using cutting-edge technology. This is not a crusty old shitbox. It's a brand new car which is made in a completely new way. If the other automakers aren't on board, if they scoff at us, if they don't get started yesterday, they're going to hand us the market altogether.... although even if they do get started right away, we're confident we will sell millions."

WWII: The Scientists' War

Exodus of the European Scientists

In the previous post, Fermi's flight from Fascist Italy to the United States in 1938 was briefly mentioned. In fact, this emigration was far from atypical; the United States was increasingly called home by a number of European Jewish scientists (or in Fermi's case, European scientists with Jewish family members or spouses).

Fermi's defection completed a powerful assemblage of theoretical nuclear physics talent in America. Some of the names are all-time legends in physics: Albert Einstein had come to the US in 1933, Edward Teller in 1935, and Leo Szilard earlier in 1938. Between Germany, Hungary, and Italy, the major Axis or Axis-aligned European powers had hemorrhaged some of their best brains for the sake of their insane national liberations.

Albert Einstein (1921)

Einstein seemed amazingly prescient about the future of Nazism. Einstein was vacationing in America in 1933 when Hitler came to power in Germany. Even though fascist governments were generally seen as benign by the world at large (Mussolini was praised for "getting the trains to run on time"), Einstein had lost faith in German democracy permanently, and he already knew of Hitler's stance on Jews. Einstein never returned to Germany, and he became a naturalized American citizen in 1940. Leo Szilard's letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 was the genesis of the atomic bomb project. Einstein did not draft the letter, but it is invariably called "the Einstein letter" because Einstein signed it himself. The professor must have succumbed to pressures from fellow scientists, who knew how revered he was all over the world, and insisted that only the magical name "Einstein" would be able to command the attention of the US president.

Einstein was largely a pacifist, and his participation in the Manhattan Project was nil, but his theories made the detonation of an atomic device possible. He later regretted his role in starting the program, but waffled on whether or not it was the right idea at the time, sometimes saying it was necessary to do so before the Germans did, and sometimes falling back on his pacifism. Einstein's last years were marked by political support for the newly-created state of Israel, founded in 1948.

Other prominent scientists rendered refugees included Otto Stern (German, emigrated 1933) Stanislaw Ulam (Polish, 1941), Ugo Fano (Italian, 1939), and Felix Bloch (Swiss, 1939).

Niels Bohr (1922)

The legendary Niels Bohr was a Danish Nobel laureate from 1922, and he initially resisted any affiliation with any government's nuclear program. Clearly the rope would tighten around him at some point; Denmark was occupied by the Nazis in 1940. Bohr was tipped off that the Germans planned to arrest him and force him to work on their nuclear bomb project in 1943, and the Danish Resistance herded Bohr and his family out of the country to neutral Sweden, which provided him with passage to Britain, from which he continued on to the United States.

Bohr was a minor advisor to the Manhattan Project, although he made note of the fact that he was among many distinguished peers and had fallen somewhat behind on the times: "This is why I went to America. They didn't need my help in making the atom bomb." Despite this, Bohr's work on atomic structure and quantum mechanics are essential contributions to modern physics.

It would be somewhat unkind to say that America was weak in physics prior to this WWII influx, but the public was largely unaware of the names of the people whose theories would be so critical just a few years later. More to the point, few of the greatest American folk heroes were scientific men. Thomas Edison was certainly a gifted, hardworking inventor, but his work was entirely empirical and he was uninterested in theory or mathematical proofs. Consequently, the work of Edison was always done with what was already understood and measurable physically, and could never be thought of as revolutionary or theoretical. Henry Ford likewise "went with the gut" when it came to knowing the right way to do it. 

Philo Farnsworth (1939)

I'd like to take this opportunity to nominate Philo Farnsworth as the most unsung American physics prodigy of all time. As a 14-year-old high school freshman in 1921, he conceived of how to transmit television signals electronically. He was persuaded by his high school teacher to keep pursuing the idea until eventually it became the world standard. The young man never received a college degree and only took a few classes at Brigham Young University in Utah before financial issues forced him to take care of his family. Farnsworth's idea eventually became the only standard for television broadcast and reception for the rest of the 20th century. Astonishingly, Farnsworth was virtually unknown for his pioneering theories, memorably stumping the panel on the TV show I've Got A Secret in 1957 regarding his secret: "I invented electronic television." Farnsworth went on to design a small device (Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor) capable of generating nuclear fusion, but frustratingly, it was unable to produce power from this reaction. Farnsworth was never a household name and it never will be, but he was endlessly influential and held 165 patents, all without a college degree. I tend to think of Farnsworth as a sort of 20th century version of Michael Faraday, who was even weaker in terms of formal education, but had extraordinary intuition and a gift for effective experimentation. The difference is that Faraday's name is still widely known, but Farnsworth is as obscure now as he was 60 years ago.

Going back into the 19th century and earlier, the Americans always remained an inventive people, but they did not have the same hard science background as was flourishing in Europe, Germany in particular. From 1901 to 1933, Germans held 11 Nobel Prizes in Physics, more than any other nation, while the Americans held just 3. Over the 1930s and through WWII, American scientists gained 4 more, while Germany gained none. Since WWII, over 75 Nobel Prizes in Physics have been awarded to Americans, and the American people (either native- or foreign-born) increasingly became the dominant nationality in physics. As of 2012, this trend seems to show little slowdown.

Vannevar Bush during WWII

The Proximity Fuze

The most widely-known American-born physicist in the prewar era was probably Vannevar Bush, who did pioneering work in analog computing and later was a trusted confidante to FDR in terms of cooperation between government demands and the body of scientists. Bush's reputation is stellar in the 21st century, but he is sometimes remembered most for his pessimism regarding innovation, saying in 1944 that "I don't see how a serious scientist or engineer can play around with rockets." Bush's stewardship of the Allied effort to develop a proximity fuze ranks as one of the most difficult and complicated engineering challenges of the war, even compared to the Manhattan Project. The VT (variable time) fuze was the first-generation proximity fuze and it had the following things in common with the contemporaneous nuclear bomb:

1. The Germans had a concurrent development program that failed to invent the same thing, either because of lack of scientific knowledge or Hitler's insistence on six-month timetables for results, killing most of the more ambitious engineering goals.
2. However, the American project was late in coming, and the UK had independently started its project earlier. The success of the proximity fuze was most primarily due to the raw materials, quantity of engineering manpower, and funding that America had, which Great Britain did not. In the case of the nuclear bomb, the British program "Tube Alloys" predated the Manhattan Project, but it never came close to success during the war because it simply did not have the funding or the quantity of scientific genius behind it. Even though the American English word for this device would be "proximity fuse", the standard term is by consensus "proximity fuze", using the British variant, probably because the British first started the research.
3. The American effort was led by a native-born American under US military control, and the contracts were provided to American companies, notwithstanding the British influence which was subsumed into the American project, which was thereafter treated as a joint Allied project and shared fully between the UK and USA.
4. The success of the project was of extreme importance for the Allies. Bush estimated that proximity fuzes increased the effectiveness of anti-aircraft artillery sevenfold. For their effectiveness in land-based artillery, Patton claimed that the invention of the fuze "required a full revision of the tactics of land warfare," which seems almost great enough praise to be used to describe the atomic bomb.
5. Usage was limited because of the enormous fear that the Allies had that the technology would fall into enemy hands. Of course, the Americans took great care in delivering the first two atomic warheads. Although individual proximity fuze-equipped munitions were infinitely cheaper and more replaceable than nuclear weapons, the American War Department decided that these fuzes should only be used in places where they could not be captured (especially shooting down incoming V-1s over British soil). Eisenhower protested the stupidity of this decision, eventually getting proximity fuzes on the front line in time for the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-1945, resulting in terrifyingly successful bombardments of unprepared German positions. A similar request by MacArthur in 1950 to allow the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean theater was a complete failure, since Truman feared the Soviets would retaliate in kind. No US commander has ever seriously requested nuclear weapons in any war since the Korean War. It's possible that only MacArthur's legendary status made him arrogant enough to make such a suggestion to the US President, and that any US general who made such a suggestion in the subsequent political climate would have been relieved of duty hastily, with an immediate psychiatric evaluation afterwards.
6. The scale of the research and development amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. The total spent by the US military on 22 million VT fuzes during WWII amounted to over $1 billion. Per-unit cost fell from $732 at the outset, to just $18. The Manhattan Project was only somewhat more than twice the price, and it produced a total of four nuclear weapons by the end of the war (one test, two dropped, one ready by the end of August 1945) making it a pretty good deal, at least to modern sensibilities.

Nuclear Weapon Types

Of course there were many other American WWII scientists of great importance: Nobel Prize winners Arthur Compton (discoverer of the Compton Effect) and Ernest Lawrence (inventor of the cyclotron) were two American physicists who offered a great deal to the Manhattan Project. Compton, like Fermi, was affiliated with the University of Chicago, which was where the earliest efforts at nuclear fission reactors were undertaken. Lawrence invented the calutron, a device for separating the isotopes of uranium. Scaled up to massive proportions at the Oak Ridge Site, Lawrence's calutrons used obscene quantities of electric power and had a dismal yield at first, but ultimately they produced enough uranium-235 for Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This single bomb accounted for roughly half of the existing U-235 in the world. It was so much more expensive to build a gun-type uranium weapon that it was only done because it was basically guaranteed to work. The design was as simple and solid as conceptually possible, and a test was neither prepared for, nor carried out.

Plutonium as an alternative to uranium has become the standard of nuclear weapons. Plutonium gun-types were envisioned ("Thin Man") but they would never have worked due to the higher spontaneous fission of plutonium. Trinity and Fat Man were implosion-type plutonium weapons. These were more complicated, but once the concept was proven in the test, they were the obvious choice for mass production. Difficult though it was to produce plutonium in reactors, it paled in comparison to getting enough U-235 for a gun-type weapon.

The principle of operation of a gun-type weapon is to fire a sub-critical quantity of fissile material into another sub-critical quantity of fissile material. Together, when the materials are brought together, they form a critical mass, and a nuclear chain reaction occurs. The gun-type can be thought of as a stepping stone to more sophisticated nuclear weapons, although it was roughly as powerful as the earliest implosion-type weapons. The US developed this method not because it was cheaper or more effective, but because the scientists felt absolutely certain that it would work, and it was designed in such a simple manner that it was practically foolproof. Because it was designed to always work, the system is extremely dangerous for long-term storage, since many failure modes will result in an unintended nuclear explosion. Although this is much simpler, most early nuclear programs have not tried it because of lack of sufficient uranium, since so much is required. Only the US and South Africa have developed gun-type weapons. South Africa has completely given up on nuclear weapons since 1989, and there have been no gun-types in the US arsenal for decades.

The implosion-type weapon uses a single sub-critical mass of plutonium, achieving criticality by the simultaneous detonation of multiple explosive charges that compress it. Unlike with the gun-type, this is not foolproof, and it is relatively safe because a combination of failures that would cause an inadvertant detonation is virtually impossible. Making it happen in the first place is difficult, and so this was why the Manhattan Project scientists chose to test the device (Trinity) before dropping an identical device on Nagasaki (Fat Man). As production quality improved, implosion-type nuclear weapons developed to the point of utter reliability and multiple layers of safety. All other national nuclear weapons programs have only used the the implosion-type, including the UK, France, the Soviet Union (later Russia), the People's Republic of China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.

What is a Fermi problem?

Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi, c. 1943

Dr. Enrico Fermi was one of the most brilliant physicists of the 20th century, winning the Nobel Prize in 1938, and producing the first self-sustaining power-generating fission reaction in 1942. His theoretical and practical contributions to atomic physics can scarcely be overstated. In 1938, Fermi and his family left their hometown of Rome as a consequence of Mussolini's anti-Semitic laws. Fermi himself was not a Jew, but his wife was. They settled in Chicago and Fermi became a naturalized American citizen in 1944.

Fermi was as close as modern scientists have come to a completely apolitical technocrat. Neither did he help draft the 1939 Einstein letter, nor did he provide an active role in the postwar order as his confederates Einstein, Szilard, and Teller did. Fermi's role in the Manhattan Project was crucial, but he was basically anti-war. He was also an intensely humble scientist who could be found machining his own parts or helping graduate students move conference tables around the university. Tragically, Fermi died in 1954 as a result of stomach cancer.

One of the stories about Fermi is that he did the first back-of-the-envelope guess about the yield of the first atomic explosion (Trinity test in 1945) by standing at a known distance from the explosion holding strips of cut paper. He threw the pile into the air periodically. When the shock wave hit, the airborne paper was displaced a certain distance that he estimated. Then, in his head very quickly, Fermi estimated the yield of the bomb at 10 kilotons of TNT. The actual yield as determined by measurement instruments was 19 kT. Granted, he wasn't precisely accurate, but it's remarkable how "in the ballpark" a scientist can be simply by using estimation.

To posit a question which requires estimation and layers of assumption is known as creating a "Fermi problem". The "solution" to a Fermi problem is sometimes indeterminate and should be carefully quantified in terms of the uncertainty of each assumption, which can be substantial.

The original question that Dr. Enrico Fermi asked while teaching at the University of Chicago was this: How many piano tuners are there in the city of Chicago?

According to Wikipedia, Fermi's assumptions are given as follows:

1. There are approximately 5 million people in Chicago (c. 1940).

2. The average household size in Chicago is roughly 2 persons.

3. Roughly one household in 20 has a piano that is kept in a good state of repair.

4. A piano in good state of repair requires tuning once per year.

5. A piano tuner can perform a complete tuning, plus travel time, in 2 hours.

6. Piano tuners work standard 8-hour days, 5 days per week, and take off 2 weeks per year.

Using the above logic, we estimate 125,000 piano-owning households in Chicago, and the 125,000 piano tunings per year can be done by a total of 125 piano tuners.

When a guest lecturer in my extremely large freshman physics class posed this seemingly insipid question, some of the very large student body promptly went to sleep, and others took it as some kind of joke being wound up. Only a moderate portion of the students actually sought to do a dimensional analysis and helped walk the professor through our class-consensus estimates. I do not believe that many of us present had been familiar with the concept of Fermi problems before. Perhaps in recent years it has become (and will continue to become) more important to teach physicists, engineers, mathematicians, and students of all hard sciences to learn the art of estimation in research.

Actually, our guest lecturer planned to devote as much time as he felt fruitful to the development of the point of this Fermi problem. To that end, the students and he hammered out a list of not merely guesses, but upper and lower bounds for those guesses. Wow, sophisticated! But don't give us too much credit, since the lecturer did get us to answer the problem using more or less the same approach.

1. Chicago's population was estimated at between 3 and 8 million by the students, some of whom had some personal knowledge of the city, and the uncertainty largely rested on whether the city proper or the metro area was being considered. Fermi's estimate of 5 million was probably more consistent with a metro area. Calculations were done with both 3 and 8 million.

2. We were not aware of Fermi's guess of 2, but we estimated that single workers would be pretty commonplace in a highly urbanized area like Chicago, and that households of 1 would be equal in number to childless couples, which together would outnumber those with kids two to one. Of those with more than 2 residents, one of the students proposed doing some kind of summation up to 12 (10 kids and 2 parents being very uncommon) with the total probability from 3 to 12 being 0.33. We arrived at an average household size of about 2.5.

3. Pianos seem to be less common, since they remain expensive while families have found other ways to encourage gathering such as television and home computers. We reckoned that 2-4% of households had pianos, of which most (75%) were regularly tuned, since a piano way out of tune is of little musical benefit. This amounts to 1.5% to 3% of Chicago households.

4. My old friend Dan plays the piano as well as the pipe organ and violin, so he dutifully told the class in boring detail about how often tuning can become necessary, depending on how often the instrument was used. Eventually the lecturer simply suggested once per year might be accurate, and we accepted it.

5. Dan pointed out that the job of tuning a piano could be done in 1 hour. When we were asked to think of how the schedule of the piano tuner might be padded with real-life constraints such as driving his vehicle to the owner's home, and waiting for the phone to ring in the first place, we reasoned that only maybe half of the time on the job was spent doing tuning. Therefore, in a roundabout way, we also reckoned 2 hours per job to be fairly accurate. However, we took "piano tuner" in the most literal sense, and only included those who actually performed that kind of work, and not support staff for the businesses that do this work.

6. We did agree that piano tuning is neither a common nor extreme vocation, and that the practitioners are likely to set themselves very reasonable 8-hour days. The stereotypical 2-week vacation and 5-day workweek were thrown in as well. It was assumed that tuners would not have to work weekends. Here we agreed completely with Fermi again.

Using our estimates, taking just Chicago proper resulted in a range of piano tuners from 18 to 36, or if the whole metropolitan area was considered, from 48 to 96.

The real advantage of an estimation analysis like a Fermi problem is that it teaches a number of fundamental skills that help in the life of a scientist:

1. Ability to get a "reality check" on figures to within an order of magnitude, if not higher precision. If we check Fermi's guess, and try to do research on exactly how many piano tuners exist, is it reasonably accurate? If an estimator feels it is exceedingly likely that there are more than 12 piano tuners but fewer than 1,250, then he or she has a certain amount of confidence that Fermi's guess is within an order of magnitude of the "real" value.

2. Proper dimensional analysis skills. Multiplying jobs per day by days per year equals jobs per year.

3. Comfort in dealing with ranges of numbers, or in uncertainty values. We might have said that Chicago's population was 5.5 million, plus or minus 2.5 million.

4. Familiarity with maintaining proper significant figures. For example, if Chicago had 8 million or 8.001 million people, what difference is implied? If you add a 100 kg man to a 40-tonne boat, is the weight now exactly 40,100 kg?

5. Crossover fields of knowledge and "common sense". If asked for the population of Chicago, a common-sense adult should know that it is in the millions (certainly not 100,000) but not greater than the population of the whole region (certainly not 30 million). Asking engineers and scientists to familiarize themselves with pianos seems silly, but it's merely an example of how arcane knowledge could be called upon. Here is some more motivation (not that any was needed by geeky undergrads in the first place) to have a very diverse base of knowledge.

6. Intellectual flexibility in quite an intangible way. The scientist who is comfortable with relying on estimates while carefully examining the limitations of those estimates, is the one who will actually get a job. A scientist who is obsessed with Ivory-Tower exactness and does not like the real world, will have a hard time finding a job, and will also find it difficult to make substantial contributions to his or her field.

Brig. Gen. Leslie Groves

Order-of-magnitude estimates are occasionally called for when approaching theoretical physics topics, but they tend to infuriate the uninitiated! Perhaps no man was so plagued by imprecision as General Leslie Groves, who was responsible for managing the Manhattan Project. Although he had almost unlimited resources (given the time period), Groves was initially unsure if the atomic bomb could even exist at all.

General Leslie Groves, the military officer in charge of the Manhattan Project, viewed the Los Alamos scientists as in need of constant reminders of reality. Their initial estimates for a critical mass of fission material were only precise to within an order of magnitude, which would have made it either easy (10 times less than the estimate), possible (close to the estimate) or impossible given the uranium-refining capability of the day (10 times greater than the estimate). He likened order-of-magnitude accuracy in the following anecdote: "The wedding party is planned to have 100 people. However, maybe 10 people will show up, and maybe 1000 people will show up." Clearly effective planning is difficult in such a situation, and his anger is in fact clearly understandable when explaining the awesome responsibility of planning the atomic bomb project.

But an estimation problem is either a thought experiment for learning purposes, or the start of a more solid investigation with greater accuracy. It should be taken for what it is. The Fermi problem continues to be an important lesson in physics and related disciplines.

To build a pyramid

This was written by me as a freshman undergrad at Case Western Reserve University in 2006 for PHYS 123, Physics I Honors. It is reprinted in full, original form, with no attempt made to make the conclusion more realistic. Some of my assumptions were silly and made the problem trivial, but these were never graded for strict accuracy. 

The Great Pyramid was the tallest structure in the world from about 2570 BC to AD 1300 (when it was surpassed by the Lincoln Cathedral in England).  Its specifications are given below:

Length of one side of base (base is square) = 230.4 m

Height (original, estimated) = 146.6 m

Number of stones = 2.4 million

Total mass = 5.9 million tonnes

Average density = 2300 kg/m³

Egyptologists, from the Ancient Greeks who subjugated the old empire of the Pharaohs, to the British archaeologists who had such an interest in the Egyptian colony, to the present day scholars, have consistently marveled at the investment of labor and planning that must have gone into producing such a marvelous creation more than four and a half millennia past. 

How much work did it REALLY take to build the pyramid?  How many workers were involved?  What was the power of the labor machine that created it?  To put things in perspective, how much would this building cost today?

for W_x is the work involved in transporting the blocks horizontally across the desert, and W_y is the work involved in getting the bricks to their locations in height on the pyramid.

where the force is in opposition to dragging the blocks from their quarry (friction) and the displacement is how far from the pyramid building site the blocks must be dragged (the stones came from various far-away source; the average distance is probably around 500 miles).  The Egyptians had no means of locomotion for these stones except ropes and muscle.  Let us say that the force of friction was approximately equal to the normal force, due to the incredibly high friction generated by rocks on sand without lubrication.  Set F equal to the force of gravity and solve for W_x.

W_x = (2.6 million tonnes)*(9.81 m/s²)*(500 miles)

W_x = 2.1E+16 J

The pyramid has an angle with the normal provided by:

Take the average height of a block (we may be getting into rough territory here) to be 2.0m.  By the total height of the pyramid, we make the deduction that the pyramid is 73 layers high, and that for every layer the angle still holds true (that is to say, the slant height of the pyramid is a straight line).  The height and area of each level depends upon which numerical level it is, so our result is going to be a sum of works required for each level; work will be the volume of the layer multiplied by the density of the pyramid times the gravitational acceleration times the height.  To simplify that expression:

where h is the height at point n, d is one side of the base of the level at point n, ρ is the density of the rock, and g is the gravitational acceleration.  When values are given appropriately:

The sum of the two energies yields:

This amount of energy is approximately equal to what is released from a 5 megaton bomb.  If you wanted to fund a labor force of this size, consider that Egyptologists project that 30,000 workers on average were needed for 20 years, provided that they worked 10 hours a day every day.  If you think you can pay average wages of 10 dollars per day without mutiny, then you too can have your own pyramid for a mere 2.2 billion dollars.

Physical analysis of Planet of the Apes

This was written by me as a freshman undergrad at Case Western Reserve University in 2006 for PHYS 123, Physics I Honors. It is reprinted in full, original form, with no attempt made to make the conclusion more realistic. Some of my assumptions were silly and made the problem trivial, but these were never graded for strict accuracy. 

In the context of the book The Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle (also a big-budget 1968 movie by Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Charlton Heston, and a more recent film), we see an early popular understanding of time dilation serve as a major plot device.  The relativity of time was used as a convenient method for allowing travel to a distant star system.  It was imagined in 1963, amidst frenzied advancement in astronomy, and so placed its opening timeframe perhaps only a few decades into the future.

Professor Antelle, a genius scientist, has invented a special spacecraft that is able to move at such a high velocity (via unknown propulsion) that time itself is slowed significantly for the pilot.  This obviates the problem of impossibly low interstellar speed, and allows a huge amount of space to be traversed in even “less” time (from the pilot’s point of view) due to time dilation.  Ulysses, the main character, is part of the expedition, along with the professor, and Levain, a physician. 

Time dilation versus velocity

They intend to use this spaceship to travel to the nearest place they believe that extraterrestrial life may exist- a star system whereof the supergiant Betelgeuse is the local sun.  The time it would take their ship to reach there is 350 years, but for the individuals inside, the time will feel like a mere two years.  What velocity does this entail?  Rearranging the above equation for known values:

In order for time dilation to be that potent, one must get very close to the speed of light.  As we can see, earthly technology brings us nowhere close to even this velocity which would only shrink time by a factor of 175.  In order to reach space millions or billions of light-years away, the only possibility is to get even closer to the speed of light.

The practical difficulty is not so much in what a person would do for years on a spaceship (although this is a bit mind-boggling) but the quantity of energy it would take to transport anything at speeds close to that of light.  The kinetic energy of an object traveling at the speed of light is phenomenal.  The craft described in the book is not miniscule, either.  Let us say, for example, that using miraculous miniaturization technologies that the spacecraft can be able to carry its engines, three passengers, and enough supplies for two years forward, two years back- in a mass no greater than that of the Space Shuttle.

This figure is a bit large, to say the least.  If this spaceship spread out its acceleration over the ridiculously long interval of 20 days, then the power required would be:

which is equal to 3.8 billion horsepower.  If it were to accelerate to that speed in the same time that it took for the Shuttle to clear the atmosphere, then over one trillion horsepower would be required. 

            The conclusion I draw from this is that, in order for humans to attain speeds close to that of light, the mass involved must be infinitesimal enough so that the energy can be produced to power it, or else new methods of power (e.g. not derived from chemical or electrical propulsion) must be found. 

            But audiences would never have suspected this in the optimistic year of 1963, and as The Planet of the Apes shows, it was not a picnic when the light-speed travelers arrived at their destination.  Society involved the subjugation of humans by their primate overlords.  When our hero Ulysse finally fled, and returned to Earth, 700 years had passed and the same fate of human enslavement had befallen his planet.

            The moral of the story, if one can be said to exist, was stated aptly by a student in Physics 123 on the day of the relativity lecture: “Stay the hell away from the speed of light.”

The sacrifice of the HMS Thunder Child

This was written by me as a freshman undergrad at Case Western Reserve University in 2006 for PHYS 123, Physics I Honors. It is reprinted in full, original form, with no attempt made to make the conclusion more realistic. Some of my assumptions were silly and made the problem trivial, but these were never graded for strict accuracy.

“About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water, almost, to my brother's perception, like a water-logged ship. […]It was the torpedo ram, Thunder Child, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping."

~H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

The prelude:

The year is approximately 1900.  The Dreadnought is not yet conceived, and in the late 1890s, ironclad rammers still represent the pinnacle of naval technology.  Fighting desperately for survival against the Martian war machines, the Royal Navy selects the finest ramming ship they had in their arsenal, and the one with the greatest nimbleness and speed. 

She was the Thunder Child, blessed of agility and formidable guns and armor, yet of size small enough to make a tactical naval battle with the Martians on its own terms.  Indeed, her skirmish would be the single bare victory had by the humans of the Victorian era Earth that attempted to fight for their lives against extraterrestrial invaders.  In the Thunder Child they found a symbol- she was built with amazing care and represented the pinnacle of the technology of the world in 1900.

 

Now was the time.  There would be no other.  Thousands of refugees were fleeing after London fell, and the entire British merchant marine could be destroyed by the horrendous Martian war machines.  Three of these devices were dispatched to the seas around England to intercept any and all human vessels, killing them with black smoke.  The lives of thousands were at stake.

The engagement:

Thunder Child was at full steam when she sighted the Martian war machines.  Not used to water, the Martians were not quite sure what to make of the ramming warship.  They had seen no mechanical device at the humans’ disposal that was as large as a warship.  They made the assumption that the device was organic, and deployed the sinister black smoke against it.  Thunder Child’s crew retreated into the ship and they did not inhale any of the poison.  The smoke clouds gave cover to the Thunder Child, and she steamed on a direct collision course with the first war machine, at full 20 knots:

The Martians finally wised up and attempted to strike it with their Heat Ray.  One hit was successful, and the Thunder Child was extremely damaged; still she steamed on.  The pointed bow, with an edge merely an inch thick and twelve feet high, struck hard and pierced the extraterrestrial metal.  The impact was devastating and Thunder Child cleaved the war machine in half very jarringly, losing half of its momentum within a second. (Assumptions made regarding the dimensions and characteristics of the ramming action are all guesses by me.)

(As we find, the armor of the Martian war machines had a tensile strength of greater than 280MPa- superior to modern rolled homogenous steel.  Steel of this quality was nonexistent in 1900, and may have seemed alien.)

The Thunder Child tried then to open up with her six inch guns, but the range was too short for them to be effective.  Instead she, with foundering keel but usable rudder and engines, accelerates to full speed again, to attack the second war machine.  Persistent and desperate salvos destroy the Thunder Child before she can ram the second ship, but the ships boiler and ammunition explode into a massive hailstorm of steel that crushes the second war machine with thousands of tons of molten iron and wounds the third.

The outcome:

A marginal victory for humanity… the destruction of two Martian war machines.  This raid saved the lives of thousands, but there was to be no respite in the struggle to survive against the extraterrestrial invaders.

Structural failure of a CD

This was written by me as a freshman undergrad at Case Western Reserve University in 2006 for PHYS 123, Physics I Honors. It is reprinted in full, original form, with no attempt made to make the conclusion more realistic. Some of my assumptions were silly and made the problem trivial, but these were never graded for strict accuracy.

Professor Starkman once asked us to use rotational mechanics to find out the properties of a CD spinning at 7200 RPM; this gave us some appreciation of the stress on a CD as it is spun. The Mythbusters once tackled the objective of trying to cause structural failure to a CD by creating unusually high rotational speeds to the CD to investigate the myth that a standard CD drive can under certain circumstances spin fast enough to cause a CD to break apart and turn into a lethal disc of shrapnel.

Let’s mesh these worlds, and see what it would physically take to destroy a standard CD.  The figure we were given in our physics class was 7200 RPM.  In certain disc drives, the regular speed may be more. 

Physical Information of CD-

Thickness (X) = 1.20 mm

Material = 100% Polycarbonate (tensile strength, σ_t, of polycarbonate is about 75 MPa)

Radius (R) = 12.0 cm

Density (d) = 1.20 g/cm^3

Let us make the assumption that since the hole is filled in, we have a complete volume of disc.  Plugging that in to our density:

m/V = d

m =dV

m = dπR²X

Mass (m) = 0.0650 kg

We have a radius and a thickness, which corresponds to a cross-sectional area of a CD on one side.  Recall that it only requires a break at one of these cross-sectional areas to fail.  This material is very brittle; do not expect much strain as a result of stress.  It ought to shatter.  This should simplify things.

I plan to evaluate the centripetal force caused by the spinning of the disc as a function of ω.  This disc must respond to a centripetal force with a normal force.  This normal force is dictated by its structural integrity.  Given that we have a specific area of interest, this force may be divided by area, leaving us with units of N/m^2… the same units as Pa, which is proportional to our tensile strength.  The units of tensile strength and pressure are identical.  Evaluate for the maximum possible ω which will cause a force that exceeds our tensile strength.

σ_t = F/A           (Force required to break divided by area equals tensile strength)

A = XR            (Cross-sectional area is equal to radius times height)

XRσ_t = F         (The force that is required)

F = mv^2 / r

v = Rω

F = mRω²

XRσ_t = mRω²

(XRσ_t / mR) ^½ = ω

(Xσ_t / m) ^½ = ω

This is the maximum possible angular velocity that we can achieve.  After plugging in the appropriate values:

((0.0012m)*(75E+6Pa)/(0.065kg))^ ^½ = 1177 rad/s

We now have a figure in radians per second, but disc drives are never advertised in such figures.  What does this translate to in terms of revolutions per minute, the preferred angular velocity measurement of the West?

1177 rad/s*(radian / second)*(1 revolution / 2π radian)*(60 second / 1 minute) =

11200 RPM

Our ceiling figure for angular speed of a CD is 11200! Um, wasn't it way faster on Mythbusters? =/

In all probability, as we estimate for error in this problem, our estimate is extremely liberal with its notion of structural failure.  In actuality, the polycarbonate material may be higher or lower than the one we listed; but every CD has a bottom and top layer which would likely enhance structural integrity.  Additionally, we did not account for the removed section of the disc (the hole in the center, into which an electric motor pushes a rotor that spins the disc.  

My point in this experiment is to reflect on the magnitude of stress on the CD in your disc drive as it whizzes around at 120 to 170 revolutions per second.  A modern engine will be on the redline when a CD drive is operating properly.

The GAU-8 Avenger Autocannon

This was written by me as a freshman undergrad at Case Western Reserve University in 2006 for PHYS 123, Physics I Honors. It is reprinted in full, original form, with no attempt made to make the conclusion more realistic. Some of my assumptions were silly and made the problem trivial, but these were never graded for strict accuracy.

Those with even a cursory knowledge of national air forces will know that there are several roles to fill- air superiority fighter, heavy bomber, stealth bomber, and close-in ground support.  The A-10, ugly and ungainly as it is, is a magnificent piece of work that fills the role of the last category.  With a low flying speed, “titanium bathtub” armor, immense endurance, and a phenomenally powerful main gun, the A-10 is a wonder of military technology and of physics.

Notice that autocannon in the nose?  This is the GAU-8 Avenger, a scaled-up version of the more familiar 7.62mm Minigun and 20mm Vulcan cannon.  It fires depleted uranium shells of 30 mm diameter at a rate of 4200 rounds per minute.  Here our cannon is shown to scale.

One of the most persistent claims by enthusiastic armchair strategists is that the Avenger is so powerful that its recoil is at least as powerful as the engines of the plane- thus, it is capable of slowing down and even stopping our A-10 in the air.  Is this true?  Let’s consider momentum and force.

(momentum) = (force)*(time)                            p = Ft

What is the momentum of our stream of fire?  Since we have a rate of fire and a mass, we can use dimensional analysis to determine momentum, and hence force.

momentum = (mass of shell)*(velocity)*(rate of fire)*(time)                   p = mrt

(mass of shell)*(rate of fire)*(velocity)*(time)/(time) = force                  (mrt)/t = F

(mass of shell)*(rate of fire)*(velocity) = force                                       F = mrv

Think of r as a frequency instead of rate of fire.  We are firing 4200rpm, which equates to 70 rounds per second or 70Hz.  Doing some additional research, we find that the mass of a round is 0.425kg and our muzzle velocity (highest velocity ever attained by the bullet) is 1036m/s.  In comparison, the makers of the A-10 claim that their two engines will produce 80kN of thrust.  Let’s see if we really have the power to stop a plane.

F = mrv

80.kN < (0.425kg)*(70.Hz)*(1036m/s)

80.kN </ 31kN

We can produce “only” thirty-one thousand newtons of force by our Avenger cannon.  This means that the plane will experience a possible deceleration if it is only using partial power, but this can be overcome by employing a steady, large amount of thrust, which is in practice what the pilots tend to do as they are well aware (and possibly fearful) of the myth of planes stopping in midair.

But the GAU-8 Avenger is still incredibly powerful.  Let’s say we mounted all 281kg of the gun on the Terminator’s back, gave him 1000 rounds of ammo and convinced him that he could fire the weapon from a standing position.  His hydraulic joints lock up (he will not drop the weapon and there will be no force lost to excess motion) and he prepares to fire at the full 4200rpm, perhaps too confident of his abilities after playing around with a 7.62mm Minigun in T2.  The Minigun is well beyond the range of a single soldier to carry and operate, but he manages it without difficulty.  However, this weapon can be mounted on a helicopter door, while the Avenger, as we have seen, generates nearly as much recoil as one the jet engines on the A-10.

The Terminator weighs 200.kg.  Of course, he manages to shoulder the behemothic weapon with a bit of effort, and starts firing at T-1000 who has found himself a nifty T-72 tank.  Arnold digs his heels into the muddy ground and achieves a coefficient of friction of 1.0.  How fast will the Terminator accelerate backwards, or can he actually stand in place?

frictional force = (coefficient of friction)(mass)(gravity)               Ff = μmg

Remember to add up all the weight that is now being held on the Terminator’s hyper-alloy legs.

Ff = (1.0)*(281kg + 425kg + 200.kg)*(9.81m/s^2)

Ff = 8.9kN

The friction force is massive, but it is less than a third of the GAU-8 recoil.  There is a net force and Arnold starts to slide immediately.  The net force, accounting for friction, on the Terminator and his gun is now 22kN.

F = ma

22kN = (281kg + 425kg + 200.kg)a

a = 2.4 m/s^2

Buh-bye Arnie. You'll be all over the place. Good luck aiming the thing.  Was the T-1000 terminated?

At 500m, the Avenger can pierce about 70mm of modern composite armor.  The armor of a T-72 is thicker than 70mm- but its armor is old-fashioned steel, meaning that it would take approximately twice as much armor to achieve the same strength.  Narrowing the range to near point-blank, the effect would be catastrophic to this pensionable commie tank.

At negligible range, the 30mm rounds would turn the tank into a hailstorm of steel confetti, and the pyrophoric depleted uranium rounds, upon piercing the frontal armor, would also set fire to the shrapnel within the tank.  They would have so much kinetic energy left that some of the rounds would indeed pierce the rear armor of the tank as well.

The American Restaurant Culture

The involuntary vacating of writing duties that you have witnessed from Barn-megaparsec is due to the chief writer, me, being occupied with immense amounts of work. I have worked in a couple of restaurants for over 3 years, in roles as server, host, expo, dish, and prep or line cook. 

3 years is not a long time compared to some lifers, but given that most people who work in restaurants only remember it from part-time jobs in youth, it's probably enough time to discern some differences between the different management styles and reflect on how restaurant work can be so villified that any number of part-time job holders can walk out or fail to show up every day, while at the same time can hold to its credit lifetime employees who in their old age still show up for work after 20 years in a place that teenagers denigrate after 20 minutes of employment.

The time has come to do some writing about restaurant work, and the focus will NOT be on service. Everyone and their brother has read something on Yahoo or in Reader's Digest that details "things your server will never tell you." You can call this blog post "things you'll never hear from your cook, because he's not allowed to talk to you."

I want to start off with some definitions of terms that are used in American restaurant work. Some are elementary and assume you have never worked in this field before.

• BOH: back-of-house, meaning invisible or mostly obscured from customer vision. Refers to cooks, drive-thru, dishwashers, prep personnel, kitchen managers, and any BOH support.
• FOH: front-of-house, meaning within customer vision. Refers to servers, hosts, bussers, food runners, service managers, and any other FOH support. Expos may be FOH or BOH, but typically they are considered FOH.
• Expo: A person whose job it is to manage the flow of food and to order food runners and servers to take food tableside when complete tickets are filled. This job involves yelling and coordinating different stations within the restaurant. An expo is the last person responsible for making sure that food goes out with appropriate quality.
• Tipping out: A percentage of the tips made by all the servers are provided to those employees whom the management has seen fit to provide part of their wage through tips. This is done at my current place of employment, but I do not know what percentage is used. It's also calculated to make servers realize that they are just a cog in a machine, and they couldn't provide excellent service without their support staff.
• Host: You probably already know, but hosts and hostesses are the ones who seat you and keep track of who is in each server's section. They are typically young, pretty, and lack the experience or equanimity to be a server at the present time. They receive a flat wage and may be tipped out. It is common to have at least one host even in a small restaurant.
• Food runners: They are required to be as presentable as servers, and they sometimes act as surrogate servers, but they too lack the experience or equanimity to be a server at the present time. They receive a flat wage and may be tipped out. Food runners may not be present in small restaurants. We did not have them at Steak n Shake.
• Bussers: The bottom of the FOH totem pole at any restaurant. Customers rarely expect bussers to provide any service. They may not be as presentable or courteous as servers. They receive a flat wage and may be tipped out. Bussers may not be present in small restaurants. We did not have them at Steak n Shake.
• Line: In the BOH, a line is generally where food goes from being initially ordered to being fully made and sold, particularly all hot dishes. Following the experience of the automobile assembly line, the restaurants adopted the production line as the most effective way to make dishes and store the prepped portions.
• POS: Product Ordering System. This is the computer terminal in which the server enters all orders. It simultaneously prints orders in the kitchen, tracks sales for management pursposes, and creates receipts for the customer. It usually allows for completely customized kitchen messages in the case of a strange request. However, cooks are expected to be aware of nearly all modifications to the menu items using the lingo on the ticket, without having to ask for server clarification. Many restaurants have a standardized POS, whereas some larger corporations can afford a proprietary design that better meets their needs.
• Board: Tickets are placed on the board. In older style restaurants, tickets are handwritten and they are put on clips and slid on a big string that runs the length of the line. In restaurants with standard POS terminals, the tickets come out of a printer, and the board is a metal surface with small marbles underneath, that provide friction and hold a ticket in place when it is pushed into the gap. In restaurants where the cooks will often have oily hands, as in a grill cook at a fast food restaurants, tickets are sometimes eschewed in favor of a computer terminal that displays orders instead. If communication between cooks on the line is necessary, sometimes "board clear" is shouted to indicate that the last ticket has been sold. 
• Dish: Once you step into a restaurant, a dishwasher is a person, and the thing that washes dishes is called a "dish machine." Every restaurant with sit-down service has at least one dishwasher and one dish machine. They are typically the last to leave because they have to clean all the pans for all the stations, without which those stations cannot fully close. Dish, therefore, is only as fast as the slowest station in the restaurant. Because dish does not really require the best people, it is sometimes considered the lowest spot on BOH pecking order, but a good dishwasher is extremely valued and can make as much as the cooks on the line.
• Pans: These do not refer to skillets or similar. A pan is a metal or plastic tub for carrying prepped food quantities and storing them on the line. A full pan (or hotel pan) is large and rectangular. Smaller pans are defined in terms of them: there exist third-pans (1/3 the size, long and rectangular) and six-pans (1/6 of the size, square) and nine-pans (1/9 of the size, small and rectangular). Any of these pans can be shallow or deep. This pan terminology is not universally known at all restaurants; at my current job, many of the cooks are inexperienced and have no idea what I'm talking about.
• Soup well: The soups or other hot liquids (like queso) are usually prepped ahead of time and then kept warm in a soup well. This device rests on a countertop, and on the bottom has a layer of water that it converts into steam. Pans of soup are kept on a rack above the steam, which keeps them hot. Since the heating is uneven, it is necessary to stir the soups frequently. It is also necessary to keep water in the well at all times. If not, the well will not function properly, and it may emit a nasty burnt smell.
• Pantry: Often considered as separate from the main line, pantry is the part of the kitchen at which salads, soups, appetizers, and desserts are made. Protein is not cooked at this station.
• Spider: At one of the restaurants at which I worked, a spider was a small handheld filter through which oil was passed when transferring from the wok back into the oil bucket. It had a very fine mesh that removed impurities. This nomenclature may not be universal, but for this particular device it is the only name I know.
• Ramekin: This is a corruption of the French term ramequin. It refers to a small vessel that holds from 2-8 oz of a sauce or side item. Though some restaurants use ceramic ramekins and wash them, the overwhelming trend in restaurant business is to purchase a very large amount of disposable black plastic ramekins of small (2 oz) or large (4 oz) size. The plastic ramekins have another advantage in that they have a lip to which a lid can be attached, meaning they can be combined with to-go orders. Ramekins are often referred to as "rams". To avoid ambiguity, the older small ceramic bowls, such as might hold baked beans, are given another name. Ramekin today almost universally refers to a disposable item.
• Deck brush: This is not a "floor scrubber" or any silly nomenclature like that. The correct term for this is a deck brush, following the usage of such a floor-scrubbing tool on the decks of ships. A typical floor cleaning policy at the end of the night is to drop soapy water, scrub the floor with the deck brush, and then squeegee the water into drains. Mops are rarely used in BOH, but in the FOH mops and hot, soapy water are often used because they do not require drains or squeegees.
• Spindle: A spindle is an upright sharp stick on a mount; it is what tickets are stabbed onto when they are sold. It might be purpose-sold for stabbing tickets, or it might be a section of 2x4 with a nail sticking through it. Whatever works.
• Bus tub: Distinct from pans, bus tubs are of standardized size and are always made of plastic. They are both used for storing dishes as a busser makes his rounds, or they can be used for storing prepped food in large quantities, like salad mix. If a dishwasher is being bombarded from many servers or bussers dumping their bus tubs in his station at the same time, it might be jokingly remarked that he just got hit by a bus.
• Wrecking shop: The solution to a hectic situation on the line is to just kick ass. Wrecking shop is the restaurant equivalent of working very fast to meet the customer's demands, and doing one's work entirely correctly despite the stress of the situation. If your line is messy because everyone has been furiously making and selling food for the past hour, then a manager who complains about the mess might receive "We've been wrecking shop" as an excuse. This might be a more recent development, but I've heard it in a lot of places.
• Shut down: When the manager needs to announce that all customers have made their way through ordering food, and no more may be expected to be sold, the call for "shut down" is given. This means that cooks can start taking steps that can't be undone, like throwing away soups or rice that couldn't be sold tomorrow. Shut down is always later than closing time, because the managers must ensure that the restaurant will feed new customers until at least the posted closing time. Shut down might not come until an hour after closing time, on a very busy day.
• GM: General Manager
• DM: District Manager
• KM: Kitchen Manager
• Dead: The restaurant is dead if it's really slow or empty. However, that doesn't mean that you'll get really fast service. Maybe the managers wanted to pinch some pennies and cut 2/3 of their service staff just a few minutes earlier. Maybe there's only one cook back there. Even a mild rush can overwhelm the skeleton crew in the period 2-4 pm. Because large business is unlikely in this time period, this is when managers ask prospective employees to drop off applications and when they schedule interviews.
• Walk-in: The word "fridge" is never used in a restaurant. If it's a walk-in refrigerator, it's called a "walk-in". The smaller refrigerators that are kept nearby stations underneath the counter are called "coolers".
• Running trash: Sometimes it is as innocuous as it sounds, as in just taking trash to the dumpster. However, it's often used as a coded message for "taking a smoke break".
• All day: This means "everything that is currently on the board." To say that you need "four ribeyes all day" is to say that that is how many steaks you need for all the tickets you presently have.

Here's something you'll never hear from a cook: We are sick and tired of hearing all the waiter rants online and in publication. Having worked both as a waiter and as a cook, I can tell you that being a waiter is better than being a cook. Why? 4 basic reasons.

1. Temperature. The dining room has to be relatively comfortable because customers eat there. However, the kitchen might be sweltering, the floor might be greasy, every surface might be dirty, and the air circulation might suck. Because waiters stay out of the kitchen generally, they don't even realize how comfortable their work environment comparatively is.
2. Pay. Yes, I know that there are whiny servers out there who gripe about that $1 tip that they made from a big table, but these cases are few and far between. Cooks without any managerial responsibilities generally make under $10 per hour. Servers make significantly more than that once they learn the ropes at their place. I often dine with servers in the employee area on my break, and I hear how they consider a mediocre morning or afternoon shift's tips to amount to 50% more than I earned cooking for them that morning. Don't try to deny it and say that people tip less than you think. I  served at a Steak n Shake and I got stiffed a lot. Our most popular meals were $4. Even on that level of tipping, I earned noticeably more than I have ever earned as a cook, and my shifts were usually shorter and easier. Servers who whine about bad tips should have their fingernails ripped out. It's just disgraceful and I'll never tire of hating on it.
3. Management. Servers are often disciplined within near-earshot of customers, so the manager isn't going to cuss at you or make obnoxious threats. In the BOH, managers do freely scream at cooks to hurry up and move their asses. They will piss on you if you let something go wrong, even if there isn't jack shit you could have done about it. Oftentimes cooks are treated as being able to deal with more bullshit, as though it's a natural order. When business picks up, and you do more work than usual, you'll rarely if ever be congratulated. Receiving a simple thank-you is often all it takes to make a cook feel better about his job, but I can't even remember the last time I heard it from anyone in a management position at my present job.
4. Tedium. During times in which you aren't completely busy, and you're cleaning or stocking, your responsibility is usually limited to one small area. It's rather boring.

Despite this, there are plus points to being a cook rather than a server, but some of them are unique to me.

1. I don't like lying or pretending to be happy. I was actually a really good server at my first job, but I was much younger then, and I don't know if I could conscientiously come up with rapid-fire excuses or blame the kitchen for my mistakes when I know what I know now.
2. Cooking food makes you feel like you're producing something for mankind. Good service is relative, and not everybody even wants full service in the first place, but when you make hot, delicious food, it's just innately valuable. 
3. Some of the servers actually do understand you, and when you help another human being recover from a mistake, their happiness rubs off on you, and the fact that you can help them earn a better tip makes you feel good.
4. The labor is sometimes physically demanding. It requires more use of your muscles than being a server. You'll be standing all day long, rushing when needed, and moving big boxes, trays, and pans of stuff around all the time. Sometimes you realize that there are people who pay to receive a gym membership just to do what you get to do anyway, which makes you feel good.
5. If you work in a place that has good food (and almost every restaurant DOES have good food, it just needs to be prepared properly) then your employee benefits are a plus. Most places will give a free meal in between shifts of a double, and on single shifts before or after, 50% discount on whatever you order. It's also common to give employees a 20% discount when they come in to eat not as employees, but as guests with their families or friends. I should point out that most restaurants extend the same advantages to servers. However, the policy depends on the attitude of management. Cooks have pretty high retention in places where the boss lets them take home a free meal every once in a while without ringing it in, and they have pretty low retention if the boss gives them shit for what sort of employee meal they order.

My current job leaves me in a dilemma: the hours are as free-flowing as I could want, but the environment is as crappy as it gets. For the moment, my resolve is to milk it while I can, since this restaurant is basically seasonal and well over half of the staff, probably including me, will not find employment there after the summer months. I work major overtime every week. My boss has never said "Go home, you're on overtime" and they have sometimes actually asked me to stay to do some final chore after my station is broken down.

The restaurant industry is something for which I will always have respect. It is the most unbridled form of capitalism. A person or some people have an idea for a good place to eat, and they can start very small, perhaps operating from their own home. The sky is the limit beyond that. Americans as a whole are always willing to try something new, but they are notoriously finicky for what will get their food dollars reliably, so the fortunes of a restaurant or chain of them sways in the wind. The only fast-food giant that has always remained embedded at the top is McDonald's; at various times all the others (Jack in the Box, Wendy's, Burger King, KFC, Taco Bell, and many others) have struggled to maintain their current position. On the other hand, the tools and equipment of a restaurant or chain are not diverse or expensive compared to almost any other field, so a new startup can take advantage of the churn and get used equipment from any vendor with waning fortunes, and use the tools of the old failures to make a new success. Because the capital cost of a restaurant is so small, and the labor cost can be elastically tailored to suit the level of demand expected, restaurants can break even very quickly after opening, and so even if a chain opens a new location, and starts losing business after the initial fanfare dies down, they might have made a profit even if the doors close in a year.

To give you an example? I remember in Seguin, TX there was a California-based company that opened a restaurant called "Malibu Burger Shack" with expensive, gourmet burgers. I ate there once and was horrified at the price, but I think everyone in Seguin ate there at least once. They did get a bit of hubbub and the place was packed in the opening weeks. Even though they didn't even last 6 months, I'm quite confident that the CEO who came up with the idea wasn't hurting too bad.

As for the employees? Don't weep for them. So what if you worked for a company that closed down your location? If you have experience and a good attitude, you'll get a job in a hundred places within a 10-mile radius. It's impossible in America to remain unemployed if you are willing to work in a restaurant; consequently, when anyone says that they are unable to get any job, I interpret that to mean that they think that my line of work is beneath them, and so I lose sympathy instantly. Granted, my full-time work at a restaurant earns me perhaps under 20k annually, but that's enough for a person to live on while they continue to look for more gainful employment.

I have a sympathy for the managers because I know how much hatred they get for themselves from the employees. Sometimes it's justified, sometimes not. But my dad has been a restaurant GM for over 20 years, and whenever he explains how he does things, the logic of management makes sense to me. Of course good managers aren't universal, and if a corporation or private company is poorly-run at the very top, then bad managers will infest it in no time.

Although I have never technically worked with a pure fast-food company, my former jobs were with two corporations. The first one, I don't mind saying, was at Steak n Shake. The other, which was my longest-held job, was with a small but growing pan-Asian restaurant chain. I became a trainer at one position with this company. They would have given me more expanded employment options had I been able to travel to other stores, but I was a full-time student and this was not possible.

Let me start with Steak n Shake. If this location is not near you (weird, and I pity you) it's a 24-hour restaurant that focuses on "steakburgers" and milkshakes. They also have a breakfast menu, although it seems like few people know this. It's cheaper, albeit more basic, than IHOP. This company was founded in 1934, and its business model of casual dine-in or carry-out (with drive-thru coming later) is older than that of McDonald's or any modern fast food locations. The fact that these locations are often open 24 hours means that if you can stomach it, you can work nightmarishly long hours and the bosses will willingly dole out overtime if you're good and you cover shifts for people who never showed up. My location had an excellent GM, and most of the other managers were also tactful and courteous. My coworkers were mostly good. When I left after eight months to go to Texas (giving ample notice), I was missed, and even showing up 2 years later, there were workers there who remembered me. The thing that inevitably struck me about Steak n Shake is that they had a large component of their workforce composed of "lifers", who had held employment in the same chain or perhaps the same location for 10 or 15 or more years. You have to attribute that to a good company. The more I looked into it, from the top the bottom, Steak n Shake had effective corporate policies, good management and trainers, good advertising presence in the regions in which it operated, and the product was both cheap and pretty satisfying. Both as a customer and an employee, I really think Steak n Shake is a good company.

Then I worked for a place called Mama Fu's. This was also a corporation, albeit much smaller. Perhaps there were 7-10 locations at the time I was hired. I was with the opening crew of the New Braunfels location. I originally trained as a server again, but was moved to expo more often, and then did that full-time, until I decided I would receive more reliable hours if I became a cook instead. This change was heartily welcomed by my managers. I found BOH work to be much harder than FOH work. The pace was tougher and without the incentive of tips, you rarely felt rewarded for doing a better job. However, my perception was wrong on this count. Although there was no monetary incentive for wrecking shop, it gave you the kind of respect from your coworkers that you never got as a server. Cooks who can stay cool under pressure and with all the boards full of tickets get their recognition from those that witness them doing their job well. Management here was mixed. I felt we always had poor GMs, but our KM was always a good guy. However, this particular location had some co-workers whom I found utterly intolerable. At one point I arrived at a chaotic situation at this job, finding myself being ordered around by someone who was junior to me, and I waited one infuriating hour to receive an explanation or for a manager to return. When no one did, I hung up my apron and quit on the spot. I regretted this decision later, but I'm a man of my word.

The current job that I hold is with a family-owned company. It is technically one location, although the location is directly adjacent to several similar restaurants and bars which are owned by the same family. The neighborhood could be said to be owned by them, and they may have achieved an effective level of synchronization between these locations. However, compared to a corporation, the level of organization is incredibly sloppy, the management is simultaneously lax and irritable, there are no full-time trainers, and little or no incentive given to those who choose to teach others to do things the right way. Maybe it's just a madhouse in summer (business on weekend days exceeds $50,000 in sales and sometimes approaches $100,000) and in winter, when sales are significantly smaller, there may exist some kind of rationalization.

Sorry to keep banging on about it, but I really like corporations! They create a very common sense barrier of entry: giving a shit. If you don't give a shit, it doesn't matter if you show up on time, you're an obstacle to success. How can you please all the customers if the cooks haven't been trained or don't care to do it the correct way? Whenever a restaurant rolls out a new recipe, they do testing to see what is the best portion size, flavor modifications, and cost control tweaks. A corporation does these things better, and then they employ a network of trainers to ferry the information both to new hires and existing workers. In a family-owned or independent restaurant, there are often 10,000 ways to do everything, and different people will be dead-set in their ways until the day they get yelled at for doing a sub-par job. And then they'll blame somebody else and keep doing it, or adjust their method so it just barely scrapes by. Corporations hire trainers who do everything by the book. If there's a question, the answer exists in writing within easy reach. At a small business, the answer might not exist except in the mind of somebody who came up with the recipe, who happened to quit 2 years ago. 

This isn't to say that there aren't employees who work long-term in a family restaurant. Of course there are many people like that. But new hires don't receive the same level of training and conditioning as a corporation would give them, and consequently everybody shows up with their own differing opinions of how to do things. A worker must resign himself to simply not knowing the exact right way of doing things. For me, I'll never get used to it, and I look forward to the end of summer so I can move on to something else.

I want to add a list of "cook secrets" and something of a rebuttal to all these "waiter secrets" you keep seeing:

• Just because something is a special, doesn't mean it's virtually expired. Sometimes they have equally fresh proteins in every department and they just want to sell a lot of a particular item because the market price is cheap this week. Furthermore, if you think a special involving fish could involve fish that is past freshness, then smell it. Bad fish always stinks, and you can't sell stinky fish. If they are trying to sell the fish before it goes bad, is that really dishonorable in any way?
• If a server actually does something unsanitary with your food, a million other people will see it. Cooks would love to snitch on a waitress for sneezing in your salad, because while that waitress was gruff with us, we weren't up front to hear the chewing out that you gave her, so our sympathies will be with the customers over the servers.
• Cooks generally don't do unsanitary things either. In the entire time I've worked in restaurants, I've seen cooks get mad, but I have never witnessed anyone spit in the food, or do anything gross with it. The risk is too high that you'd be disciplined. Most restaurants have conscientious people who'd be fine tattling on those who commit willful violations of the health code. Yours truly is one of these folks.
• Unless the restaurant is visibly dead, the chances are high that your server has no chance of coming up with enough time to mess with your credit card.  If you're mean to your server for no reason, they would rather ignore you and focus on the other customers more, to maximize their tips there. It's pretty darn rare to see a server go out of their way to get even.
• We remake things constantly. If there's a finished dish that turns out bad in some small way that we can't put right very quickly while it's still hot, we will redo the whole damn thing, because if it's going to reach your table looking good, it has to come out of our window looking superb.
• Cooks very rarely put out food that they know is inedible. If you say it's cold or it's gotten crusty on the top, the odds are 5:1 that your server simply let it sit and didn't run it to the table promptly after we made it. We want to do it right the first time because we don't want to have to remake it.
• Managers let cooks throw away food that isn't good. If you tell a manager that you simply wouldn't feel conscientious to sell something, because you think it's ugly or nasty, they will back down and eat the loss of product, because it says something to have a cook stand up for the quality of the food.
• If you give your server a complicated order, and it's made wrong, the odds are 3:1 that the server didn't understand. I cannot count the number of times that a server has come back apologizing that they need us to remake that order that just had a bunch of modifications, because he didn't get it right the first time.
• DO tip your server poorly if the food is cold. This will force the server to have some kind of an incentive to get the food to you hot. They are supposed make sure the food is good before it leaves the window. If it wasn't hot when they grabbed it, they shouldn't have grabbed it!
• DO NOT tip your server poorly for saying that we can't make a specific modification. If you want the tortilla soup without onions, I beg your pardon, but it's impossible because there's a million tiny chunks floating around in it, and that is not your server's fault.
• Feel free to ask any and all questions about our recipes. If most of the cooks don't know, then they will ask the most experienced one, and then they'll all have to learn something. It's a win-win.
• Don't assume that it has to be made fresh to be good. Every single dessert we make at my restaurant comes to us frozen, but the German chocolate cake is the best I've ever had. Welcome to the 21st century- we have amazing technology nowadays. If it tastes good, and if your palate isn't put off by any artificial flavor, then it ought to be good enough.
• Know your allergies before you come in. If you have an allergy to nuts, don't order any desserts, since the dust could be in any of the dessert toppings. Don't ask me to ensure that no allergens could possibly contaminate your body, because you take the same risk walking out the front door every morning. I can't sanitize life for you.
• Salads aren't made days earlier! I have never heard such rubbish in my entire life. A 3-day old salad would be disgusting. Iceberg starts to go orange on the corners in maybe 30 hours, romaine will start to get brown spots in 2 days. I have never worked in a restaurant where a single portion of salad wasn't made and then sold in less than 12 hours, even if they were pre-made and then wrapped in a case. At my current restaurant, we sell so many salads that during our dinner rush, they are virtually made at the time of ordering, and the salad mix is made twice a day. And even THEN we sometimes have to throw out product that isn't fresh enough. We want our salads to look as good as you would ever care to make yourself at home using ingredients you just bought from the market.
• Nobody wears gloves unless they like the feel of them. 70% of pantry cooks (who make salads) do not wear gloves ever. Those who do wear glove don't change them often enough. But how often do you get sick from eating a salad? I'm kinda disdainful of the notion of wearing gloves as long as you wash your hands regularly and touch only sanitary things. We're cooks and we only touch food, but you might not even wash your hands before you eat, when your hands could have been anywhere.
• Cooks don't clean the bathrooms in the dining room. If the bathroom isn't clean, that has absolutely nothing to do with the cleanliness of the kitchen. To say that the cleanliness of a bathroom has any bearing on the sanitation of the kitchen is silly.
• I've never even heard of powdered eggs outside of "waiter secrets" lists. At Mama Fu's we used liquid eggs, which tasted fine. At Steak n Shake we used real eggs: there were HUGE cartons of them in the walk-in.
• "9 times out of 10, if your food takes a long time to come out, it's the kitchen's fault and not the server's." By my personal experience, servers make exactly twice as many mistakes as kitchen staff do. And go back and read my comment about how often we remake food. If it took a long time, I'd give 3 most likely reasons: 1) we're just plain busy and couldn't go much faster; 2) the server misunderstood you and we had to remake a mistake; 3) the cook didn't look at the ticket closely enough, and we had to remake a mistake.
• I read once that servers at casual dining restaurants earn a median income of $8.01 after including tips. That's horseshit: they don't have to report their cash tips if they bank personally. They can claim that they made $50 in tips when they made $100. Saves on taxes and makes them look poorer than they really are.
• The original purpose of tipping was to provide feedback and reward really good behavior by servers. If you tip servers at 15% regardless, you might be subsidizing lazy servers at the expense of really excellent ones. I feel free to give mediocre tips if they did a mediocre job that they should have been trained to avoid. I am not a tough or complicated customer, and if a server screws up big time, I am not afraid to stiff. Servers get 80% or more of their income from customers, with little or no management oversight. Managers won't know that there's a problem with a server's performance, or some hidden excellence, unless you show them exactly how you feel by giving a tip that reflects it.