Monthly Archives: March 2017

US Naval Losses in WW2

I have been putting together some information on US naval actions during WW2. Specifically, I wanted to look at US Naval losses by year during WW2 in order to get a feel for the change in battle tempo over time. The Wikipedia has an excellent page on all the US naval losses during WW2, so I simply downloaded this page, cleaned it, up and generated an Excel pivot table (Figure 1). The breakdown by combatant type is my own, everything else is from the Wikipedia. Continue reading

Posted in History Through Spreadsheets | 6 Comments

Word of the Day: Omphaloskepsis

I was sitting in a management meeting today that seemed to be rather unproductive. It ended up in a philosophical discussion that did not go anywhere. I commented that we seemed to be engaging in omphaloskepsis, which is the name for the ancient Greek practice of contemplating one's navel (Figure 1). I first heard this word at Orbital ATK, where it was used to describe some of the meetings there. Continue reading

Posted in Management | 2 Comments

Television Analogies to Working for a Startup

I was talking to an old friend the other night about the positives and negatives associated with working for a startup company. Overall, we both enjoyed working with startups enormously, and I would seriously consider joining another. However, both of us understand the special challenges that startups face. Continue reading

Posted in Management | Comments Off on Television Analogies to Working for a Startup

Graphic Depicting the Need for Succession Planning

I recently had an employee retire in my group that caused me to look at the age distribution within our entire HW organization. After seeing the age of our engineering staff, I made a proposal to our management team for ensuring that the skills of our senior staff members were being transferred over time to our junior staff members. This post shows how I presented the age information to internal management. The presentation was successful, and I thought it would be useful to show here. Continue reading

Posted in Management | 3 Comments

Optical Fiber Attenuation Specifications

I needed to estimate the loss on a fiber network today – something that I have done hundreds of times before. However, today was a bit different because I decided to look at how sensitive my results were to my assumptions on when the fiber was deployed. I was a bit surprised to see how much fiber has improved with respect to losses due to contamination by OH molecules, a problem often referred to as the water peak. Continue reading

Posted in optics | 1 Comment