Fish, Fish Everywhere

An acquaintance of mine recently postulated a theory to me: Taco Bell's recent introduction of the Shrimp Taco (which he declared disgusting; I'll take his word for it) was a move to allow more observant Catholics something to eat from their menu during Lent. I was skeptical but didn't know any better one way or the other so I said nothing.

I noticed yesterday that McDonalds has brought back its fish sandwich.

Today, a BBQ place I drove by was advertising its salmon BBQ.

Maybe he was onto something.

OK Go III

I found out about OK Go's third video from a podcast I listen to which I would safely describe as not being on the pulse of pop culture (much like myself); the odds are good you've already seen this somewhere else. For the rest of you like me, enjoy this greatness:

For a lab in college I was on a team that had to make a Rube Goldberg machine, one with only a dozen or so mechanisms. The demonstration of these contraptions is a school event and I had been watching them for two years before I got a crack at my own as a junior. I was highly committed to making sure that ours worked perfectly and insisted that it run without error ten times in a row the night before the demonstration. It did by midnight and we were confident it would work fine the next day.

It didn't. Two new failures popped up that we had never seen before and we joined the almost universal ranks of those who weren't able to demonstrate a working machine in that classes history.

I bring this up because, even though it took 85 filmed takes to get it right (according to their website), a Rube Goldberg this size that works at all is a miracle.

Kansas City in Spring

My wife and I are up in Kansas City for a early mini-anniversary weekend. Here's a little trip update.

• The weather was wonderful yesterday, mid-60s. Today we woke up to snow. And they're expecting more throughout today. Its the first day of spring, too.
• We were able to get our hotel room for half-price via Priceline. The thrifty man in me is very happy.
• We went to the Federal Reserve Bank here in Kansas City and visited the museum there; definitely worth the visit. The best part was a viewing area into the money sorting/counting area. We couldn't see the whole area but it looked like it consisted of a long hallway with sorting rooms on each side the whole way down. The rooms were all glass and there seemed to be about five security cameras for every worker and there weren't a lot of workers. There were also three robots that took the cases of money from the sorting into the vault. These guys were highly automated with complete freedom of movement and the ability to wirelessly open the doors to the sorting rooms to pick-up the cases of money and, similarly, the gates to the vault to drop them off. The rest of the museum is mediocre unless you're into coin collecting but the engineer in me loved the robots. They were fascinating. Oh, and we got a free bag of shredded money.
• This morning at breakfast it was clear that there was a group of guys here at the hotel that were fanatical about some kind of Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game. Every few minutes it seemed like another one would wander in carrying an elaborate game case and/or folder. They congregated in the corner and as their numbers grew we heard more and more talk of "upgraded warlocks" and "damage rolls". As an occasional board game player (but never anything like this) I've never thought of trying to hold my own mini-gaming convention.

Up on the schedule today is probably some more shopping, an art museum, and visiting with some friends.

Day-Night Map

This is what nerds like me do when they need to take a break from reading and homework. I've been wanting to put together this animation for a while but didn't know how to get the images I needed. Until today, that is. Thanks to timeanddate.com, I was able to "create" the images and then stitch them together into a movie.

The animation below shows where the sun is and is not shining on the Earth at noon Greenwich time over the course of one calendar year. The yellow dot in the middle is the sun and the white dot that quickly passes by is the moon. And, just to be clear, the light areas are where the sun is shining at that time of day and the dark areas are where it is not.

My wife and I spent several minutes watching the animation in a loop, mesmerized by it. I hope you enjoy it as well.

Teams

I remember back in my undergrad days at LeTourneau frequently hearing from the head of the engineering department how employers today were looking for people who could work on teams and that teamwork was a norm in the workplace. He would cite the engineering advisory board that the school had assembled as his source. The advisory board was a collection of people who, for various reasons, were supposed to have their hand on the pulse of the engineering workforce. Their role was to advise the faculty in such a way as to keep the engineering program at LeTourneau relevant.

While in school, working in a team was rarely a good thing as far as I was concerned because I always felt like the act of coordinating, organizing, delegating, and the like was overhead effort; I often felt like it would be easier to just do everything myself. (This kind of gets at the "mythical man month" idea where some business managers assume that effort from any employee is interchangeable with effort from any other employee and to get something done faster you can simply add more people. In reality, adding more people introduces more overhead and coordination costs that may not pay-off in the long run.) I always wondered just where these advisory board members worked and what kind of teams they worked on. If there teams were anything like ours at school, it was a miracle that anything useful got done.

As I've pondered this over the years and worked for two very different manufacturers in industry , I've come to the conclusion that I think there was a hidden communication breakdown between the advisory board and the LeTourneau faculty. I think the root of the breakdown comes in the multiple definitions or styles of teams. Here's how I see things, making up the terms and definitions as I go along.

Independent teams: These are teams where very little interaction is required between team members and the final result of their effort is the sum of their cummulative effort. There is no synergy, no interaction effects, just a bunch of solo efforts combined. Using sports analogies, these are the wrestling, track and gymnastic teams. Everybody does their own thing and the output of the team is sum of each individual players efforts. Some might say that this is hardly a team at all and there is clearly a good case to be made for this point. Regardless, the word "team" is used in these situations and not just in the athletic world. They are some form of team.

Co-operative teams: Co-operative teams have significant independent responsibilities as well as a role in a larger whole; an example would be a basketball team. The fitness and skill of each player is required and there is definitely a huge positive effect of having superstar members but no superstar could single-handedly win on his or her own. The team must coordinate their efforts, plan and work together to achieve their goal, and often must execute in a manner that is both aware and dependent on others. There is still high value in the skills of the invidiuals though. Basketball teams need their specialists, their three point shooters or the big guy down low to get the rebounds and everybody on the team needs to be making their free throws. There are always superstars that seem to be able to do it all but even they can't win the whole game on their own. They excel but not without other (admittedly less skilled) players doing their part. Michael Jordan would win hardly any games if he was the only players on the team and wouldn't do much better if the rest of his team were high school players.

Integrated Teams: These are the teams where the value of the team is almost entirely a function of how well the team works as a unified whole. In the world of sports this is the syncronized swimming, or bobsled team. There is very little if any room for a superstar to excel and the team is at its best when in complete uniformity, when no part stands out. There is obviously a minimum level of fitness required to be on the team but the hard work is in the coordination, getting everybody to move together and to act as one. We on the outside look at the team as a whole and evaluate them in terms of the collective output. There is very little value in one swimmer (or at least the output isn't very impressive); the value of the team exists only as the collection of parts. To use a business term, it is only synergy and any part on its own has very little if any value. In the business world, these are committees where consensus is required for any decision to be made.

Clearly, these three catagories are arbitrary and the reality is that the groups above are points on a specturm. Every team falls on this spectrum somewhere. There is probably some value of thinking of the teams in your life and where they fall in this spectrum but the whole reason I bring this up is to point out there can be very wide definitions and understandings of what a team should be.

The engineering teams in industry I've been on are much closer to a track team than a synchronized swimming team. If the track team is a ten and the synchronized swimming team is a zero then I'd say the engineering teams I have experience with fall somewhere between an eight and a nine. The teams I worked on at school were more like a four. Part of the reason school projects end up being more integrated is that there is often a lack of clear leadership; this forces the team members into a consensus mindset. With a good clear leader in place, the team members can spend less time coordinating with everybody else and more time accomplishing their part of the project. Of course, in engineering classes, most people would prefer to do the engineering rather than the managing, thus the trouble. Maybe a specific team-work class would solve that problem.