Thanks for the thread on ISBNs and UPCs. I dropped five dollars on a CueCat and have been scanning away; once I read of what you were doing with the Excel file, I reverse-cobbled together my own version to translate UPCs into ISBNs. It's not a masterpiece of design, with =mid, =concatenate, and some =vlookup scattered here and there. The hard part was the checksum; I used a brute force method with multiple columns and =mod (I was a liberal arts major; it took some time to remember what a modulus was, and to subtract from 11). Without your thread, I would have wasted the CueCat and hand-keyed in the ISBN. Thanks for the guidance.

skrevet af Jasehall kl. 10:49 pm (EST) den May 25, 2008

Hello Patent Nonsense,

Thanks for accepting my friend invitation.

Best,

Barbara

skrevet af bslavin kl. 11:22 am (EST) den May 4, 2008

Thank you for the recommendation of The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture by Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen. It arrived today, and appears to be a remarkable work of scholarship. The final chapter of background by another author will be helpful in filling in some long lost gaps. I am most appreciative!

skrevet af stellarexplorer kl. 12:03 am (EST) den Apr 15, 2008

We seem to share a taste in analogue computer books. Most of mine are missing the jackets, do you plan to scan yours? I see that you have Stong's Scientific American Book of Experiments (also missing its jacket!). Wasn't it a great column in a great magazine in the 60's: how to make rockets, irradiate metals with beta rays from an accelerator to make them radioactive. The only experiemnts in it now are done with a PC. Shame. No wonder engineering as a profession is decaying.

TomH

skrevet af celephicus kl. 7:28 am (EST) den Mar 28, 2008

Totally agree with your review on Book of Lost Things. Loved it right up until the ending then I thought it was a let-down. Are they making a film of it now?

skrevet af Heathcliff kl. 9:33 am (EST) den Feb 26, 2008

Added cover image for Harold Bloom / Shelley's mythmaking -- FYI.

skrevet af chuck_ralston kl. 12:47 pm (EST) den Feb 23, 2008

Your review of Pullman's Amber Spyglass as "half baked Blake" I thought a hoot. And I agree, although I gave it a higher rating.

skrevet af Darrol kl. 7:30 am (EST) den Dec 14, 2007

Oops, its actually by Phil Alger, another motor pioneer.

I am now in Blacksburg VA working with a startup on motor designs. I worked for Emerson Motors for 13 years.

skrevet af pw0327 kl. 11:33 pm (EST) den Oct 12, 2007

Yes I am in the IEEE. I am presently the committee chair of the Electric Machines Committee of the Industry Application Society. I started on this path in 1993 and I worked for the Westinghouse motors company, now the TECO/Westinghouse Motor Company back then. They have the shop order files from the old Westinghouse days from East Pittsburgh and Buffalo works. Buried deep in there is supposedly Shop Order # 1 for an induction motor built first by Westinghouse.

I find the battles between Edison and Tesla, through Westinghouse fascinating. Two giant, make that three giant egos battling it out. Tesla claimed so many things that it is really hard to discern what are viable and what aren't. Its too bad he was such a bad businessman.

Kron is one of my personal heroes, he is a Don Quixote of his day. His tensor analysis of machines, breaking things down to primitive networks is the precursor of a lot of the modern motor drive control theories, except nobody would give him credit becasue he was so far ahead of his time. H. H. Happ wrote a biography of Kron, I have a copy of it somewhere, it is very interesting and remarkable. I tried to incorporate his tensor analysis into my PhD work but couldn't get past the math, now I am older maybe I am mature enough to understand the math.

You clients don't ring a bell, maybe if you can tell me what kind of motor controls they did I may remember.

skrevet af pw0327 kl. 11:27 pm (EST) den Oct 12, 2007

We seem to share quite a few books. Are you a electric machine designer too?

skrevet af pw0327 kl. 4:57 pm (EST) den Oct 12, 2007

Hi there,

thank you for your message! I'm working on getting Italian working better...It shouldn't take too long. Let's wait and see... I've been cataloging many books manually, and it really is in my personal interest to get that work!

Gio

skrevet af Gio kl. 6:01 am (EST) den Aug 6, 2007