Diametrically opposed views?

Your Fall 2007 issue included an article about Professor Abolhassan Astaneh’s investigation into the Minneapolis bridge collapse. He attributed its failure to “a perfect storm of accumulated problems” including corrosion, poor maintenance, crude pre-1970 welding technology and fatigue cracks exacerbated by brutal winters and de-icing agents.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle (January 16, 2008), the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) attributed the failure to gusset plates that were roughly half their required thickness. The NTSB apparently found no evidence that poor maintenance, cracking, corrosion or other wear “played any role” in the collapse of the bridge.

Readers are left with what appear to be two diametrically opposing views of why the bridge collapsed. Could this be clarified? Thank you.

—GERALD CAUTHEN (B.S.’53 CEE)
Senior Project Manager, Korve Engineering, Inc.
Oakland, California

Professor Astaneh replies:

My statement about the I-35W bridge was intended to convey the range of possible causes that led to its collapse. As the Forefront story said, the NTSB will not complete its investigation and final report for several months. In fact, the remarks made in January by NTSB chair Mark Rosenker and widely reported in the press—that the gusset plates were the “critical factor” in the collapse—were, unfortunately, premature and misleading.

These remarks were intended to provide an update on the investigation and alert the Federal Highway Administration that the gusset plates were indeed undersized, but the role they and other factors played in the collapse will not be known until the investigation is complete. We all look forward to the NTSB report to clarify what happened on August 1, 2007, and help prevent such tragedies in the future.

(Ed. note: As of March 21, 2008, Professor Astaneh has been retained by a law firm representing a group of victims of the I-35W bridge collapse.)

 

 

Sharing the BCC dream

In response to your Fall 2007 stories on Project Genie and Charles Simonyi, I was married to Mel Pirtle (B.S.’61, M.S.’62, Ph.D.’67) until 1972 and worked at Berkeley Computer Corporation. I have very fond memories of those years and a few reminiscences worth sharing. . . .

BCC was known as the “hippie company” because of the free spirits we attracted. One of our draftsmen (yes, they were all males) definitely looked the part: long hair, well-worn T-shirts and pants and bare feet. One day we got word that a very conservative investor was coming out for a meeting. Everyone was asked to dress up for the occasion, so that morning I made the rounds to make sure no one had forgotten. As I opened the door to our drafting area, sure enough, there was our little hippie wearing a coat and tie. How nice! Then, when I glanced down, I saw his bare feet sticking out. . . .

Everyone was driven and very focused, but one especially stands out in my mind: Charles Simonyi. Charles had gotten it in his head that he wanted a Jaguar XKE, so he taped a large picture of a primrose-colored XKE—primrose, not yellow, I was told—over his desk. He told me if you want something badly enough, you can make it happen. And he did. He asked for an advance on his salary and bought himself a brand-new, primrose-colored XKE. My [current] husband and I had the pleasure of visiting with him on his yacht in Copenhagen in 2006. Despite his enormous wealth, Charles is still the same gracious person he was during the BCC days.

—ELEONORE JOHNSON (formerly Eleonore Pirtle)
Portola Valley, California

 

 

Educating superb human beings

In response to Dean Sastry’s Fall 2007 Forefront message, welcome to your new position at the finest College of Engineering. I appreciate your introduction and hearing about your priorities. You say that Berkeley’s approach is not only to educate engineers as superb technologists but also to instill in them an urgent sense of how technologies can make a difference in the real world.

It is wonderful that Berkeley educates “superb technologists,” but I’ve always been concerned (ever since I attended the College in 1997) that overemphasis on that priority causes the College to overlook educating and producing “superb human beings.” While I was in the COE, I felt that many of my colleagues were well-trained to do engineering tasks but ill-equipped to thrive in many other facets of human and social life. . . .

—DUC BIEU PHAM (B.S.’02 EECS)
Campbell, California

 

 

How to define a nanometer

Thank you for a fine publication. I read Forefront almost cover to cover. I enjoyed the short-form pieces in your Fall 2007 story entitled “Green Future.” The basic ideas are good—even better that you also list a couple of websites where one may dig deeper into the related topics.

I would like to point out what I think may be acceptable in People or even Time, but not in Forefront. On page 15, in defining nanometers, you say: “. . . that is, one-billionth of a meter or 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.” . . .

I suspect that most, if not all, readers are engineers or technologists who have a good sense of what a nanometer, or one-billionth of a meter, is. No need to obfuscate by the “100,000 times smaller.” Most of us might even feel more nostalgic with a 1.0E-9! In any case, the measurement should be 1/100,000th of a human hair, if you really want to put it that way.

—AZMAT MALIK (M.S.’73 EECS, M.B.A.’78 Haas)
Director of Operations, Renesas Technology America
San Carlos, California

 

 

A nerd and proud of it

In response to “Nerd or not?” in your Fall 2007 issue: As an alumna of Berkeley Engineering and former Berkeley High School Mathlete, I am definitely a nerd! Oddly enough, my gifted teenage son and all his friends are nerds too. This is not a bad thing to be. . . . I’d much rather be a nerd than not!

—HEIDI STEWARD (B.S.’83 EECS)
Research Engineer,
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Portland, Oregon

 

I don’t remember being called a nerd, but everyone in my family calls me a “contraptioneer.” This refers to my habit of modifying, if not building, my own version of almost anything. Some projects are simple, like a backpack frame; others are more complicated, like kayaks and iceboats. I’ve never owned a production whitewater kayak because they are difficult to get out of a turn and will initiate a turn if you don’t actively keep them going straight. So I tank tested a bunch of foam blocks in the swimming pool until I figured out that a slight reverse vee at the back would improve the directional stability without using a skeg, which introduces yaw rate damping and reduces maneuverability. . . .

The iceboat started out as a cheap hollow door with runners and a sailboard rig but is now similar to many others, except that the sail is a NACA 0012 airfoil. I recently saw an article on the aerodynamics of wing masts that explains why mine needs more wind before it will move; the wing mast and sail they studied had a maximum lift of 2.0 compared with my maximum of 1.5. On the other hand, I have sailed in more wind than they could handle without ever lifting a runner off the ice. . . . So many gadgets, so little time!

Nerd is a word that lacks specificity. Is it synonymous with geek? Both have bad connotations, but which is worse? Contraptioneer applies specifically to engineers with an insatiable need to improve everything they use. . . . The English language can express any idea accurately, but too often an inexact word is used where an exact word is available. Sometimes, a new word is needed; and contraptioneer captures the essence of a true engineer’s character.

—JOHN PENNUCCI (M.S.’80 ME)
Colchester, Vermont

 

Hell, yes, I’m a nerd, geek and probable dweeb. So what have I done since leaving Berkeley in 1951? A bunch of jobs in macho industry, like oil patch on a doodlebug crew for United Geophysical, underground hard rock mining engineer for Climax Molybdenum and adjunct professor of engineering at what is now the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).

In 1961 I was asked by the dean to apply for a full-time position that he created to start the engineering program. For eight years I was the only engineer titled as such; talk about being the nerd with all those liberal-artsy types around. I was once on a three-person committee for an English master’s student and asked her to compare Elizabethan sonnet with Troubadour form. “Oh!” said the English professor. “I didn’t think you engineers knew anything about that!” . . .

Finally, I was allowed to hire two other engineers. Since then, UNLV engineering has split from the almost-good-enough-to-be-nerds in the science college, and we are now a college of about 60 professors with a doctoral program. . . . We call the other areas where they can’t get a job with their degrees “Twinkies” and point out that their four-year degree emphasizes learning to say, “Would you like fries with that?”

Unlike Berkeley we don’t have the top 7 percent, but we do darned well with the nerds we get. Typically our students take five years to graduate, and we have a strong Tau Beta Pi chapter. In civil we run about 30 percent women. Our economy here is great, so, among sophomores and higher, eight percent are interning. This slows down their progress to graduation because they take fewer classes, but it does help them pass the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, which we require of all graduates in all fields. It also means we have one of the lowest student debt ratios on campus.

So I come from a family of nerds: Dad, Grandpa, uncles, cousins, and I’m damn proud of it. My wife and older daughter are engineers, as are two of my sons, and another son is in architecture. Are they nerds?

—HERBERT C. WELLS (B.S.’49 Geology, M.S.’51 Mining)
Professor Emeritus, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Las Vegas, Nevada