Hi! I notice we have many parallel interests: 1) I read German about as well as English, and hobble along in Russian, Italian, French, Spanish, and even less well in Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Polish. I'm trying to revive school taught Latin (Aeneid) and am plugging away in Greek (Thucydides). For a while I tried doing Arabic but haven't got very far. 2) I love mathematics and did applied physics for a living. 3) I'm a musician playing semi-professional classical gigs on most winds and stumble around on piano. With my parents (both now dead) I put together a large collection of early musical instruments (late 18th and 19th century), that my father and I restored, most of which we gave to Duke University. I am somewhat of an expert in the acoustics of wind instruments, and at one time thought when I retired I'd get a bunch of patents on some of my inventions and then go into business selling significantly improved winds (but no longer have the stamina to do much more than dream of what might have been). 4) I love art, but no longer paint, and instead, collect art books and occasionally go to shows. 5) I love exotic electronic circuits and do Spice and Mathcad simulations that I occasionally turn into hardware and/or papers, mostly for my own amusement, occasionally for profit. 6) I am fascinated by the history of science in general, but at the moment, am dabbling in early Greek/Alexandrian astronomy, and in the development of the astrolabe by the Arabic community. 7) When tired, I read a lot of history and semi-serious biography; I used to read "Literature" but find I really can't keep up with all the latest. 8) When thoroughly exhausted, I sometimes go down into my cellar machine-shop and pretend that I really do know how to do precision work (although I do really know better).

I'm guessing that I have over 8,000 books. I used to fancy that I had total recall and knew where everything was. I now find that no longer to be the case, and much too late, am starting to reshelve things by subject, alphabetically by author, but get bogged down in fitfully building bookcases and in trying to catalog everything. I'd be interested to know how you've managed to cope with 12,000!

Neal

posted by fneddy at 4:49 pm (EST) on Aug 15, 2008

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.

posted by Jasehall at 10:49 pm (EST) on May 25, 2008

Hello Patent Nonsense,

Thanks for accepting my friend invitation.

Best,

Barbara

posted by bslavin at 11:22 am (EST) on 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!

posted by stellarexplorer at 12:03 am (EST) on 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

posted by celephicus at 7:28 am (EST) on 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?

posted by Heathcliff at 9:33 am (EST) on Feb 26, 2008

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

posted by chuck_ralston at 12:47 pm (EST) on 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.

posted by Darrol at 7:30 am (EST) on 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.

posted by pw0327 at 11:33 pm (EST) on 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.

posted by pw0327 at 11:27 pm (EST) on Oct 12, 2007

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

posted by pw0327 at 4:57 pm (EST) on 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

posted by Gio at 6:01 am (EST) on Aug 6, 2007