Re: engineers' brains


mrdarrett@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
bill.sloman@xxxxxxxx wrote:
mrdarrett@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
bill.sloman@xxxxxxxx wrote:
mrdarrett@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=LMQBPTKGZ5QYKQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=189401732

John


So the moral of the story is, we engineers should choose... um, how do
I say this politely... less intellectually talented females for wives?

Scarcely. The are lots of ways of being intelligent in lots of
different fields. My wife is a psycholinguist, a professor and the
author of a lot of heavily cited papers. Her opinions on the way our
central heatings system should be run are firmly held and perfecly
rational as far as they go, but wrong, because she doesn't understand
the engineering involved and isn't in a postion to appreciate the depth
of her ignorance.



"...isn't in a postion to appreciate the depth of her ignorance." I
like that line. I like it a lot. ;)

Just curious, what *were* her ideas on the modifications to the central
heating system?

She insisted that the hot water be heated be heated only for about four
hours every night, so that it was hot when we took our showers in the
morning, rather than letting the central heating boiler keep the hot
water up to temperature all the time.

She had found this to be a good scheme when living on her own in a
house with a very poorly insulated hot water tank, and insisted on
sticking to the strategy in a house with a double insulated hot water
tank that had an thermal time constant of three days.

She was right, in the sense that her strategy did save us about ten
dollars a year, but it meant that if I came back from hockey practice
soaked with sweat, I had a significant chance of getting stuck with a
cold shower. No amount of arguement would persuade her that my
calculation of the magnitude of the saving involved was to be relied
on.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen


Ah, so her plan was indeed implemented. How unfortunate.

It was that or divorce.

Any chance of installing an on-demand electric water heater for when
you come home from hockey?

I didn't know in advance when the hot water had been exhausted, and
instant electric water heaters don't produce enough hot water to give a
respectable shower - most of the time there was enough residual hot
water for my shower, so it never got irritating enough to force me to
do something about it.

Happily, when we moved house in 1993, the central heating controller in
the new house didn't offer programmable heating times for the hot
water, and we didn't go to the trouble adn expense of finding and
paying for a new controller that would.

Or maybe a solar water preheater...? (On second thought, the capital
cost for that would be significant.)

In Cambridge, the roof timbers (from 1895) had been sized to carry a
slate roof. They hadn't been reinforced when the slates were replaced
by much heavier tiles - I wouldn't have dared to put a solar water
pre-heater on top of the tiles. In Nijmegen our house has a thatched
roof - water-reed thatch is a great roofing material, but no basis for
a solar heat collector.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

.

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