The Y Files

When I was an undergraduate at the State University of New York (SUNY), Albany in the 1990s, I took a writing-intensive "Introduction to Philosophy" class as one of my general prerequisites. The class examined most of the philosophical problems – such as Truth, Freedom, Ethics and Values – and I was a bit surprised to discover that Beauty was on that list.

Unfortunately, the semester ended before the class could write about Beauty. So I never gave the subject much deeper, further thought. Then in 2002 I saw a BBC documentary called "The Human Face". As it turns out, Beauty isn't just a philosophical subject. It's a mathematical one, too..

The Golden Ratio

Beauty – both in humans and in nature – is based upon a ratio. Plants, animals and humans grow according to precise mathematical laws. Flowers don't unfold in "beautiful" patterns by chance. Rather, their development is based upon a geometrical ratio - 1:1.618.

This "Golden Ratio" is based on the Fibonacci sequence, where every number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers. Eventually, the Fibonacci series will produce the ratio of 1:1.618, also known as Phi. This ratio appears constantly – in architecture, nature, and human beings. This is the only mathematical relationship that is consistently present in beautiful things.

Dr. Stephen Marquardt, a facial surgeon from California, has constructed a mask based upon this Golden Ratio. The proportion is seen everywhere on the beautiful face – the length of the nose, the positioning of the eyes, even in the teeth. And not only does this mask conform to beautiful faces (regardless of race) of today's standards, but also in pre-Modern paintings, Greek statues and old-time movie stars. So contrary to popular belief, the standard of facial beauty remains the same over time and across cultures. "Beautiful" body types come in and out of vogue, but the beautiful face always remains the same.

So this starts us down a rather slippery slope to the idea that since beauty can now be quantified by a mathematical ratio, is it any less remarkable to be beautiful or a waste of time to philosophize on what it means to be beautiful? In our beauty-obsessed and image-driven culture, beauty has indeed saturated the market, thus making it less remarkable. However, beauty is indeed only skin deep – and there is more to the philosophical idea of beauty than one's appearance. Beauty is not only how you look, but also how you act. What do you think?

Resources

http://www.bloggers.it/paolog/fibonacci-numbers-nature.htm

http://www.beautyanalysis.com/index2_mba.htm

http://www.intmath.com/Numbers/mathOfBeauty.php

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/blinded-by-science

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Face

Today, November 11, is Veteran's Day in the United States. Originally known as Armistice Day, the date commemorates the end of the Great War – a conflict that acquired a number once the world learned that the "war to end all wars" was but an opening act. World War II, a longer and even bloodier conflict, followed World War I all too soon. Once again, military engineers heard the call of duty.

Building Roads through Hell

Military engineering, a discipline which dates back to at least Roman times, was an important part of the Allied victory during the Second World War. In 1942, the U.S. Army began rolling to Alaska on the road that "couldn't be built". In a triumph of men and machines over Mother Nature, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineering finished the Alaska Highway, a 1500-mile stretch of frozen road that connected airfields and radio ranging stations along the Northwest Staging Route (NWSR), a critical national-defense air corridor. Remarkably, the time to complete this "Glory Road to Tokyo" was less than eight months.

The Alaska Highway was an important achievement, of course, but it wasn't the only road through hell that the U.S. Army built. According to Lewis A. Pick, the general who oversaw the building of Burma's Ledo Road, that project was "the toughest job ever given to U.S. Army Engineers in wartime". Designed to re-establish a land supply route to China, the Ledo Road also serviced a pipeline that carried fuel. Through the jungle and over mountains, soldiers struggled to cut a 100-foot path. Surveyors who rode elephants guided bulldozer operators who, when pounded by monsoon rains, joked "that's not a river, it's the Ledo Road."

The World's Largest Office Building

Military engineering doesn't usually include office buildings, but World War II was unlike any previous conflict. On September 11, 1941 – some 60 years to the day before terrorists tried to destroy it – construction on the Pentagon began. Designed to house an army of workers within the U.S. Department of War, the Pentagon would become the world's largest office building.

During the summer of 1941, the head of the Army Quartermaster Corps' Construction Division ordered Lt. Col. Hugh J. Casey to design a 4 million sq. ft. office building - and to have the plans on his desk by Monday morning. With help from George H. Bergstrom, a prominent civilian architect, Lt. Col. Casey worked all weekend and met his deadline. The plans that Casey delivered called for a massive, five-sided, air-conditioned building to sit atop 29 acres in Arlington, Virginia.

Although the Pentagon's original plans called for two floors, the Department of War more than doubled the building's height after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Under the leadership of Gen. Leslie Groves, three crews of 4,000 worked around the clock to finish a building with five floors.

In April 1942, the first occupants moved into the building even though the grounds and exterior were incomplete. Yet even when Pentagon construction was finally finished in January 1943, Groves' wartime work wasn't done. As head of the Manhattan Project, he would oversee the war's most sensitive engineering plan – the building of an atomic bomb.

Resources

http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/441

http://ledoroad.home.comcast.net/~ledoroad/Ledo_Main.html

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/2343

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/2085

"Why does the oven keep tripping the earth trip? It's so annoying. Can you sort it out?"

Editor's Note: Click here if you missed Part 1 of this two-part series.

Chapter 3: More Investigation

One thing that was curious was that the heritage cable presenting the fault at the distribution board was 2.5mm² whereas the remainder of the lighting circuit was heritage 1.0mm². So somewhere on this particular cable circuit was a joint between these two sizes that hadn't presented itself when the recent extension electrics went in. The other curious thing is that the earth fault presented itself at four places:

• At the distribution board in the cupboard
• At the kitchen lighting fittings
• At the lounge lighting fittings
• At a junction box on the lighting circuit on the landing upstairs (the box is tucked away behind a beam and ordinarily invisible).

So the faulty cable had four ends, which meant that there were two hidden T-splices in it!

The inherited electrical installation had not been carried out fully in pursuit of the UK's Wiring Regulations applicable at that time, whereas any professional Electrician is required to leave his/her work compliant with the edition of the Regulations, embraced within British Standard 7671, current at the time of the work. And whereas the work in the extension had been done to BS7671, the installation in the rest of the bothy had presented a lot of inherited faults, all of which had been corrected over time. This one, however, was the last one and a complete pain. The splices had to be found, for Neutral and Earth were still touching at one of them.

BS7671 requires that all cable ends are accessible for maintenance and testing. The two splices and the earth fault were clearly not.

A quick discussion with the Client: "Take the cupboard ceiling out and see if they're in there. It will be easy to hide the repairs when the ceiling goes back."

Plasterboard and glassfibre insulation make such a mess when they come down. Still, keeping the pieces makes sense, and drywall screws and short pieces of batten make a quick and easy solution to putting them back up again, while the saw gaps can be filled relatively easily before sanding down and making good prior to touching-up the paint.

No cables.

"Let me feel around in the ceiling". The Client's hands were somewhat smaller, and their squeezing into tight places discovered a "lego brick" cable connector hidden in the next bay along from the cupboard ceiling. Lo and behold: 2.5mm² cable on one side and 1.0mm² on the other. A piece of ceiling outside the cupboard had to come down to get to it to disconnect it, though.

Chapter 4: The Remedy

A 25m reel of replacement lighting circuit cable was purchased. The next step was to pull it in between the light fitting in the hall, which was fed from the other OK heritage cable on the lighting circuit, and the connection point just inside the garage loft space. This is where the extension works lighting cable had arrived from the other end of the house, and the remainder of the heritage lighting circuit cold be fed the other way round. A further two connections onwards to the kitchen and the lounge lights, and then the four-ended cable with two splices could be disconnected and abandoned, thereby bringing the whole bothy up to BS7671 current edition.

Then there was the access problem to consider.

Pulling the new cable in was easier said than done. The space above the hall is covered by a triangular-shaped pitched roof of gentle slope, which had been added above it during the extension works. There wasn't quite enough height to crawl. Further, 200mm of additional glassfibre loft insulation had been added to this space, some of which had to be moved aside to gain access.

"Cup of coffee and a biscuit?" Not now, for goodness' sake!

The space was a pot-holer's paradise, and the tight gap between a rafter and a brick chimney, some 8m away from fresh air, had to be squeezed through in some kind of crazy, itchy, sideways-horizontal limbo dance no fewer than 6 times before the new cable could be connected at both ends. It took an evening's effort just to get it in, and, as any reader that has handled the stuff will know, glassfibre loft insulation is very unforgiving to the human body.

The connections themselves were straightforward, as were removing the temporary supplies set up in Chapter 2. The bothy is now up to standard electrically, there are no more spurious earth trips, and the heritage 4-ended cable with the earth fault is now abandoned for good. All that remains is to tidy-up the ceiling in the hall and the cupboard and make good the decoration, hopefully before any relatives come over for tea and cakes.

Conclusion

The moral of the story is simple: if one is doing electrical work, make sure it is up to current local electrical codes at the time of installation, for it can be a very awkward and annoying job to sort out the problems after the final decoration is done.

The author (PWSlack) would like to thank CR4's Masu for offering advice and encouragement from another continent and for the incredibly kind offer of coming over to help find the fault and fix it, an offer that has not needed to have been taken up.

Postscript

The fault turned out to be a woodscrew, which had been used to screw a bracket to a wall to support a light fitting. There was a cable in the wall that had been buried in filler and remained undetected. The screw happened to have punctured the cable insulation and just kissed the Neutral conductor as it went through. When the light fitting had been added, the bracket became connected to the Earth conductor. Hence the Neutral-to-Earth fault. And as the Client stated, "So annoying."

Editor's Note: PWSlack had an "annoying electrical fault" in the United Kingdom. Masu lives in Australia, but provided his fellow CR4 guru with "encouragement and suggestions" from 10,000 miles away. Every day, CR4ers such as PWSlack and Masu collaborate and communicate through our community's open forums and private mail system. What follows, courtesy of PWSlack and in his own words, is evidence of one such effort that is too good not to share. - Moose

"Why does the oven keep tripping the earth trip? It's so annoying. Can you sort it out?"

Good questions.

The bothy is fed with 230V 50Hz electricity from overhead cables, and TT is the earth system in use. There is an earth rod at the 11kV-230V distribution transformer in a field some distance away, which is connected to Neutral at the pole. 230V Live and Neutral are fed to a brick connection cabinet in a neighbour's field. Inside the cabinet are the kWh meter and a 100A supply fuse together with an isolation switch. The outgoing cable is a steel wire armoured one, with two of the 4 cores connected to Live and 2 to Neutral. The cable disappears underground before surfacing inside the bothy, where both Live and Neutral pass through a 100A/100mA RCD before being connected to an 8-way distribution board with 100A double-pole isolating switch before going onto the individual circuit breakers.

All Earth conductos witin the building are connected to an Earth bar inside the distribution board. The Earth bar is connected to two earth electrodes at different places outside the building.

The oven circuit is fed via a 32A/30mA RCBO, which trips properly when the "test" button is pressed.

What was curious was why the 100mA RCD took the incoming supply out, whereas had there been a fault in the oven, the 30mA RCBO would have gone instead. So there had to be an earth fault, somewhere downstream of the distribution board, which leaked more than 100mA to earth when the oven was approaching full throb and less than 100mA when only a couple of rings were on.

CR4's Masu was helful in providing some guidance and encouragement. The thoughts went round and round and round...

Then it clicked.

The words of the professional Electrician that carried out the testing and certification of the recent bothy extension work electrics in compliance with Part P of the UK's Building Regulations a couple of years ago came ringing back: "You've got a good Earth!" Well, with an Earth-to-Neutral fault elsewhere within the bothy, that expression would make sense, and correlated well with the oven tripping the supply out when taking a high current from the supply. Masu was right. There was a sinking feeling. Tools, old clothes and overalls <sigh>….

Chapter 1: Investigation

Having isolated it and fired up the multimeter, the oven checked out OK at its incoming terminals, with >20 megohms between the protective Earth conductor and both the Live and the Neutral conductors, no matter how many cooking rings, grill elements and oven elements were switched on at any moment. The same story was told at the distribution board with the oven reconnected and the meter connected to the oven circuit cable disconnected at the board. No problem there.

The distribution board is in a cupboard in the hall. With the incoming mains isolated, there isn't much light in there, so temporary lighting needed to be brought into play. A head-mounted LED torch with wind-up charging to its internal batteries proved to be a godsend; both hands could be kept free while there was good lighting wherever one's head is turned at the same time.

There was still a fault.

"Have you fixed it yet?" Mutter, mutter.

With the supply still isolated, the next step was to meter for ohms between the Neutral terminal and all the Earth conductors running through the circuit cables within the bothy, which were connected to an Earth bar within the board. 0.3 ohms or pretty much a hard short circuit. Hmmmm. The next step was to disconnect the circuit Earth conductors from the Earth bar, one at a time, and see if the meter reading changed. Nothing happened until one of the two earth conductors that were part of circuit no.6, the 6A lighting circuit, was disconnected, at which point the meter went >20 megohms. Bingo! Somewhere on one of the two cables feeding the lighting circuits, Neutral and Earth were touching!

Chapter 2: Buying Time

The errant cable feeds about half the bothy lighting fixtures, some of which had metal casings including all of the light switches. So leaving the earth wire disconnected at the distribution board was not a good idea, as in the event of a Live to Earth fault developing on the circuit, all of the metal fittings would have become live until the fault current exceeded 100mA, which is enough to kill a human. So the logical step was to hook up a temporary feed for the errant cable, with the Earth conductor disconnected for now, from a BS1363 plug with 3A fuse plugged into a wall socket near the distribution board via a plug-in 30mA Power Breaker (usual disclaimer) auxiliary RCD. At least there was now an combination of a level of safety, a lighting circuit that sort-of worked (OK, so the plug's 3A fuse blew once when an ageing filament lamp downstream of it went through its death throes) and an oven that could now be operated at full throb without the supply going off.

Editor's Note: Part 2 of this series will run tomorrow.

"The virus that caused the greatest world epidemic of influenza in modern history – the pandemic of 1918-1919 – may have returned." Those words, written by Harold Schmeck, appeared in pages of the New York Times not in the fall of 2009, but during the winter of 1976. A month later, on March 24 of that bicentennial year, President Gerald R. Ford asked Congress to provide immediate funding "for the production of sufficient vaccine to inoculate every man, woman, and child in the United States."

Editor's Note: This is the second in a three-part series. Click here if you missed Part 1.

The day after President Ford's announcement, Dr. Harry Meyer met with representatives of pharmaceutical companies and personnel from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Meyer, director of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Bureau of Biologics (BoB), learned from drug manufacturers that, in the words of one participant, "you couldn't possibly have 200 million doses by fall".

There's Something Wrong with the Vaccine

Doubts about its ability to produce enough swine flu vaccine wasn't the pharmaceutical industry's only concern. During the summer of 1976, vaccine manufacturers delivered an "ultimatum" to the CDC, demanding protection against claims of adverse reactions. As then-CDC Director Dr. David J. Sencer later recalled, this demand sent an "unintended, unmistakable message" to the American pubic that "there's something wrong with the vaccine". Faced with an epidemic, however, the federal government agreed to industry's indemnification demands.

Soon after the National Influenza Immunization Program (NIIP) began delivering flu vaccine to state health departments, another crisis of confidence occurred. On August 2, 1976, a mysterious pneumonia-like illness sickened over 250 veterans at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia. Although CDC researchers later determined that the illness, Legionnaire's Disease, was caused by bacteria from a hotel cooling tower, the media used the episode to hype fears of an early-season flu epidemic.

The subsequent deaths of three elderly people who had recently received the swine flu vaccine then caused the pendulum of public panic to swing back towards fears about the vaccine itself. Ultimately, venerable CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite scolded the media for sensationalism and shoddy reporting.

This time, fears about the swine flu vaccine were unfounded – or were they?

Editor's Note: Part 3 of this series will run soon.

Resources:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125571271634890319.html

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol12no01/05-1007.htm

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103642563

http://blogs.consumerreports.org/health/2009/04/the-swine-flu-epidemic-that-never-really-was-1976-swine-flu-outbreak.html

http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2009/04/28/1976_swine_flu/

http://www.amazon.com/epidemic-that-never-was-Policy-making/dp/0394711475