The Power of the Analogy

Let's see now.........

Raining cats and dogs.

Room to swing a cat in.

Ho Hum...lol...

I mean in an engineering sense, and I don't think they are analogies! ( )

OK Del, it's Monday morning and I'm making my lame attempts at humor.

In giving it a bit of thought, I would submit "HORSEPOWER"; an oldie but goodie in that when machines became more abundant, an analogy of their potential had to be derived so that one could equate a device to a known quantity. Not sure how the actual figure was arrived at, but I believe it is (ironically) attributed to James Watt.

Sorry about the cat swinging .

Imagine the guy trying to pull himself out of a swamp by his own hair. What a struggle it was and will ever be. They keep trying though. I just did then, when I tried to get the irony out of horsepower and James Watt. Were is bloody vermin when you need him?

"What we have here, is a failure to communicate."

Hope your scalp is still intact ky.

The irony is that the IS unit for power is called WATT, while the British Unit of mechanical power, atributed to James Watt, is the HP (HorsePower)

How about putting 10 lbs of potato in a 5 lb bag??

But seriously, how about the one about electricity and garden hose:

Current: the water flowing inside the garden hose.

Voltage: the pressure (or how fast) the water is flowing out of the hose.

Resistance: the diameter of the hose.

MidniteFighter

I like the analogy of the one about the.... Oh forget now but its REALLY good....

John.

Was it the hair analogy? Pulling out lumps of it and getting nowhere?

When I used to design deinterleaving interferometers (radar ELINT) for the military, I gave a class to our techs, and I used these analogies.

For interferometry I had them close their eyes. As I continued talking I walked around the room and had them realize that they could keep track of my position by listening to my voice - their brains performing interferometry on the phase differences of the sound reaching their ears. Our system did the same thing, on the phase differences in radar pulses that hit an array of antennas on an aircraft.

For deinterleaving I used the analogy of starting with a single track recording of a 100 piece orchestra and ending with 100 tracks, each with only a single instrument on it.

I recently used an ohmmeter as an analogy to a complex impedance measuring setup, which is not that much of a stretch, really.

nice...

Impedance matching is a concept that I'm always using analogies for...

Mind power/impedance matching applied to sooooo many things....

Even matching the weight of an arrow to the bow.... for max power transfer, trade off between velocity and mass with energy being 1/2 m v ^2 , but that's relatively easy to see so I sometimes try that as an analogy for electrical matching....it just depends on your audience I guess...I don't often lecture in electronics to medieval archers tho'

Possibly all our reasoning is based on some sort of an analogy. When we start learning to analyze we don't have any means for doing it. Gradually we amass experience with which, using more and more analogies, we are supposed to understand better.

Perhaps even pure strict logic is analogy based, but this is beyond my powers of analogy finding.

Hmm..

You mean it's like a row of dominos toppling slowly as the years go by...?

Probably not...I just couldn't resist it

Keeping with that analogy...I find people keep removing my dominoes...now what was I saying?

Yes, the toppling, stealing and general loss of dominoes...

It is difficult to find an analogy for a loosely connected multidimensional complex of interdepending partial analogies.

A measure of density (mental or otherwise) = as thick as a yard of lard.

Distance = as long as a very long thing.

Language = His vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever...

My favorite - ...flew through the air with all the grace of a brick..

A mind like a steel trap, one that was left out in the rain for a month..

One I used the other day in a meeting with my MD (oops), trying that here is like trying to produce nuclear fission by banging together two lumps of uranium ore..

I'll often say, "He has a mind like a steel sieve."

One just popped up at work her...explaining logic gates...as sheep in a pen with 'gates' hey..that's why they're called that in the first place...gee I'm a dummy today (I knew that really...OMG I'm talking to myself now...oh no you're not etc....)

This one just came in an article on gizmodo about the Burj-Dubai skyscraper:

The developers of the Burj Dubai, Emaar properties, declined to comment on how tall the completed structure would be. What is for sure—it will be large—as large as my penis if it were a building.

I think my favorite is the analogy that best fits our sales force here.

Sell a job then figure out how to make it work.

or as we often say here. "They keep putting the cart before the horse"

Testify, my Brother!

Actually, the analogy I'm familiar with is a bit more bawdy, likening Sales, Engineering and Customers to Pimps, Whores and Johns...(see Taxi Driver).

After a few different discussion I changed my tag line.

This one being one of them.

'As Cunning As A Cunning Fox Who Is Professor Of Cunning At Oxford University.'

Captain Blackadder.