Today a friend suggested that I type “why” into Matlab. You should too. Not only had I never tried it, but it never crossed my mind that it was something that one should try.  I’ve never wondered “what happens when I type ‘why’ in Matlab?” That’s the value of person-to-person... [Read More]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IGJ2jMZ-gaI What would somebody from 1863 think if you told them that in the future, we would think nothing of watching a moving image of  a real man actually pouring a gallon of a metal more precious than gold down an ant hill without getting up from our desks? He... [Read More]

I wrote a post on the lab blog about what I see as the Documentation Dilemma. How much time should you spend making sure every piece of your work is individually useful vs. pushing on to a final product?  

Everybody has passed dozens of construction sites. Usually you get a quick snapshot – heavy machinery, a half finished structure and dozens of workers. How often do you pay attention to the logos on the side of the trucks? I’ve been walking past the same construction site every day for... [Read More]

One tool in the control/dynamics engineer’s toolbox is the Kalman filter. It’s one of those big intellectual hammers that makes many problems look like nails. Put simply, a Kalman filter combines noisy external measurements with an internal simulation of the system in question in order to estimate the system’s true... [Read More]