by Bill Lenihan
Thursday, 02 Sept 2010, about 5:30pm. A corner office on the top floor of an office building in El Segundo, CA (tribal hunting grounds of America's bloated Aerospace corporations). Four engineers — three on the wrong side of middle age, one 20-something — are sitting around discussing the technical problems of the day. Specifically, concerning a module that acts as the heart of the signal generation capabilities for the Radar embedded in one of America's front-line fighter aircraft.
Brent (53), talking about the measurements he's conducting, mentions how he's using Lissajous patterns ....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lissajous_curve
.... to work around the limitations of the low-bandwidth test equipment he's got (i.e., company management is cheap). When Thoai (51) asks "A what pattern?", Brent pipes up "Didn't you see the old Outer Limits TV show? The opening featured 'Lissajous patterns'".
Your author (49), trying hard not to tip his hand about his unseemly 20-year-long OL obsession (even in the geekdom of engineers, being overly fussy about a TV show not named Star Trek does not earn one admiration), opines "No, Brent, that was a pure sine wave .... actually, now that I think of it, not pure; it was a triangular, as opposed to sawtooth, LFM*. It started at a low frequency, ramped up high, then ramped back down. The X-axis was time-domain all the way."
"No, I think it was a Lissajous pattern" retorts Brent.
"Let's find out. I'll betcha the evidence is just a few keystrokes away on YouTube ..." I say, straining to hide the confidence behind my challenge.
And so, 4 engineers, upon whom the company is counting to solve problems that threaten to bring the F-XX Radar production line to a halt — at a cost of $23M USD per month in progress payments — gather around Thoai's computer screen to watch the opening credits of the black-and-white TV show that we can never turn off, two weeks shy of its' 47th birthday, this last fact being known to only one of the characters in our play.
As the video unfolds, Brent sheepishly acquiesces about the correctness of my claim. Then, toward the end of the credits where the sine wave pattern changes abruptly, Brent leans forward with a renewed sense of justice to assert the presence of Lissajous! But, once again, my peculiar synergy of Engineering Talent & Outer Limits Trivia shoots him down (not unlike certain hunters encountering an errant Thetan in the woods) as I point out that the new patterns are merely phase-shifted replicas of the previous sine wave ".... essentially like MultiPath** distortion, Brent."
Our dispute now settled, the meeting moves on to more germane topics, my attention to which falters as I bask in the inner glow of satisfaction that, finally, my Outer Limits Enthusiasm (as generous a label as I can assign it) has had it's day in the sun. Somewhere in the Borderland, Joe & Leslie smile, too.
That 20-something engineer? The three late-model, baby-boomer technologists are too frightened of his Gen-Y apathy to chance asking Daniel — who I reckon was in grade 4 when the ShowTime abortion premiered — what he makes of this spontaneous research into the title sequence of an ancient black-and-white TV show. Someday, that show will die within the culture of human beings on Earth***, but .... that day is not today.
Epilogue: As of this revision date (18 Jan 2011), our self-anointed Awesome Foursome has pretty much solved all of this product's technical problems that threatened the F-XX production line. Thus, American & Allied readers can all sleep easy knowing that (a) your tax dollars have been wisely spent, and (b) your nation's security remains ... err, well, ... whatever the real state of your nation's security, at least it isn't being compromised by underwhelming Radars aboard the F-XX fighter jet.
Thursday, 02 Sept 2010, about 5:30pm. A corner office on the top floor of an office building in El Segundo, CA (tribal hunting grounds of America's bloated Aerospace corporations). Four engineers — three on the wrong side of middle age, one 20-something — are sitting around discussing the technical problems of the day. Specifically, concerning a module that acts as the heart of the signal generation capabilities for the Radar embedded in one of America's front-line fighter aircraft.
Brent (53), talking about the measurements he's conducting, mentions how he's using Lissajous patterns ....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lissajous_curve
.... to work around the limitations of the low-bandwidth test equipment he's got (i.e., company management is cheap). When Thoai (51) asks "A what pattern?", Brent pipes up "Didn't you see the old Outer Limits TV show? The opening featured 'Lissajous patterns'".
Your author (49), trying hard not to tip his hand about his unseemly 20-year-long OL obsession (even in the geekdom of engineers, being overly fussy about a TV show not named Star Trek does not earn one admiration), opines "No, Brent, that was a pure sine wave .... actually, now that I think of it, not pure; it was a triangular, as opposed to sawtooth, LFM*. It started at a low frequency, ramped up high, then ramped back down. The X-axis was time-domain all the way."
"No, I think it was a Lissajous pattern" retorts Brent.
"Let's find out. I'll betcha the evidence is just a few keystrokes away on YouTube ..." I say, straining to hide the confidence behind my challenge.
And so, 4 engineers, upon whom the company is counting to solve problems that threaten to bring the F-XX Radar production line to a halt — at a cost of $23M USD per month in progress payments — gather around Thoai's computer screen to watch the opening credits of the black-and-white TV show that we can never turn off, two weeks shy of its' 47th birthday, this last fact being known to only one of the characters in our play.
As the video unfolds, Brent sheepishly acquiesces about the correctness of my claim. Then, toward the end of the credits where the sine wave pattern changes abruptly, Brent leans forward with a renewed sense of justice to assert the presence of Lissajous! But, once again, my peculiar synergy of Engineering Talent & Outer Limits Trivia shoots him down (not unlike certain hunters encountering an errant Thetan in the woods) as I point out that the new patterns are merely phase-shifted replicas of the previous sine wave ".... essentially like MultiPath** distortion, Brent."
Our dispute now settled, the meeting moves on to more germane topics, my attention to which falters as I bask in the inner glow of satisfaction that, finally, my Outer Limits Enthusiasm (as generous a label as I can assign it) has had it's day in the sun. Somewhere in the Borderland, Joe & Leslie smile, too.
That 20-something engineer? The three late-model, baby-boomer technologists are too frightened of his Gen-Y apathy to chance asking Daniel — who I reckon was in grade 4 when the ShowTime abortion premiered — what he makes of this spontaneous research into the title sequence of an ancient black-and-white TV show. Someday, that show will die within the culture of human beings on Earth***, but .... that day is not today.
Epilogue: As of this revision date (18 Jan 2011), our self-anointed Awesome Foursome has pretty much solved all of this product's technical problems that threatened the F-XX production line. Thus, American & Allied readers can all sleep easy knowing that (a) your tax dollars have been wisely spent, and (b) your nation's security remains ... err, well, ... whatever the real state of your nation's security, at least it isn't being compromised by underwhelming Radars aboard the F-XX fighter jet.
Footnotes (for the technically curious)
* LFM = Linear Frequency Modulation (aka Chirp or Stretch). Now, no geek story like this is complete unless I point out to the reader that the chirping sine wave featured in TOL opening is in fact very useful in real radar applications. In particular, it is key in creating (a) large time-bandwidth products for SAR (synthetic aperture radar) ground mapping, and (b) pulse compression for GMTI (ground moving target indicator) modes. Returning once again to the Borderland, we discover that Leslie is now smiling a little more broadly than Joe.
** MultiPath distortion is what happens when a signal bounces off several different surfaces/objects resulting in various times-of-arrival at some receiver. Those various times-of-arrival produce a mixture of constructive & destructive interference, and thus the signal fades in & out, respectively. If you're of a certain age, you almost certainly experienced this listening to older-technology radio while driving among tall buildings. Today's improved receiver technology using DSP (digital signal processing) can sift through the junk to extract the real signal ... well, for FM radio; AM remains an unsolved problem.
*** TOL's original broadcast transmissions will, of course, live forever in the Cosmos. But, just to be accurate, "forever" isn't really FOREVER. It's signal strength is constantly decreasing, and eventually gets so small that it falls so deep below the noise floor that the receiver filter(s) needed to recover it must have a bandwidth so narrow (or be of a parallel number so large) as to be impractical. But, let's not end on a pessimistic note. Perhaps someday, somewhere a (not necessarily terrestrial) counterpart to Alan Maxwell will solve this problem, if he can be steadfast in resisting the siren's call of the prosaic (i.e., his Carol Maxwell).
I don't think I've ever had as PRACTICAL an application for OUTER LIMITS trivia as this ... but the question remains, did you ever get the 20-something to watch any of the episodes? Or was it just too far outside his purview?
ReplyDeleteI didn't really broach the subject with the 20-something ("Your author (49), trying hard not to tip his hand . . . . . not named Star Trek does not earn one admiration"). Someday he'll receive an anonymous gift that will usher him into TOL universe. I suspect he's adventurous enough to give B&W film a try (is this our stretch goal for generation Z?).
ReplyDeleteA few more things bear (sorry) mentioning:
Most engineers, especially of baby-boomer vintage, almost certainly start professional life out with some kind of sense of wonder at the "Awe and mystery of the universe ..." (even if they don't think of it in those exact words or with a direct lineage to TOL). Eventually, over time, the politics & nonsense of the corporate world -- in conjunction with the burdens of family & mortgage -- tend to drum this out of one. The specific business enterprise in the story is a case study in Dilbert-esque management philosophies, and I can't help being reminded of the late British comedian Peter Cook's famous quote "There's terrific merit in having no sense of humour, no sense of irony, practically no sense of anything at all. If you're born with these so-called defects you have a very good chance of getting to the top."
And, yet, Brent, the oldest of the group -- who almost certainly saw TOL in it's initial network run as a 7 or 8 year old, and was thus precisely the target audience for the brain-shaping images of that remarkable little show -- has resisted these forces with singular ease. He retains a guileless sense of wonder about technology, science, life, the universe, etc., that clearly marks him as an outlier on the Bell curve of engineering ennui. If anyone is the living embodiment of a Leslie Stevens hero, it's Brent.
I did make one embellishment to this, otherwise true, story. We don't call ourselves the "Awesome Foursome". I borrowed that from a champion Australian Olympic rowing team circa the Seoul & Barcelona Games. I figure if Joe Stefano can take Jaws-size bites of "dramatic license", surely a long-time fan can have a nibble. First of all, engineers don't have that much of an ego to do any kind of self-marketing. Secondly, there are other (~10) people involved in this project that simply weren't present for TOL' serendipitous appearance.