Why Your iPhone has a Cracked Screen - It's a Howler! 😂

Is it just me? Or has anyone else noticed the high incidence of cracked screens on iPhones? (Sarcasm intended.) I 'm not sure, but I don't recall having seen one more than six months or so old that did not have a crack. I even seem to remember seeing something about Apple planning to offer repair kits as standard add-ins to their newest model, so the user would be able to replace both the screen and the Lightning connection (another weak point in their products).

Recently, after my son Doug gave my wife Nancy his old Kirkland (made by Rexton) hearing aids, she had to give up her trusty Android phone and get an iPhone, in order to use a proprietary Bluetooth streaming transmitter that Apple had developed in cooperation with a limited number of hearing aid manufacturers. To give the Devil his due, this is a marvelous innovation! There is so little lag time, it is essentially like having wired headphones on. It is a little annoying that they have chosen to go the proprietary route with this innovation, like with all of their best stuff. But that's a minor quibble - not everyone is like Benjamin Franklin with the lightning rod. And certainly, Franklin made a lot of money with other products. But I digress. Sure enough, it wasn't long before she had a cracked screen in two places. So, I've been thinking, why doesn't Apple just license the glass formulation that all the other manufacturers use and be done with this problem?

A couple of days ago, I was reminiscing (AKA bragging to Nancy) about some of my more astute simple fixes to different semiconductor industry manufacturing processing problems I encountered in my career, when I sat bolt upright and practically screamed, "NO WAY!" I grabbed my wife's iPhone! "WAY!", as I looked, as best I could, at the edges of the screen!

The particular fix I had been telling Nancy about occurred, as I recall, in 1984. At the time, I was Manager and Process Engineer for the Photomask Blanks shop of the Photomask Department at Texas Instruments in Dallas, TX. The semiconductor industry was closing in on megabit memory chips, and one of the enabling new developments was the introduction of quartz photomask blanks. Because of the magnitude-smaller coefficient of thermal expansion of quartz, quartz was replacing Hoya's LE-30, the dominant plate of the day, in photomasks for the highest density integrated circuits. LE-30 had supplanted soda-lime glass (both green and White Crown) a few years earlier when non-contact projection printing equipment had been introduced, in the 16-kilobit era, as it had a similar smaller coefficient of expansion advantage over soda-lime. The advantage was due to the need to allow a better overlay of stacked patterns on wafers, especially toward the edges of the wafer, when using equipment that causes the photomask to heat up as a batch of wafers is being patterned. At that time, 5" X 5" quartz plates were costing about $500 each. 

The Japanese company TDK, well known for its recording tapes, but also a player in other ferromagnetic-related industries, came up with the idea of drawing a ribbon of molten quartz through a platinum die and then cutting the ribbon into squares, as the source for their entry into the quartz photomask blank market, anticipating a $100 price point. This was a huge innovation and a significant departure from the existing process of cooling off a boule of quartz and then sawing it up into slices, then squares, and then grinding and polishing them down to the final flat and polished thickness. 

As we were evaluating the TDK plates, we experienced a problem with a high incidence of cracking in the corners of the plates in our ultrasonic cleaning baths. When they visited the next time, I pointed this out and told them, "Your plates have very sharp edges and corners, so a lot of stress resides in those edges and corners. You need to put a little radius (rounding) on all your edges and corners to relieve that stress." (This was not some ground-breaking insight on my part - it was standard practice by all other vendors.) Then I took them over to visit George (I can't remember his last name), the crusty old guy that made all of the quartzware for TI's Central Research Laboratory. I asked him to put one of their plates under a polariscope, and when he did, a veritable rainbow of colors emanated from each edge and, especially, each corner. He told them, "You need to put a little radius on all your edges and corners to relieve that stress."

About a month later, TDK came in for another visit and reported what they had done back in Japan: They had put together a 14-engineer task force and seriously attacked the problem with brute force, as is their wont. (Think Russian Army tactics.) They had conducted a series of ball drop tests from various heights and angles. They had done ultrasonic bath tests, etc., etc. etc. And they had come up with a definitive solution, "We need to put a little radius on all the edges and corners of our plates." Somehow, I managed to keep a straight face. 

Not so, right now! I am howling! 😂 Really! 

How has Apple, the repository of all that fantastic brainpower, not picked up on this almost trivially simple solution to their problem - 39 years after old George took one look at TDK's quartz photomask plates and confirmed what I had told them? Have all of Apple's competitors just been snickering up their sleeves all these years? I mean - I know there is a lot of hubris at Apple, but are they that elitist and insular? A big part of my career was sussing out the simple little low-tech details that the guys much, much smarter than me overlooked. Has no-one like me ever worked at Apple. Nah, probably not. JOATs need not apply, I suppose.

(Sadly, TDK's plates did not fare well in the market, due to inclusions near the ribbon-edge sides of the plates. In other words, they made the die too narrow, not leaving enough extra width to trim off the edge-effect scuzz. Another simple little detail was not accounted for by the brilliant guys,)

A Most Interesting Professor - Dr. Lawrence McNamee

"Ah, Mr. Norris, I see you've decided to take the final." Oops!

I had noticed that my roomie at East Texas State College, Noel Reed, had forgotten a pamphlet that he needed for the final exam in German I. He would need to translate one of the articles in it, so I rushed up to campus to take it to him. As I turned to leave the classroom, having delivered the pamphlet, I was face-to-face with Dr. Lawrence McNamee. "So, Mr. Norris! You decided to take the final?" 

Well, I had nothing else scheduled for the next hour and a half, since I had been taking the course - and doing well enough - until the spring Chorale tour. 

I shrugged my shoulders and mumbled, "Why not?" I had been helping Noel prepare for the test, so I knew the material. Well, I took the final and pulled a B in the course! Of course, that was far from enough to keep me from going from Dean's List to Academic Probation in one semester - my infamous Spring of 1963. Oh, well.

This was not my first course under Dr. McNamee. As a Physics Major, I had previously taken an English Literature course, basically a Shakespeare course, that he taught as part of the General Studies Required Course Program. The man was a mesmerizing teacher. So, when he was tasked to put together a German language curriculum, I was an enthusiastic enrollee. 

Along the way, I had heard a bit about his service as a translator at the Nuremburg War Trials and his earlier undercover work on the Continent during World War II. I was actually under the impression that he was a Brit and had served in MI-5 or MI-6, rather than a Pittsburg-born baseball player (He once had a tryout with the Pirates.) and boxer who served in the OSS. He even made a few passing remarks in class about how his flawless German and his reddish-blond hair made it easy for him to pass as a German.

I returned to East Texas State (then) University for the Spring Semester of 1965, now as a Business Major. I soon met up with Dr. McNamee on campus. and we chatted for a bit. He remarked that that German class had really gone very poorly. He remembered my background and ended up hiring me as a tutor for his daughter in 7th Grade Math.

Flash forward 15 to 20 years. I'm browsing through the Dallas Morning News one Sunday morning, and I happened to notice a letter to a column from Archie Moore. The Archie Moore? Yes, the former light-heavyweight Champ and American Goodwill Ambassador was asking a question. "In my travels all over the world, I have rarely found myself in a situation where no one spoke English. Worldwide, how many people speak English?", or words to that effect. And then what really grabbed me? The Columnist was Dr. Lawrence McNamee! Sadly, I have never been back to (now) TAMU-Commerce.

Dr. McNamee passed away on July 17, 2006, at age 89. RIP, sir.

A&M-C's renowned Prof McNamee dies - North Texas e-News (ntxe-news.com)

Pulling in the Derrick (If Blood is Yellow, I'm Bleeding to Death!)

 

This tale is based on my dad’s accounting of a fairly significant event in his life - an accident which contributed to the demise of using the old steel derricks left over from the pre-portable drilling rig era that were still standing around in older oil fields for workovers.  Ironically, perhaps, my dad’s occasional work in the oil fields began even before those steel derricks were built, when he worked as a wooden rig builder in the east Texas oil fields.

Dad went to work for the Texas Company, later renamed Texaco Inc., in 1944 after having worked as a derrick man on drilling rigs in west Texas for a while. With the Texas Company, he worked as a derrick man for a workover pulling gang based out of Hamlin TX.

The gang pusher's name was Newt Cotton (Cotten? We called him Uncle Newt.) The other guys on the crew were Virgil Dockins and Beady Mason. The gang became an extended family, going on fishing trips together down on the Concho and Colorado Rivers, attending sporting events together, and getting together at each other's homes. In the summer of 1952, they also had a work-study student (or apprentice, I'm not sure of his formal status) named Johnny Moran who was a Cajun studying petroleum engineering at LSU. My older sister, Pat, 13 at the time, was totally crushing on Jonny Moran.

My oldest sister, Gwen, had gotten married earlier that year to Ed Baker, a South Carolinian who was an Air Force cook stationed at Shepherd Air Force Base in Wichita Falls. He had subsequently been transferred to Ellington Air Force Base in Houston. On the day before we were to leave on vacation to visit them, the gang was assigned to do a pump replacement on a well out of Rotan, Texas.

In that day, there were many of the old steel derricks still standing in the oil fields. It was common to use them for workover jobs, as it saved considerable time, since you had to unscrew fewer joints of pipe, compared to when using the shorter derrick of the workover rig. On this particular well, my dad had previously observed that the derrick seemed to be getting very weak. In the morning meeting, he recommended that they not use the existing derrick for that job, but that they use the workover pulling unit’s derrick, instead. Alternatively, could they put off the job until the next day after he was on vacation. My dad was the Safety Coordinator for the Department, and he felt his recommendation should carry a lot of weight. However, the boss, either Mr. Richie or Mr. Rose, overrode his recommendation. My dad reacted angrily, telling everyone in the meeting, “If I get killed today, you are all my witnesses, and I want my wife to own a big part of this company as a result of this decision.”

So they went out and strung up their pulling unit on the old derrick. The pulling unit is a big truck with a big old Waukesha engine that drives a huge windlass with enough cable to reach down to the bottom of the hole.

If you’ve ever driven around in oil fields, you’ve seen pump jacks – teeter totters atop elevated fulcrums with one end connected to a motor and counterweights and the other with a “horsehead” bobbing up and down with a rod going down into the ground connected to it. The pump sits at the bottom of the hole and is connected to the horsehead by a string of rods. To bring the pump to the surface for replacement, you do a “rod job”. With the pulling unit in position, the derrick man carries a light line up and runs it through the pulley at the top of the derrick, so that it can be used to haul the main cable up and around the pulley and back to the ground. The string of rods is secured to the pulling unit and then the rods are disconnected from the horsehead. The derrick man is then positioned in the crow's nest midway up the derrick. The cable is then connected to the rods, and then the string of rods is pulled up the hole. After the top of the string of rods arrives at the crow's nest, the rods are clamped down at a point below a convenient joint and the floor gang unscrews that section of rods. They are then swung to a side platform and stacked by the floor man and the derrick man. The cable is then attached back to the top of the string of rods still in the hole. The process is repeated until the pump arrives at the surface. The pump is then replaced, and the process is reversed to put it back down into the hole.

In this case, this pump was firmly stuck. When Uncle Newt applied pressure to get it unstuck, my dad observed the derrick start deforming really badly. He described it as going from a square to a flattened diamond. He waved for Uncle Newt to stop, grabbed some rags, and bailed out of the derrick on the dead man. After he was on the ground, Uncle Newt, still thinking the derrick was safe, applied pressure to the pump one more time. The derrick began falling and laid down directly across the top of the gang truck, as everyone scrambled for their lives!

After the dust settled, and everyone started reassembling, Johnny Moran was unaccounted for. They finally located him where he had dived – under the gang truck. They helped him to extricate himself. When they asked if he was hurt, he said, "If blood is yellow, I’m bleeding to death!”

Amazingly, no one was hurt. But Uncle Newt was totally abashed, and he cried for a long time about almost killing his best friend.

The next day we were off for Houston.

I’m not sure if an old derrick was ever again used on a workover job in the oil field, but the practice didn’t persist for very much longer, for sure.

 

It's Time for the Centrists to Stand Up and Take Charge of Our Government

 We are in a situation that is unprecedented in the modern era of our democracy. The Republican Party is paralyzed by a handful of MAGA anarchists that are elated to bring government to a halt. They are unable to come to an agreement on Kevin McCarthy's bid for Speaker of the House of Representatives, even though he has basically given away the farm to their looney objections. We were not that far from a similar situation with the last session, but with a slightly different twist - the Democrats were unable to get a lot of their agenda to move, thankfully, because of a couple of centrists not being on board with a lot of the more extreme measures that were being touted by the wild-eyed liberals on the extreme left.

With more than 70% of Americans in agreement on a wide range of issues, it would be really nice if that 70% had a way to make their voices heard over the rantings of the extremists on both the left and the right. The way that has worked in the past is that the out-of-power party would respond to their constituents by moving back to the center. Sadly, in this day and age of hyper-partisanism and media (where controversy yields advertising revenue) driven misinformation, the old natural correction forces no longer work. So, it is apparent that this impasse in Congress could go on for a long time.

The most sensible solution that I have seen floated is a bipartisan coalition to select a Centrist leaning Republican Speaker, who would be beholden to none of the extremists. In return for the support of moderate Democrats, a power-sharing system on committee memberships, some commitments on agenda, etc, would be part of the deal. This would, indeed, be a really Radical Centrist move.

I would love to take credit for this idea, but it has been floated by a number of moderate pundits in the past few days. An example is here: How about an Alaska-style coalition to end the impasse at the U.S. House? Nice idea, Peltola says. - Alaska Public Media