Chestnuts

Technically the title is The Christmas Song but when a musician calls it on a gig it’s Chestnuts — as in roasting on an open fire. It’s a good lyric full of holiday imagery and it’s a great tune by a guy better known as a singer, arranger and...

A Bill of Goods

When my grandmother would say “He sure sold you a bill of goods” there wasn’t anything good about it. The dictionary says the phrase has two meanings. The first is literal, meaning a list of merchandise. But the second meeting seems to be the one...

Continuity

I’ve been training new analysts recently, and I thought I would share some thoughts about continuity. Of course signal continuity is important for sensors and probes so we have reliable data to perform actionable analysis. I’ve made this point before and...

GADFly in Action

Years ago, when we noticed that one of the data signatures of a burning valve was an oscillating pattern in the EGT trace, we got excited about the prospect of setting up automatic scans for other parameters. Would we be able to write a program that would identify a...

Inconceivable

It’s one of the great lines from a movie filled with great lines. Wallace Shawn was the perfect actor to deliver it, and now it’s hard to say the word without putting his unique cartoon-like spin on it. And now a quick pivot to engine data. Sometimes the...