Kilty's Office

Another roadside attraction on
The Information Superhighway


Notice: Unless identified otherwise, all images and documents on this web page or in files downloaded therefrom are Copyright © 1998, Kevin T. Kilty, All Rights Reserved.

Please excuse this tiny bit of unobtrusive self promotion.
I sell contract and consulting services for a living. For those who may be interested in joint projects or contracting, refer to my resume and statement of capability.


What's new this month?

A third installment in my series about Boards of Trustees of public colleges. Here is a PDF file about free money. .

Several years ago I gave a talk about thermodynamics and perpetual motion machines at a mathematics articulation conference. This necessarily made a connection to the arts--literature, movies, paintings and so forth. Here is a PDF file about Art and Thermodynamics. .

A second installment in my series about Boards of Trustees of public colleges. Here is a PDF file about those pesky special interests. .

I wish that Boards of Trustees of public colleges would give more thought to how their college spends its money. Here is a PDF file about what a project may become otherwise. I hope to put up a series of these short papers.College Lesson 1.

Here is something old that is new. My old statistics calculator disappeared from the website at some time, and I recently found it lurking on the directory with no links to reach it! It is back... right... here.

In May, 2011 I gave a commencement address for the LCCC SAGE-Trio graduation. This is a link to the PDF file of that talk. 2011 Commencement.

Over the past few months, readers of WUWT that expressed everything from puzzlement to concern to outrage over adjustments of USHCN temperature records. I have read the documents behind these adjustments, and have prepared a draft summary of how these adjustments work. I also make comments about my concerns after reading these papers. Among other things I think these corrections are being made out of order. My report is found at here.

In November, 2009 certain physics students of mine needed to make up a laboratory session. So I gave them a crazy experiment to try from the pages of NOAA. The original experiment is no longer at NOAA, but the way-back machine has a copy archived. Read about our attempt at this experiment here. Go have a look at the way-back machine archived page here.

In November, 2005 I gave a talk at LCCC about Einstein's Miracle Year. This is a link to the PDF file I produced to accompany the talk. SAS members and anyone else who may be interested, here is Reflection on the Miracle Year.

Since I am on the task of fixing up old work, I offer the revised PDF document about Euler's disk. This is an expanded version of the older HTML files, but has better graphics and a complete explanation of how Euler's equations become a simple set of differential equations displaying a finite time singularity.

I am back once again, and offer you a revised document about steady-state tornado vortex models as a pdf file. I have also added a link on the appropriately modified HTML page in the sequence of pages on Tornadoes.. I hope to make this the first in a series of files exploring mathematical models on this topic.

I have placed the essense of a talk I gave, about viewing data as evidence, at the LCCC Star Club meeting on November 20, 2003, on this web site as a power point file. I have also added more detail on these topics in the accompanying PDF file.

As some of you may have noticed I have done a terrible job of updating the content of this web site for the past year (i.e. from June 2002 to June 2003). I apologize. I took on the task of teaching too many engineering courses at Washington State University, Vancouver during the past academic year, and this prevented my getting anything else done. I promise to be better in the future. Oh, by the way, Dr. Jekyll died.

Donald Simanek's museum of unworkable machines.

An example Excel spreadsheet illustrating how to perform a regression analysis on spreadsheet programs having no data analysis tools except matrix multiply and inverse.

Mr. A.A. Stanislavsky pointed out a typographical error in my formula for spin-down time of the Euler Disc. See the corrected version.

Mr. Richard Halter wrote to me recently about the short note I had written regarding hurricane-like storms which strike the Pacific Northwest Coast about once per decade. I made a closing remark in my note to the effect that the singular ferocity of the Columbus Day storm of 1962 may be a composite memory of two storms two weeks apart in October, 1962 and perhaps also one in October, 1964. My research of weather records indicated that the second storm in late October, 1962 had lower pressure and higher peak wind speed than the one on Columbus day. However, as Mr. Halter assures me, "The Columbus Day storm of 1962 was the single most powerful non-hurricane ever to hit the United States." I stand better advised now. Also, I have an addendum to the paper on Perpetual Motion which clears up some pesky issues on first law machines, including a surprising revision of how a Cavorite engine is meant to work. Thanks here to Dr. Donald E.Simanek for many interesting discussions.

A mystery regarding surface pressure. Can anyone supply additional information about this?

A presentation I made at LCCC in March regarding How to Freeze to Death in the Summer in Wyoming. Checkout a graph summarizing some experimental data on an Euler Disc, or in this case a Sacajawea Dollar.

Lately I have been remiss in my duties as webmaster; so, I promise at least two new topics in the next two weeks. One is a selective log of my recent trip to N.Mex. and Arizona. The other is a series of pages on IR Thermography.

Well, everyone else seems to have a photo of their cat on a web page, so here are my two. This older one is very intellegent, but lacks social skills. Despite his formal appearance, he bites guests. I named him Oliver Heaviside. The other is a very lovable cat, but he leads a secret life at night that involves fighting with large mammals, perhaps even raccoons. His name is Dr. Jekyll.

An edited correspondence between my chemist friend HD and me about a single sentence in a chemistry textbook. Well I learned something from it at least.

A temporary link to class notes for Statistics 360, a junior level class in statistics for engineers at WSU, Vancouver.

Here is a note about Euler's Disc and the finite time singularity. You'll need a basic familiarity with rigid body dynamics to understand it.

How about the musings of Bill Joy, who has brought us much of the technological present, but who has become afraid of the future?

Here are several old reviews of books on the state of the world. I wrote them mostly to point out that reviewers do not appear to read the books they review. There is also a document filled with links to examples of scientific analysis gone awry.

A link for the physics I class at LCCC to get to spreadsheets and other information for lab. This includes an updated sheet of errata -- in otherwords an erratum for errata.

An analysis of the list of strange Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences circulating on the internet.

A Java Applet illustrating a binomial process named Pascal.

Note: The Internet Explorer 3.x and earlier has trouble with this applet, reporting a SecurityException. Netscape 4.7 has some entertaining difficulty with the scrollbar--I do not know why, yet.

A new project concerning Tornadoes.

Photo of a fault in the sky.

Another paper gone astray. The Cheap Instant Coffee Effect. My colleagues Peter Baum and Thomas Means have suggested changes that make this paper read better than the original, which will be published in the Society for Amateur Scientists (SAS) Newsletter.

A revised paper on perpetual motion. I've done some editing to make this read better than the original version.

Skip the preamble and go straight to the Office.


Instructions

Check out objects on the page which serve as anchors to link other documents and graphics. Most of the material is technical, but you may also find pictures of the Buffalo Lodge, a short story, or a recipe for New Mexican Chili Verde that will make your eyelids sweat.

Technical Papers and Commentary

Go to the bookcase image and check the contents (links) on each graphic of a book or magazine. Clicking on any that are not HTML will begin download of a PDF file that includes text and graphics. You will need Adobe ® Acrobat Reader to print these. Most files are HTML that will display directly on a web browser. There may or may not be PDF equivalents of the HTML with better quality graphics.

Software in 'C'

Return to the image of a disk drive beside my bookcase and give it a mouse click. This will take you to a list of 'C' language functions, in source code form, which you may down load. I'm spending a little time porting useful code over to Linux. Don't look for rapid progress though. I'm getting old.

The Projects!

Go to the filing cabinet and check out its contents, or shuffle around the desktop. Lot's of these projects will get about 80% completed and hang there forever.


@ My Office

Bookshelf || Project || Code || Capabilities || Instructions


Other Useful Links

Strange Stuff

Ontario Skeptics || iTulip || Skeptics || ThingWorld

Miscellaneous Reference

Time || DomainNameSearch || Reference

Geophysics and Geology Academic Sites

NewMexicoState || ColoradoMines || Reno || MichiganTech || UofAlaska

Portals

AltaVista || Excite || Lycos || Netscape || Slider || Yahoo

More Portals!

Matilda || NetSearch || EZSearches || 1UpInfo

Miscellaneous Science Sites

AmateurScience || HydroFrac || Seismology


Just in case I neglected to mention it...
I sell contract and consulting services for a living. For those who may be interested in joint projects or contracting, refer to my resume and statement of capability.

Direct comments regarding this web page to... kkilty@ix.netcom.com

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