Pat's Technical Corner:
Not Your Father's Accumulation Conveyor
Back in your dad’s day – decades ago depending on your age, the accumulation conveyor systems had issues! They used air pressure and spring-loaded mechanical product sensor bars to move product along the rollers – a single point drive train was utilized to make the whole thing work
Flexible Zone Recognition
know what you thinking. What in the world is Flexible Zone Recognition and why do I need it for my conveyor? Well, let me tell you.
Pushmi-Pullyu
The pushmi-pullyu is an animal character from Hugh Lofting’s children’s book “The Voyage of Dr. Doolittle.” The pushmi-pullyu is a “cross between a gazelle and a unicorn” and it has two heads – one at each end of its body. According to Wikipedia, “the pushmi-pullyu usually only uses one of its heads to talk, reserving the other for
With a Brain the Size of a Planet
One of my favorite reads is the Douglas Adams’ “trilogy” (there are more than 3 books) of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a spoof of science fiction with colorful characters and insane plot twists. Throw Star Trek, Star Wars, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus into a mixing bowl, put it in the microwave, and you get the gist
Relativity, Regrets, and Reality TV
I am an avid reader of science related books, particularly ones about physics (yes I do this for fun). A while back I remember reading a biography of Einstein and at one point after he was famous he recollected to an interviewer about some of his “not so huge” regrets from his work (recalling that his addition of a “cosmological constant”
