We had an intern/senior management networking event today. One of the side things was a pretty cool project that some of the actual engineers did while working full time. They entered some car competition where you build a raceable car (real car) using the current year as the budget. They entered the competition in 2007, so they had $2007 dollars to spend.

The engineers realized that there was no way they could build a car that would simply go fast for $2007, at least not do so and win. The competition involved lots of turns and twists on the course, so they decided to install some ridiculous blower to generate vacuum/pressure difference from the top and bottom of the car. It works really well, 1000 # total (only about .24 psi I think, but large area covered) of downforce. They were describing the system to us, mentioning the pressure change several times when

Engineer: "Yeah, this blower is crazy, it sucks 9 inches of water constantly."
Intern: "Where does the water go?"

Also, I hate it here at P&G. Again. I've talked with a few full-times who graduated from Cornell and other places and have worked here for like <2>

Project is going down the shitter too. I've never seen a piece of equipment that seems to exist for no reason at all. The max capacity of the machine is like over double the needed rate and none of it seems to be remotely close to theoretical execution.

So a fluid bed dryer is supposed to have the exiting air stream be fully saturated with water, in theory. This dryer takes incoming air at 77% relative humidity in the summer...and exhausts it at 51% RH.

Sorry for the rant, but I know I can't post this on my normal blogs or facebook.