Document Search

…. at Fulton and his steamboatHershey and his chocolate bar….OK, this is one of my all-time favorite songs.  George and Ira Gershwin.  Performed for the first time by Ginger Rogers.  But everyone… Read More

General Limit States Design, Hygrothermal AnalysisAt a basic level a wall is an environmental separator.  It keeps the outside out and the inside in.  Easy to say, not always easy to do.To function… Read More

If we don’t call things by their right names we don’t really understand how things work.1 If we don’t understand how things work how can we prevent problems from happening? Or how can we fix problems… Read More

If someone invented wood today it would never be approved as a building material. It burns, it rots, it has different strength properties depending on its orientation, no two pieces are alike, and… Read More

Flanged windows and foam plastic insulating sheathing.Sometimes I don’t get it.  Why would anyone deliberately recommend a thermal bridge when it is completely unnecessary?  The window industry must… Read More

Of course the crazy way we speak about the Second Law does not help: “In an isolated system, a process can occur only if it increases the total entropy of the system.” Huh? It makes you want to hate… Read More

I did a bunch of wood foundations in the early 1980’s.  Time of Blondie, Kim Carnes and the Police.  I learned a great deal…some good…. some bad.  The bad taught me a lot of things to avoid.  At the… Read More

Now I am a simple kind of guy. I just bet that a roof with a couple of hundred bullet holes probably leaked I wonder what all those holes did to the roof at the Superdome? Just asking.I remind… Read More

You have got to love salesmen. They figure things out way before physicists, usually before engineers and certainly before greenie weenies. Harry Tschumi and Les Blades,1 a pair of salesmen from… Read More

Civilians seem to think that we have the technology to go into a space, do a test, and determine what is in the air. As simple as that sounds we can’t do it. We don’t have the technology.1 You cannot… Read More