How much is a kilogram? It turns out that nobody can say for sure, at least not in a way that won’t change ever so slightly over time. The official kilogram—a cylinder cast 118 years ago ... [Read More]

The Airbus A380 is the most modern, spacious, and capable civilian aircraft ever. The project was launched in December 2000, christened “The Flagship of the 21st Century,” and developed in ... [Read More]

The speed, convenience and cost benefits of microliter volume, air displacement pipettes drive the frequent use of these precision instruments. However, pipettes, like all mechanical instruments, ... [Read More]

As part of a volunteer team that cleared a walking trail in my neighborhood, I helped to shovel a straight path through a small berm. Seeking to solve another problem at the same time, a ... [Read More]

Slow monitors that don’t pick up the exact end-point when a part is seated properly can hamper high-volume press-fitting operations. This process-control problem is especially ... [Read More]

The local environment can be an important factor in the quality of measurements. No matter what is being measured, the higher the resolution of the measurement (the finer the detail), the ... [Read More]

This is the first “Measurement Matters,” a column that will show how much measurement matters in achieving and maintaining quality, especially in manufacturing. I will cover topics such as ... [Read More]

Referring to human relations, my father advised me always to "save the surface," which is something like "don’t burn your bridges," only more subtle. The connection ... [Read More]

Usually, when people discuss measurements they speak in absolute terms—degrees of temperature, millimeters of length, ounces of weight, candela of illumination intensity, degrees of angle, ... [Read More]

No, this isn’t about promises you made on New Year’s Eve and broke the next day. It’s about measurement resolution—the number of decimal places to which a measured value is ... [Read More]