Constituency boundary changes

I don't normally blog about politics, but this radical approach to boundary reform looks very interesting ... New boundary changes

A bit of history - the first atomic clock

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) recently turned up this old piece of film from the 1950s.

NPL developed the first atomic clock, and this short film explains how it worked.

click here and the film should appear in a new window

NPL is well worth a visit. They hold open days every so often, and have a wealth of really useful information freely available on their web site. They also offer excellent training courses (including our Geometrical Tolerancing course).

New ISO 1101:2012

ISO have just published the new version of ISO 1101, the geometrical tolerancing standard.  The BSI implementation, which will be called BS EN ISO 1101, will appear shortly.

The new standard is mainly concerned with ensuring that all geometrical tolerancing requirements can be applied to 3D CAD models as well as to 2D engineering drawings. Although most of the 2D annotation can already be applied directly to a 3D model without any change of notation or meaning, this is not true of all of it. The standard now includes some additional 3D annotation elements, such as annotation planes and orientation planes, to ensure that all requirements can be fully implemented in a 3D environment.

The new revision also includes some minor changes and clarifications to the wording of the standard, as well as some new functionality.  The use of projected tolerance zones is now incorporated into ISO 1101, instead of a separate standard (ISO 10578), and there is now provision for unilateral and unequal bi-lateral tolerance zones with profile tolerances, using a new UZ modifier.

Explaining Londoners

Picked this up from a tweet from Evan Davis.  A New York Times article explaining Londoners, but much of it applies to Brits anywhere:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/magazine/explaining-londoners.html?_r=3&src=tp

A sense of proportion

If you have not seen this before, it is really worth checking out:

http://www.freewebarcade5.net/media/the-scale-of-the-universe-2.swf

You may have to click to skip an ad, but then you just start the app and move the slider - awesome!

Beijing

Trying to catch up with some blogging for the first time in ages.

I had my first trip to China in September last year, with the ISO TC213 meeting series being held in Beijing.  The city is a fascinating mix of the traditional, the modern, and in the case of the traffic, the downright terrifying.  Parts of the city look as if they have remained unchanged for hundreds of years, whereas the efficient underground railway is full of young Chinese glued to smartphones and media players.

We were treated to the standard tourist trip to the Forbidden City, which is as vast as it is impressive, although many of the interiors are off-limits, which is a shame.

Food was interesting.  In the hotels we were paying western prices for food that was often very poor, whereas a few hundred yards away were local restaurants offering fantastic food for a fraction of the price.

The highlight of the trip was a banquet at the Baijia Dayuan ('Garden of the King') restaurant.  This is set in a beautiful courtyard, reputedly several hundred years old, full of pools and flower beds, and illuminated after dusk with a wonderful array of lanterns.  The staff are all in fabulous traditional dress, and put on a variety show of music and dance to accompany the food.  Highly recommended for anyone who gets the chance to go there.

BS 8888: 2011

We (that is committee TDW/4/8 at BSI) have recently finished putting the final touches to the next revision of BS 8888. With the new revision, why have tried to do something significantly different with the standard, which we hope will make it much more useful for industry.

BS 8888 first appeared in the year 2000, when BSI withdrew BS 308 and adopted the ISO system of standards for technical specification.

The ISO system for technical specification is documented in a large number of ISO standards (probably around 250 in total).  At present this is like a large, disorganised technical library, consisting of numerous documents from different authors with very different styles of writing.  Some documents provide a broad overview of a large area of technical specification, while others go into minute detail in a very specialised topic.  Some documents deal with specific manufacturing processes, such as casting and forging, while others deal with general topics such as dimensioning or drawing views.  Some documents have overlapping content, and in many cases, you would have to use two or three documents together to properly understand a particular topic.

ISO are making some efforts to bring structure and organisation to this collection of standards, but this is a slow process, and will take many years.

BS 8888 was introduced to help engineers work with the ISO system, and initially did so by providing an index, along with some additional commentary to help explain some topics.

With the new revision of BS 8888 we are taking this a step further.  There were two fundamental reasons behind our approach to the new revision:

• Industry has in many cases found BS 8888 unsatisfactory to work with, because they expected BS 8888 to be a replacement for BS 308, and to contain the same level of information.  Some poor marketing from BSI early on encouraged this misperception, and the subsequent disappointment felt by many who purchased the standard.
• The ISO system is difficult to work with because of the way in which it is spread over a wide range of different standards, which are interrelated, but often in a fairly haphazard manner.

Our aim within the technical committee has been to use BS 8888 as a vehicle to address both of these problems.

In order to make the ISO system more accessible, we have taken the core content of a number of key ISO standards, such as ISO 1101 and ISO 5459, and incorporated it directly into BS 8888.  In this way, we intend to make the essential elements of the ISO system available together within a single document.

In order to make the ISO system more useable, we plan to use BS 8888 as a filter.  We will include the main elements of the ISO system, which are relevant to most users, but screen out some of the more specialised aspects of the ISO system, which would have very little relevance to most engineers (and would only tend to confuse matters).  BS 8888 will continue to index and reference all these ISO standards, but the aim is to maintain a central body of content which provides access to the fundamental elements of the system.

The 2011 revision of BS 8888 is currently scheduled for publication in December.  It is not perfect, but we hope that does mark a significant step forward in terms of the usability of both BS 8888 itself and the ISO system.

I will lay out some of our plans for the further development of this standard in a future post.