Recently, my wife and I watched the multi-part television series on Albert Einstein, developed for the National Geographic Channel and directed by Ron Howard. Despite some of the criticism leveled at the effort, like compressing portions of the timeline and the screenplay’s inclusion of his first wife’s contribution to his …

What do you gain by taking the systems engineering approach? Stop and think about that for a minute. As a systems engineer, you may know the answer, but how do you explain it to other people? In a recent blog post, Vitech principal systems engineer Fran McCafferty wrote about how …

I graduated from Temple University in 1987, and was married later that summer. So yes, I’m an old guy—before anyone feels the urge to point that out. Early in my career as a systems engineer, I worked in a highly classified environment. The facility rules didn’t allow people to bring …

Summer means vacations. Our two boys have always looked forward to the big trip to “the lake” in July and the smaller long weekends where we “get to” stay at motels. We eat breakfast out—something that never happens at home—in restaurants that specialize in breakfast. One summer when the boys …