Consider the lowly pressure gauge. Consider it well. From it, all of the control and automation in process industries follows as a logical progression. Happy birthday to the folks who started it all.

Here's the press release:

Amid reports that US manufacturing has expanded for the 29th month in a row, and growing hope for a lessening of fear (or at least fear-mongering) in the European debt crisis, and hope that the Chinese will have engineered a "soft landing" for their no-longer-growing at hothouse rates economy, the automation giants are beginning to spend some of the great big gobs of cash they've been squirreling away for  that proverbial downpour. Apparently, they are beginning to think that we aren't going back into a recession, and they won't need that cash.

Advocates of sustainable business and manufacturing practices, including me, have been saying for years that a sustainable enterprise is not only possible and practical, but that it is profitable beyond the low hanging fruit of energy savings from replacing light bulbs and the like.

Here's an article from our sister publication @SustainablePlant that says we have not been wrong.

I, along with several other people, have been predicting the arrival of "lick and stick" sensors-- very inexpensive wireless sensors capable of being used in many industrial and building automation applications. Here's a press release from Omega Engineering that makes my case. Note the price.

This just in on a Friday:

Ah, the law of unintended consequences! It always works to bring a good idea back to reality. All we have to do is to make electric cars and the carbon problem and the pollution problem will go away! Well, not exactly.

Batteries are made of hazardous materials and must be disposed of. The electricity to charge and recharge those batteries must be made in coal- or oil- or natural gas- or nuclear-fired power plants. Each of them has wasteproducts and pollutants, although the least polluting obviously is nuclear.

Country rocker Toby Keith has a hit song called "Made in America" where the chorus goes, in part, "Spends a little more at the store for a tag in the back that says USA."

This press release just came in. I'd seen the results of the survey last week, but now it has been made public. It is a pretty damning assessment of the future of high technology in the USA. It says quite a bit about the, well, frankly, stupidity, of previous Administrations and many corporations who've essentially refused to do anything to attract young people to high technology jobs in manufacturing, and who've supported moving those jobs outside the USA.

Now the proverbial chickens are roosting. (There's more commentary after the press release)

Today I received an article from MediaPost in an email newsletter. The column was by Gord Hotchkiss, a specialist in Search Engine Optimization. What immediately caught my eye was the quote from Vannevar Bush out of an article he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in 1945. The link to Bush's article is in Hotchkiss' column.

Well, I'm back.

I took some time off from blogging at the end of last year, but I will be posting much more regularly again now. Through the magic of VPN, high speed internet and cell telephony, I was able to go to Western Washington and Vancouver Island for Christmas and New Year, and still be able to do my job. And again thanks to the same tools, I didn't have to struggle through the snow today to get to the office. I remain, snug and warm, in my home office where snow is something outside the windows, not a pain to drive through.