[ATM] ATM chinese puzzler

[Guy Brandenburg <gfbrandenburg@yahoo.com>]

Here is a real optical puzzler for you, sort of like
the 'Car Talk' puzzlers, only, here I don't know the
answer. See what you can come up with.

Before I give you the puzzle, I need to give you some
background, so here goes:

I recently met an American businessman who is
interested in optics and other relatively
high-technology industries. He visited an optical
manufacturing plant in Taiwan and one in China proper,
both of which were manufacturing eyepieces,
binoculars, refractors, reflectors and other
relatively low-end consumer optics for all of the
major names (Celestr**, M**de, Or**n, and so on).
These two factories were NOT owned by the same firm. 

He saw the optical testing facilities of the Taiwanese
plant, and he said they were rather modern and
extensive - inteferometers and so on. The Chinese
plant, he said, was much less advanced. In both
places, the work was almost all done by hand, much in
the way that I and many of you push glass, except at
the at least one of the plants, the lap is motorized
and rotates very slowly as the worker pushes the glass
back and forth.

The mainland Chinese plant was not clean (filthy, he
said). As far as he could tell, the people pushing
glass (several hundred of them, in row after row)
there did not have access to any sort of testing
equipment themselves. 

What he did see was this, and here comes the puzzler:
A wall about 20 or 30 feet long was covered with
pegboard, and there were pegs  wide enough apart to
hold 6-inch mirrors - maybe 25 to 30 mirrors in all at
a time. Workers would come out of one door and put
mirrors on the pegs and then, upon signal from the
inspector (details will follow), others would then
remove the mirrors one at a time from those pegs. 

There was one man, and only one man, inspecting the
mirrors. He would walk up and down the length of the
wall with the mirrors sitting on the pegboards,
standing about 8 feet away from the wall. This
inspector had a little device he held in his hand that
looked a bit like a Chinese fan. 

My interlocutor did not get a good look at the 'fan'
device that the inspector was looking through; but he
reported to me that the inspector would move his head
and his body so that he could get a good look at each
mirror, but only for about 3 to 5 seconds per mirror.
After the end of this extremely _lengthy_ and
_thorough_ (not) inspection, the inspector would wave
his hand at the other workers indicating which way the
mirror he had just inspected should go. 

The American businessman does not speak Chinese, but
as far as he could tell, the inspector did not SAY
anything, just wave his arm to the left (say) if the
mirror needed to go back to be re-worked, and the
mirror would leave the room through the door to the
left, or else he would wave his arm to the right if
the mirror was OK and ready to move on and be
aluminized (or whatever).

And, by the way, in the shipping section of this
factory, there were boxes silkscreened with the logos
of all of those big 'American' optical companies:
(Celestr**, M**de, Or**n, and so on). The telescopes
and so forth would go out shipped to the US under the
name of those companies, since virtually no low-end
optics are now made in the US. The cost to the
American firm for a complete eyepiece would be
somewhere upwards of two dollars ($2.00); but they had
to purchase at least several hundred of them .... You
all can calculate the markups, minus the tariffs and
shipping costs and advertising and so on...

So that's the puzzle: assuming that my American
businessman's report is reasonably accurate, then what
was in that 'fan' device? How can a 3 to 5 second test
of an otherwise untested mirror tell for sure whether
it's any good or not, and if not, what needs to be
done? Were there other tests that were more
comprehensive in nature, somewhere in that plant, that
my source simply didn't see? He admits that he did not
tour the entire factory... Actually, the fellow
wondered whether they in fact did ANY inspection at
all, and whether the 'inspector' was just a show for
his benefit ...

Any good guesses? If you think you know the answer to
this year's optical puzzler, then write your answer on
the back of a twenty-dollar bill and mail it to:

Optical Puzzler
ATM-NCA-CCCC Towers
Box 2004
Washington (my fair city) DC, 20017

(just kidding about most of the last paragraph, but I
report the rest of this puzzler as best as I can
recall it.)

Guy Brandenburg


=====
Guy  BrandenburgWashington, DChttp://home.earthlink.net/~gfbranden/GFB_Home_Page.html

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