1 A couple of guys in a silicon valley garage came up with a time machine in "Primer"! (That was a documentary, right?)

2 "Sliders" was a pretty good documentary series too ;->

3 I miss Bob. Damn you, Microsoft.

4

As a person who has studied engineering (Petroleum, MS) in graduate school, I can say that the engineers follow the jobs, not the concentration. The implosion of the computer science industry with the dot-com bust in the 2000-2001 era led to a strong decline in the fast-growing CS departments, often funded with dot-com money.

Mechanical engineers are generalists, and their skills are applicable to a number of engineering areas.

The problem here is the fact that the engineering departments at our universities are often a majority foreign students, and with the growth of the Asian economies, these students will often go back home or to other overseas locations. The capital markets here are not the growth engines they once were.

In addition, our amateurish administration and Congress does not elicit confidence from the investment community.

5 That's encouraging, we need more people to invent real ideas to make life better for everyone ... not finance, lawyer, and marketing types that figure how to scam money from those that "earn it".

Jobs may be scarce, which might push many into the "tinkering" arena (hopefully more so than into lawyer type tinkering with scams).  Without a GE team behind you, I'd guess turning good ideas into money is pretty tricky. 

But it has gotten easier with the internet marketing, and UPS delivery.  Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door click over to your website.

Good luck with your excellent adventure PA ...

6 My alma mater is an engineering school, & that particular department has seen as increase in students each year. [My brother is still a student there; he is studying mechanical with an aero concentration.]

7 Good points TexasJew ... I still wonder why America seemed so intent on giving away top education to the rest of the world.  I dropped out of differential equations because the TA was speaking Chinese ... or at least it sounded like it.  And that was at good old U of Illinois ... I thought we spoke English.

And yeah, fund money could finance all sorts of production and innovation, but the fund runners misdirected so much.  Investor America had its money stolen by scam artist financiers and lawyers, who managed to multiply their profits via leverage against future generations, through crap like the derivative "inventions".

With oppressive government, PA's bold new invention will have to fund a team of lawyers to protect his patent, then BigGov will take most of his "excessive profits".  Then someone will put an eye out with the product, and some trial lawyer will take the rest.  And China (or Microsoft) will steal the technology and mass produce at one tenth the COP.

But maybe that is too skeptical ... LOL

8 the movie "primer" took place in texas.  gotta give that wonderful locale credit where due.

9 I work for the college of engineering at a major public university.

Our undergrad students are mostly Americans. 

Our graduate students and faculty on the other hand are almost entirely made up of foreigners.

Some come from India.  Some come from China.  Some come from Pakistan.  There are many who I don't even know where they come from.  One guy I know is from Greece and another from Turkey.  But there are others who I don't even try to guess.

We don't seem to get students from Korea or Japan for some reason.  Don't ask me why.

It has been like this for YEARS now. 

The interesting thing about most of these guys is that while they can be extremely intelligent, they lack the hands-on approach to their field that most Americans have. 

For example, a computer science undergrad from the US will have years of tinkering and playing with computers at home, usually from an early age.  Their knowledge will be very broad and they will have the ability to take what they know and figure out what they don't as they go along.  They'll beat a problem to death.

Most of the grad students on the other hand know everything there is to learn from a book, but don't know anything else.  They didn't play with computers when they were a kid.  In many cases their undergrad work was all done on with pencil and paper.  They seem fearful of what they do not know, rather than curious. 

Most Americans will be generalists who have become specialists in a particular area.  The grad students on the other hand are hyper specialists and many come from an educational tradition that values memorization rather than abstract problem solving. 

This is why, time and time again, innovation on the part of Americans and others from western nations such as the UK have outpaced what engineers from India, Pakistan, or China can do.  This is despite the fact that these nations have huge populations and no shortage of brilliant people.

This is something that those who are ready to count America out of the race should stop and think about. 

10

O,I think people ought to do something for the food of  themselves.

eg.sell laptop battery

11 9 Lee...
"...This is why, time and time again, innovation on the part of Americans and others from western nations such as the UK have outpaced what engineers from India, Pakistan, or China can do.  This is despite the fact that these nations have huge populations and no shortage of brilliant people...."

I dunno nuttin' about nuttin', but I've always believed that the American innovative spirit does not exist elsewhere. The Chinese can (and do) reverse-engineer anything, and with one out of every five people on the planet, they have the labor pool to muscle their way through anything. While they've made great strides in opening their markets, they're still stuck in that socialist planned-economy approach that limits innovation. The Russians are worse, headed back to communism, and of course, broke too. Western Europe's soft-socialism, with certain exceptions (I'm thinking of Nokia cell phones here), does not lead to innovation. Pakistan and India have their own concerns--hating each other as much as sharing a desire to drag themselves out of the third world.

With regard to macro-economics, politics, and the religious war the world is engaged in, I guess I'm about an 80% pessimist about the world's future. But if we can find a way out of this without blowing this planet apart, I don't know what the Next-New-Thing will be (I'm hoping it will be related to energy--and not that idiot Al Gore's vision of it), but I do retain a shred of faith that it will be an American that will produce it.

12 I think more of the problem America faces is the fact that we've trained almost 50% of our population to be couch-sitting, uninterested, celebrity-watching intellectual slugs.

Who are allowed to vote.

13 Well PA I have to kinda disagree slightly here.  While the news does say ME is on the uptake, they do not say it is American. 

When I retired more and more of our new hire engineers were foreigners.  Most of them from India.

What my younger brother says who is in charge of hiring at hiring at a major company (phd Chemistry) is that U.S. students just do not want to do the work involved in engineering/science degrees. 

He also says that the ones that do do not want to travel and think they can get any job they want starting at a high 6 figure salary in their own home town, but that is a different story.

14 If you get a chance, look up the science-fiction novel The Peace War by Vernor Vinge...

15 Racist... racist...racist...

Don't you understand these tinkers are nothing but ext ream radicals. Your Government has the answers to everything and is here to help.


roflmao

16 Someday all production, research, tinkering, and general messing around will be decentralized in this fashion, then people will be able to set up mini-factories in their mini-mansions and produce hyper-customized goods based on parameters sent by their customers.

As to engineering...as long as our system rewards people more for studying law (or for studying management) than it does for studying science/engineering/mathematics, the students will avoid the extra work and go for the easy cash. This country would benefit handsomely from shutting down the schools of law and business for a 10 years.

17 Yeah, but Texas Jew, if you're a brilliant MIT graduate, where do you want live: Communist-run, over-crowded, hyper-polluted Shanghai, or (let's say) Boulder, CO or New Canaan, CT?

Contrary what the effeminate, pale San Francisco Leftist crowd thinks, to the world America remains, as ever... AMERICA.

18

Thanks Purple Avenger for the article.

I've been a midnight engineer for decades now and every tool and commodity gets cheaper and cheaper.  I dont etch 2 layer printed circuit boards anymore - or upload 4+ layer PCB's design files and get any qty back them from FedEx.  I dont solder individual logic chips anymore - I simulate them with free logic synth tools from Altera.com - then download the result to a single CPLD/FPGA chip that replaces hundreds, no hundreds of thousands (no shit!) of logic chips over a USB port.  My peers in RobotBattles have CNC machines at home and write their names in custom fonts on their custom made parts.

Even my X-girlfriend bought a (new) CNC table with a 60W CO2 laser for cutting parts at her apartment.

We shall thrive in these tech times!

  

 

19 The only reason Microsoft Bob is just a tiny amusing failure in Microsoft's past is that Windows 4, Windows ME, Windows CE and Windows Vista cast such gigantic shadows of suckitude.

20 Woah! Check out Nicole on Fox News channel at this moment! That short dress, those legs, that butt:

Miss Penthouse November?

21

Purple Avenger is working on the most very good solutions for problem which you to have: laptop battery.

Seriously, something as simple (and as purely mechanical) as a blender changes the way we address the most ancient, most fundamental of human activities: food preparation. Now if someone with some culinary savior faire would recognize that we eat different foods than we did a generation ago and come up with a gadget that helps me process a mango . . . (hint).

22 Observations from personal experience;
There is an obvious decline of US innovative hard manufacturing on the larger scale.
There is an increase of innovation in small scale manufacturing enabled through automated fabrication with COTS materials and tooling (frequently from offshore) that once proven, goes overseas for large scale manufacturing.
This is not the worst of it though.
When many of the entrepreneurs personally invested in their own design, development and manufacturing efforts get overseas to ramp up production, a growing percentage stay longer leaving more of the overall effort off-shore than here.
There is a simple reason for this;
Getting anything done in this country is a growing pain in the ass with fewer rewards to show for it.
In short, the US is becoming a great place to visit on a working vacation(for now) but you don't want to live and work here if you want to actually build something over the long haul that will see a shrinking margin and declining return.

23 I'll believe America is in an industrial resurgence when law and journalism school enrollments plummet.

24

This is all good news indeed.  Because:  my Dem congressman (Perriello,5th CD, Va), said that he voted for cap 'n trade because he trusted that an American scientist/engineer/inventor would find the way to make cheap, non-polluting energy that can power our country.

Perriello didn't mention that we should really, really get started on this project right now before this administration puts us in the dark.

25

Links to my post above:

Cheap Altera USB>FPGA prototyping: http://tiny.cc/DYskH

UL metal design>FedEx results: http://tiny.cc/GXPcJ

Robot CAD competition (surf around his site) http://tiny.cc/GAO3q

My lovely hacker X-GF Jeri (I'm happily married now!) : http://tiny.cc/wdaKc

26 It's no mystery why so much of manufsctiring is moving offshore: we're exporting our pollution overseas, to countries like China, that can neither afford nor care to impose the regulations we do.

Environuts have effectively poisoned hundreds of millions of Third World Swarthy People... (But all that upsets them is calling them "swarthy.")

That's what makes Cap & Trade such a bad joke.

27 This is all good news indeed.  Because:  my Dem congressman (Perriello,5th CD, Va), said that he voted for cap 'n trade because he trusted that an American scientist/engineer/inventor would find the way to make cheap, non-polluting energy that can power our country.

What I find absolutely amazing is the attitude of Democrat congressmen.  Not that they actually voted for Crap and Tax, but that they offer up such a damn lame excuse as that.  They are so epic stupid that they expect the average American to believe that happy horse shit.

That just shows how stupid they are.

28 MoeJoeTee@25: Are you insane? I mean, yum. And she probably has Bluetooth surgically embedded under the skin, am I wrong?

29 Cambrian explosion?

30 And speaking of epic levels of stupiddom...

On Fox a short while ago Commie Chris Wallace on the decision to bring KSM to NYC for trial.....

"if you are against Obama you will be against this; if you are for Obama you will be for this".

My God; I haven't heard even ONE person say this was a "good" thing. What really amazes me is that last week one of the Moronettes chastized me for saying he was biased.

hahahahahaha

31 Well the electrons in the CPU has become a really big bucks deal with little firms able to afford the massive costs of manufacturing the chips. So you have software and the rest. Not to hard to understand ...

32 I find it amusing that the engineering staff keeps our plant running and the accountants and IT seem to think they are responsible for our great success.

33

They didn't play with computers when they were a kid.  In many cases their undergrad work was all done on with pencil and paper

Hell, theyprobably still used abacuses (abaci?) when they were. Come the complete collapse of the industrial world, they'll actually be better prepared

34 33
They didn't play with computers when they were a kid. In many cases their undergrad work was all done on with pencil and paper

...and yet it were THOSE kinds of people that put a man on the Moon. Today's generation of engineers are using computers and software to design the "next generation" of Orion spacecraft that looks an awful lot like... an Apollo capsule.

Granted its not the same thing, but it shows you how advanced those people back in the Sixties really were, and how overrated the importance of computers may really be.

35 Hell, theyprobably still used abacuses (abaci?) when they were. Come the complete collapse of the industrial world, they'll actually be better prepared

Actually most of us "old farts" in the Engineering/Science disciplines used slide rules in the early days.

All Morons should know their history accurately.

And yes, I still have mine and know how to work it.

36 My nieces boyfriend brought an abacus to a math test.

His teacher told him he could bring any kind of calculator he wanted. The kid is a math genius and can work most problems to two or three significant digits with pencil and paper, quickly.

The teacher was pissed because the kid was playing with him. 

37 And for all you Morons who want a little bit of history

http://preview.tinyurl.com/yfa7v66

38 We used slide rules in high school chemistry. That is when and where I learned math.

39

Look into 3D printers, rapid proto-typing, mass customization, table-top plasma torches, etc.etc.. Lots of room for tinkerers and programmers.

 

 

40 We used slide rules in high school chemistry. That is when and where I learned math.

Yes, we used them in HS Chemistry and Physics and in Nuke school. We also used them at work up until the early 80's.

We actually had to get "permission" from the government to transition to calculators.

41 I don't really know what to think about this article. Mainly because I went to a college with a very large, high prestige engineering school and the tinkering geeks were greatly outnumbered by kids who went for a challenging, marketable degree and then parlayed their technical background and subsequent MBA's into a boatload of money. All of which is to say that I don't know whether this increase in mechanical engineering majors reflects a desire to be mechanical engineers or just a shift in what the smart but practical set ischoosing to major in.

42 FIRST robotics. Dean Kamen puzshed this and more kids are into tech.

43

Screw slide rules -- real number crunchers used a Curta.

44 http://tinyurl.com/2vrmtc
abe Lincoln

45

Jesus..up is down..black is white..Obama is patriotic..

David Brooks is actually making more sense than George Will ...not that I'm a fan of Will's...but holy fuck...David "Perfectly Creasesd Pants" Brooks

46 Avenger, once the flux capacitor is complete, may I offer my services in traveling back to a happier time?

Say, oh, 1980 or so?

47 Say, oh, 1980 or so?

That'll get you back just in time for the big recession of '81.

48

Little Miss Spellcheck: #28   No.  Compare my past and present babes here:

http://tinyurl.com/yg6yd7w

I mean no slight to the much younger than I, genius catch Jeri on the left,
but I upgraded to the more mature and smarter than I wife Leslie on the right.

(Im in pic 45)

49 Oh, and on the subject of slide rules:

I'm old enough to have had to use them as well, in Chemistry and Physics.  Calculators didn't exist, and one knew the computer kids because they were the ones carrying the boxes full of punch cards.

My own slide rule had an interesting story.  My father gave it to me, and when I asked why it was marked in German, he said his dad had gotten it from the body of a German soldier he'd blown away in WW1.

I think it was bullshit, but it made for a cool story.

50 That'll get you back just in time for the big recession of '81.

Yes, but I'd invest wisely.  Wink.

51

Henry Ford

My 9 yo wants to be a ME. 3 of the guys I ride with have ME masters. The work in everything from HVAC to tool design. All can affrord a fleet of bikes from '50's Flathead Harleys to mid 70's K3 2 strokes that absolutely fly. Most of them work in my shop at nights. He loves their confidence and the fact that the never go to a garage, except for inspection stickers. I have no Engineering degree, but he has seen us take an auto transmission cooler from a car, and adapt it for use on a 60's Harley shovelhead.

 I'm glad to see the ART of engineering make a comeback. Not just for the economy, and all the innovations from medical to warfare. But just because we are indeed creating the tinkerers that we need. And instilling the confidence and Zen that our young people need.

52 Awesome link to slide rules Vic!

53

hutch1200:

Mentioning Zen and motorcycles in the same post really dates you.

54 BTW my shops lights and cordless hand tool chargers are solar powered. Solar panels go a shelf of batteries, wired to a big power inverter. The only wired electricity is for the welder and compressor, which is rarely used.

55

With Cap and Tax the Luddite Left is actually waving around a technological carrot stick, using the idea that some mysterious technological Perpetual Motion machine will solve all "energy problems". What tripe.

We do not have an electical generation problem (we have the largest coal reserves in the world), we have a transportation fuel problem, if that.

But mainly, we have a political problem, with the Left leading this country into ruin by foisting trrillions of wasteful taxes and tens of trillions of debt onto the back of an already bankrupt economy.

The taxpaying public and free market economy are being crushed by parasitic malinvestments like wind turbines (which generally cost more in energy to mabufacture and transport than they ever produce), solar, which is simply far too costly, even with endless tax rebates - ie, welfare payments, and the boondoggle of ethanol, which is an out-and-out vote-buying scam.

And all to "solve" an non-problem. That is lunacy.

Fifty years ago, Detroit and Deerborn were the golden lands for engineers. Now look at them. That is our true technological future as we scare off our young engineers and entrepreneurs by destroying our economy with these massive politically-driven malinvestments.

 

56 I re-read it every few months. I'm 43, and wore out one hardcopy. I have fiends who say stupid shit like..."I read that on a flight from Paris". They didn't learn shit.  I've had to read paragraphs 3-4 times to almost get the jist the 1st time.

57 Sorry, better url http://tinyurl.com/yly3q2m

58 Awesome link to slide rules Vic!

Thanks; Did you see how much money they are charging for those things?  LOL, I didn't know I was harboring gold in my dresser.

I guess they are cheap though compared to those "curtas" that Tinian was pushing.  And a curta wasn't good for real scientific work since it would not do the really complex math functions.

59 Fifty years ago, Detroit and Deerborn were the golden lands for engineers.

Now they are golden lands for welfare and crime; ruled by Democraps.

They are a hint to the rest of the nation.

60

Okay morons -- here's the real old school calculator

61 The tinkering bug has always been one of America's greatest assets in the past.

D-Day is a great example. Thousands upon thousands of hours of planning failed to prevent us from getting bogged down in hedgerow country. Initiative by GI's in the field who cut up the Germans' steel invasion barriers and welded them to the front of our tanks to cut through the hedgerows helped save the day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_Tank

62

US President Barack Obama's administration may buy a near-empty prison in rural Illinois to house detainees from Guantanamo Bay along with federal inmates, a White House official said Saturday

The maximum-security Thomson Correctional Facility, about 240 kilometers west of Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago, was one of several evaluated by the Federal Bereau Of prisons,

 and emerged as a leading option to house the detainees, the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because a decision has not been made.

Obama wants detainees from the controversial military-run detention center in Cuba to be transferred to US soil so they can be prosecuted for their suspected crimes.

Thomson was built by the state in 2001 with 1,600 cells, but budget problems prevented it from fully opening, and it now houses about 200 minimum-security inmates

Jerusalem Post  link @ Breitbart

a pay to play for (Union) guards and management  In Illinois?

63 There were 27% more undergraduates who earned mechanical-engineering degrees


My guess, students have grown tired of  the perpetual suffering endured through enforced Liberal Arts indoctrinated  'fill-in-the-blank Studies' agenda.

In Mechanical-Engineering there are no such insane equations as:

 'Male + Male = Baby'

or

"Female - Shredded womb = Equality'.

Mathematics is one cure for Ivy-Inbred Indoctrinating Politically-Correct Speech Coded Sensitivity Classes.

64 Purple Avenger,

I would like to join you in your endeavor.  I have always hoped to work with an Avenger of one color or another, and Purple seems to be as good as any.

Kindly peruse my attached business card.

Yours truly,

WW Green

http://bit.ly/3k8oDy

65

Oh -- I just read that vintage Curtas sell for up to $2,000. So if you find one in the attic or a flea market you can make some cash.

66

Good news to read. Our economic power has always originated with the tinkerers.

67

I was at a lecture on this issue a few days ago.

Half of the engineering grads are foreign born.

China graduated 1.5 MILLION engineers last year.

68 I think it was bullshit, but it made for a cool story.

Posted by: Winston Smith at November 15, 2009 09:42 AM (MFbfZ)

That may not be a bullshiot story. Germany drafted engineers to calculate angles of  trajectories on the artillery teams that were blasting the allies' trenches. They used specialized calculators (actually a form of planimeter) as well as slide rules from the many German manufacurers (ie, Faber, Nestler and others, I believe). We used them on our side as well. With poison phosgene and mustard gas shells being shot from both sides as well as thousands of ordinary ones, such calculations were critical.

If it's a K&E, I wouyld call it bullshit, since K&E was and American manufacturer, founded by Gemrna immigrants.

Go the the International Slide Rule Museum page. It's nerd-o-mania!

One story -just before the A-bomb was tested, someone (Teller, I believe) suggested to Enrico Fermi, that the million-plus dgree-Kelvin heat may ignite all the oxygen in the atmosphere on earth and thus destroy the world. This concerned Fermi so much that he whipped out his slide rule and quickly did some calculations. He was VERY relieved to see that this would not be possible, and the test proceeded ahead.

Yes - Fermi's trusty K&E slide rule saved the world! 

69 "But if we can find a way out of this without blowing this planet apart, I don't know what the Next-New-Thing will be (I'm hoping it will be related to energy--and not that idiot Al Gore's vision of it), but I do retain a shred of faith that it will be an American that will produce it."

I'm hoping it will be EESTOR (or something similar) -- an ultracap which could solve the energy storage problem and make EVs consumer-friendly (as well as facilitate home and utility energy storage.)

70

Does anybody remember when a neighbor would get a new car? Everybody would crawl all over/under it, ooohh-ing the latest innovations and performance parts. People used to READ the owners manuals! My family has 2 new Hemi Grand Chrokees, with a huge plastic F'ng cover over the engine! WTF. I want to see the damn thing. M-B V-12? Same deal. Pop the hood and the most prominant item is the washer bottle. Ford Focus? Great little Grocery getter, but it is advertised on TV as how cool the radio(sorry audio system) is? Are you buying a car or a juke box.

Anybody remember how M-B engineers almost refused to put cup holders in their cars because that would be a distraction to what you were supposed to be doing? All this frivolous technology (mp3/gps/cell/texting etc..) brings the need for side impact beams, an 37 airbags, back up sensors, etc...

71

Yo Vic, just to be a dick, I mailed a veteran slipstick with all the K scales to my kid at Star Fleet Academy (a little engineering school in the Rockies). His physics prof, Class President '61 and the leading authority on [calculation of] orbital decay, caught him doing his homework on it (pretty easy catch when you have to show all your work) and was Tickled Pink.

It's considered a gentlemanly thing to pass 215 Physics on the first try, and the kid with the slide rule has aced it so far. Sadly noted, he appears to be the only engineer in a student body of 4000 who regularly uses one. I told him it will really come in handy on Mars. I got  a Meh, he may stop over there on the way to the outer plutoids.

We don't make fun of Heinlein at our house. Except for his alma mater.

72

People used to READ the owners manuals!

I think the new manuals don't even tell you where they've hidden the fuse panel.

73 a huge plastic F'ng cover over the engine! WTF. I want to see the damn thing

Heh. I've been bitching about this for years. It's sad to lift the hood and not recognize any of the parts. Especially when you can be quite sure lots of them are completely unnecessary for the proper functioning of an internal combustion engine (glances at snowblower, generator, chainsaw and other examples in the garage).

74 I mailed a veteran slipstick with all the K scales to my kid at Star Fleet Academy (a little engineering school in the Rockies)

LOL, did you see how much those things are going for now?  you mailed him an expensive present!

75 If we would shitcan about half of the college departments like gender studies and all that crap, there would be enough funding to have kids actually study something necessary to this world.

76 "US President Barack Obama's administration may buy a near-empty prison in rural Illinois to house detainees from Guantanamo Bay along with federal inmates..."

Awesome idea!  Let's house them with max security federal criminal inmates for them to convert into more jihadists!

77 Ford Focus? Great little Grocery getter, but it is advertised on TV as how cool the radio(sorry audio system) is? Are you buying a car or a juke box.

Sadly, a symptom of everything that is wrong with our society.  I blame LBJ and the war on poverty.

78 If we would shitcan about half of the college departments like gender studies and all that crap, there would be enough funding to have kids actually study something necessary to this world.

LOL, but that would eliminate most of the college sports programs as well!

79 I've heard that the much of our success in WWII was due to the fact there were so many farm boys in the service that grew up learning how to fix things that broke down.  This ability kept us going whereas the enemy stood around waiting for someone else to bail them out.

80

Old School? I got your pissant Curta, right here:

http://tinyurl.com/62tk96

 

 

81 Um, maybe. But America no longer has a patent system that's accessible to Americans of ordinary means (do you have $20,000 to apply for a patent?) so the tinkering, however successful it may be in itself, tends to dead-end.

82 LOL, but that would eliminate most of the college sports programs as well!

You mean it would eliminate college sports as the NFL/NBA minor league and bring back the "student athlete" concept? Sign me up.

83 Mathematics is one cure for Ivy-Inbred Indoctrinating Politically-Correct Speech Coded Sensitivity Classes.

Posted by: syn at November 15, 2009 10:10 AM (ZjEOd)

+1000 ... as someone who earned his BME at a top 5 engineering school and got his Masters of Management at an Ivy... 

-non-science/engineering, non-pre-med students should not get full government loan amounts...  no grad school fed loans w/o full calculus and PDE requirement... (the IVY's can always self-finance with there endowments... in fact every student to the Yale School of Music gets 100% scholarship today)

84 In engineering school we had the annual egg drop contest. Drop an egg from 4 stories and hit the target, with egg unbroken being  the objective. My friends put the egg in a plastic bag with 2 gallons on mayonnaise. It was dramatic!

85 Good find PA.  It fits quite nicely with the last discussion about the nature of American individualism (and innovation as a result of that) vs. the rest of the world.

86

Would Reagan bow to the Jap emporer??

Fuck no! It's the other way around...scroll a tad

87

I chose Mechanical Engineering over Petroleum Engineering when I went back to school at age 27 after working on oil and gas drilling rigs for 8 years.

The breadth of M.E. is great through the first 3 years then one choses a focus for the senior year.

Had job offers from three major oil & gas companies, Cat, Deere, Cargill and GE. Cargill was actually the highest offer but I didn't want to run a plant in the middle of Iowa. Went with a major oil co starting in Lafayette, LA and it's been a great career.

I've done college recruiting trips in the last few years and it seems like there a lot of high quality graduates coming out.  

88 You mean it would eliminate college sports as the NFL/NBA minor league and bring back the "student athlete" concept? Sign me up.

True dat;

LOL, it reminds me of the time I was taking a "required career" course at NC State (Raleigh) and me and another fellow student we walking from the parking lot to our class past the football team dorms (an old motel that had been bought out by the college) and the place was a mess of drunken players laying half out of the rooms on the floor passed out.

Real AOSHQ material.

89 I told him it will really come in handy on Mars. I got  a Meh, he may stop over there on the way to the outer plutoids.

We don't make fun of Heinlein at our house. Except for his alma mater.

Posted by: comatus at November 15, 2009 10:24 AM (/VEEI)

An Apollo lunar astronaut once told me that they had those on the surface of the moon.

I've seen a photo of one of them having a slide rule watch (a Breitling?), standing on the surface of the moon.

The astronauts generally used Picketts because they were lighter than the K&E's. Remember them - they often had an "eye-saver yellow tinge.

90 All this innovation will be stifled by the environuts and I can all but guaranty that, if the Dems somehow remain in the majority, all this tech will be taxed into oblivion to buy off voters in failed inner cities.

91 We don't make fun of Heinlein at our house.

Hah, we have an entire book shelf dedicated to Heinlein at our house. Even wifey likes Heinlien and she is not a tech weenie like me.

92 So tell us more about that little effort you and your friends are involved in. Is there a web page somewhere describing the equipment?

93 "Basically, what I'm trying to say, is I believe we're on the brink of a new "Permian Explosion" of creative R&D that simply wasn't possible say 40 years ago due to the cost and size of equipment.
"

I agree, if the State doesn't kill it.

94 Individual innovation, huh?  Let's see... tighten up the zoning laws to classify 'tinkering' in a shop as commercial activity, insist on EEOC and environmental regulations being applied at the garage-shop level, add some licensing and unionization requirements for the ownership/operation of the equipment involved, get OSHA and the IRS in on it...  Yeah, I'm pretty sure we can kill this bitch.

95 78 If we would shitcan about half of the college departments like gender studies and all that crap, there would be enough funding to have kids actually study something necessary to this world.

LOL, but that would eliminate most of the college sports programs as well!

Posted by: Vic at November 15, 2009 10:31 AM (CDUiN)

I was a varsity athlete at UT/Austin and I'm all for that. Returning college athlestic to actual amateur status would protect our kids by refocusing the universities on doing what they ought to be doing, instead of recruiting semi-pro morons and convicted rapists.

The liberal arts faculty constantly propagandizes naive 18 year-old freshmen with all their leftwing bullshit in those introductory survey courses. Parents pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for that crap.

96 My friends put the egg in a plastic bag with 2 gallons on mayonnaise. It was dramatic.

Who got to clean up the mess?

97 93 "Basically, what I'm trying to say, is I believe we're on the brink of a new "Permian Explosion" of creative R&D that simply wasn't possible say 40 years ago due to the cost and size of equipment.
"
I agree, if the State doesn't kill it.

Posted by: LiveFreeOrDie at November 15, 2009 10:56 AM (TxRLC)

You all need to look at this another way.

Americans are actually the trilobites in this Permian scenario, and the end of the Permian was definitely not good for the trilobites.

98 http://tinyurl.com/5tsdmt

99 My last post was the story of Burt Munro. An old school New Zelander who took on Bonneville from his little shack. And won.

100

 Texas Jew, your post #55 is spot-on.

Regarding transportation fuel, the country is chock full of natgas. Convert to natgas for motor fuel and we can cut our crude imports / USD exports dramatically.

101

It's cool to read about scientists & engineers getting back to the garage and hands-on tinkering, but the real problem is across campus in the humanities departments. Science education might semi-isolate students from real world processes, but the humanities actively turn their graduates into absurdly arrogant retards whose utter lack of any discernable skills is matched only by their smug self-superiority.  The law school fantasy engineers, the ones who believe solar-powered jets will magically appear when the new Solar Powered Jet Act of 2010 is passed.

An enlightening set of question to ask anyone running for office is: What have you ever actually created, physically? What have you ever repaired? What tools do you own -- not "tools" in the abstract bizspeak bullshit sense, I mean Bridgeport lathe / voltage tester / sewing machine sense?

I would be shocked if there were a single member of the Obama administration who knew how to change their own oil, let alone run a fucking car company.

102 Nice to see some real Hope and Change.  Go America Go. 

103 The Obamanauts are hell bent on destroying your ability to buy and sell anything. You WILL work for the State; You WILL get the health care they want you to have; You WILL live where they tell you; You WILL eat what they allow you to; You WILL drive the car they let you...if at all. You WILL enjoy your well supervised and managed lives.

104 Americans are actually the trilobites in this Permian scenario, and the end of the Permian was definitely not good for the trilobites.

Hell, I just remarked to my wife that the average American would have no idea what this sentence means.  But in reality, a lot of so-called educated people would have no idea what that sentence means.

105 Who got to clean up the mess?
Posted by: Vic

Most of it ended up on the spectators, so they just washed their clothes. The rest dissolved rapidly in the sun. Like i said, it stirred quite a drama. I still laugh about.

106 Rapid prototyping equipment is definitely getting cheaper. Here's a unit that you can put together for less than a thousand bucks.

107

I got my BSME in 1995, graduated Navy nuke school 1996, MSIE 2002.  I work in oil and petrochem now.  I work with engineers all over the world.  By and large, Chinese and Indian engineers are worthless.  They have no ability to innovate, no hands-on experience, and no engineering judgment whatsoever.  If you want a real mechanical engineer, hire an engineer from USA, UK, Canada, or Germany.  If you want a mechanical engineer that doesn't understand "rightly tighty" hire a Chinese or Indian engineer.  You'll get exactly what you pay for.

Cap and Trade, if it passes, will destroy US manufacturing.

108

What tools do you own -- not "tools" in the abstract bizspeak bullshit sense, I mean Bridgeport lathe / voltage tester / sewing machine sense?

I've got this thing -- it's like a giant pair of pliers -- you use to neuter steers. Mot that I have any steers, but when I saw it I just knew I had to own one.

109 What have you ever actually created, physically? What have you ever repaired? What tools do you own
Posted by: iowahawk

That is a question i ask all coop and eng students that have applied for work over the years.

110

Eightball: I don't fix 'em, I just drive 'em."

Love the ME talk around here..always food for thought. I'd like it even more if those Civil Engineers came out. Bridges, streets, highways, water, sewer, fiberoptics, telephone, electrical transmission. Those are the building blocks of our civilization and the industry is in sad shape. Been funemployed for 10 months here in Florida and it ain't looking good. Fortunate for me, that I've got a fat (but getting skinnier) 401k to live off of 'til it all comes back.

111 graduated Navy nuke school 1996.....

LOL, a young Moron, 1971 is better!

112 I know some rich guys. The richest ones I know are patent holders. I know a guy so rich he just moved to Bermuda. He invented something that I would wager 99% of us morons use every day. The guy literally has no idea how much money he has, since his daily net worth fluctuates by millions.

Yep, patent holders. Forget rock stars.

113 Been funemployed for 10 months here in Florida and it ain't looking good. Fortunate for me, that I've got a fat (but getting skinnier) 401k to live off of 'til it all comes back.

When I retired 4 years ago our last civil guy went out at the same time. If you are still 'funemployed" and do not mind moving to SC let me know, I'll check around here.  There still may be some openings (note that I retired 4 years ago before Obamanomics)

114

I'd like it even more if those Civil Engineers came out. Bridges, streets, highways, water, sewer, fiberoptics, telephone, electrical transmission. Those are the building blocks of our civilization and the industry is in sad shape.

CEs will get my respect when the open their own sanitary manholes and take their own inverts. They're a bunch of lazy four-eyed nerds.

115

Vic

Thanks for that. I've got deep roots and family here in JAX and the thought of bailing makes me nervous. SC is a beautiful state and I love every moment that I spend there. Myrtle Beach is a personal favorite. I think I'm considered something of a dinosaur because of the experience I have and not too many private companies want to pay for it these days. Thanks for the offer but I know that this city is still growing even though the recession is dragging on longer than I ever expected it to.

116 I got a phd in chemistry, but was lucky to land a job at a engineering-centric company, one with a long legacy of letting creative people tinker. I agree with those who have mentioned that the key is to use the skills to fit the problem, and to use what you learned to develop further.

If I were designing science and engineering education, some part of it would include projects where the disciplines have to work together, in areas where you could all but guarantee there would be blind spots.  There is, no doubt, a great deal of very hard, grinding work that goes into becoming a scientist or engineer. But what so many kids never see is how much fun it is, what that bloodshed in the form of mathematics and calculation and lab work buys you. In my experience, it buys a job that I wake up wanting to go to every day. In a company like mine, this permeates up through management, too, so we are led by people with this ethos, and not by soul-less bean counting MBAs.

If any of you youngsters are still in school and are studying chemistry: learn to turn wrenches, and use a lathe and mill. You might not get to do it much, but it pays to know what to ask for when you go to the machine shop later. Physical chemistry is good training to work around engineering stuff.

117

Tinian, man, you are preaching to the choir right there. A good friend of mine and I were always the guys that were out in the "field" checking out the surveyor's work. We had a couple of marketing slogans we used:

"We can't wait to get our hands on your turd"

"Your shit is our bread and butter"

118 said that he voted for cap 'n trade because he trusted that an American scientist/engineer/inventor would find the way to make cheap, non-polluting energy that can power our country.

I believe that too (probably some variation on fusion, or someone gets the Thorium reactor idea pushed past break even), and I believe I'll probably see it in my lifetime. 

However, I'm not willing to gamble the economy away TODAY on a future technology that would need a 20 year minimum (if its discovered tomorrow) R&D and deployment ramping phase to become pervasive.  That's just plain retarded and reckless.

The assholes in Washington should be looking to buy us that 20 years worth of R&D time with all these green/AGW imbeciles.  They'll get what they want, they're just not going to get it quite the way they wanted. 

Obviously we'll need some "today tech" bridges (i.e. conventional fission nuclear reactors) built to get us across that 20 year implementation gap.  But no....can't do that nuclear power is evil.  We're building that bridge by burning low-carbon freaking unicorn farts.

119 Civil Engineers design targets.

Engineers, in general, write poorly and spell even worse.

Chemical Engineers get mad because they are smarter than their doctor yet only make a third the salary.

120 I got a phd in chemistry.......

LOL, my youngest brother has a phd in Chemisty.

He rebuilds Chevy 350's on the side and one of the jobs he had when he was going to school at Ga Tech was going around changing the oil in cars at people's houses.

It must be something in the Chemistry classes. I borrowed his thermo textbook and read it, didn't see the correlation.

121

Whenever anyone at work talks about catching native rainbow trout I tell 'em I know where the brownies are.

122 I would be shocked if there were a single member of the Obama administration who knew how to change their own oil, let alone run a fucking car company.

Damned straight, iowahawk.

Who could have possibly predicted that elevating someone who has never run anything, other than his mouth, to Chief Executive Officer of the largest enterprise in the country would have disastrous results?

Obama is the poster child for the Peter Principle.

123 Thorium reactor idea pushed past break even), and I believe I'll probably see it in my lifetime.

PA -

There is nothing wrong with the current nuclear reactor design.  All the opposition is from the idiot eco-tards and ALL of the supposed weaknesses are political.

Until you kill the political problems you will never see ANY revival of nuclear power.

Take that from a 30 year veteran of nuclear power (civilian).

124 If you lucky enough to get a job with a real employer these days, one of the first documents you will sign is one that says that anything you invent while in the employ of the company, belongs to the company. I have known several people who invented things for companies and felt like they got a bum deal on that end.

125 Any word on an NFL thread?

126

Great post, PA.

Its good to hear that inventive American spirit isn't completely dead. 

But in all seriousness, where are the fembots, flying cars and hand-held nuclear proton-packs I was promised by Hollywood and my fevered imagination? 

 

127 Given my bout of long-term unemployment in the software development sector, there's no way in hell I'd recommend getting a computer science degree.  If I had to do it all over again, I'd have studied law and become a trial lawyer.

128 @127: "If I had to do it all over again, I'd have studied law and become a trial lawyer."
Posted by: Herr Blücher at November 15, 2009 12:00 PM (sz37A)

Right. Because if it's one thing this country needs, it's more lawyers.

129 Iowa,

It's worse. Forget the technical illiteracy in the administration, NASA is just as bad.

130 Obama is the poster child for the Peter Principle.
Posted by: Andy at November 15, 2009 11:54 AM (VMyjP)

As was Clinton for the Unprincipled Peter.

131 Awesome.  I hope some of these bright boys can create something nice, to make life more inconvenient, which can then be declared a human right, which can then be duly confiscated.

132 Oops.  Convenient, not inconvenient.

133 Tinian,,, I guess I worked for different civil guys .
When I was a kid I did the surveyor thing . Started out as a rodman ended up a party chief . Most of the civil engineers I worked for were hands on , not as hands on as surveyors but not shrinking violets , either . Switched to carpentry at 25 as they used to make more money than surveyors . My last field engineering/surveyor job paid the princely sum of 5.00 an hour here in the rural south . If we weren't cutting line in the August sun we were sweating anchor bolt layout while a civil superintendent waited impatiently with a truck full of concrete sometimes perched literally over our heads .
Dirty , dangerous ,physically and mentally demanding work .. Did I mention 5.00/hr?

134 I saw some rough statistics once that indicated, not including the US, the UK had twice the number of lawyers per capita as any other country.  The US has roughly twice the number of the UK.

135 128
Right. Because if it's one thing this country needs, it's more lawyers.

I'm merely suggesting that I would have far fewer worries regarding unemployment as there is absolutely no shortage of plaintiffs who wish to sue to shit out of others--being that this is a lawsuit-based economy, and all.  Or, I could learn Hindi.

136 This session shows why the Human Race must expand beyond Earth.

If we do not, we will become contaminants in a Machine society.

137 John Ratzenberger, the guy who played know-it-all Cliff Clavin on the old sitcom Cheers, has started an organization for tinkerers, called the Nuts, Bolts and Thingamajigs Foundation:

http://www.nutsandboltsfoundation.org/

138

Dirty , dangerous ,physically and mentally demanding work .. Did I mention 5.00/hr?

Posted by: awkward davies at November 15, 2009 12:11 PM (wb68R)

And it hasn't changed over the years.

139 BTW, if you meant the Cambrian "Explosion", it took about 80 million years.

140 My computer background has proven useful in areas other than computers.  I've always thought of software as a huge whirling/spinning Rube Goldberg machine.  If you're any good at programming, then almost by default you know how to design feasible (electro)mechanical systems. 

You'll need to gen up some new info on materials/alloys/electrical shit, but the skill of being able to visualize something that can be made to work is there.  Your first cuts might not be the best or close to optimal, but they're going to work.

I visualize our (non-traditional methods and materials) semiconductor work the same way - little spinning atomic level machines where some covalent or trivalent bond is like a spinning disk that picks shit up on one side and throws it off on the other with "???" magic happening along the way

141 John Ratzenberger , another former carpenter , if memory serves .

142 Somebody should graph the complexity of technology vs. the fraction of the population that understands it.

I bet there is an alarming approach to zero.

143 142 Somebody should graph the complexity of technology vs. the fraction of the population politicians & trial lawyers that understands it.

I bet there is an alarming approach to zero.

144 Somebody should graph the complexity of technology vs. the fraction of the population that understands it.

Not even high tech shit.  How many people are capable of swaping out a water heater or replacing a toilet flush valve?  This isn't rocket science.

Billions of dollars worth of "economic activity" occur each year because people don't have the basic skills to handle common life problems they had 50 years ago.

145

As a moron at the garage level, I'm always in awe of the brainsmarter people whe P/A posts.

I have made my kids do their own maintainence on guns and Go Carts. My 5 yo tore the right front off his midget. I took the time to explain, to him and his 9 yo brother,  the successecion of parts breakage. Explained the removal and repair of the pieces, and weighed the whole setup. I didn't buy any parts. We used the tubing bender to make a new A-arms, welded on some flat stock for the mounts and voila'. Better and lighter than ever, and quicker than parts could arrive by mail. When we were finished they made the comment.."wow, that other side looks weak and ugly".  The important part is, they put it back together as a team, double checked their work (measuring and correct bearing/bushing spacing) etc... Made myself, and more importantly them, very proud indeed.

146 PA,

So there is your trend: people are becoming increasing separated from technology and eventually when the technology advances to the point where it has it's own agenda we will be helpless.

If we stay here. The more we move outward the more we can sustain a critical population of "knowers and doers".

147

Billions of dollars worth of "economic activity" occur each year because people don't have the basic skills to handle common life problems they had 50 years ago.----P/A

   Hence these former renters, walk away from a hugely water/electrical damaged properties because the blew that cash on a cruise or a  JagTaurus.

Which is the way HE wants it. Well, HE gets it. I don't like it any better than you do.

148 Billions of dollars worth of "economic activity" occur each year because people don't have the basic skills to handle common life problems they had 50 years ago.

This is the flipside of specialization to a certain extent. There's a great argument to be made that, even though I know how to do it, my time spent doing other things is more valuable than what I would pay the plumber to change out the water heater (a flapper valve, not so much).

But other people may come to a different conclusion and replace it themselves. Also, there's a certain amount of fun involved when you fire off the propane torch and join two pieces of copper with fire and solder, and that needs to be factored in as well. Wives tend to multiply this part of the equation by zero, though.

The problem is the fraction of those billions of dollars that are due to the government interceding in my value judgment by telling me what the plumber has to be paid or that I have to use a politically correct curlicue lightbulb to "save the planet."

149

Andy, I agree.

I'd work O/T rather than dig my own pool hole. But if my broker wants to make stupid, and redundant trades, to jack up his fees to pay an overpriced copper cobbler (sarc), well that just pisses me off. I'm sure an over stressed E.R. doctor really doesn't have time to re-screen a window, let alone lay paving stones.

150

MoJoe Tee at #18 -

A chick with her own CNC laser cutting table?  In her apartment?  And you  let her go?  Can you post a phone number or Facebook ID for the rest of us? 

151 Slightly OT, but as many have stated, with increased gov't regs, I see a more barter based economy coming.           

152 150,

No shit!

Did she kill his dog or something?

153 But other people may come to a different conclusion and replace it themselves. Also, there's a certain amount of fun involved when you fire off the propane torch and join two pieces of copper with fire and solder, and that needs to be factored in as well.

There's a vast difference between not being capable of doing something, and choosing to vend it out because you have other things you want to do that day. 

Quality of implementation is also an issue.  When something is vended, chances are you're going to get the implementation the installer wants, not a superior one you might have preferred (if even offered a choice).  The "code minimum" bullshit wiring in houses is a good example of this.

If you're even minimally savvy, on the hot water heater swap example, you'd tell the installer you want to see TWO ball valves one on the hot and one on the cold, not a single bullshit gate valve on the cold feed that will dribble the next time it needs changing.

Every hot water heater I ever put in got two ball valves cuz I knew I'd be doing it again at some point, and that little extra investment in time and money up front would make the next replacement cycle a breeze.

154

Purple Avenger-

Please tell me you live near Seattle and my husband and I can come by and check out your set up! Please please please! It's interesting to see the breadth of knowledge that morons have. Fantastic!

I was telling my husband about 3 months ago during the space elevator conference that the equipment needed to make just small CFNT shouldn't be all THAT expensive... ;-)

Only problem with Ratzenberger's site is he mentions Edison but not Tesla. Blech.

155

When my dad and his plumber friend were replacing a water heater (I was about 11, 1977?) I asked why there was no tank before the water heater? My theory was a tank that would help bring cold street water up to the temp of the furnace room would really save hot water bill $$$. Still haven't seen this done anywhere except my ,when I replaced the 43 yo furnace w/built in water heater. Huge killer furnace that ran year round.

156 Is anybody working on a Space Elevator climber that coils up the cable like a snake climbing a tree?

Is there a mechanical advantage in that?

Plus, it seems the climber could be relatively short and simple and the the vehicle could piggy back on it.

157 My theory was a tank that would help bring cold street water up to the temp of the furnace room

Posted by: hutch1200

The heat has to come from somewhere. You could benefit from this plan by having a heat source such as the Sun provide the energy. So, a Solar panel that makes enough juice just to preheat the intake water to 60 or 70 F would work.

158

Someone had to quote Heinlein:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

159 Please tell me you live near Seattle..

I'm in South FL (Palm Beach county) and my partners and the "lab" are up in the Orlando area. 

160 Posted by: hutch1200 at November 15, 2009 12:31 PM (ltTUs)

Your kid are lucky and please show this post to them. This is extremely rare.

PA

If you're even minimally savvy, on the hot water heater swap example, you'd tell the installer you want to see TWO ball valves one on the hot and one on the cold, not a single bullshit gate valve on the cold feed that will dribble the next time it needs changing.

Please, you have encountered hot water heaters with no inlet and outlet valves?

LOL, mine didn't have these either, they do now.

BTW, the hardware store where I purchased by last HWH added a $5.00 fee for disposal, I asked what theat was for and they said it was for getting rid of the thing.  IOW was yet another hidden tax.  When I got the old heater out I hailed it to the nearest county dumpster and threw it in there. 

161 Well folks, it is 13:16 here and 76 degress.

I have to give up on the geeky side and give in to the AOS alcohol side.

PORCH ROCKER!

162

PA at #144-

For me, it started as a destitute college student with a motorcycle.  $200 for a tuneup, or $200 for a Craftsman wrench set.  Still have most of the wrench set. 

163

I'm not a boozer anymore Vic, but hoist one for me! It's 56 degrees outside Scranton, and I'm taking my 95" Harley Lowrider for a rip. Cool, moist air is loved by the Mikuni 51mm. 106 hp is funner to hang onto than a crack whores glass pipe, after you've paid her. Nothing like leaving a light and getting rubber in 1st, 2nd  and 3rd. If the front end stays reasonably down.

Great thread, Morons! 

164 Um, could you move on and discuss ceiling fans?. You've pretty much exhausted what can be said about water heaters, which isn't to say that it wasn't an absolutely fascinating topic..

165 added a $5.00 fee for disposal

Albany NY tried this kind of shit with appliances some years ago wanting to charge people extra for hauling them away.  Naturally, every vacant lot in the city promptly became a graveyard for dead stoves and fridges.

It took a few years for the "reality in the street" implications of their foolish money grab to sink in, but eventually it did and they backed off the extra fees and now the vacant lots stay largely clear of dead appliances.

The local junk yards here in Palm Beach are accepting appliances.  You won't get much if anything for them, but they will take them and not charge you to do it.

166 For me, it started as a destitute college student with a motorcycle.  $200 for a tuneup, or $200 for a Craftsman wrench set.  Still have most of the wrench set.

With me it was an old VW Beetle as a grad student.  I still got the metric Craftsman wrenches too ;->  Picked up a copy of John Muir's How To Keep Your VW Alive book and it quite literally changed my life.  That Muir book is good reading even if you don't own a VW or ever intend to fix your own car. 

167 I keep the full size K&E slide rule in the car
a  6" baby slide rule in the toolbox
...and if all else fails I have the bezel of the watch.

My hopes with the technological advancement is that the Easy Bake Oven DNA Gene Splicer stays out of the hands of those that wish us harm.

168 I've been noticing this in the music industry as well. After years of turning more and more tasks over to computers, the younger guys have rediscovered old analog synthesizers. Some buy vintage, some even make their own, and now there are established manufacturers making "reissue" vintage gear, and boutique companies making very high zoot custom jobs.

There are some really cool things going on in the Techno and Trance generas right now, believe it or not.

169

#159-

Bummer. Happy tinkering! Need to find a group of morons up here then with the goods. =)

170 Hmmm, you know, there are other parts of Florida where it's considered to be chic to use old refrigerators, old stoves, old bed springs and old pickup trucks as lawn decorations, as opposed to using those tacky, ceramic Flamingos.

171 Question : Why are patent fees so high?  Wouldn't innovation be encouraged  with lower fees?

172

158:

A human being should be able to:

OK, I've done all of them except write a sonnet, set a bone, and die gallantly.

Grim

173 re: 171

all said and told, acquiring a patent is somewhat costly for most people ($5-15k, depending on complexity).  But most of that goes to patent atty fees.  The atty costs, as far as I know, constitute most of that.  OTOH, the Patent Office is running a budgetary deficit and the current talk is on increasing fees in order to shore up the difference.

found this link for fees: http://www.ipwatchdog.com/patent/patent-cost/

the atty fees are basically so you don't have your idea stolen.  and, generally, the more you spend, the more thorough the protection.

174 the humanities actively turn their graduates into absurdly arrogant retards whose utter lack of any discernable skills is matched only by their smug self-superiority.

Yup, and you know what the really tragic thing is? There's a push to get more humanities into engineering school curricula. Ugh.

The market for engineers ain't what it used to be. My husband is funemployed with an ME degree. It's damn near impossible to find a job for an engineer with less than 8-10 years experience. It can be pretty discouraging at times. 'Course, that's probably because we are in the heart of the Rust Belt.

But we both love to tinker, make stuff and do stuff. So it was really cool to see this article.

Vic - you a former Navy Nuke? You sound like my dad - he went to NPS, spent some years as a nuke, then went on to a long career in civilian nuclear power. I always tell folks nuclear power's where it's at, and we'd be a lot farther along with it if it weren't for the stupid clueless anti-nuke hippies.

175 If we would shitcan about half of the college departments like gender studies and all that crap, there would be enough funding to have kids actually study something necessary to this world.

But then we'd be back to the '60s, where all the useless kids have nothing to do but screw, take drugs, and make trouble.  Those ethnic and gender studies programs were a bribe - take them away and there will be trouble for the students trying to learn something.

176 I'm getting an education in lasers and optics from a community college. Don't think that was possible twenty years ago.

177 171 Question : Why are patent fees so high? Wouldn't innovation be encouraged with lower fees? It would indeed. But high fees mean that the established companies which can afford them have a lock on innovation. It's a variation on 'regulatory capture'. 173 re: 171 ...all said and told, acquiring a patent is somewhat costly for most people ($5-15k, depending on complexity). Given the low probability of any one patent's returning a profit, five to fifteen thousand dollars is not "somewhat costly for most people:" it's prohibitive.

178 Ace, you need a preview feature.

179 I've been building a small "Hackerspace" in my basement, it is low-tech with circa 1950s machines (a Deckel mill, South Bend lathe, & Sheldon-Vernon shaper).  I'm accumulating the needed tooling to operate them too (a larger project than getting the machines).  I'd like to get into the CAD/CAM side, but the folks I rely on for advice are also mostly low-tech.  Anyway I think there are a lot of us, not compared to the number of couch potatoes, but still quite a few.

RE. 3-phase power:  Variable-frequency drives (VFDs) have become really cheap in the last couple of years, and they are an easy (& fairly efficient) way to convert single phase to 3-phase.  Once you have done that, you are no longer competing with lots of buyers looking for the single-phase stuff.  You can get bigger, more versatile (if obsolete for mass production) machines for less money.  Of course then you have the trouble of moving them . . .

180

Hutch1200  My 5 yo tore the right front off his midget.

Look, my family was up to its hips in karts, midgets and sprint cars, but even I have to admit, that right there is going to give practically everybody the wrong idea. Tearing the right front off a midget just plain means something else now.

Heh.

 

181 If it wasn't for Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, we'd have nucs all over the country.  I'd swear to god those were sabotage jobs by the Greens, except they don't have the brains to pull them off.
I'd love to see Westinghouse reactors popping up all over the place but I'm utterly certain it would take a minimum of 15 years of legal BS before there was even the slightest change of breaking ground on one.  Someone here posted a few months back that "nuclear power is the solution to 90% of our energy needs and there is absolutely no chance whatsoever of one being built in the US ever again due to the anti-nuc forces and their lawyers and political helpers."  I hated to read that but I'm pretty sure he's dead right.

182 Croaker 179

I've been building a small "Hackerspace" in my basement...

I think there are lots of 'us' out there. Again, not in comparison to couch potatoes, but still. One of the coolest things about the intertubes is the ability to find the far-flung doozers, midnight engineers, and garage scientists that are out there.

I like the idea I have seen implemented some places, of a membership based shop (like a gym). For a monthly membership fee, and after safety and basic use training, one has access to fairly nice machine tools. There isn't one where I live, but the concentration of technical types is sufficiently high that it might work.

183

Penultimatum: Find&friend me on FB and I'll suggest you big guy!

YMMV

184 Penultimatum: search 4 mojotee

185

i'm looking forward to getting a perpetual motion arse-buzzer.

that'd be neat. no more batteries see?

 

 

186 Sad to see that. Lively thread, looked like it had a couple more ways it could go, but it's as dead as Sully's hamster now.

187 hey, get this guy a subscription to Popular Science!

188 Its the Mythbusters effect.  Seriously.  In the last few months I have met at least a dozen young people either going into or will soon be entering college and who have decided to study engineering or the "hard" sciences, all because they've become addicted to Mythbusters and want to be the next Jamie Hyneman or Adam Savage.  Never have engineering geeks been more cool.

189 Dave Eaton@182:

Yeah, I love the interteroobs for the same reason ("the ability to find the far-flung doozers, midnight engineers, and garage scientists that are out there"), and all the M&Ms too.

I think the trouble with the club idea is the liability issue.  I wonder if it would be able to structure a kind of limited liability business partnership that someone could buy into, that would eliminate liability for the other members beyond the cost of their buy-in.  Or a straight business arrangement, maybe Purple Avenger has something like that (If you're reading, PA, maybe you'd say how your enterprise is arranged).

Those working with more high-tech design & construction tech avoid the problem (I think) by being able to work remotely, or to design things wherever they are and have them built elsewhere, like the three-D modeling & stuff an early poster suggested.  Or like MoJoTee is doing (from what I understand of it from this thread).

190 @189, Curiously, neither of the Mythbusters principals is an engineer by training. Acting, model-making, Russian literature: sounds like more of those Liberal Arts villains so roundly drubbed, above. "But I play one on TV." 

191 If you're reading, PA, maybe you'd say how your enterprise is arranged

We've been given free space and gear to use through execution of a JDA with another firm.  Our work is helping them develop a next generation of their products using us as guinea pigs.  Its worked out very well for both parties so far.  Its been a 2+2=5 kind of situation.

This isn't a bad approach if you can find a larger firm your work doesn't "compete with" per se, rather complements in a symbiotic manner.

Then your JDA will allow them to keep IP related to their business, and you to keep IP related to your business. 

Many universities also rent lab space fairly cheaply to startup.  Previously, we were working out of lab space at UCF.

192 I built my own CNC milling machine. Does that count?

193 Vic - you a former Navy Nuke? You sound like my dad - he went to NPS, spent some years as a nuke, then went on to a long career in civilian nuclear power.

Just in case you check back this morning.

Yes, NPS Bainbridge, MD 1971, Prototype D!G Saratoga Springs, NY, fleet USS Enterprise. + 30 years civilian Nuke.

I'd love to see Westinghouse reactors popping up all over the place but I'm utterly certain it would take a minimum of 15 years of legal BS before there was even the slightest change of breaking ground on one

When I retired 4 years ago several of the larger utilities had already file "notice of intent" with the NRC to build new Nukes at existing sites.

194

"Over the same period, the number of computer-engineering graduates slipped by 31%..."

Where did Bill Gates get his computer degree?  Oh, that's right, he dropped out of Harvard to make software.  Where did Steve Jobs get his computer degree?  Oops, another drop out.  Wozniak was another drop out, though after he invented the Apple he did go back and finish his degree.

The dirty little secret of the software business in America is that most programmers are self-taught, coming from disciplines other than computer science, which may be why the industry has such an advantage in creativity.

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