An Interesting Article on Education

Real education is difficult to attain in an academic setting alone. If you have ever taught or studied Kerouac’s On the Road, for example, you will know that it is impossible not to look out the window at some point, and consider the futility of trying to grasp in a classroom what could better be grasped in a boxcar. "In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice – in practice, there is." Yogi Berra’s distinction is tonic to those who squat in books, starved of what William Carlos Williams called "the thing itself." Students of Drivers’ Ed can appreciate the vast difference between correctly answering a multiple-choice question on the distance one ought to maintain between oneself and the car ahead, and getting in a car and actually maintaining it.
John Leichty

The above quote is taken from interesting article on education at LewRockwell (here).

This article captures some of my thoughts on the problems with modern engineering education.

We have a new graduate engineer. He worked with us when he was in school. He recounted how on his senior project he was the only student who knew how use CAD to put together a drawing package to document the project. His knowledge of how to make drawings came from his work experience.

I would not expect college students to be proficient at this but I would expect that they would have a general idea how to this. The question is do their professors know anything about this and how important it is? I don't expect the professors to be proficient at this either. Is it unrealistic to expect the professors to have some knowledge of industrial practice? After all most of their students will go to work in industry.

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engineering education

Died in the saddle

Chauncey Starr died last week at the age of 95. He was a nuclear energy consultant. He had worked with Robert Oppenheimer during WWII on the Manhattan Project. He was a pioneer in the field of risk assessment. At the age of 95 he was still working six days a week. His heart stopped beating during his morning nap before he went in to the office.

You can read a fuller obituary and description of his life here.

I am convinced that what enabled him to live such a long life was he had a passion and he remained engaged and productive.

In my time in the corporate world I have known several individuals who were looking forward to retiring and playing golf and lounging about. They died within a year of retirement. I believe their early demise was due to a feeling of purposelessness.

One of the fabrication shops I do business with is run by a father and his two sons. The sons are in their forties and the father is in his late seventies. The father is no figurehead. He handles customer relations and technical problems while the sons do the day to day management. By remaining active, I believe, he has prolonged his life and his health.

An old tool

I started working in the early days of CAD and these were still in common use. They were left from the old days of manual drafting. It is a bolt calculator. It is kind of like another old tool the slide rule.

It is used to determine the dimensions relevant to the size screw or bolt you have selected. To use it you pull the slider until the size you are interested in shows up in the SCREW SIZE window. The other windows then show all the relevant dimensions for a screw/bolt of that size.

You want to know the dimensions for a socket head cap screw, a hex head bolt, or a pan head for example - it is all there.

I actually find this tool more useful than handbooks or CAD libraries. Handbooks and CAD libraries have their place but the interface on the calculator is hard to beat.

The good news is they are still available. You can still order them from Media Marketing Associates. They are available in Inch and Metric versions.

I've been a victim of specification creep

Sorry I haven't written in a while. I've been busy at work. The work has not been onerous but it has been primarily all on the computer. This has left me disinclined to spend my spare time on the computer to blog.

I've finished design on what amounts to a mirror positioned to look down a hole at a radioactive source. When I started I thought this would be a quick project. A mirror, a mounting bracket, done!

I started by talking to the research folks. Because the hole was oversized relative to the size of the window they wanted a liner to minimize the radiation streaming down the hole to the cold mirror side. It also needed a beamstop behind the mirror to stop the radiation coming down the hole. By the way shielding was needed on the other sides to stop any secondary scatter.

I designed that up and then went to operations. What I had now designed was intended to be assembled onto the hole when used. Operations didn't like it. They didn't want to perform any assembly in the vicinity of the hole. The radiation dose rate would probably be too high. They wanted something that could be placed into the hole as a single unit.

At this time research decided they wanted two mirrors - one silvered for visible light imaging and another gold for infrared viewing. The mirrors would need to be selectable without breaking the radiation shielding.

Now the design includes a selectable mirror, radiation shielding, an integral optical table, an X-Y translation stage for installation, rubber mounts to allow for minor misalignment, and a lift truck to handle the whole package.

So what started out conceptually has a simple mirror on a bracket turned out to take over a month to design. The drawing package is going out today for estimating. There are over thirty drawings in the package.