Domain

Explanation

Writing as bridge-building

• Engineering is as much technical as writing
• Contrary to "Such traditional writing virtues as lively language, trenchant choice of word, & varied sentence structure count for little in technical writing"
• Each structure, whether bridge, building, tunnel, is a portrait of its engineer – a manifestation of the engineer’s experience, perspective & imagination

Of two libraries

• Highly technical one for R&D
• And, the public library for laypeople
• Specialization & generalization are not mutually-exclusive but complementary qualities
• The books write "a balanced history of the past, an accurate worldview of the present, or a successful proposal for the future"

Amory Lovins woos

• Hard technology: high-voltage transmission lines, coal, synfuel & nuclear fission, fusion à focused approach
• Soft technology: solar energy, hydroelectric, wind, energy-efficient ecological designs à systems approach

Soft technology is hard

• Critical role of engineer & technologists in charting viable paths into an unmapped energy future
• Large-scale alternative energy systems
• Engineers would be both damned & praised for their hard sculptures in concrete & steel

The gleaming silver bird & the rusty iron horse

• Aerospace: the bird goes up, up & away
• Railways: relics that bring to mind crowded courthouses & empty museums

Reflections on a new engineer’s pad

• Pad of engineer’s thoughts, ideas, imaginations & records of failures
• Similar to Ronald Dahl’s little red booklet
• (slide rule) vs. (pocket laptop)

Logon proceeding

• Logon to common network & community

How poetry breeds reactors

• Lack of poetry have no doubt contributed to past & present lethargy, if not the downright demise

Can’t tell an engineer by his slide rule

• Engineering students stereotypes: "Saturday Night Live" TV as gauche males whose sport shirt pockets are bulging with pencils, pens & other implements like slide rules
• Changes in heterogeneous mix of colours, sexes, potential faculty & lifestyles

New generation of engineers

• More women engineers – the archetypal girl who bakes, cooks & sews dresses is in fact doing quintessential engineering
• Focus too much on analysis, but less on design
• Girls: chemistry of cooking, dynamics of rope-jumping & mechanics of sewing
• Boys: blocks, erector sets, automobiles
• The more academically inclined women engineers may begin to return to graduate school, as male engineers have done
• Engineers should bring a further practical perspective to engineering education

The quiet radicals

• Great deal of soul-searching over how to respond to radical demands for their participation in moratoriums, protest marches – actions that were often directed against engineering as a symbol of the technological establishment
• Conscientious engineers should know that a profession theirs was no more responsible for atrocities than poets as a class were responsible for the rhymes & jingles of mind-numbing TV commercials
• Engineering stereotypes: coldly unsympathetic & ultraconservative
• Contemporary engineers aim for nonconformity
• What attracted many an engineering student to his major was not the problems with the profession deals,
• But the common method by which it attacks those problems, not the ends but the means à methods of rational problem-solving
• Hence, engineers change quietly & quickly

Apolitical science & asocial engineering

• From the point of view of accuracy & intellectual honesty, the more men of engineering background who become public officials, the better for representative government - Herbert Hoover
• Political leaders with (engineering background) as opposed to (lawyers, doctors, grassroots)
• It is observed any political drives that scientists & engineers have seem to be satisfied within their professional societies
• Engineering education has not made it any easier for their students who might aspire to political office to realize their aspirations
• Students are also trained to communicate not through the spoken word alone, but through multimedia
• Engineers are accustomed to jargon & acronyms to his peers & little else à in politics, the citizen is left feeling the engineer is in the dark, as he literally would be should he attend a technical lecture
• Only the changing nature & image of technical education holds any promise of changing that in future

Numeracy & literacy: 2 cultures & computer revolution

• Stereotypes: engineers as social misfits – ignorant or insensitive to the traditional culture of the humanities
• Public perception of science: development of atomic bomb showed how powerful the fruits of science could be, but also how clandestinely scientists & engineers would work towards revolutionary ends
• Understand that technology is human, that it has limitations
• The new intellect must recognize that keeping up with advances in science & technology is imperative for those who wish to march in the avant-garde of tomorrow

Engineering shortage

• Education shortage
• Professional shortage

Engineering Quotes

• Books are the liberated spirits of men, & should be bestowed in a heaven of light & grace & harmonious color & sumptuous comfort – Mark Twain
• It is advantageous to have a handsome name & one that is easy to pronounce & retain, for thereby kings & grandees recognize us more easily & are less apt to forget us; & even with our own servants, we more ordinarily call on & employ those whose names come easiest to the tongue – Montaigne
• The ear is pained by an irregular sequence of air waves which strike the tympanum without any fixed order - Galileo