...because I think I look good in a striped cap.
I know, thats a terrible joke, and its one that actual members of the engineering discipline have been living with ever since Casey Jones rolled out of the roundhouse. Nonetheless, its true -- I think I should have been an engineer, or at least, an artist with an appreciation of engineering, because I like it when things fit together, when things can be described with diagrams and flows, and they make sense -- there isn't any interpretation, they just feel right and they work, they explain what they're meant to explain, and they do it lucidly, with a clean brevity of text. I like that.
It could be that I just have a romantic view of what it means to be an engineer, of course. I am sure that most of it is hard work. It might be work that is emotionally satisfying, but it isn't actually fun; it isn't something you can just bang together and say 'okay, thats a wrap'. To me, engineering embodies the need for adequacy and for precision: all the pieces have to be there, and they all have to fit, and they all have to work.
I'm always amazed when something thats engineered doesn't work. The Tacoma Narrows bridge. The Kansas City tea dance balconies. But even then, I like to think, capital-E engineers get together and they find out why it didn't work -- what assumption was hidden in the way that things were done that this time rose up and bit you -- and they come up with a way to make it so that it doesn't happen again -- doing so in a way that doesn't give rise to other gotchas, newly created or until-now hidden but ready to leap up from the tall grass. They fix it, and they do it right.
Thats engineering, to me.
3 comments:
You just missed National Engineers Week ("E Week"). :)
Take an engineer to lunch !
There is a book I read several years ago which postulated that only through failure will we find out how to progress. Obviously it is helpful to do tests and studies in the "lab", but as we all know, things are different "in the field". Concrete isn't as pure or properly braced, steel may have cracks from the rolling mill, bolts and rivets may chemically react with the girders, and so forth. Any large project goes through three stages, "over building, then paring down as you figure you can get away with it, second, do the expensive pre-testing and on the job Q.A., and three...build it and see if it falls down. Perhaps it is unfair to mention this last method, however it is the most important because by failing, it will show you where to make it better next time. You learn to put lateral bracing into suspension bridges built in windy areas, learn to armour your space shuttles against even soft foam projectiles, learn to use aluminum powder in your explosives...the list is endless.
These failures give us that all important "hindsight" which causes us to put nice warm tarps around the O-rings of first stage rockets when the temperature dips!
Loss of life, while regrettable in and of itself, also spurs the political masters who control the purse strings to fund these steps, so now we get proper escape routes in tunnels, and life boats which can carry most if not all the passengers. Lots of work to be done in this field...do you suppose whatever building replaces the twin towers will have escape pods (or fire slides) on the floors above where the pumper trucks can reach? That variants of convor belts will move people, thereby saving the lives of wayward children, ashma sufferers, and drunk drivers? Hmmm....in these cases perhaps loss of life isn't a hard enough prod.
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