Enginerding
My father had degrees in engineering, something military, and business. He was also a carpenter, electrician, and cabinet and fine furniture maker.
I learned to look at things from watching him work.
At University, I was a teaching assistant (TA). We graded papers and programs, taught labs, and sometimes presented lectures.
This was a great way to learn, and I loved doing it. I still love teaching.
One of the computer science professors started in the psychology department. Since computers were relatively new, he became interested in them as a psychology problem. To that end, he wrote a textbook about programming. He then requested and was assigned to teaching CPS300 FORTRAN for Engineers.
This was a large lecture hall with around 300 to 400 students in it. Labs were taught by TAs.
His big thing was flow charting. Everybody loved flowcharts at that time. And he had some of the most beautiful flowcharts I’ve ever seen.
Mostly because he was using Nassi-Shneiderman Digrams. These things show program structure clearly, making it trivial to verify the correct functioning of the flowchart.
The problem with them is that they are almost impossible to modify. You didn’t so much modify them as rewrite them.
As engineering students, we were taught piecewise progression. You know where you are, you have an idea of where you want to be, so you take a step in that direction. Verify that the step got you closer; iterate until you are there.
If it becomes impossible to proceed, you backtrack and try again until you reach your goal.
Professor Hans Lee wasn’t an engineer. He was a psychology dude. About a third of the way through the first term working with him, I had a private conversation with him. The gist of the conversation was, “How do you write programs? What do you do when your program doesn’t work?”
His answer was that he visualizes the complete Nassi-Shneiderman, draws it out, and then translates that into code. And if the program doesn’t work, he “throws that design out” and creates a new version.
I had to explain to him that his students were not creating the flowcharts first; they were using the flowcharts to document the code they had already written and proven out. And that as engineers, they were all taught a piecewise problem solving method. His methods might work for the general student body, but for engineers it was a bad fit.
This was the first time I actually vocalized a part of being an engineer actually means.
One of the things I do at The Fort is “fixing” things. Here’s the problem with that: many of the things that exist at the fort don’t have Google pages telling you how to use them. They certainly don’t have IKEA instruction manuals on how to put them together. And many of them are broken, repaired badly, or missing parts.
So I look at things and figure out how they go together and how they work. For me, it just makes sense that tab A goes into slot A. I have been told that most people can’t identify “slot A” or “tab A,” much less that the two go together.
This played out last weekend when I stopped at The Fort; they had a newly donated great wheel plus some parts to go with it. I went over to give it the once-over to determine its condition and what we would need to do to get it back in production.
The answer seems to be replacing two leather axel holders, two leather adjuster holders and putting new drive string on.
The thing that happened, was that as I looked at the wheel and parts, it was obvious to me how the pieces should align. But the kicker in fitting two pieces together was a notch in one of the pieces.
The first rule is that any cut or extra work was done for a reason. The spokes are turned down for a reason: to make the wheel more responsive. The little grooves are for beauty.
Given that rule, why is there a notch cut in that part? What does it do? Some craftsman spent the time to put the notch there. Why are those risers threaded? Making a threaded hole in wood and the matching screw is extra work.
Why is the axle bearing for this part in a separate peg instead of being a part of the riser?
Each of these questions leads to only one answer.
The notch is so that the spindle drive pulley has enough room to run freely. The riser posts are threaded to be able to adjust the tension on the drive string. The separate pegs to hold the axle bearings (holes in the pegs) are so that they rest on top of the risers and the risers can be adjusted.
It all makes perfect sense, once you know what to look for.
Politics And Engineering
When something happens, politicians want to be seen addressing the problem, right now, in very public view. The issue is often that they have no idea what the problem or issue actually is. Instead, they have feelings about what the cause of the issue is.
So they propose a change. What they don’t do is look at what the possible results might be. Instead they focus on what they want the results to be, becoming blind to potential failure or, at best, a waste of taxpayer money.
The problem with most bills is that they are experiments with our freedoms, our livelihood, and our search for happiness. They never seem to have a plan for what to do if their experiment fails. Or if they do, it is mostly “throw more money at it.”
