engineering
Live your ten years
I'm sorry, I love engineers
Strength from both mass and form
Warmed by the afternoon sun
Textbooks on water-system engineering state that supply mains are generally installed on the north side of the street in the Northern Hemisphere and on the south side in the Southern Hemisphere, so that the sun will warm them. In both hemispheres they are supposed to be on the east side of north-south streets, on the premise that the afternoon sun is warmer than the morning sun.
An emblem of friendship
Bridges make connections; they bring people together—a role that has made them a traditional emblem of friendship. Consider the town of Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina. When fighting between ethnic factions broke out there in the 1990s, nothing symbolized the social disintegration more clearly than the destruction of a sixteenth-century stone-arch bridge that had linked the two parts of the town on opposite banks of the Neretva River. And the emblem of efforts to heal the divisions is a rebuilt bridge, opened with fireworks and fanfare in July of 2004.
Routine design
When we think of bridges, it is the dramatic and monumental long spans that come to mind first, especially the lithe suspension bridges such as the Golden Gate and the pure geometric arches such as Sydney Harbour. But the majority of bridges are not such spectacular structures. Most of them are ordinary overpasses, with spans of 30 or 40 feet, carrying roadways or rails across other thoroughfares or over small streams. You see such bridges by the dozen on any drive down the Interstate. They may be lacking in glamour, but they are more representative of a bridge builder's art.
The engineering and construction of girder bridges are pretty routine these days, but the bridges are not quite standard items you order from a catalogue. The girders, whether of steel or concrete, are custom-build for each bridge, then trucked to the site and hoisted into place with a crane. The designer still has scope for variation and creativity, and it shows out on the highways: some overpasses are prettier than others.
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
A Book by Richard HammingThe Art of Doing Science and Engineering is the full expression of what "You and Your Research" outlined. It's a book about thinking; more specifically, a style of thinking by which great ideas are conceived.
Design Links & Learning
A Blog by Nick TrombleyCollections of articles, links, and other material from around the web, relevant to software design and engineering.
“Design” is now “Product”
An Article by Dorian TaylorDesign has very little to do with what tools or methodologies you use, or what your job title is, or what you have a degree in, or even anything like “creativity”; design is about your relationship to constraints. Rather: to what extent are you defining constraints rather than just obeying them? Design is about taking a universe of possibilities and converging onto exactly one outcome. Being handed a set of constraints which you treat like immutable laws of physics (because many of them are) and solving within that envelope is what engineering is. To wit: what most designers are doing most of the time is actually a form of engineering, and engineers are always doing at least some design.
This is because genuine design—the power to define constraints—is a privileged political position within an organization, and not everybody can occupy it. In other words, the “seat at the table” comes first. Design is Steve Jobs infamously dropping an iPod prototype into his fish tank, pointing at the bubbles coming out and yelling at his staff to make it thinner. It doesn’t matter what your title is; Jobs is the designer in that scenario.
Are We Really Engineers?
An Essay by Hillel WayneInnovation in Structural Art
A Book by Eladio DiesteDieste's unique and innovative method of design, a melding of architecture and engineering, elevated these often humble buildings to masterworks of art.
The Lorax
Deep in the Grickle-grass
And deep in the Grickle-grass, some people say,
if you look deep enough you can still see, today,
where the Lorax once stood
just as long as it could
before somebody lifted the Lorax away.I speak for the trees!
This thing is a Thneed
"Look, Lorax," I said. "There's no cause for alarm.
I chopped just one tree. I am doing no harm.
I'm being quite useful. This thing is a Thneed.
A Thneed's a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!
It’s a shirt. It's a sock. It's a glove. It's a hat.
But it has other uses. Yes, far beyond that.
You can use it for carpets. For pillows! For sheets!
Or curtains! Or covers for bicycle seats!"The Lorax said, "Sir! You are crazy with greed.
There is no one on earth who would buy that fool Thneed!"Biggering
I meant no harm. I most truly did not.
But I had to grow bigger. So bigger I got.
I biggered my factory. I biggered my roads.
I biggered my wagons. I biggered the loads
of the Thneed’s I shipped out. I was shipping them forth
to the South! To the East! To the West! To the North!
I went right on biggering...selling more Thneed’s.
And I biggered my money, which everyone needs.The last of them all
And at that very moment, we heard a loud whack!
From outside in the fields came a sickening smack
of an axe on a tree. Then we heard the tree fall.
The very last Truffula Tree of them all.UNLESS
The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance.
Just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance,
as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants.
And I'll never forget the grim look on his face
when he hoisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.
And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks, with one word...
UNLESS.The word of the Lorax
But now, says the Once-ler, Now that you're here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.