Category Archives: Uncategorized

Good reads for budding engineers

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Photo credit: Tom

Photo credit: Tom

I have been asked to help populate a school library with books that will be of interest to prospective engineers.  I suspect there is a sub-text that it would be good to include books that might stimulate more pupils to consider becoming engineers.  I think this is a hard task and so I am hoping my readers will help me by leaving a comment in the form a personal recommendation.

There are a number of suggested reading lists available, e.g. the one provided by Cambridge University Engineering Department.  However, the feedback that I have had from an enthusiastic budding engineer is not encouraging.  She found all the books she read from these lists to be dull and uninspiring.  So, that’s why I am issuing a challenge this week: find books connected to engineering that under-18s think are interesting!

Please don’t send me a recommendation unless you have actually checked with a teenage that they enjoyed it.

Dream machine

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Painting by Katy Gibson

Painting by Katy Gibson

A machine that can do work indefinitely without any external input of energy.  It would solve the world’s energy problems, eliminate global warming and make the inventor very rich.  There have been so many attempts to design such a machine that a classification system has been established.  My machine, that does work indefinitely with no energy input, would be a perpetual motion machine of the first type because energy is not conserved – a contradiction of the first law of thermodynamics.  The second type contravene the second law of thermodynamics, usually by spontaneously converting heat into work, and the third type eliminates friction and, or other dissipative forces.

I said ‘my machine’ in the sense that I have an on-going sporadic correspondence with the inventor of a machine that is claimed to produce ‘power above the primary power that drives it’.  It is an epistemic impossibility, which means that it cannot exist within our current understanding of the real world.  In other words, if a perpetual motion machine was to be proven to exist then the laws of thermodynamics would have to be rewritten.  This would probably lead to an invitation to Stockholm to collect a Nobel prize.

Such arguments make no difference to inventors of perpetual motion machines.  Many appear to start from the premise that the laws of thermodynamics have not been proven and hence they must not be universally applicable, i.e. there is space for their invention.  Whereas the laws of thermodynamics form part of our current understanding of the world because no one has demonstrated their falsity despite many attempts over the last two hundred years.  This is consistent with the philosophical ideas introduced by Karl Popper in the middle of the last century.  He proposed that a hypothesis cannot be proven to be correct using observational evidence but its falsity can be demonstrated.

So, inventors need to build and demonstrate their perpetual motion machines in order to falsify the relevant law of science.  At this stage money as an input usually becomes an issue rather than energy!

 

The painting by Katy Gibson is from a series made as part from an art and engine collaboration between Okemos High School Art Program and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan State University.

 

 

Six NYC subway trains

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Distribution of blog visitors in 2014

Distribution of blog visitors in 2014 (from WordPress.com)

It would take six New York City subway trains to hold the number of visitors to this blog last year, according the Annual Report sent to me by WordPress.com.  That’s more than double the number of visitors in 2013 which is quite an impressive increase.  The visitors came from more 100 countries which makes it a truly global blog, unless I have some globe-trotting readers who visited all of those countries between them during 2014.

The blog is also being published on Tumblr now, which my youngest daughter told me would be a waste of time because users of Tumblr are not interested in the sort of things I write about. However, an original objective of the blog was to increase public understanding of engineering and so this is small step to reach a wider public.

I wrote 54 posts last year so that there are more 120 posts in the archive now of which the five most frequently read are, in descending order:

Closed systems in nature? published on December 21st, 2012

100 Everyday engineering examples published on April 23rd, 2014

Small is beautiful published on October 10th, 2012

Benford’s law published on August 15th, 2014

Zen and entropy published on December 11th, 2013

If you only started reading the blog recently or you are visiting for the first time then you might enjoy some these old favourites.

New Year Resolution

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I started 2014 with a post on January 1st about the ‘Knowledge Economy‘ in which I extolled the virtues of knowledge-based rather than energy-based agriculture and engineering.  At the end of the year, oil prices have dropped from $110 to about  $60 per barrel, making it likely that in most countries the energy-based economy will continue to dominate.  In the USA, sales are rising of huge gas-guzzling cars, such as the Escalade, which is 5.15m (17ft) long, weighs 2.59 tonnes and only manages an average of 17 miles per gallon!  Fossil fuels account for approximately 80% of world energy consumption and are responsible for most greenhouse gas production.  During 2014 it was reported that greenhouse gases were rising at the fastest rate for 30 years but still the countries of the UN meeting in Lima before Christmas only agreed that those countries who were ‘ready to do so’ should submit national pledges on cutting emissions in the first of quarter of 2015.

The global average temperature is within one degree of the maximum temperature in the last million years, and a 2 degree rise would be equal to the temperature three million years ago when the sea level was 15 to 23m (80 to 130 feet) higher.  A 1 metre rise in sea level would displace 145 million people, and there is evidence that it has been  rising at 3.5mm per year during the last 20 years which is twice as fast as during the previous 80 years.

How bad does the condition of the planet need to get before effective action is taken?  How many more islands, like the Carteret Islands, will have to disappear?  How many more people than the 7 million in 2012 will have to die prematurely as a consequence of air pollution? Cities such as Beijing are beginning to be described as ‘almost uninhabitable’.  Kofi Annan has suggested that grass roots action is needed because our leaders will not take action in time. So tonight make it your New Year Resolution to reduce your carbon footprint in 2015 by 15%.

Estimate your current carbon footprint using an on-line calculator and starting working out how to reduce it.  If you want to find out the carbon footprint of your organization then the Carbon Trust has useful information and services.

Sources:

‘Inside Beijing’s airpocalypse – a city made “almost uninhabitable” by pollution‘ by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian on Tuesday 16th December, 2014.

Blockstein DE, Wiegman L, The Climate Solutions Consensus. Island Press, Washington, 2010.

Links to previous posts:

‘Year of Air:2013‘ on November 20th, 2013 or ‘Mass-produced nuclear power plants?‘ on November 12th, 2014.