An Engineering Look at Social Issues and Other Stuff
My grad school mentor, Gene Franklin, used to use an expression, “With malice aforethought,” to express an analysis trick he was about to show the class which would seem odd to the uninitiated, but would become obvious later. The expression is a legal term for premeditation, but with Gene’s smooth Southern accent, it always sounded … Read more
(This was originally published on Facebook, January 24, 2017, and got a lot of positive responses and shares. I ended up changing the privacy settings so that more folks could see it.) Last Saturday, January 21, 2017, almost 3 million people (mostly women) around the world marched to protest, to show solidarity with each other, … Read more
Okay, I’m an engineer, a gearhead, a nerd. Glad we got that over with. Now, one of the things that engineers can’t stand is mathematics that you can’t do anything with. We learn a lot of math, but when the stuff is just esoteric and we can’t use it, it pisses us off (technical term). … Read more
Gordon Gecko, the movie foreshadowing of Mitt Romney, once captivated an audience with the simple statement, “Greed is good.” The premise was that being greedy clarified what you needed to do and as long as everyone was greedy at the same time, something better would be achieved. In the end, of course, Gecko is exposed … Read more
(I originally published this on Facebook on January 24, 2017, in an attempt to explain why a techie such as myself would concern themselves with politics and be worried about the state of the world. It got a lot of reposting, and so I thought it should be part of what is in this blog … Read more