With Brian away on vacation, Adam, Carmen, and Jeff address issues and questions found on the “Engineering,” “Ask Engineers,” and “Ask Electronics” sub-Reddits.
Carmen is off on an immediate rant about finding brown M&Ms in his trailer this week, which is apparently a violation of his appearance rider.
Adam addresses a Reddit query about what engineering students should bring to college.
Jeff prefers the Staedtler Mars-Plastic eraser for correcting his work, while Carmen and Adam are fans of the eraser included in the Twist-Erase III mechanical pencil from Pentel.
If you’re going to be using a lot of engineering pad for recording your computations, Adam recommends buying a box (or splitting a case with others) as a Freshman.
A good backpack is an important investment for the college student, says Carmen. He recommends the Dakine Campus or Terminal backpacks.
Mechanical engineer Jack Reid joins Adam, Brian, Carmen and Jeff to discuss the philosophical aspects of engineering, and to review Samuel Florman’s book, “The Existential Pleasures of Engineering.”
Jeff is pretty sure his life is not a syllogism, although he’s not completely sure what the term means.
Our guest for this episode is Jack Reid, a mechanical engineer who recently graduated from Texas A&M with a dual degree in philosophy.
Jack notes that he had the opportunity to read Newton and Leibniz in his philosophy courses, as well as make use of their mathematical tools in his engineering classes.
Back in Episode 12, we talked about the Ethics program at Texas A&M; Jack took this class while studying abroad in Qatar, and found his international classmates provided beneficial insights on the subject.
One of the lessons of the Challenger explosion is that engineers need to recognize when to wear an “engineering hat” and when to wear a “management hat.”
Although repairs to the Citicorp Center had a positive outcome, the communications involved in implementing those repairs have made the project a classic case study for engineering ethics courses.
Brian suggests young engineers search for “engineering disasters” on YouTube, and watch the videos to learn about what can go wrong in engineering projects.
The Arabic word “wasta” has various meanings, including the use of one’s connections and/or influence to get things done.
Philosophy literally means “the love of wisdom,” and encompasses a number of sub-fields, including epistemology, logic, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics.
Metaphysics attempts to explain the fundamental nature of being, with the sub-category of ontology focusing on what entities exist or may be said to exist.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge, and what is knowable.
Aesthetics investigates the nature of beauty and taste.
Ethics considers how one should live life, and the meanings of right and wrong.
Considering reality ultimately unknowable, pragmatists consider thought a useful tool for progress and action, rather than a viable means for comprehending absolute truth.
Existentialism promotes the viewpoint that truth is found through being, and not through reasoning.
Publishing in the late 1700’s, Immanuel Kant moved philosophy from the abstract ideals of Plato and Aristotle into considering individual perceptions and free will.
Rationalism may be seen as the counterbalance to existentialism, in that rationalism views thought as the primary means for accessing truth.
Florman compares the engineer’s lot in life to that of Sisyphus, who was forever condemned to roll a large boulder to the top of a still hill, only to have the boulder roll back to the bottom each time the summit was approached.
In the book “Soul of a New Machine,” engineers talk about their work being like playing pinball, in that the reward for doing a good job is getting to work on another project.
Brian suggests the podcast team launch a Kickstarter project to create Utopia.
Listeners can contact our guest via email: jackbreid -=+ at +=- gmail.com.
Thanks to Kellar Wilson for use of the image titled “Anodized Golden Engineering Marvel.” Podcast theme music by Paul Stevenson.
Brian, Carmen, and Jeff discuss movies and TV shows they find inspiring or entertaining (or maybe just awful) from an engineer’s perspective in this episode of The Engineering Commons podcast!
Carmen recently “unplugged” his cable service, and will soon be using a Tablo device to record over-the-air TV programs.
The Martian is a soon-to-be-released movie (October 2015) that features a mechanical engineer as its protagonist. Carmen highly recommends the original sci-fi novel, and is hoping the movie lives up to his lofty expectations.
Brian is a fan of Real Genius, a 1985 movie starring Val Kilmer. The movie is set on a fictional college campus that is eerily reminiscent of Caltech, and depicts the operation of one honkin’ big (5 megawatt) laser!
As a kid, Jeff was fascinated by the scientific advances predicted on The 21st Century, a news show hosted by Walter Cronkite. Just look at what we thought the year 2000 would look like back in 1967!
Jeff was disappointed by the Dilbert animated television series, as he found the writing and voices incongruent with the Dilbert comic he enjoyed reading in the daily newspaper. Nonetheless, Jeff still likes the clip about Dilbert having an engineering “knack.”
Manufacturing processes are highlighted in the TV series How It’s Made. For example, a recent episode discussed pencil fabrication.
An HBO series about a startup company attempting to create a better data compression algorithm, Silicon Valley, has garnered Brian’s attention. An article about the show’s creator recently appeared in Wired Magazine.
Jeff remembers enjoying the old television series BattleBots, which after a 13 year hiatus is being resurrected in 2015 with new episodes.
Futurama is an animated sci-fi show that shares the trials and tribulations of one Philip J. Fry, who wakes up in the 31st century after being cryogenically frozen for a thousand years. The plot line of a Season 6 episode relies on a new math theorem.
Brian recommends a documentary about the promise of nuclear power, titled Pandora’s Promise.
Particle Fever is a 2013 documentary about experiments carried out at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.
Carmen recommends a set of three documentaries (each produced by Gary Hustwit): Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized.
An AMC television series about the 1980’s personal computer business premiered last year, titled Halt and Catch Fire. Brian enjoys the show’s ability to interweave drama with hard-core engineering.
The Pentagon Wars is a 1998 HBO movie that depicts the making of the M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The movie’s lessons about feature creep might be instructive to all engineers, says Brian.
Carmen enjoyed learning about the inner workings of a popular children’s toy in the documentary Inside Lego.
Swordfish is 2001 crime drama that Brian found “awful,” at least from a technical point of view.
Takedown is a 2009 movie about the U.S. government’s search for hacker Kevin Mitnick.
Thanks to Ángela Burón for use of the image titled “Incultura general.” Podcast theme music by Paul Stevenson.
With Brian away on vacation, Adam, Carmen, and Jeff address issues and questions found on the “Engineering,” “Ask Engineers,” and “Ask Electronics” sub-Reddits. 
