It's the holiday season!

On a somewhat related note, I've managed to stump Akinator on a few famous engineers. One such example was Jack Ridley.

Akinator, the mind reading genie

Akinator can read your mind and tell you what character you are thinking of, as if by magic. Think of a real or fictional character, answer few questions, and Akinator will try to guess who it is. Will you dare challenge the genie? <link rel=
en.akinator.com
 
When I was a teenager I spent a couple of summers in Alaska with my grandpa, who rented an apartment to a civil engineer (I think) who was in town for a project. He said his dad liked to ask new-hire engineers to figure out how much concrete he’d need for his sidewalk project…it usually came out to several truckloads.:rofl:
 
MauleSkinner said:
When I was a teenager I spent a couple of summers in Alaska with my grandpa, who rented an apartment to a civil engineer (I think) who was in town for a project. He said his dad liked to ask new-hire engineers to figure out how much concrete he’d need for his sidewalk project…it usually came out to several truckloads.:rofl:
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Edison would hand new engineers the glass envelope from an electric light, and ask them what the internal volume was. They'd spend hours with calipers and calculations.

Then when they gave Edison the answer, he'd fill the envelope with water and pour it into a graduated flask. "Looks about right...."

Old engineering joke. The professor includes a question on the final exam, "How would you use a barometer to determine the height of a building?"

A student answers, "I would walk up to the building custodian, and say, 'I'll give you this fine barometer if you tell me how tall your building is.'"

The prof marks the answer wrong, and the student protests. The review board agrees with him, and requires the prof to reword the question.

The new question: "Showing the use of physics, how would you use a barometer to determine the height of a building?"

The new answer: "I would go to the top of the building, drop the barometer off the edge, and time its descent (T). Then, using 1/2 *G*T^2, I would calculate the height of the building."

The board gave it to him.

Ron Wanttaja
 
I love engineers. My dad was a mechanical/aeronautical engineer and my husband is an electrical engineer. I'm a scientist. I'm old enough that there were very few women in the physical sciences when I was starting out. Someone did a study and found that women physical scientists at the time were overwhelmingly daughters of engineers. (We were also overwhelmingly first children, but that's another story. Or not.)
 
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judypilot said:
Some did a study and found that women physical scientists at the time were overwhelmingly daughters of... engineers. (We were also overwhelmingly first children, but that's another story. Or not.)
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I half expected my (firstborn) daughter to become an engineer, but she ended up as a middle school science teacher. Close enough?

My second daughter is a nurse, and she was definitely born to that role.

Dana,
who was obviously an engineer from around age ten or earlier.
 
Half Fast said:
HAPPY NATIONAL ENGINEER'S WEEK, EVERYONE!
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In this day and age, are we still allowed to sing the song?
NoBShere said:
and without engineers, we wouldn't have this thread - https://www.pilotsofamerica.com/community/threads/na-over-engineered-improvements.150462/
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Before engineers, things were often much worse than over-engineered, they were just not engineered at all and as a result were horribly overbuilt.

For example, I once did some work on an old house that had a *14-inch-thick* solid concrete wall running across the basement. Way more structure than necessary. I needed to bore a 4-inch hole through it, took me 5 hours with a big two-handed Milwaukee hammer drill. Ugh.

Another example: There was a local building that needed to come down. It was maybe a dozen stories high and rectangular, and it had concrete walls on the edges and giant concrete columns in the middle. They wanted it to fall along its long axis, so they put explosives in three of the walls (both long and one short) and all of the columns a couple floors above ground. I heard about it and went down to watch. Law enforcement cleared the area, a siren sounded, there was a countdown and a bunch of explosions as they blew the walls and columns to bits.

The fourth wall held up the entire building. For a week. After which they just added more explosives to it to finally bring the thing down.
 
:) I seem to remember the army trying to blow up a bridge across the Ohio river like that in the 80's. If I remember it correctly, lots of explosives went off, the bridge went down about 10 or 20 feet or something, and completely jammed up the river. Stayed completely intact through the fall and landing.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
In this day and age, are we still allowed to sing the song?

Before engineers, things were often much worse than over-engineered, they were just not engineered at all and as a result were horribly overbuilt.

For example, I once did some work on an old house that had a *14-inch-thick* solid concrete wall running across the basement. Way more structure than necessary. I needed to bore a 4-inch hole through it, took me 5 hours with a big two-handed Milwaukee hammer drill. Ugh.

Another example: There was a local building that needed to come down. It was maybe a dozen stories high and rectangular, and it had concrete walls on the edges and giant concrete columns in the middle. They wanted it to fall along its long axis, so they put explosives in three of the walls (both long and one short) and all of the columns a couple floors above ground. I heard about it and went down to watch. Law enforcement cleared the area, a siren sounded, there was a countdown and a bunch of explosions as they blew the walls and columns to bits.

The fourth wall held up the entire building. For a week. After which they just added more explosives to it to finally bring the thing down.
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lol. Where to start, anecdote vs data or discuss a common sentiment of “things aren’t made the way they used to be”?
 
flyingcheesehead said:
In this day and age, are we still allowed to sing the song?
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Nobody? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godiva's_Hymn (Some NSFW language)

I don't recognize much but the first verse, though we had one verse that ended with a line very similar to the third one listed, and the song overall had more of a storyline to it than the disconnected verses they list here. For example, our second was:

She said I've come a long, long way, no man has come so far,
So take me off this bloody horse and get me to a bar!
The men who took her from her steed and stood her to a beer
Were a bloodshot-eyed surveyor and a drunken engineer.
 
I am a (retired) engineer. My parents were not surprised as I fixed everything that was broken in the house when I was growing up. My dad? He was a college professor, teaching small animal surgery at the vet school at WSU. My college advisor had been my Scoutmaster and was a member of our church. Small town, Pullman.
 
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