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How Everyday Things Are Made
OckNock writes "The Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing at Stanford University in conjunction with Design4x has released online courses on design and manufacturing that include over 4 hours of streaming video (Flashplayer required). Some of the topics include airplanes, crayons, and waterjet cutting.
If only they had this when I had studied mechanical engineering - maybe I would have stayed awake in class more."
When I was a kid, all you had to do was tune in Mr. Rogers to see crayons being made.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Seems alot like the MIT online courses earlier in the week. It's interesting but 4 hours on engineering isn't terribly helpful
This helped me a lot, watching the lectures of the inctructs that they tape is almost better than going to a real class
During this internet craze, I think a lot of techies have lost touch with the amazing techniques that we develop for designing and manufacturing all the physical things around us.
If you're an out of work geek, consider looking into the "old smoke-stack" industries for places where you could apply your software skills in helping companies improve margins through better automation and more efficient processes.
Some of the topics include airplanes, crayons, and waterjet cutting.
/me "borrows" candles blackout and emergency box ...
I was depressed after reading the story about tech jobs being
outsourced. But this new story suggests me a new career and I can already
see the light at the end of the tunnel. I am gonna become a World-Class
Crayon maker.
I learned about this sort of thing watching Mr. Wizard's World when I was a kid. I gained my interest in science watching this show.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I love it when places do this. I've always found it easiest to learn by watching someone else doing it, then copying, and then experimenting. I've learned basic cooking and baking, simple home repair and basic automotive repair this way all from tv. From there I usually realize I enjoy it, pick up a book or find a web site and get better at it. I'm currently in the middle of rebuilding a car using a manual a web forum and what I learned watching those hotrodding shows on TV saturday mornings. Now if only someone would release free videos of how to play with fiberglass and carbon fiber.
Take a look at http://www.howstuffworks.com/. There's a lot of explanations for just about anything.
it seemed to me like a crappily edited tape that theyed show to middle schoolers before a field trip. i watched the 'transportation / automobiles' and it was HORRIBLE. no mention of tolerances, or part placement. well no, the narator did say, "up it goes" when they put the engine in. this is hardly up to teh quality of MIT's open courseware, but hey, if perty colors is your idea of an education, go for it, im sure your 'accredited' degree is in the mail.
I want 2D games back.
I think for the out of work geeks, if they could've they would've and they wouldn't've (Bushism) been out of work geeks. Odd you should mention this, SecurityFocus' job list recently had a thread going on with people ranting about how bad the industry is. Personally I've found it's always good to know at least two other things to avoid falling into depression if the industry is bad and your out of work. I remember one of the threads where a CISSP certified guy was now cleaning airplanes, and he stated he was happier doing that, then being in the tech field.
Oh well on-topic comment now, pardon me for being the first to say this, but does anyone here honestly have 4 hours to sit through this? I would rather waste my four hours reading some crypto files, or learning something different. I think this may be good for teens, and younger kids, but I can't think of any reason to waste 4 hours, heck not even 1 hour, looking at a clip. If I want to learn about something I'll google it thank you. Now hopefully you can place some real 'News for nerds' this weekend there taco/michael/etc.
MoFscker
...it's a live action How Stuff Works? Neat.
Everything needs a little bit of Agent X, just so we could PowerPuff everything! Muahahahahaha!
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I dont see anything there about how babies are made
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Which means interesting and undestandable by anyone without specific prior knowledge. Their disclaimer says (with highlights added):
AIM has developed an introductory website showing how various items are made. It covers over 40 different products and manufacturing processes, and includes almost 4 hours of manufacturing video. It is targeted towards non-engineers and engineers alike. Think of it as your own private online factory tour, or a virtual factory tour, if you wish. We are able to cover only a small number of products and processes, but we believe it will give you a good introduction to the world of manufacturing.
You mean I've been lied to all these years.... stuff isn't made by tiny gnomes who live inside of everything?
That was back when you did not need to sign a NDA or EULA to get a propriatory player to learn something. Mr. Rodgers came to you via published standard broadcasting signal. Now you gotta have a silly flash player, tomorrow you will have to have a DRM OS and dissapearing files for the distributed memory hole and universal censorship to work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Booming in China, that is. It's so easy to exploit the poor bastards there with their wonderful centralized government. Once price pays all, all but the workers and engineers. Why pay 60,000 for a US process engineer when that might cover your entire Chinese or Russian payroll? Now that's sutting the doors but good. As long as there's money to be made selling stuff made by slave labor, labor will continue moving to non-free countries where wages can other expenses are kept low at gunpoint.
This will stabilize one way or another. We will take what we want from the rest of the world by force of arms or go broke when we run out of things to trade. Agribusiness giants will continue profiting from grain exports, the rest of us will go under when there's no one left to buy what we make and sell. The "service economy" is bullshit. Other people know and can do what we do.
Airplanes, crayons and all that. I wonder how old the archives are they used.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yeah, you should.
Then you wouldn't have to spend the rest of your life railing against capitalism. Ya eejit.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
For years I have been attentively reading these online "blogs." Recently, it came to my attention, however, that I could read one every morning without ever having to fire up my PC. All I have to do is look between my legs when I take my morning shit. Sometimes it even burns my eyes, like looking directly into the sun. For this reason, I have termed myself a "blog factory." I have also noticed a correlation between diet and the number of blog entries I can produce in a given day. Sometimes I am unable to produce blog entries for extended periods of time. I have termed this condition "gastric bloggage." Sometimes I check the factory output log and know that a blog entry has been produced, but when I look into the shipping area, it is gone. Sometimes when I walk down the street, a dog will produce a blog entry in front of me in some attempt to communicate. I shove the blog entry into my ears and eyes, but I am still unable to understand. One day though...
Alcohol & calculus don't mix. Never drink & derive.
Good luck. You are likely to be trampled by all the early retirement package, people from closed plants and layoffs who were hoping that this new fangled IT thing might make them useful again. People like me, who would be happy to have another job at a power plant. Manufacturing has been "contracting" in the US for the last 25 years. It's been moving to Mexico, Canada, East Europe and other places. Trade with China put that trend on th fast track. Big dumb companies have moved lots of IT offshore, engineering jobs took off with the factories and soon the consulting firms will have serious competition from them.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Does anyone know how chicken wire is made? The best I could come up with grows it one strand at a time widthwise (ie, along the ground, given its eventual orientation).
This just seems a bit slow.
...unless it doesn't.
We all have our moments...
Hope be with ye,
Cyan
"I only they had this when I had studied mechanical engineering - maybe I would have stayed awake in class more."
Stick to the crayons, dude. I wouldn't want to cross any bridges you "engineered."
Hahahahaha mate that's freakin' hilarious, no shit
This rather reminds me of HowStuffWorks.com - I've just noticed that they have done a site redesign. A whole lot of neat documents there...
HowStuffWorks always used to suck because of that popup that just would not go away. Looks like they got rid of it with they re-design. Cool, I might visit the site more often now!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
This is what it says in the upper-right corner of the screen.
Or is that only when played on Linux?
Increasing productivity increases wealth. Unfortunately, some people don't get it. For example, if you force redistribution of wealth to balance things out and screw it up by removing incentives to increase productivity, you often descrease productivity and hence destroy wealth.
Imagine back about 150 years ago when most of our society was agrarian. More than half of all labor went into producing food. Not a lot of luxuries back then. When automated farm equipment came out, a lot of farm hands lost their jobs. Was this a bad thing? Of course not. Because food became cheaper, jobs shifted to manufacturing where goods were produced to make people's lives easier, etc, etc...
When jobs shift to other countries, some wealth shifts there too. But usually the productivity gains are more than enough to offset the loss in wealth because there's more of it to go around. It also helps the lives of other people in other countries to improve. Is that such a bad thing? Having a billion people in this world just sitting around and not being productive is a horrible waste of the world's potential. They should be out there making cheap toys for Happy Meals damn it!
Beyond the economic benefits there are also other benefits. As each country's economy becomes dependent on others, they are less likely to take hostile action against each other (although introduce religion into the mix and all logic and sense goes out the window).
As was posted by someone else above, there are still opportunities in IT to increase productivity in workers in your native country. As I look around my job site now, I see a tremendous amount of time spent in desktop support issues. I think the current design of software and OSes really suck. Lack of security, viruses, software that, when installed, can negatively affect other software on a PC, user's mucking with and destroying settings on PCs, etc, etc. Too much time in IT is spent with desktop support issues, fixing software issues, supporting users and not finding ways to improve the business process and hence increase productivity all around. There's also a horrible lack in adequate training. There are software tools out there to help, but employees don't know how to use it. How many in management know how to use software to plan things using a project-planning program for example?
The first thing I thought of when I read the subject was closer to 'how everyday things are created,' a cause near and dear to my heart.
/.ers who haven't yet decided on a career) who find the manufacturing process interesting might also give a thought towards the industrial design aspect.
Manufacturing is fascinating stuff, but my wife is an industrial designer, and as a result I get to see the REALLY neat parts--the research/design/prototype/test process that feeds into manufacturing.
Not too many people thing about the work that goes into making a chair (for example) fit properly, but it's a complex process and one that requires a lot more engineering than people realise.
Nothing really important to say here--just thought that people (especially those younger
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I watched the harly davidson motorcycle manufacture and immediately saw ways for them to reduce up to 100 people in their manufacturing process through automation. I thought this was all done in the 1980s and 90s.
we learn how molten piles of server goo are made.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Have you ever wondered why a lonely middle-aged scientist such as Professor Utonium would try an experiment to create "perfect little girls"? It seems there are similar hints in just about any science-related show.
Sorry, but process engineering is a dead field right now.
I make a very tidy sum doing process customization and optimization for this "dead" industry, in a small city on the east coast. If you can make a process more efficient, there's always money to be made. I don't know about larger industries, but smaller companies have been a goldmine for me. I'm an EE with an embedded design specialty, and right now I have more projects than I can handle.
The pulp mills in the area are hiring qualified people as well.
I don't know about the sysadmin / IT thing though. You might have a point, but this is far from a dead field.
..don't panic
Dear, God! You're helping the terrorists! All citizens should restrict giving out information and allow the government to know everything and protect us. We should all live in holes in the ground with guns and wait for the bad people to come and then blammo! I'm scared. Hold me.
Wow, i had to read that twice before i caught the word wire. I was wondering how chickens could be grown one strand at a time.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Somewhat OT, but lately I've been interested in learning a bit of carpentry. Any slashdotter's recommendations of online tutorials about working with wood?
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
I found out by watching some hardcore pr0n at school.
Then again, there's a sizable portion of the population today that's never been inside a factory of any kind.
There used to be thousands of "industrial films", (many of which are online here), intended for instruction and used for advertising. Watching some of those will give you a good sense of how things were really made.
The following comment is neither deep nor original, but ...
:)
Waterjets are cool.
When I was small (too small to remember, but I've been back to the place), I lived in a house with central vacuum. Central vacuums always puzzle me; Sure, it's a bit lighter than carrying around a complete vac, but it seems to introduce fiddly bits in places (like walls) where trouble could become Trouble when something goes wrong, and introduces a much longer tube along which suction must be maintained.
However, waterjets are another story. Central waterjets would rock
Dremel? What's that, the 20th century? Forget about keeping a loaded pistol around for burglars, save that for the range and the black helicopters -- just have your water pressure set to "maim."
I'd like to see a Blofeld-type villain set up his elaborate death trap so the protagonist would be (if not rescued / escapes) sliced in pieces by a waterjet
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I would also recommend the television show How It's Made, which airs on Discovery Channel.
I like the original there better than that parody by the Kinks.
I didn't know that. Thank you for your post. I'd still rather use a machine put together by a machine than by a person. Once something is automated correctly I'd rather trust the machine than the human.