I dunno, I'm thinking at the combustion temperatures and rates they are likely dealing with, CO2 and H2O will be heavily favoured products. No NOx either.
Actually, paraffins are a broad class of hydrocarbons not just the familiar candle wax. Paraffins are characterized by having unsaturated C=C bonds, whereas olefins are all saturated C-C bonds. Not sure what kinds of paraffins would have the kind of energy density they would need for rocketry level thrust, maybe aromatics?
As a ChE, this is cool. But the really interesting part is the oxidizer (which they give no details on) and the nozzle. Vapourizing and mixing must be amazingly fast.
Not so much, really. Canadian and American engineering firms are respected enough that a lot of middle eastern countries hire us. It's knowledge work for the most part, I can do it for anywhere from anywhere. The odd trip to site might be required, but not many.
And I'd be only too happy if I worked myself out of an oil industry job. One of my specialties is energy efficiency, lots of transferable skills to any other industry.
Maybe in the tech industry, but not for what I do. Engineers with 20 years experience in refinery design and revamp are few and far between. And worth their weight in gold. Sure, as a recent grad I may know the computer based design stuff better than some of the older guys, but as I have learned the hard way "Two weeks of simulation can save you 5 minutes of thought."
Engineers with a ton of real-world design experience are an amazing asset, not just in my industry but aerospace, civil engineering, and most other "old" engineering disciplines. I definitely wouldn't generalize that all engineers get less valuable with time.
This article is a bit of an eye opener for me. I am an engineer, but in a "mature" industry. I design petroleum and chemical facilities, mainly oil refineries. In my industry, we have never been busier. Clean fuels legislation has been a boon to us, lots of work getting sulfur out of gasoline and diesel fuel. Early in my career, I looked wistfully at the mega-salaries and bonuses of colleagues in the computer industry. But now, those who I know who still have a job are admiring the stability I have. And that's not to say I'm not well compensated, it's just that my pay has progressed more slowly.
As far as knowledge having a half life, I'd have to agree. I work my butt off to stay current and know what clients will want before they do.
It seems to me that there still will be rewarding engineering careers in the computer and programming fields. I just think that the attractiveness of the industry became it's own worst enemy and drew a ton of talented people who would have been good at anything they put their minds to. I think as the tech industry matures, it will grow a more solid foundation that will give engineers good careers, but without the outrageous perks. Sure, they may feel like they have to join a more plebeian "real world". But really, it's not that bad.
4) To any other chicks out there who read/. and are close to applying for college... Olin has a 50:50 male to female ratio. You don't find that many other places.
Not as unusual as you may think, my chem eng graduating class was better than 50% female, civil about the same, mechanical maybe 30% female. The big disparity was in EE/CompEng, prolly 10% female. Which is likely most relevant to the/. crowd.
Not to be glib, but chemical engineers really don't learn, or need to know, a lot of chemistry. Thermodynamics sure, but I haven't looked at any chemical reactions in years. Maybe research guys do.
Not sure about the american accreditation process, but I had to go through this with my similar program here in Canada. I was in the first graduating class, and we couldn't get the program accredited until we actually had a class of students complete all the proposed curriculum. A bit of a nail biter, but we had all the technical courses of a regular degree so there really wasn't anything they could catch us on. One advantage of starting a program like this in an existing engineering school rather than starting one from scratch.
Can't get to the site, but it sounds exactly like the program I graduated from. I was in the first graduating class, and I have to say if it wasn't for this program I would have never finished my engineering education.
The Engineering and Society program at McMaster is a 5 year program instead of the usual 4 for a standard engineering degree. You still "belong" to a particular branch of engineering (chemical in my case), but you spread the technical portion of your education over the entire 5 years, freeing up time for other areas of study. I studied anthropology and philosophy outside of engineering, as well as a number of targetted Engineering and Society courses on social impacts of technology, environmental issues, history of technology, etc. And these were far from bird courses, critical thought was stressed and the work load was high. Math and physics were for the most part easy for me, defending my arguments critically was hard. But it is the skill I took from university that I am most proud of.
For me, it was the best education I could have had. I'm good at the technical part, and always wanted to have a career in engineering. But I always had in mind that sometimes technology doesn't always make the world a better place. I think that as engineers, we need to have a broader world view of how what we do affects the world around us. Both the human societies and environment. Engineering education requires a huge amount of content, and in order to pack it all into 4 years, there isn't much room for anything else.
I think that anyone looking to get into engineering should look closely at programs like this, the extra year may seem like a lot now but the rewards in the end may far outweigh it.
Another article I read indicated a fuel consumption of about 2 oz. per hour. Using a nominal 40 hr of flying time, 80 oz =.625 gal. Which would be about 3.5 - 4 lb of fuel. Nice fuel consumption of 1900 miles per 0.625 gal or 3000+ mpg!!!
People are laughing at you not with you? God sysadmins are so pitiful. Yay for you, you have the root passwords. You can 0wn my workstation. You can play Quake at work. How nice. Luckily those of us who actually do the work contribute to the profitability of the company, rather than the overhead. Oh, and take that sign on your door saying I can't talk to you directly and shove it up your ass. Call the help desk? Yeah, nothing I like better than explaining to those monkeys how to do their job. Now admittedly, there are some very professional sysadmins out there who can save your ass. But most of the ones I work with are self-important jag-offs of dubious usefulness. God that felt good, burning karma is almost as stress relieving as drinking.
You mean the Fairchild Channel F? The controllers were way ahead of their time, joystick that you could twist and move up and down. Picked one up for about $10 a few years ago, had no idea what it was.
Yes, but we are notoriously bad at coming up with digital storage mediums that are readable after 20 years (have you seen an 8" disk drive lately?) or that are stable for extended periods (CD's). Even hard drives require a certain amount of ongoing maintenence to keep entropy at bay. But written text can easily survive thousands of years with minimal upkeep costs.
Maybe just to play devils advocate here, but is there anything on the web that is historically significant that is not also in a more permanent (say, dead tree) format? I'll agree that the Internet is important, but in the scope of history I would think that the structure would be of more interest than the content.
Wow, such a shame he is gone. Have been reading his books for over 10 years, and he is the best I have ever seen at conveying difficult scientific concepts simply. I've often thought that as our society moves towards trusting more and more complex science and technology, the need for informed scientists and engineers who can clearly convey new ideas to the public increases substantially. Despite some cynics who contend the contrary, I believe that the public wants to be informed and engaged in technological decision making. Sadly, I have seen few who can do this well and SJ Gould was one of them.
Rest in peace Mr. Gould, you truly inspired some of the direction I've taken in my life.
You know, I've been seeing that coloured scroll bar thing more and more lately. The New Yorker even has it. I must be missing something, but what is the purpose? How does this enhance my experience?
Maybe I'll try out the 1.0 release anyway, although it will have to be pretty impressive. The previous versions I looked at did little to convince me to give up OmniWeb.
Love that game! Bought a brand new set at Canadian Tire last spring. Was really surprised to see it, thought they stopped making it eons ago. Or banned it like lawn darts - my other favourite backyard game from back in the day.
Was thinking more of peripherals. FW drives, etc. Thanks for the link, couple of promising leads there.
Basing my pessimism on not getting an Apple store on how long it took to get the www.apple.ca store. That, and I am in Calgary which would probably be about the 4th place in Canada to get one.
The margins for retailers on Mac's are pitiful, and commision for sales people in the big box retailers follow suit. I honestly wonder how the small "Mac only" retailers where I live actually pay the bills.
Getting slightly off topic, since there is exzctly zero chance of ever seeing an Apple Store in Canada, can anyone recommend a good online source for Macs and peripherals in Canada? I hate the customs hassles of buying stuff from the states.
Yep, last plant I worked at was fairly isolated and had it's own water treatment plant. One system for plant water and one system for "people" water. One was 100x the size of the other, guess which. An interesting thing I saw in Saudi Arabia (where water is a bit harder to come by) is that even households have two separate water supplies. One for drinking and one for laundry, flushing toilets, lawns, etc. Much less water has to be treated to drinking water quality. The problem with infrastructure (as evidenced by this article) is that in most peoples minds, it is fixed. Even the people responsible for running it have a lot of inertia to overcome to change things.
Roman aquaducts seem to be lasting 20 times as long as this. Silly capitalism.:)
Seriously, crumbling infrastructure is only part of the reason that I see water getting (comparitively) real expensive in our lifetime. As source waters get more scarce and contaminated treatment costs go up. Plus the infrastructure is just wearing out. And since governments (at least in N. America) seem loathe to raise taxes, the costs are going to be passed on to the end user. Which I really don't think is a bad thing, once people realize the real costs of the resources they take for granted, conservation should go way up.
So yeah, flame me for being a tree hugger. Some are passionate about linux, I'm passionate about water.
Actually, I'd have to say you do pay to walk to the store. Taxes paid for the roads and sidewalks you walk on, plus the maintenence of them.
Having said that, maybe you are on to something. If the government provided universal bandwidth, then the notion of paying for content would be more palatable.
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I dunno, I'm thinking at the combustion temperatures and rates they are likely dealing with, CO2 and H2O will be heavily favoured products. No NOx either.
Actually, paraffins are a broad class of hydrocarbons not just the familiar candle wax. Paraffins are characterized by having unsaturated C=C bonds, whereas olefins are all saturated C-C bonds. Not sure what kinds of paraffins would have the kind of energy density they would need for rocketry level thrust, maybe aromatics?
As a ChE, this is cool. But the really interesting part is the oxidizer (which they give no details on) and the nozzle. Vapourizing and mixing must be amazingly fast.
Not so much, really. Canadian and American engineering firms are respected enough that a lot of middle eastern countries hire us. It's knowledge work for the most part, I can do it for anywhere from anywhere. The odd trip to site might be required, but not many.
And I'd be only too happy if I worked myself out of an oil industry job. One of my specialties is energy efficiency, lots of transferable skills to any other industry.
Maybe in the tech industry, but not for what I do. Engineers with 20 years experience in refinery design and revamp are few and far between. And worth their weight in gold. Sure, as a recent grad I may know the computer based design stuff better than some of the older guys, but as I have learned the hard way "Two weeks of simulation can save you 5 minutes of thought."
Engineers with a ton of real-world design experience are an amazing asset, not just in my industry but aerospace, civil engineering, and most other "old" engineering disciplines. I definitely wouldn't generalize that all engineers get less valuable with time.
This article is a bit of an eye opener for me. I am an engineer, but in a "mature" industry. I design petroleum and chemical facilities, mainly oil refineries. In my industry, we have never been busier. Clean fuels legislation has been a boon to us, lots of work getting sulfur out of gasoline and diesel fuel. Early in my career, I looked wistfully at the mega-salaries and bonuses of colleagues in the computer industry. But now, those who I know who still have a job are admiring the stability I have. And that's not to say I'm not well compensated, it's just that my pay has progressed more slowly.
As far as knowledge having a half life, I'd have to agree. I work my butt off to stay current and know what clients will want before they do.
It seems to me that there still will be rewarding engineering careers in the computer and programming fields. I just think that the attractiveness of the industry became it's own worst enemy and drew a ton of talented people who would have been good at anything they put their minds to. I think as the tech industry matures, it will grow a more solid foundation that will give engineers good careers, but without the outrageous perks. Sure, they may feel like they have to join a more plebeian "real world". But really, it's not that bad.
4) To any other chicks out there who read /. and are close to applying for college... Olin has a 50:50 male to female ratio. You don't find that many other places.
/. crowd.
Not as unusual as you may think, my chem eng graduating class was better than 50% female, civil about the same, mechanical maybe 30% female. The big disparity was in EE/CompEng, prolly 10% female. Which is likely most relevant to the
Not to be glib, but chemical engineers really don't learn, or need to know, a lot of chemistry. Thermodynamics sure, but I haven't looked at any chemical reactions in years. Maybe research guys do.
Not sure about the american accreditation process, but I had to go through this with my similar program here in Canada. I was in the first graduating class, and we couldn't get the program accredited until we actually had a class of students complete all the proposed curriculum. A bit of a nail biter, but we had all the technical courses of a regular degree so there really wasn't anything they could catch us on. One advantage of starting a program like this in an existing engineering school rather than starting one from scratch.
Can't get to the site, but it sounds exactly like the program I graduated from. I was in the first graduating class, and I have to say if it wasn't for this program I would have never finished my engineering education.
The Engineering and Society program at McMaster is a 5 year program instead of the usual 4 for a standard engineering degree. You still "belong" to a particular branch of engineering (chemical in my case), but you spread the technical portion of your education over the entire 5 years, freeing up time for other areas of study. I studied anthropology and philosophy outside of engineering, as well as a number of targetted Engineering and Society courses on social impacts of technology, environmental issues, history of technology, etc. And these were far from bird courses, critical thought was stressed and the work load was high. Math and physics were for the most part easy for me, defending my arguments critically was hard. But it is the skill I took from university that I am most proud of.
For me, it was the best education I could have had. I'm good at the technical part, and always wanted to have a career in engineering. But I always had in mind that sometimes technology doesn't always make the world a better place. I think that as engineers, we need to have a broader world view of how what we do affects the world around us. Both the human societies and environment. Engineering education requires a huge amount of content, and in order to pack it all into 4 years, there isn't much room for anything else.
I think that anyone looking to get into engineering should look closely at programs like this, the extra year may seem like a lot now but the rewards in the end may far outweigh it.
Another article I read indicated a fuel consumption of about 2 oz. per hour. Using a nominal 40 hr of flying time, 80 oz = .625 gal. Which would be about 3.5 - 4 lb of fuel.
Nice fuel consumption of 1900 miles per 0.625 gal or 3000+ mpg!!!
People are laughing at you not with you?
God sysadmins are so pitiful. Yay for you, you have the root passwords. You can 0wn my workstation. You can play Quake at work. How nice. Luckily those of us who actually do the work contribute to the profitability of the company, rather than the overhead.
Oh, and take that sign on your door saying I can't talk to you directly and shove it up your ass. Call the help desk? Yeah, nothing I like better than explaining to those monkeys how to do their job.
Now admittedly, there are some very professional sysadmins out there who can save your ass. But most of the ones I work with are self-important jag-offs of dubious usefulness.
God that felt good, burning karma is almost as stress relieving as drinking.
You mean the Fairchild Channel F? The controllers were way ahead of their time, joystick that you could twist and move up and down. Picked one up for about $10 a few years ago, had no idea what it was.
Yes, but we are notoriously bad at coming up with digital storage mediums that are readable after 20 years (have you seen an 8" disk drive lately?) or that are stable for extended periods (CD's). Even hard drives require a certain amount of ongoing maintenence to keep entropy at bay. But written text can easily survive thousands of years with minimal upkeep costs.
Maybe just to play devils advocate here, but is there anything on the web that is historically significant that is not also in a more permanent (say, dead tree) format? I'll agree that the Internet is important, but in the scope of history I would think that the structure would be of more interest than the content.
Wow, such a shame he is gone. Have been reading his books for over 10 years, and he is the best I have ever seen at conveying difficult scientific concepts simply. I've often thought that as our society moves towards trusting more and more complex science and technology, the need for informed scientists and engineers who can clearly convey new ideas to the public increases substantially. Despite some cynics who contend the contrary, I believe that the public wants to be informed and engaged in technological decision making. Sadly, I have seen few who can do this well and SJ Gould was one of them.
Rest in peace Mr. Gould, you truly inspired some of the direction I've taken in my life.
You know, I've been seeing that coloured scroll bar thing more and more lately. The New Yorker even has it. I must be missing something, but what is the purpose? How does this enhance my experience?
Maybe I'll try out the 1.0 release anyway, although it will have to be pretty impressive. The previous versions I looked at did little to convince me to give up OmniWeb.
Love that game! Bought a brand new set at Canadian Tire last spring. Was really surprised to see it, thought they stopped making it eons ago. Or banned it like lawn darts - my other favourite backyard game from back in the day.
Was thinking more of peripherals. FW drives, etc. Thanks for the link, couple of promising leads there.
Basing my pessimism on not getting an Apple store on how long it took to get the www.apple.ca store. That, and I am in Calgary which would probably be about the 4th place in Canada to get one.
The margins for retailers on Mac's are pitiful, and commision for sales people in the big box retailers follow suit. I honestly wonder how the small "Mac only" retailers where I live actually pay the bills.
Getting slightly off topic, since there is exzctly zero chance of ever seeing an Apple Store in Canada, can anyone recommend a good online source for Macs and peripherals in Canada? I hate the customs hassles of buying stuff from the states.
Yep, last plant I worked at was fairly isolated and had it's own water treatment plant. One system for plant water and one system for "people" water. One was 100x the size of the other, guess which.
An interesting thing I saw in Saudi Arabia (where water is a bit harder to come by) is that even households have two separate water supplies. One for drinking and one for laundry, flushing toilets, lawns, etc. Much less water has to be treated to drinking water quality.
The problem with infrastructure (as evidenced by this article) is that in most peoples minds, it is fixed. Even the people responsible for running it have a lot of inertia to overcome to change things.
Roman aquaducts seem to be lasting 20 times as long as this. Silly capitalism. :)
Seriously, crumbling infrastructure is only part of the reason that I see water getting (comparitively) real expensive in our lifetime. As source waters get more scarce and contaminated treatment costs go up. Plus the infrastructure is just wearing out. And since governments (at least in N. America) seem loathe to raise taxes, the costs are going to be passed on to the end user. Which I really don't think is a bad thing, once people realize the real costs of the resources they take for granted, conservation should go way up.
So yeah, flame me for being a tree hugger. Some are passionate about linux, I'm passionate about water.
OK, just to add to the pedantic comments. Smoke is solid, really small solid particles suspended in a gas. :-)
Perhaps because Apple has deeper pockets?
Actually, I'd have to say you do pay to walk to the store. Taxes paid for the roads and sidewalks you walk on, plus the maintenence of them.
Having said that, maybe you are on to something. If the government provided universal bandwidth, then the notion of paying for content would be more palatable.
All the best and much future happiness.