Except in an engineering sense. It is actually funny but I ran into someone that was offended about things like retard valves or retardant devices. They thought that all of those devices should be renamed to be more culturally sensitive.
Think of what it is like to live here as an engineer. It is even more depressing, worse is when you run into these people at work.:(
I have been a programmer for 10 years and the this whole push for less education and worse education is really hurting businesses at all levels. It is so amazing to me that older workers seem to fairly quickly pick up how to use a system and they use it effectively while newer people have mostly been failing at it. Worse they say it does not work the way some system that is for an entirely different purpose works and they will refuse to learn it at all or just say it is too hard.
That is not entirely true. Recent research has found that some epigenetic markers if set on the mother will also end up being set on children. Some of these markers can propagate. Epigenetics is such a new and interesting thing that it will be a while before we can really say what is likely to be passed on, what is not and why.
It is only recently that the idea that type 2 diabetes is an epigenetic marker has come about. If we can actually isolate it to a marker we could probably "cure" it but the issue is complex. If we used some custom virus to remove the marker the type 2 diabetes would go away but the same diet that caused the marker to be there in the first place would likely put it there again. We also don't know what that would do. Your biology probably put the marker there for a reason and removing it could cause more harm than good. The coolest thing is we will probably know the answer to this one within 5 years.
This is the part that most people don't understand at all. What they see of evolution is what they where taught in a basic biology class. Evolution has mathematical models that requires understanding of things like differential equations. Those models work extremely well and allow us to bionengineer some pretty amazing stuff. I don't think most people realize how advanced things are getting and how quickly.
13 years ago making custom genetically engineered bacteria and viruses was science fiction. For the last 8 years or so now we have actually been doing it in things like iGEM competitions.
It is just sad that people think that all evolution says is the extremely dumbed down version they where taught in high school. I can also poke holes in a lot of basic chemistry and physics but that does not make things like relativity wrong or some of the models on how chemical reactions occur wrong. It just means that the versions taught in basic science classes are too divorced from the actual theories they are based on.
At some level I don't think we can really avoid this problem. Unless we teach everyone up through calculus 3, differential equations and linear algebra there is no way they can understand the mathematical basis of most science. Without that understanding they will continue to trash the dumbed down versions and they attack those who try to say there is most to it than they understand.
Even worse if you have your engineers learn form textbooks based on religion your infrastructure and new developments will fail pretty quickly.
I can't even imagine how someone could do bioengineering if they did not learn how stuff really works and instead learned the whole creation idea instead or the more modern creation idea, intelligent design. How would you figure out mutation rates, crossing to other species, mutations and the side effects of those etc if you never learned how evolution really works?
The problem is that you can't teach a complete enough version of evolution to someone in high school or heck even most college students because they don't have the math background for it. It is pretty easy to poke holes in the version that is dumbed down to be taught to people without a hard science background.
Heck you can pretty easily poke holes in a lot of the science people are taught in school and it is not because the science is that poor, it is because it is dumbed down to be taught.
So a high school student being able to poke holes in evolution is not something I consider a real challenge since any biologist or engineer can poke holes in the biology they had to learn in high school or most had to learn in college. However that is not an actual attack against modern evolution as a theory.
Actually changing an ape to a human requires very very few DNA changes. For instance we share about 99% of our DNA with bonobos.
Very minor changes in DNA can have very large impacts in final structure. One of the interesting finds recently is that at some point in the past part of our DNA was essentially damaged that massively weakened our jaw muscles. As a result our skulls did not solidify completely as early. As a result of that our brains grew bigger and it turned out this was a pretty major competitive advantage.
DNA also turns out to work on something like a fractal concept. Humans have about 20K genes total and that number has actually slowly been revised down a number of times. Our DNA has patterns in it for how cell grow and branch but not an exact schematic. What that means is that a very minor change can have a huge impact.
DNA across basically every species on earth is pretty much compatible. We can take out a gene in humans to make insulin and put it in yeast and the yeast will then make human insulin. We can take genes that allow fireflies to glow out and stick it in other species and allow them to glow.
Also one of the big problems is that the theory of evolution taught to most people in highschool is essentially wrong because it has to be simplified too much to allow it to be taught to people in highschool. Like many things in education when you simplify something too much it ends up with a lot of holes. The holes are not there in the most complete explanations but unless you have taken math up through differential equations you are not going to understand it so those parts get left out. Evolution does work though and we even use it to calculate how long it will take to evolve drug resistance. That is something I have really enjoyed about some of the bioengineering classes. You learn a lot about how much BS was in the lower level classes in order to make stuff more understandable to people.
I would say that most of what people are taught about science is basically incorrect because of simplifications.
On the other hand since your body is mostly water you can absorb a LOT of energy.
So long as your energy transfer rate with conduction and convection in an area are higher than your heating from radiation due to the cellphone you won't have any heating in the surrounding area. From what I can find human skin has a thermal conductivity about.37 W/(m K). That should easily be enough to keep up with a cellphone and that is without convection which is much higher.
I just don't see how a cell phone can physically heat you up.
How would you even correct for the changes in technology over time?
Maybe early cell phones did have problems but those giant analog things are also gone. The point is that it would no longer matter if you could figure out that a piece of technology that has been dead for more than 10 years could cause problems if anyone wanted to go to a museum and get one again.
The point is that this kind of study would be basically impossible to do long term since you would have to a group of people that stay with the same cellphone technology for a very very long time. In another 10 years the things called cell phones will have little resemblance to what we have now and will likely be another order of magnitude lower energy usage.
You can understand something without memorizing it. There are hundreds of equations involved in various ways of doing heat transfers. You don't have to remember them all to understand how to use them correctly. If you know your situation is laminar fluid flow through a pipe you can look up the appropriate equations. The important part is learning and understanding hows and whys of heat transfer.
You can also measure the progress of students by giving them real problems to solve. Something that requires applying the knowledge they have gained. Most of my engineers classes have two hour exams with 4 problems and everything is open book, notes, calculator etc. You are given real problems to solve that are unlike problems you have done before. You have to figure out how to apply your knowledge to solve the problem. Memorization does not help you for squat on those exams. Understanding is the only thing that will help you on those exams.
What I have seen is that even though I scored extremely well in standardized tests they do a very poor job of measuring skills.
More and more the way we test people is becoming divorced from the reality that we live in.
Mostly though standardized tests focus too much on memorization. Memorization is NOT learning it is just easy to test. You can be great at solving real problems but if you have a poor memory you will do badly on these exams while doing well in actual life problems.
One nice thing about the FE exam is that it is not a memorization based exam. You are given a book with equations, tables etc.
The computer is also valuable for data simulation. If you want to do a liquid-liquid extraction or run a distillation column where your species are not independent the math is just too long and complex for a human to solve in any reasonable time span and with any real accuracy. It would take weeks to solve one of those problems that a computer can solve in seconds.
If you want to make a lot of approximations you can solve it far more rapidly but for a production system those approximations are not a good idea.
The really big problems come when you get to a full process system where you have reaction, separation and many parts. You quickly get beyond what any human can calculate correctly.
The engineer has to know how to setup those problems, they have to know the basics of how to solve any given part but when you have 20+ components the material balances alone end up being ridiculous, much less the energy balance when you start factoring in things like using waste heat from one stream to help heat up another stream.
Even for a simple multicomponent vapor-liquid single stage flash distillation you can solve a problem in excel that is very useful that is just not viable to do by hand. Solving the same problem by hand is 10s to thousands of iterations to solve. Once you know how to setup the problem there is no need to actually compete with it, Put the problem in and let it solve it.
I do suspect though that the kinds of problems that mechanical engineers solve and chemical engineers solve though are different. It does work well for cheme stuff from the practicing engineers I have worked with all pretty much all the tools for cheme stuff integrate with excel. HYSYS is amazing, but god is it complex.
I do have to give Excel a lot of credit though for being very good at engineering tasks. I have tried to use openoffice but it is just missing too many of the engineering type tools. The excel solver is VERY good and excel has a bunch of stats stuff needed.
Excel can even be integrated with various engineering tools like HYSYS or Matlab and do some truly amazing things. I do like openoffice but I also have to be realistic that for engineering tasks you need to learn excel. My professors all expect us to use Excel, Matlab, HYSYS and other tools for our homework. If you don't know how to use those tools the odds are you won't pass the class. The problems are too complex to solve by hand and while you can use any other tool you want the odds of doing it well enough to solve the problems is pretty low.
A regular user does not need even a tiny fraction of the power that excel has and could easily use even stuff like google docs.
One way or another education is going to radically change in the next 20 years. Schools are either going to adapt to more modern technology or at least the colleges will be replaced because they are so darned expensive. Something like the khan academy or other online learning systems are not any worse and usually far better than any of the large lecture classes.
I disagree entirely at the college level at least.
For engineering classes if you can't solve a problem with a computer you are not a very useful engineer and the way you solve problems on a computer is a learned skill. Just knowing how to solve a problem by hand with a LOT of the simplifications needed to solve a problem by hand help in any way at all for solving a real problem with a simulation program like HYSYS.
Heck knowing how to solve a problem by hand does not even translate very well to solve the same kinds of problems in Excel much less Matlab but with far fewer assumptions. Many of the students in my class are having a very hard time with the homework because we have mostly moved beyond hand solvable problems and they don't have the computer skills necessary to solve them effectively on computers. Even the exams seem to be slowly changing to more setup and understanding.
Even the law expects engineers to look stuff up instead of going from memory. Memorization has no real place in learning anymore. You need to learn how to work with technology effectively to solve problems. If you define yourself based on competing with computers you are going to lose badly.
It works the same in every area of life. You get what you incentivize not what you profess to believe or support.
It is why people cheat in college classes. Many are memory based classes and are designed to encourage cheating regardless of what the professors claim to support.
Anywhere in society you see behavior other than what you want or think the system should have it is because you are giving an incentive for that behavior and no amount of rule changing is going to fix that.
That is why we have can harsh anti-drug laws, anti-cheating codes of conduct, laws about what companies can do etc but as long as the reward is greater than any penalty and the odds of being caught are low people will do what makes the most sense.
Some people do learn though. I see less cheating in engineering classes where the exams are open book, notes, calculator, previous exams etc because it does not do any good. The exams are purely about understanding.
For memorization based classes I see people using Adderall and other drugs to do well in the class and damned be any future consequences. Universities can even say it is bad that people use drugs to pass those classes but nothing they say will really stop it. Mostly the problem is that in the short term the drugs work, you do better in class and people don't care about long term damage.
Most chemistry departments might as well be sponsored by Adderall given how much memorization I see in them. The sad things is so many people studying to become doctors while they damage their brains to do well in tests in the short term.
Heh, most of the engineering students I know don't even go out on dates at all. Classes take up far too much time and energy to want to deal with dating.
However most of the ones I know that have graduated don't have ANY problems with dates. Unlike many other degrees they have well paid jobs.
I do think we are near a low point right now but I think things are looking very good for the future.
I think that biotech/nanotech are going to fundamentally change the way we do things on this planet and will be as disruptive as the industrial revolution was and the USA is well positioned to take advantage of it.
Actually I think we are due for a change in economic systems.
Our automation is continuing to grow faster and faster and more people are ending up out of work that actually have very good educations they are just not needed anymore. Some of the companies I have been working with are having some of their best years every but they continue to lay people off because of automation.
I don't think this is any cause for sadness or alarm though. No system lasts forever and we have had many economic systems and we will have many more. Our current system is just no longer stable given our current technology and so a new balance will be struck.
I really doubt though that having ever greater numbers of people is going to be desirable moving forward and hopefully our next economic system will help balance that.
I don't really know what our next economic system will look like just that it won't be what we have now. Change is interesting and it should be fun to see how the world changes as technology continues to develop. Things that took billions of dollars and a decade of work like the human genome project can now be done more accurately in about an hour for $1K. Things that used to be considered impossible just 10 years ago you can now find for sale.
The world is changing more rapidly than any other time in history and it is fun to see it change and see where you can help.
Our cybernetics and regeneration are improving at insane rates. I am easily young enough to see these advancements extend my life in order to work on further advancements.
Overall I would prefer to replace body parts with cybernetic parts than organic upgrades.
I don't accept that we should see this as inevitable. We are learning a lot very rapidly about nanotech and biotech and some of those advances are in the fields of things like regeneration, cures, and life extension.
I fully intend to work on developing this technology and trying to fix this problem. Just because our DNA is built this way doesn't mean that we can change it.
Bioengineering and Nanoengineering are going to be some of the coolest things to do for a long time to come.
This is the big thing. I would love a tablet that I can take real notes on. Especially one where I can enter mathematical notes.
Every tablet I have looked at has been very bad to taking notes on. They just don't have the accuracy required. This tablet even runs a full windows of windows which means I could take notes and still use applications like matlab and excel.
I am pretty glad flash is dieing also. Even with all the hardware acceleration turned on for a Windows 7 laptop flash kills my battery life. I get about 8-9 ours of normal usage from my laptop. With flash it drops to 4 hours or less. I have no idea why it sucks down so much battery time but even fallout 3 doesn't drain the battery as fast which is insane.
I have an AMD llano laptop that also has a dedicated 6750M graphics card in it also. While just playing flash video the AMD software shows me the dedicated card is completely off, the igpu in the llano chip is barely work and the cpu is doing a lot of work.
If I play the same video on youtube with the html 5 player I see almost no cpu usage, no dedicatd gpu usage and very low igpu usage and a very small impact on battery life.
Flash just has too large of a negative impact on the system. If adobe could fix that I would not mind as much but even the absolute latest versions still have these problems.
I do think we need something less than the full responsibility for an engineer for a lot of software at least.
However the VAST majority of software problems are just idiotic things. Simple things like SQL injection exploits that should not be happening at all anymore. I know that software is not going to be bullet proof but that doesn't mean that some fairly small amounts of extra work would not have huge gains for people using the software.
Even if programmers we just trained to the same standards but not held to quite the same standards it would help a lot. So you would not be liable for some complex issue but not bounds checking, writing obviously inject-able code etc would get you in trouble.
Too much of the software out there is just bad period. The people writing it are very clearly not qualified to do it. How many times do we need to see the same kind of exploit over and over and over again until there is some responsibility and fixes?
Software is not designed at least not the ways that engineers use the word designed.
It would be nice if software was designed like a chemical process is or a bridge is etc. However the education required to learn how to properly design things is HARD. There is a reason that Computer Science is often considered a slacker engineering degree compared to the other engineering degrees.
Software would be harder to do and require more qualifications to do it. It would also work correctly far more often. Right now we are in the wild west of programming. In time that will change and it will become a regular engineering profession.
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Except in an engineering sense. It is actually funny but I ran into someone that was offended about things like retard valves or retardant devices. They thought that all of those devices should be renamed to be more culturally sensitive.
Think of what it is like to live here as an engineer. It is even more depressing, worse is when you run into these people at work. :(
I have been a programmer for 10 years and the this whole push for less education and worse education is really hurting businesses at all levels. It is so amazing to me that older workers seem to fairly quickly pick up how to use a system and they use it effectively while newer people have mostly been failing at it. Worse they say it does not work the way some system that is for an entirely different purpose works and they will refuse to learn it at all or just say it is too hard.
That is not entirely true. Recent research has found that some epigenetic markers if set on the mother will also end up being set on children. Some of these markers can propagate. Epigenetics is such a new and interesting thing that it will be a while before we can really say what is likely to be passed on, what is not and why.
It is only recently that the idea that type 2 diabetes is an epigenetic marker has come about. If we can actually isolate it to a marker we could probably "cure" it but the issue is complex. If we used some custom virus to remove the marker the type 2 diabetes would go away but the same diet that caused the marker to be there in the first place would likely put it there again. We also don't know what that would do. Your biology probably put the marker there for a reason and removing it could cause more harm than good. The coolest thing is we will probably know the answer to this one within 5 years.
This is the part that most people don't understand at all. What they see of evolution is what they where taught in a basic biology class. Evolution has mathematical models that requires understanding of things like differential equations. Those models work extremely well and allow us to bionengineer some pretty amazing stuff. I don't think most people realize how advanced things are getting and how quickly.
13 years ago making custom genetically engineered bacteria and viruses was science fiction. For the last 8 years or so now we have actually been doing it in things like iGEM competitions.
It is just sad that people think that all evolution says is the extremely dumbed down version they where taught in high school. I can also poke holes in a lot of basic chemistry and physics but that does not make things like relativity wrong or some of the models on how chemical reactions occur wrong. It just means that the versions taught in basic science classes are too divorced from the actual theories they are based on.
At some level I don't think we can really avoid this problem. Unless we teach everyone up through calculus 3, differential equations and linear algebra there is no way they can understand the mathematical basis of most science. Without that understanding they will continue to trash the dumbed down versions and they attack those who try to say there is most to it than they understand.
Even worse if you have your engineers learn form textbooks based on religion your infrastructure and new developments will fail pretty quickly.
I can't even imagine how someone could do bioengineering if they did not learn how stuff really works and instead learned the whole creation idea instead or the more modern creation idea, intelligent design. How would you figure out mutation rates, crossing to other species, mutations and the side effects of those etc if you never learned how evolution really works?
The problem is that you can't teach a complete enough version of evolution to someone in high school or heck even most college students because they don't have the math background for it. It is pretty easy to poke holes in the version that is dumbed down to be taught to people without a hard science background.
Heck you can pretty easily poke holes in a lot of the science people are taught in school and it is not because the science is that poor, it is because it is dumbed down to be taught.
So a high school student being able to poke holes in evolution is not something I consider a real challenge since any biologist or engineer can poke holes in the biology they had to learn in high school or most had to learn in college. However that is not an actual attack against modern evolution as a theory.
Actually changing an ape to a human requires very very few DNA changes. For instance we share about 99% of our DNA with bonobos.
Very minor changes in DNA can have very large impacts in final structure. One of the interesting finds recently is that at some point in the past part of our DNA was essentially damaged that massively weakened our jaw muscles. As a result our skulls did not solidify completely as early. As a result of that our brains grew bigger and it turned out this was a pretty major competitive advantage.
DNA also turns out to work on something like a fractal concept. Humans have about 20K genes total and that number has actually slowly been revised down a number of times. Our DNA has patterns in it for how cell grow and branch but not an exact schematic. What that means is that a very minor change can have a huge impact.
DNA across basically every species on earth is pretty much compatible. We can take out a gene in humans to make insulin and put it in yeast and the yeast will then make human insulin. We can take genes that allow fireflies to glow out and stick it in other species and allow them to glow.
Also one of the big problems is that the theory of evolution taught to most people in highschool is essentially wrong because it has to be simplified too much to allow it to be taught to people in highschool. Like many things in education when you simplify something too much it ends up with a lot of holes. The holes are not there in the most complete explanations but unless you have taken math up through differential equations you are not going to understand it so those parts get left out. Evolution does work though and we even use it to calculate how long it will take to evolve drug resistance. That is something I have really enjoyed about some of the bioengineering classes. You learn a lot about how much BS was in the lower level classes in order to make stuff more understandable to people.
I would say that most of what people are taught about science is basically incorrect because of simplifications.
On the other hand since your body is mostly water you can absorb a LOT of energy.
So long as your energy transfer rate with conduction and convection in an area are higher than your heating from radiation due to the cellphone you won't have any heating in the surrounding area. From what I can find human skin has a thermal conductivity about .37 W/(m K). That should easily be enough to keep up with a cellphone and that is without convection which is much higher.
I just don't see how a cell phone can physically heat you up.
How would you even correct for the changes in technology over time?
Maybe early cell phones did have problems but those giant analog things are also gone. The point is that it would no longer matter if you could figure out that a piece of technology that has been dead for more than 10 years could cause problems if anyone wanted to go to a museum and get one again.
The point is that this kind of study would be basically impossible to do long term since you would have to a group of people that stay with the same cellphone technology for a very very long time. In another 10 years the things called cell phones will have little resemblance to what we have now and will likely be another order of magnitude lower energy usage.
You can understand something without memorizing it. There are hundreds of equations involved in various ways of doing heat transfers. You don't have to remember them all to understand how to use them correctly. If you know your situation is laminar fluid flow through a pipe you can look up the appropriate equations. The important part is learning and understanding hows and whys of heat transfer.
You can also measure the progress of students by giving them real problems to solve. Something that requires applying the knowledge they have gained. Most of my engineers classes have two hour exams with 4 problems and everything is open book, notes, calculator etc. You are given real problems to solve that are unlike problems you have done before. You have to figure out how to apply your knowledge to solve the problem. Memorization does not help you for squat on those exams. Understanding is the only thing that will help you on those exams.
What I have seen is that even though I scored extremely well in standardized tests they do a very poor job of measuring skills.
More and more the way we test people is becoming divorced from the reality that we live in.
Mostly though standardized tests focus too much on memorization. Memorization is NOT learning it is just easy to test. You can be great at solving real problems but if you have a poor memory you will do badly on these exams while doing well in actual life problems.
One nice thing about the FE exam is that it is not a memorization based exam. You are given a book with equations, tables etc.
The computer is also valuable for data simulation. If you want to do a liquid-liquid extraction or run a distillation column where your species are not independent the math is just too long and complex for a human to solve in any reasonable time span and with any real accuracy. It would take weeks to solve one of those problems that a computer can solve in seconds.
If you want to make a lot of approximations you can solve it far more rapidly but for a production system those approximations are not a good idea.
The really big problems come when you get to a full process system where you have reaction, separation and many parts. You quickly get beyond what any human can calculate correctly.
The engineer has to know how to setup those problems, they have to know the basics of how to solve any given part but when you have 20+ components the material balances alone end up being ridiculous, much less the energy balance when you start factoring in things like using waste heat from one stream to help heat up another stream.
Even for a simple multicomponent vapor-liquid single stage flash distillation you can solve a problem in excel that is very useful that is just not viable to do by hand. Solving the same problem by hand is 10s to thousands of iterations to solve. Once you know how to setup the problem there is no need to actually compete with it, Put the problem in and let it solve it.
I do suspect though that the kinds of problems that mechanical engineers solve and chemical engineers solve though are different. It does work well for cheme stuff from the practicing engineers I have worked with all pretty much all the tools for cheme stuff integrate with excel. HYSYS is amazing, but god is it complex.
I do have to give Excel a lot of credit though for being very good at engineering tasks. I have tried to use openoffice but it is just missing too many of the engineering type tools. The excel solver is VERY good and excel has a bunch of stats stuff needed.
Excel can even be integrated with various engineering tools like HYSYS or Matlab and do some truly amazing things. I do like openoffice but I also have to be realistic that for engineering tasks you need to learn excel. My professors all expect us to use Excel, Matlab, HYSYS and other tools for our homework. If you don't know how to use those tools the odds are you won't pass the class. The problems are too complex to solve by hand and while you can use any other tool you want the odds of doing it well enough to solve the problems is pretty low.
A regular user does not need even a tiny fraction of the power that excel has and could easily use even stuff like google docs.
One way or another education is going to radically change in the next 20 years. Schools are either going to adapt to more modern technology or at least the colleges will be replaced because they are so darned expensive. Something like the khan academy or other online learning systems are not any worse and usually far better than any of the large lecture classes.
I disagree entirely at the college level at least.
For engineering classes if you can't solve a problem with a computer you are not a very useful engineer and the way you solve problems on a computer is a learned skill. Just knowing how to solve a problem by hand with a LOT of the simplifications needed to solve a problem by hand help in any way at all for solving a real problem with a simulation program like HYSYS.
Heck knowing how to solve a problem by hand does not even translate very well to solve the same kinds of problems in Excel much less Matlab but with far fewer assumptions. Many of the students in my class are having a very hard time with the homework because we have mostly moved beyond hand solvable problems and they don't have the computer skills necessary to solve them effectively on computers. Even the exams seem to be slowly changing to more setup and understanding.
Even the law expects engineers to look stuff up instead of going from memory. Memorization has no real place in learning anymore. You need to learn how to work with technology effectively to solve problems. If you define yourself based on competing with computers you are going to lose badly.
It works the same in every area of life. You get what you incentivize not what you profess to believe or support.
It is why people cheat in college classes. Many are memory based classes and are designed to encourage cheating regardless of what the professors claim to support.
Anywhere in society you see behavior other than what you want or think the system should have it is because you are giving an incentive for that behavior and no amount of rule changing is going to fix that.
That is why we have can harsh anti-drug laws, anti-cheating codes of conduct, laws about what companies can do etc but as long as the reward is greater than any penalty and the odds of being caught are low people will do what makes the most sense.
Some people do learn though. I see less cheating in engineering classes where the exams are open book, notes, calculator, previous exams etc because it does not do any good. The exams are purely about understanding.
For memorization based classes I see people using Adderall and other drugs to do well in the class and damned be any future consequences. Universities can even say it is bad that people use drugs to pass those classes but nothing they say will really stop it. Mostly the problem is that in the short term the drugs work, you do better in class and people don't care about long term damage.
Most chemistry departments might as well be sponsored by Adderall given how much memorization I see in them. The sad things is so many people studying to become doctors while they damage their brains to do well in tests in the short term.
Heh, most of the engineering students I know don't even go out on dates at all. Classes take up far too much time and energy to want to deal with dating.
However most of the ones I know that have graduated don't have ANY problems with dates. Unlike many other degrees they have well paid jobs.
I do think we are near a low point right now but I think things are looking very good for the future.
I think that biotech/nanotech are going to fundamentally change the way we do things on this planet and will be as disruptive as the industrial revolution was and the USA is well positioned to take advantage of it.
Actually I think we are due for a change in economic systems.
Our automation is continuing to grow faster and faster and more people are ending up out of work that actually have very good educations they are just not needed anymore. Some of the companies I have been working with are having some of their best years every but they continue to lay people off because of automation.
I don't think this is any cause for sadness or alarm though. No system lasts forever and we have had many economic systems and we will have many more. Our current system is just no longer stable given our current technology and so a new balance will be struck.
I really doubt though that having ever greater numbers of people is going to be desirable moving forward and hopefully our next economic system will help balance that.
I don't really know what our next economic system will look like just that it won't be what we have now. Change is interesting and it should be fun to see how the world changes as technology continues to develop. Things that took billions of dollars and a decade of work like the human genome project can now be done more accurately in about an hour for $1K. Things that used to be considered impossible just 10 years ago you can now find for sale.
The world is changing more rapidly than any other time in history and it is fun to see it change and see where you can help.
You are guaranteed to lose if you don't try.
Our cybernetics and regeneration are improving at insane rates.
I am easily young enough to see these advancements extend my life in order to work on further advancements.
Overall I would prefer to replace body parts with cybernetic parts than organic upgrades.
I don't accept that we should see this as inevitable. We are learning a lot very rapidly about nanotech and biotech and some of those advances are in the fields of things like regeneration, cures, and life extension.
I fully intend to work on developing this technology and trying to fix this problem. Just because our DNA is built this way doesn't mean that we can change it.
Bioengineering and Nanoengineering are going to be some of the coolest things to do for a long time to come.
Takes me about an hour to upgrade between ubuntu versions also and I have never lost anything.
Well technically it takes the computer an hour, I let it start running and go do something else since it does a very good job without me watching it.
Overall upgrades work pretty well on most systems now, people just have a fetish about clean installing all the time.
This is the big thing. I would love a tablet that I can take real notes on. Especially one where I can enter mathematical notes.
Every tablet I have looked at has been very bad to taking notes on. They just don't have the accuracy required. This tablet even runs a full windows of windows which means I could take notes and still use applications like matlab and excel.
I am pretty glad flash is dieing also. Even with all the hardware acceleration turned on for a Windows 7 laptop flash kills my battery life. I get about 8-9 ours of normal usage from my laptop. With flash it drops to 4 hours or less. I have no idea why it sucks down so much battery time but even fallout 3 doesn't drain the battery as fast which is insane.
I have an AMD llano laptop that also has a dedicated 6750M graphics card in it also. While just playing flash video the AMD software shows me the dedicated card is completely off, the igpu in the llano chip is barely work and the cpu is doing a lot of work.
If I play the same video on youtube with the html 5 player I see almost no cpu usage, no dedicatd gpu usage and very low igpu usage and a very small impact on battery life.
Flash just has too large of a negative impact on the system. If adobe could fix that I would not mind as much but even the absolute latest versions still have these problems.
I do think we need something less than the full responsibility for an engineer for a lot of software at least.
However the VAST majority of software problems are just idiotic things. Simple things like SQL injection exploits that should not be happening at all anymore. I know that software is not going to be bullet proof but that doesn't mean that some fairly small amounts of extra work would not have huge gains for people using the software.
Even if programmers we just trained to the same standards but not held to quite the same standards it would help a lot. So you would not be liable for some complex issue but not bounds checking, writing obviously inject-able code etc would get you in trouble.
Too much of the software out there is just bad period. The people writing it are very clearly not qualified to do it. How many times do we need to see the same kind of exploit over and over and over again until there is some responsibility and fixes?
Software is not designed at least not the ways that engineers use the word designed.
It would be nice if software was designed like a chemical process is or a bridge is etc. However the education required to learn how to properly design things is HARD. There is a reason that Computer Science is often considered a slacker engineering degree compared to the other engineering degrees.
Software would be harder to do and require more qualifications to do it. It would also work correctly far more often. Right now we are in the wild west of programming. In time that will change and it will become a regular engineering profession.