Feb28th
I have absolutely no statistics to support this, but I just have a feeling that engineers are disproportionately represented in the fields of toolshed owning, railway enthusiasm and stamp collecting. Tick me off for at least one. So I have no hesitation in drawing attention to the fact that today sees the launch of a really nice set of stamps from the Royal Mail here in the UK on the theme of innovation. Stamps are big business, and have therefore rather predictably been undervalued by some shameless opportunism in recent years; even now some Pacific island is probably printing off a commemorative set of stamps depicting this year’s Celebrity Big Brother contestants. However, the new Royal Mail ones are great. (more…)
Feb21st
They say that engineering’s biggest problem is its own PR, and that may be true. But when it comes to the negative PR created by technology not working, blame the management. How many engineers, scientists and technologists of any sort are, at any one time, working on something which they know should never have been commissioned in the first place? The most obvious culprits of all, of course, seem to be our political leaders, but worse still are the industrial management which leaps in to offer to meet the most hare-brained requests even when they’ve got “potential disaster” written all over them? (more…)
Feb14th
Many moons ago (and I do choose my phrases carefully sometimes), I wrote about what a great piece of engineering the two NASA Mars Rovers were. You may recall that much, much later I wrote: “Wow! They were only supposed to move a few hundred metres over three months, and that was it. But they’re still going!” (more…)
Feb7th
I’m indebted to Steve Price of the European Institute for Industrial Leadership for the comments he sent me last week, in response to the symbolic “Lights out across Europe” gesture on 1 February. If you missed that, a group of environmental associations called the “Alliance pour la Planete” asked citizens to give the planet “five minutes respite” by turning off lights and other equipment from 7.55pm to 8pm - not just to save 5 minutes’ electricity consumption, but to draw attention to how much (possibly unnecessary) energy is being used at any one time. (more…)
Feb6th
Few people will be surprised to hear that the first positive steps are being made to reopen coal mines in Britain, and even open new ones. The industry was criminally run down in the eighties for political ends, despite the country’s electricity still coming largely from coal-fired power stations (up to a half even as recently as last year). The arguments about coal being a dirty fuel are irrelevant: we didn’t ever stop using it with the demise of the collieries, and now we’re importing over 40M tonnes a year, despite having over 500M tonnes of the stuff here lying untouched underground. (more…)
Feb1st
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