Common Sense 101 - Engineering - 16 Dec 2012

Common Sense 101: Engineering
Laser Quasar Absolutely
Version 1.0.0.0
by
Laser Quasar Absolutely
Copyright 2012
Dedication
his book is dedicated to arguably the greatest engineer of all timeImhotep, the man who invented the rst proper cut-stone Pyramid: the design on which all the Pyramids of Egyptincluding the Great Pyramidwere based. He never went to engineering school: there werent any engineering schools to go to. He had to gure out from scratch everything. How to make the Pyramid so that it wouldnt collapse. And how to make it last, and how to make it look cool, and how to make sure the work was nished in time. And how to make it popular in spite of the huge expense. And how to make burial chamber, and the maze of tunnels leading to it, so that none of them would all collapse under the weight. And how to seal it with a three-and-a-half-ton block of granite. And, and, andtoo many ands to mention. All from scratch. No wonder they called him a god.
The No-Small-Print Warranty
he principles outlined in this book are unconditionally warranted to work. If you apply them all in your product and that product still fails, you will be refunded ten times the price you paid for the book! (No kidding.) (And seeno small print, either!)
[...] we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the rst duty of intelligent men. George Orwell.
Introduction
am not an engineer. Like most people, I am a consumer. So I can think outside the box, unlike most engineers. I guess engineers are not supposed to think outside the box, because if they were to do that theyd lose their jobs. And, of course, the managers who oversee them, and the COOs who oversee them, would also lose theirs if they thought outside the box. That has got to be the case. Otherwise I have no way of explaining why pretty much everything we buy or use is so crappy. I also suspect that I am not alone in thinking so. How many times have we said Drat! when using or xing a gadget, an appliance or a machine? How many times have we said Yikes! when looking at the price of something we wanted to buy? How many times have we said My cars in the shop? How many times have we wanted to throw our computer through the glass partition? Programming the VCR and Flashing 12:00, 12:00, 12:00 have even become clichs, for gawds sake. More often than not, things are expensive to buy; hardor next to impossibleto use properly; ugly to look at; break down every now and then: cost an arm and a legor, again, are next to impossibleto x and, at times (like with appliances, uorescent bulbs and batteries), cant even be gotten rid of when they stop working. Really? In this day and age? In the twenty-rst century?!? From the simplest to the most complicated, most products are crap. Picture frames (how much simpler can something be?) hang lopsided unless we keep adjusting them every so often. Soap dishes let the soap get all slimy and clammy. Every so often faucets drip, toilets and drains get clogged up, and the roof needs redoing. And, at the other end of the scale, the Space Shuttle and the Concorde are grounded because, apparently, their f$%&ing engineers didnt make them safe enough; while the B-2 bomber costs more than its worth to deploy against any competentor even half-competentenemy. And in-between, of course, our roads need to be repaired every few years (would the Pharaoh have put up with that?); computers have to be replaced every few yearsand even when new, can and often do display the blue screen of death; and we have to take the car in for maintenance every few months. Why do we put up with all this crap? Oh yeah, I forgot: because theres nothing better available! Well, its time we consumers rebelled, and showed the engineersand their overseers: the managers and COOs and CEOsa thing or two. Because we, as consumers, know better than them how things should be designed, made, sold, repaired and eventually disposed of. They clearly havent a clue. So: lets do it.
Summary
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Everything should completely t the purpose(s) for which it was originally intended Everything should be as ergonomic as possible (or more accurately, have human factors engineering built into it, to the max) Everything should be made of parts that snap together to assemble, and unsnap to dismantle Everything should be made of parts which can be moved around, handled and snapped together by just one person Everything should be made of parts that are easy to pick up and holdno part should ever be too small to be picked up easily (or too small to get lost) Everything should be easy to move around without machinery (think: wheels, castors) Everything should be easy to transport over long distances (think: t into a car, or at most into a truck)anything bigger than that should be easily dismantlable Everything should be easy to clean (preferably with just water, soap-and-water, or a wet rag)even in its crevices and hard-to-reach places, if it has any Everything that is not supposed to wear out due to friction should last forever
10. Everything should have the lowest possible cost of ownership over the years its intended to last 11. Everything should come with a no-questions-asked life-time warranty (like Craftsman brand tools) 12. Everything should be low-maintenanceor preferably no-maintenance, even when in hard daily use
(think hammer, think anvil!)
13. Everything should look cool (at least as much as most Apple products created under Steve Jobs, or a
Tamburini-designed motorcycleand, preferably, cool enough to be displayed in the Guggenheim)
14. Everything should have some quirk or special character that makes people fall in love with it (think:
the rst iMac, Pagani cars)
15. Everything should be given a cool name or appellation (think: iPod, Kleenex, 911) 16. Everything should look just as good old as newindeed, preferably look even better old than new
(think: Chippendale furniture, Stradivarius violins, Holland and Holland ries)
17. Everything should be made of parts that cost a reasonable amount of money to makeand thus can
be sold at a reasonable and competitive price
18. Everything should cost, for the buyer, only as much as the cost of the sum of its parts, plus the cost
of the (minimal) amount of time and effort needed to snap them together
19. Everything should be adequately advertised (so as to ensure good sales) 20. Everything should be easy to make 21. Everything should be easy to buy 22. Everything should be easy to use 23. Everything should be easy to re-sell 24. Everything should be easy to upgrade and expand
Summary
25. Everything should be easy to get xed , and the user should not have to do without the product while
its being xed
26. Everything should be easy, and even protable, to recycle 27. Everything should be make best possible use of the available energy (think: reuse wasted energy) 28. Everything, including all parts, should be easy to see in the dark 29. Everything, including all parts, should be easy to nd if lost 30. Everything, including all parts, should be easy to locate and unambiguously identiable if stolen 31. Everything should be designed using a check list a mile longand which gets even longer as time
goes by
32. Wherever possible, everything should adjust, repair, restore and upgrade itself automatically 33. Wherever possible, all features necessary for a product to function well should be be sold as standard, not as optionsand this goes for warranties too
34. Wherever possible, all gadgets and machines should be waterproof, or at the very least waterresistant
35. Wherever possible, all reciprocating motion of parts should be replaced by rotary motion 36. Wherever possible, undesirable friction should be eliminated, or at least minimised, and if possible all
moving parts should be self-lubricatingor, better still, not require lubrication at all
37. Wherever possible, all electrical and/or electronic connections should be wireless 38. Wherever possible, all gadgets and machines should have multiple uses 39. As far as possible, everything should be idiot-proof, childproof and accident-proof 40. Nothing should ever t in the wrong placenot even close 41. Nothing should ever require re-painting or re-staining (unless a change of colour is desired) 42. Nothing should prematurely break down in normal useor even in somewhat abnormal use 43. Nothing should ever deteriorate just as a result of it lying around for a long time 44. Nothing should ever corrodeand if it is to be used or stored in an even mildly corrosive environment, it should be made of corrosion-proof materials
45. Nothing should ever roll off by itself when lying aroundeven accidentally 46. Nothing should require a long manualand preferably none at all 47. It should never be possible to get accidentally pinched, or in any other way hurt, when using any
gadget or machineor even when repairs are being carried out on it
48. It should never be possible to get an electric shock or an electrical short circuit from any electrical
part or device, even when cleaning it with lots of water
49. Any part that contains liquids or gasses of any sort should be absolutely spill-proof and absolutely
leak-proof (think: gas tank, gas lines!)
50. All engineers should make a deep and exhaustive study of the future

You wont need a notebook. Just use the empty spaces in this book to jot down your notes and sketches. Or whatever. (If youre using the PDF file and want to sketch, you might need to invest in some inexpensive software for the purpose.)
1. Good Intentions
verything should completely t the purpose(s) for which it was originally intended. Sounds reasonable, right? Yeah, but few things do.
This applies, unfortunately, not only to products of engineering but to lots of other things too. Take text books, for instance. The purpose of text books is to aid in teaching, right? And its been known since a long time that to teach effectively, you need to entertain. Why else do you think the Bible contains so many great stories (like, especially, the stories of Jesus) and catchy one-liners (like Love thy neighbour, Take up thy bed and walk, andmy favouriteBlessed are the cheesemakers), not to mention amazing poetry: even erotic poetry like the Song of Songs, which is Solomons? Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies clearly the reader is supposed to get a hard-on just thinking about it. Do you think the Bible would have become the best seller of all time, and acquired billions (literally) of ardent fans, if it had been written like a text-book example of a text book? Most text books do not even adequately, let alone completely, serve the purpose for which they are intended: not even the best of them. Take for instance The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which is so widely known as a text-book example of a text book that it was even mentioned in The Big Bang Theory (Imean the excellent TV show, not the pseudoscientic claptrap). Heck, I myself bought a copy in my rst year at university, even though it wasnt the one the prof recommended. Admittedly it starts off well, but after the rst few pages it all goes downhill. To his credit, Feynman himself wrote in his preface that he was pessimistic as to how well it would succeed in teaching his students, and rightly sothe book is dull, dull, dull! (And I say this despite being a person with a life-long interest in physics myself.) The very phrase dull as a textbook has become part of the lexicon: if you Google it (even with the quotes) youll get close to 6,000 hits! How exactly are dull text books supposed to succeed as aids in teaching? How many text books have you studied which you remember as well as the stories of Jesuss birth, miracles and crucixion, or Samson and Delilah, or the Ten Commandments (the last of which was even made into a movie with a cast of thousands and starring Charlton Heston)? Move over, Richard Feynman: youve got the brains but you dont got the touch, and your Nobel Prize dont impress us much. So: suppose you were an engineer writing a text book for a course you were going to teachwhat would you do? Its almost a no-brainer: make it fun, entertaining, sexy and easy to remember! Use simple terms, bung in a few witticisms, add an anecdote or two, and maybe a few pictures (wherever possible, with sexual associationsremember that sex sells, especially to college students with raging hormones), and you might even have a movie deal in your future (just kidding, that last bit, just kidding). But even doing so, though satisfying the requirement of tting the purpose for which the text book is intended, doesnt completely do so: the text book doesnt t its purpose as well as it could. So lets think outside the box. First of all, consider the language youre going to write it in: i.e., think of your target audience. They use terms like ROTFL (Rolling On The Floor Laughing), UMMH (You Make Me Hot) and IWUIM (IWant You Inside Me), so why arent you speaking their language? The way most text books are written they might as well be in a foreign language, at least as far as their readers are concerned. Thats not the way to write, not if you want your words to actually be read. Then, why not publish the book online as well as on paper, as both ipbook and pdf les, so that it can be searched, copied, pasted, and all that? (And while youre about it, make the paper book out of waterproof paperremember that students spill things!) And why not also create a CD and/or DVD of it? Why not, in addition, create an audio version, for those who learn better via the spoken word than the written, and the dyslexic? And then, why not make a hi-def video of its salient points, with subtitles and special effects and everything, and upload it onto both YouTube and Vimeo? Heck, why not make two videos: one the detailed, complete and unexpurgated version, with commentary by the author thrown in for good measure, and the other a ve-minute version for the students to watch just before the exam, to remind themselves of its salient points? And, last but best, why not create a computer game out of it, calling it, say, SIMThinggy, with songs by Britney Spears interspersed randomly for no apparent reason? With all this, who could fail to ace the course? And more to the point, they will remember its lessons long after the course is over. Now thats teaching!
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Much the same thing applies to any engineering product. Suppose you were designing a fun sailboat for single-handed enjoyment. Now think a bit about the purposes it should serve. Not only should it be fun and therefore easy to sail, but it should also be inexpensive, easy for the user to transportnot everyone has membership at a sailing club!easy to rig and un-rig, easy to store for the winter, never need maintenance, and have a good resale value. And when I say easy to transport, clearly it should be possible for one person to lift it onto the roof of his or her cars, even if the car doesnt have a roof rack. Besides, it should be unsinkable, easily righted if capsized, and should be able to carry more than one person when the occasion demands (because everyone likes to go sailing once in a while with their signicant other.) The ropes should all be unambiguous and impossible to get tangled up, and the sail see-through; and the boom should never come round like a medieval mace when the boat is gybing, and hit the sailor on the head. And it should be possible to enjoy in many different kinds of weather and water, because Poseidon doesnt always cooperate even with Zeus, let alone with Odysseus. The Laser was intended to be just such a dinghy. Its probably the most popular single-handed sailing dinghy in the world. As of 2011, there were more than a quarter of a million of them. One reason for its popularity is that it is robust, simple to rig and sail, and can be transported on top of a car. It was designed in 1971, and despite its limitations, we should give all kudos to its designers. But it doesnt completely t the purposes for which it was intended. For one thing, its much too heavy and cumbersome to be easily lifted onto the roof of a car by just one person. (I own one, so I know.) Its also not too easy to get back into when capsized. (Ive tried.) And storing it indoors in the winter is almost impossible unless you have a garage (I dont). The boom has often whacked my novice son on the head when he comes sailing with me (and I myself have managed to escape unscathed up till now only because I am an expert sailor). The sail area is not adjustable, so when the wind blows hard the risk of capsizing goes up exponentially; and when the water is cold, as it often is here in Canada, capsizing is no fun. The ropes often get tangled up, and even the tiller gets caught once in a while in the ropes. And the sails tiny see-through patch is much too tiny. How can we x all this? And not just x it, but also improve upon its intended use? Like with the text book example, many of the solutions are no-brainers. Firstly, no piece of the whole sailboat should weigh more than about 50 pounds (or around 20 kilos), which is about the max the smaller and weaker users should be expected to lift onto the roof of a car. If the entire hull is going to be too heavyas is likelythen make it dismantlable. (Frinstance, make it possible to separate the deck from the bottom; or even better, make it possible to take the entire hull apart into four piecestwo for the deck and two for the hull bottomthat snap together for assembly and unsnap for cartopping. That should also make it easier to store in the basement. If necessary, provide air bladders to ensure unsinkability, and a pump for them that plugs into the cars cigarette lighter outlet, or into the mains if available.) Then make sure each piece has convenient handles or grips to grab onto, for lifting. Also provide built-in padding on the pieces to enable them to rest on the roofs of cars that dont already have roof racks. And make sure you provide built-in tether lines or elastics. (Hey: everything needs to be tied down to the top of the car, dummy!By the way, people who take offence at being called dummy just conrm the diagnosis: Socrates, who was no dummy, nevertheless insisted in thinking of himself as one, claiming that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing. We should take the hint. Mind you, lots of people already do: why else do you think there are so many popular books entitled Xxxxxx for Dummies?) Now, getting back to the Laser: make its area adjustable, so it can be used in any strength of wind. And make it mostly, or even entirely, out of something transparent, like Mylar, so that its all see-through. (Sailboards have such sails: why cant sailboats?) Minimise the number of ropeswherever possible, like for the daggerboard or the mast and boom attachments, replace ropes with latches, ratchets or bayonet-mounts (like interchangeable camera lenses). That way the ropes wont ever get tangled up. Provide grab points and toeholds on the hull and daggerboard to enable a lone sailor, no matter how small (well, within reason), to right the boat quickly when capsized. (Remember that the amount of time spent in close-to-freezing water can make the difference between life and death!) And make sure its easy for the sailor(s) to get back onto the boat once its righted.
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Good Intentions
The boom problem could be solved by simply eliminating the boom. A fully battened sail should not need a boom, should it? Surely the battens can be made stiff enough to hold the sail in shape all by themselves. If necessary, a wishbone could be added, like for sailboard sails. (See the picture at http:// tinyurl.com/c7ftl4o.) The lowest batten could even be eliminated, so that when the sail comes round while gybing, nothing hard hits the sailors head even if he forgets to duck. (BTW: if you dont know the meanings of nautical terms, look them up! Its really not that hard in this day and age). But this is not all. We could think even father outside the box, and ask ourselves: Why does it have to be a monohull? Catamarans are generally faster than monohulls, and have twin hulls to begin with, each of which would probably be light enough to lift onto the roof of a car without needing to be broken up still further. Since most of the deck of a catamaran is lightweight fabric or netting, there could be a considerable saving in weight. Making it a catamaran should take care of many other problems too. For example, cats are harder to capsize, and could also be easier to right if they do. And if the outer sides of the twin hulls were asymmetrical and slab-sided, daggerboards might not be needed either, which would result in still greater weight savings, and make the boat easier to launch and beach as well. While were at it, why not make the mast a three-dimensional aerodynamic wing sail, with an area equal to that needed for the strongest breeze in which one might reasonably go sailing? Properly designed wing sails can be much more efcient than two-dimensional ones. To this minimum-area mast-sail, fully battened fabric or Mylar sails could be added for sailing in lighter breezes. A small set of three or four such fabric sails could even be carried on board in small compartment(s) built into the hull(s). Thinking even farther outside the box leads us to wondering whether we could make the boat impossible to capsize, thereby eliminating even the second hull. We could use just one of the thin catamaran-like hulls, perhaps with platforms, called wings, for the sailor(s) to sit on. One way of making a boat non-capsizable is to incorporate a gyroscope into it! The gyro could be a removable, lightweight carbon-bre one with frictionless bearings rotating in a sealed vacuum container, and set spinning at the beginning of the trip using an external electric motor powered by, say, the cars battery. It could be on gimbals provided with progressive springs, so that a bit of heeling of the hull would be permitted by it, but the more the boat heels, the greater the righting moment, so that if it were to heel all the way to a capsize, the gyros moment would right the hull all by itself! Of course the gyro would not spin forever, but with good engineering and proper construction it should spin for an hour or two, which is enough time to enjoy quite a bit of sailing. (The gyroscope of doom idea was originally my son Cyruss, who is also not an engineer, except by avocationand he thought of it originally as a way to make motorcycles crash-proof on slippery roads. It would work for that too. Admittedly some hardcore sailing enthusiasts might consider the use of a gyro in a sailboat akin to cheating, but would it not make the boat easier for novices to sail, and thus more readily acceptable to the general public? Besides, lets not start pointing the nger too soon: sailors nowadays do permit auxiliary motors on larger sailboats in order to make them more manoeuvrable in the harbour and wouldnt that have been considered at one time akin to cheating too?) So now we have come a long way from the design of the Laser, havent we? As I said, all kudos to the designers of the Laserthey were, after all, working forty years ago, and weve come a long way since their timebut its far from being completely t for its intended purpose. Mind you, our own design outlined above isnt either. Forty years from now, who knows what people might come up with? Variable-geometry hulls (maybe even inatable ones), wing sails that can be deated, folded up and stowed in the trunk of the car, and stretchy low-drag skins over the hulllike the full-body swimsuits being designed these days for Olympic swimmersall come readily to mind. (Hey! We might be able to incorporate these into our design even now! Lets do it!) So there you have it: within just a bit over three pages and in just a bit over three days (which is how long it took to write the pages), we have made one of the best boat designs of all time much more t for its intended purpose. Trust me, theres nothing that cant be made more t for its intended purpose. From sewing needles to spacecraft, from oyster shuckers to oil tankers, everything can be made more t for its purpose: most things, in fact, greatly so. All it needs is some common sense!
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Theres empty space below. Use it to jot down a few notes, or doodle, or whatever.
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2. Oh, the Humanity!
heres a discipline called ergonomics, but its more correctly called human factors engineering. What is meant by this is, that engineers should take into account the humans who ultimately use whatever it is they make. Human factors engineering, however, is multidisciplinary. Engineers are, in general, incapable of doing a good job of it by themselves. To do it properly requires input from psychologists, statisticians, anthropometrists (those who measure human bodies), industrial designers, and operations researchers, in addition to engineers. And most importantly, it needs input from the consumersthose who actually use the products engineers design and make. So it needs common sense. You know why the Three Mile Island meltdown happened? Shortfalls in human factors engineering, a.k.a. common sense. There were so many indicators and dials on the wall of the control room of the nuclear reactor that the operators couldnt keep track of them all. Besides, the indicators didnt always mean what the operators thought they meant. Despite a crucial valve being stuck open, they assumed that a light on the control panel indicated that the valve was closed. The light did not in actual fact indicate the position of the valve, but rather the status of the solenoid upon which the valve depended for opening and closing; but there was nothing to inform the operators of that fact. And another indicator, which could have told them that the valve was actually stuck open, was located out of sight of the operators. On top of that, even if it had been visible to them it wouldnt have done any good, because this particular set of operators had not even been trained to use it. The problem was not diagnosed for hours. In fact, it was only when the shift changed and a fresh set of operators came into the control roomoperators who did not share the confusion of the rst setthat the problem got diagnosed at all. Theres a word for all this: Confusionism. (Again, just kidding. Or maybe not. Maybe there should be a word for this sort of cockup, given how serious its consequences can be.) It was the interface between the reactor and its operators that was at fault: had the interface been properly thought out, the meltdown would never have happened. Just goes to show how important human factors engineering is. The problem, though, is that even today, over thirty years after Three Mile Island, neither engineers nor their overseersnamely, managers and COOs and CEOstake it seriously enough. Most things, even in this day and age, are created without any input from psychologists, statisticians, anthropometrists, industrial designers, or operations researchers. Maybe in the manufacture of simple things like tables and chairs it doesnt matter too much, but with complicated, big ticket items, it sure does. Actually, it matters with simple items too. Take post boxes, for instancethe kind you put your letters into for mailing. Here in Canada, at least, they are mostly located at street corners. The idea is, I suppose, that people will walk to the corner of their street to post their letters. Maybe that used to happen in the past. But in this day and age, hardly anyone walkspeople drive everywhere. (That this is not a good thing, health-wise, is beside the point: the fact is that most people simply dont walk when doing their errands. Theyll gladly go out jogging another time with their iPod, but not when doing their errands.) But at most street corners theres never any place to park, or even to stop the car! So how is one supposed to get out and post a letter? Many people carry around unposted letters in their cars for days on end until they nd a post box near some parking spotIknow I do. This is utterly ludicrulous. Whatd be the difculty in locating post boxes in parking lots, where people actually park? Better still, why not locate them at entrances to ofces, grocery stores and shopping areas? If people are going somewhere, they wont be going merely to post a letter, will they: theyll be doing something more serious, and posting a letter will be just a side issue. Mind you, post boxes could be improved still further, by, like, incorporating stamp-vending machines in them, and maybe even a scale to weigh your letter or parcel to tell you how much postage is needed; and that sort of improvement would also fall in the domain of human factors engineering. The American military takes human factors engineering so seriously, in fact, that, to quote the current (December 2011) Wikipedia entry on Human Factors, U.S. Department of Defense regulations require a comprehensive management and technical strategy for human systems integration (HSI) be initiated early in the acquisition process to ensure that human performance is considered throughout the system design
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and development process. But why should weapons be the sole beneciaries of such a good idea? Why cant we incorporate it into everything? To do human factors engineering properly, it should be part of the initial design process. Better still, the pre-design process: the process that decides what will be designed. The pre-design process is much more important than the design process. Before engineers are allowed to put pen to paper, a decision should be made just what they should be designing. Apple became the richest company in the world under Steve Jobs by following just this principle. Jobs would decide just what was going to be designed, and then hed tell Jonathan Ive, one of the best designers in the world, to design it. Before he joined Apple, Ive had designed a cool toilet, and if a guy can make a toilet look cool he can make anything look cool, so Jobs asked him to design the rst iMac, and then everything else. The point is that one crucial advantage Apple had over every other company in the world was that Jobs thought up cool gizmos for Ive to design. Ives toilet design is now forgotten, but the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad live on. Thats because Steve Jobs did their pre-design brilliantly. An example of a brilliant design that suffered from awed pre-design is the Silbervogel or Silverbird, the 1930s brainchild of German engineer Eugen Snger and his then-lady-friend Irene Bredt, who later became his wife. Snger decided that he would design a suborbital Mach-10 plane capable of taking off from Berlin and landing in Tokyo while carrying an 8,000-pound payload, skipping the top of the atmosphere like a stone being skipped on the surface of a lake to do so; and he proceeded to design just that. (This, was, remember, when swept wings had not yet been invented, the fastest planes in existence were piston-engined and couldnt even reach 450 knots, and the sound barrier was a decade away from being smashed!) The calculations performed by Bredt, who was an applied mathematician, prove that it would have worked: perhaps some kinks might have needed to be ironed out, but the original design was sound. It was never actually built, though, because the German air ministry pulled the plug on it: Snger had envisioned it as a bomber, to bomb Amerika as it ew over the USA; but what was the point in dropping a dumb bomb from above the stratosphere while ying two miles every second, when the bomb could just as well have landed in a potato eld in Idaho as on the Empire State Building? Had Snger predesigned it as a document transport instead, it would have succeeded brilliantly and cornered the market: it could have literally got your papers there yesterday (and this at a time when the next-fastest method could have taken maybe a week.) Tons of papers transported every day between Europe and Asia would have easily paid for the plane and its launching apparatus, including the 600-ton-thrust rocket sled which accelerated the Silverbird to twice the speed of sound even before it took off: Lufthansa could have charged pretty much whatever they wanted per letter, packet or parcel, for no other competitor could have even come close. Andit would have won for German aerospace technology the admiration of the world. Much more can be said about human factors engineering, and indeed there are university courses in the subject, which every engineer and manager should take: this is just a summary. The point is that its important to think ahead when designing somethingand even before designing something. How is it going to be used? By whom? Whats going to be the mindset of those who will use it? Whats the likelihood that they will screw up when using it? How can screw-ups be prevented? What will make people fall in love with your product, so that theyll be willing to buy it even if you charge a premium? (Think iPad, iPhone!) How can you demolish the competition with your product (think Silbervogel, used as a document transport!) Think, think, andthinksome more. Do it for a long time, well before you put pen to paper. Get all your ducks in a row rst. Get input from every kind of person you can think of. Toy companies get input from kids for gawds sake, so why cant you get input for your product? Ask psychologists, statisticians, repairmen, recyclers and garbage collectors. The more the better, even if you have to pay them handsomely for their inputitll cost a lot more to correct mistakes once theyve been made! Tackle problems before they become problems, and youre well on the way to eliminating them altogetherand saving a bundle to boot.
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3. Come Together, Right Now
ost things are made of parts; few things are made in one piece. So somewhere the parts have to be put together. It may be done in a factory or at home, but somewhere it has to be done.
Common sense tells us that the cost of a product has something to do with the cost of putting it together: the more effort goes into its assembly, the more its going to cost. Besides, if the assembly is to be done in a factory, or even in a workshop, the overheadthe cost of the factory or workshop, including its tools, and the cost of maintaining it all and paying those who do must also be factored in when talking about the cost of the assembly, and thus the cost of the nal product. Right? Right? Besides, most products will probably need xing some time or other. And to x them, in most cases we need to take them apart, do the xing and then put them together again. The cost of repairs is also, therefore, affected by the effort and overhead that goes into taking things apart and putting them back together. Not to mention that downtime can be a problem too: during the time a machine is getting xed its not being productive, and something else will probably be needed to take its place. That can be a signicant issue for someadmittedly not allthings. So wouldnt it make sense to make it quick and easyand inexpensiveto put things together and take them apart? Many things are already quick, easy and inexpensive to put together and take apart. Flashlights, for instance, are easy to load and reload with batteries, and light bulbs are easy to screw in and out. Most electrical gadgets are easy to plug into the mains, and unplug when were done with them. Most rearms can be assembled and disassembled in a matter of seconds. Interchangeable camera lenses can be interchanged in no time. With big rigs, the tractor can quickly be attached to and detached from the trailer. Even a cars oor mats can be easily changed by one single person, without any tools. (Duh!) But not everything is so well made. Most cars, for instance, are put together in huge assembly plants requiring billions of dollars worth of equipment and a gigantic labour force. Mind you, nothing is actually manufactured in these plants: all thats done is assembly. The same goes for appliances and most furniture (except Ikea furniture). And, of course, most houses are made on site, in all kinds of bad weather, so that the quality of the workmanship suffers. No wonder they all cost an arm and a leg to buy and repair! And whose fault is it but of the engineers who draw up the blueprints for all these things, andeven more sothe managers and COOs who oversee them??? (It sure aint the fault of us, the consumers!) Is this majorly silly or what. Why cant everything be made of parts that can be put together without any tools, and likewise taken apart for xing? Why, for example, can a cars alternator, distributor, fender or bumperor, indeed, any and every other partbe made so that it simply slides in or snaps into place, so that if it needs replacement you simply buy another at the auto parts store, slide or snap out the old one, and slide or snap in the new one: like you might with a oor mat which has got ruined? The principle is whats important: make everything quick and easy to put together and take apart. Just like replacing the battery in a ashlight, disassembling an AK-47 or hitching up a big rig trailer to its tractor. Most of the time, in fact, it should be possible to do the assembly and disassembly without any tools: bare hands should be sufcient. When tools are absolutely essential, which is likely to be the case for really big things, let them be built into the equipment, like with the big rig. For example, why should we need a hand-operated jack to change a at tire? Whats so hard about building a couple of jacks into the bottom of a car, operated via the cars engine, capable of lifting the front or the rear of the car, as desired, with the simple push of a button? And why should there be ve or six nuts keeping the wheel in placenuts which are often put on so tight, using machine tools, that it takes a macho, macho man to loosen them? Why cant a quick-release be provided instead, like with bicycle wheels, allowing any person to quickly and easily change the at? In the winter its no fun being out in the cold for up to half an hour just to change a at tire. If were worried about the wheels being stolen, we can easily provide a lock for the quick-release, which can be unlocked using the cars own key.
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Just about everything can be made using parts that can be put together without tools. Certainly space stations should be made like that: who wants to use tools when overdressed in a space suit? Things should simply snap into place and snap out when necessary. Snap-On brand tools and Luger pistols are made like that, so why cant everything? Even Ikea furniture and ashlights can be improved upon in this respect: nothing should need screwing-in. One of the worst things an engineer can use is, in fact, screws. Screws often fall out and get lost, and then good luck nding a replacement from the gazillion choices available at the hardware store. Not to mention that they need a screwdriver, and the right one is never available when you desperately need it. Besides, some of them take forever to screw in or out, even when they dont need screwdrivers. Camera makers used to have screw-in interchangeable lenses until they smartened up and switched to the bayonet mount, whereupon screw-in lenses went the way of the dinosaur. Its about time all screws, in fact, went the way of the dinosaur. Everything should t together with at most a quarter turn, like interchangeable lenses on most cameras. Hasselblad, the Swedish camera company, went even farther: they made every major part of their cameras snap-in-snap-out, not just the lenses: lm magazine, viewnder, eyepiece, you name it. If such high-precision stuff can be made snap-in-snap-out, theres absolutely no reason other stuff, which doesnt need such high tolerances, cant be. None of this needs ultra-modern engineering, either. Luger pistols were rst made over a century ago, and the rst Hasselblad cameras over half a century ago. So why havent engineers (and managers, and COOs and CEOs) been learning from these examples? Houses too can be made snap-in-snap-out. Doors, windows, walls, oors, ceilings and roofs can all be made to snap into place. Large things can be made in sections. At most, machines might be needed to dig out and pour the foundation. And in most places in the world, a foundation might not even be necessary: a properly built house can just rest on the ground. The notion that foundations dug deep into the ground are absolutely necessary for buildings is belied by the fact that many of the most famous buildings ever constructed have no such foundations, or hardly anyand have nevertheless lasted centuries. They include the Pyramids of Egypt, the Ziggurat of Ur, and the Parthenon (this last being constructed to such close tolerances that many modern buildings cant match them.) Even the foundations of St. Pauls Cathedral in London are only four feet deepand its built on clay for crying out loud. It should be possible to build a family home in just a day or twousing the familys own labour to do it. And if they later decide to move, they should be able, if they wish, to even dismantle it and have it shipped in a semi to its new location. Sure, constructions workers might complain, but not for long: they would nd better jobs constructing the parts out of which future homes will be made. You dont nd chauffeurs complaining now because nobody wants to hire them, do you, though at one time pretty much everybody who owned a car had to have a chauffeur to drive it and x it when it broke down on the road (which was quite often)? Think how much snap-in-snap-out parts would save in manufacturing costs alone. No assembly line, no factory, no overheadsand, if anything breaks down, no big repair bills. Products made with snap-in-snapout parts would demolish the competition! Who could compete with you when your thingumabob costs maybe half what theirs costs? Not to mention that when your customers clue in that your stuff is always easy to x, they are never going to buy your competitors stuff which costs an arm and a leg to repair, and takes all day (if not all week).
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4. Do it Yourself
nd when I say yourself, I didnt mean yourselves.
The problem with doing it yourself while relying on others to help is that theyre almost never there when you need them. They may have other things to do, or youve had a row with them, or theyre klutzes whom you dont trust to do anything right, or whatever. So most of the time when youre doing it yourself theres only you doing it. (That, by the way, goes for sex too. Just keep track.) Of course you could get lucky, but that doesnt always happen. So even when thingamajigs are designed to be snap-in-snap-out, they should never need any more than one person to snap them in or snap them out. Ikea sells affordable furniture that can be easily transported because its packed at, in parts that are put together on site by the purchaser. But even Ikea furniture sometimes requires two people to put it together. This should not be the case. What happens if your customer lives alone? What if your customer cant nd a friend or family member to help her? What if they cant help even when found, for whatever reason? The reason this happens, mostly, is that parts can get too big to be handled by one person. So why not make them smaller? Although more assembly will be required, itll be easier, and will therefore take less time. Not to mention that itll be more pleasant. Most of the time, more than two hands are only needed because things need to be held in place while they are being attached together. One person just holds the parts in place while another puts them together. But this should never be the case. Its easy to provide temporary holding thingies for holding thingies in place temporarily. Maybe I should rephrase that. Its easy to provide clamps or other methods of holding parts in place while more permanent ways for attaching them are implemented. Pros do this all the time when gluing things or welding them together. It shouldnt be just pros that get to do it, though. Most of the time the rest of us simply dont have the requisite clamps or braces or grips or whatever when were putting something together. The seller could easily provide us with them. Alternatively, they should be built into the parts that need to be put together. Would it be impossible, for example, to design a house that could be made in parts that could be put together by just one person, without any help and without any tools? No, it wouldnt! All that would be needed is to make most of the parts small enough for one person to manipulate, and in those cases in which they cant be made like thatlike, say, for sections of the wall or roofto provide clamps or grips to hold one in place against the other temporarily until they can be attached permanently. It would hardly increase the cost of the house by much, would it? The cost would easily be recouped with increased sales, when you advertise the fact that one person all on his ownsome can put the entire house together. Everything should be made of parts that can be moved around, handled and snapped together by just one person. Well, maybe not everythingmaybe not things like aircraft carriers or nuclear subs, or even just a bridge on the River Kwai. The target market for those things is, however, almost never one single person. When you have an entire navy or armyor even just a PoW battalionat your disposal, you may be forgiven for designing things that take many people (and, often, heavy machinery as well) to put together. Everything else should be possible for just one gal or guy or transsexual to assemble and disassemble.
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Use the empty space below wisely, okay? Like: Draw some sketches, or something. (Leonardos sketchbooks are, arguably, the best engineering books of all time.)
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5. Get Lost
heres also another problem with parts, this time with those that are too smallthey get lost!
And some of them are too hard to hold with the ngers, or even to pick up. (Ever tried repairing eyeglasses, with their dinky screws? Nuff said!) This, to put it bluntly, is stupid. The whole point of making things out of parts is to make life easier, not harder. Theres a simple way around this: parts should be made large enough to hold with the ngers, and grippy enough not to slip through them. Eyeglass fames, for instance, could be made with snap-in pieces, not screws. The same thing should apply to computers, when for instance one needs to replace the hard drive. It should just snap or slide into place. It should not be necessary to unscrew anything, especially when the screws are almost too tiny to see. Its not just a mater of convenience for the customer. The cost of your product would be dramatically reduced too, if it were designed right from the get-go to be put together in seconds using unskilled labour (like, of course, the customers). Sure it would take more money to design the parts that way, but it would be well worth it. Spending a few hundred thousand dollars to design the parts so that they snap into place could save you tens of millions in assembly costs. These savings could be used to either lower the purchase price of your productthereby undercutting your competitionor to increase your prots. Not to mention that when people nd out how easy it is to x your producta fact which you could loudly and widely advertisethey would be even more inclined to buy your brand over your competitors. Well, really, theres not much more to say on the subjectI mean, its elementary, my dear Watsonso heres a lovely picture of a naked lady bringing herself to sexual ecstasy, bunged into this text book purely for your viewing enjoyment. I mean, whats the point of a dull text book, right?
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Use the empty space below to you know.
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6. I Like to Move it, Move it
ake a look around. How many big things do you see that can be moved around? Can that roll-top desk youre sitting at be moved? How about that bookcase? That sofa? That ling cabinet? That wardrobe?
Sure they can, youll say: they were moved in at one time, werent they? Doesnt that prove they can be moved? True, but it probably took two burly guys to do it. And once these things were in place, there they sat, and sit even now, until you can nd two burly guys to move them again. Whats with that? I read oncedont remember wherethat Toyota, the biggest car company in the world, has a rule: all its ofce furniture has got to be supplied with wheels or castors, so that it can be moved around easily. Idont know whether its true or not, but it should be. And not just in Toyotas ofces, eithereverywhere. Why isnt it? Only recently have we got round to putting wheels on suitcases. I remember a time when all suitcases had to be carried around, and there were porters at railway stations to help you do so. In fact, even today a lot of suitcases dont have wheels: you have to have a separate strap-on trolley. And, of course, kitchen cabinets are still bolted into place, so even two burly guys cant move them. The gal who invented the wheel must be rolling over in her grave, wondering why she had bothered, given that we hardly make use of her invention. (It had to have been a gal, of course: guys can use brute forcethey dont need wheels. Its a guy thing.) Of course wheels arent the only things that can enable things to move on smooth at surfaces: spheres imbedded into the bottoms of ofce equipment can work just as well. But whatever is used, it must take into account the terrain over which the item is to be moved. (Naturally.) For instance, moving a garden shed can be tricky, so we may need wheels the size of those on a wheelbarrow. Preferably pneumatic. On the other hand, to move a fridge or a freezer, those spheres we spoke of above might be sufcient. Again, there aint much more to be saidor you can think up the implications of this advice yourself so, to change the subject completely, have you ever seen a picture of Picassos bum? (I dont mean his bum, of course, but someone elses ass drawn by him.) If you havent, here it is (nice, innit?):
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Theres a reason why theres empty space below. Figure it out, if you havent already.
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7. YouCANTake it With You
f course, moving our stuff around for a short distance is good, but hardly enough. We may need to move it across town, or even across the country. What are we going to do with our kitchen table and chairs, for instance, if we need to loan them to the in-laws for Christmas dinner? How about taking our cordless electric lawnmower to the cottage once in a while, and then bringing it back home? How about whatever. They say You cant take it with you, and theyre right! Ikea has for a long time been making furniture that can be packed at and shipped long distances, even overseas. But even their furniture, once assembledand it takes a fairly long time to do that: not just minutesis not easy to disassemble and then re-pack at for transport in ones car. Sometimes it cant be done at all. Do people not have a problem with that? Not only should stuff be made possible to put together easily, but also to take apart easily. That goes for large pieces of furniture too. Why cant sofas be made that way? Wardrobes? Roll-top desks? Kitchen cabinets, counters and sinks? Look around youyou surely have stuff right where you are reading this, which would be a friggin chore to transport. Why should you not be able to take it with you? The house too. We already spoke about snap-in-snap-out houses. They could go further: they could be made in pieces that can easily be loaded onto a truck, so that when youre moving coast to coastor even if you dont like your neighbourhood any moreyou can take it with you along with your furniture. All youd need to buy, when you got there, would be a plot of land. Or a large raft on which to oat it on your favourite lake. (Floating homes are all the rage nowadays, didnt you know that? See http://www.oatinghomes.com.) Maybe the only thing you wont be able to take with you will have to be your garden lawn. (Flower beds, not a problem: make them in containers.) And, of course, your basement, if you have one, will have to be left behind. Everything elsewhy not take it with you?
This nude was sketched by Rodin, one of the greatest artists of all time. Telling you just in case you didnt know.
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Jot down a few notes on this blank page, or sketch your thoughts, or even put your coffee mug down on it if you like.
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8. Cleanliness is Next to Godliness
hats what they say, right? So why is it so damn difcult to clean just about everything except dishes and clothes?
The interiors of cars are notorious in this respect. Detailingwhich is just a fancy way of saying cleaning a car properlycosts an arm and a leg; and within a week thereafter its all dirty again. Even worse is the engine bay, which cant even be hosed down unless you take great pains to protect the electricals. But they arent the only culprits. Even Apple products have problems in this regard. I have an old TitaniumPowerBook which has served me well for eight years, and I love it, but the keyboard, and even the case in some areas, is lthy and I have absolutely no way to clean it. (And I havent even spilled anything on itits just grime from my ngers, from typing away at it.) Compressed air doesnt do any good. Luckily the feel of the keyboard isnt affected, but it sure doesnt look good. The TiBook when new was a work of artone of the coolest laptops ever designedbut now its nothing special to look at. And I have an even older Apple USB keyboard which is so dirty it doesnt even feel good to type with. I tired to clean it with soap and water in the kitchen sink and dry it off afterwards, but although it worked after the procedure, it didnt remove the grime, which must be so strongly embedded in the mechanicals that it simply wont come off. Mind you, PCs are far worse: just try to clean a PC with soap and water in the kitchen sink. What wrong with the people who design such things? Why cant everything be designed so that it can be cleaned just with soap and water? It should be possible to clean small things by simply putting them in the dishwasher. If we can clean dishes that wayclean enough to eat off, mind you!then why not everything? And it should be possible to hose down large things, like the interiors of cars and their engine bays and trunks. The exteriors of cars and be hosed down, so why not the interiors? And anything made of cloth should be made easily removable, so that it can be washed and dried along with the rest of your laundry. If the seats are leather, why not make them snap-in-snap-out, so that you can hose down the interior and put them back into place? Another problem is making things with nooks and crannies in which grime can accumulate. Even hosing them down doesnt always get rid of the dirt, which can get embedded in it. Mind you, even some pots and pans are made that way, which goes to show how stupid it is: youre supposed to be able to eat off of them for petes sake. To say that it would be too expensive to protect electricals from liquids is nonsense. Even liquids under pressure are routinely contained very cheaply in recyclable coke bottles: so why cant liquids be contained in far more expensive gadgets? All it takes is a bit of plastic or rubber, as far as I can see.
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And now for something completely different:
The Judgement of Parisclassical story illustrated by the Austrian painter, graphic artist, designer, and musical composer Erhard Amadeus-Dier (1893-1969). The gals are the goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, and the guy with the erection, checking them out, is Paris: son of Priam, king of Troythe chap who abducted Helen. The guy " " " " " " looking on is Hermes, who brought the girls there.
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9. The Pyramids
heres an Arabic saying that goes something like this: All fear Time, but Time fears the Pyramids.
This is how it should beand not just for the Pyramids, but for everything we build. Why should things deteriorate just because Time passes by? Admittedly it makes some sense to think of parts that rub together, like brake pads, wearing out. Friction can certainly wear things down. Sometimes. But why should things that simply exist be worn out? Its bad enough that we have to die. Why, however, should our creations? Theres absolutely no reason for things to deteriorate just due to time passing bynot in this day and age, when even plastic bags last forever in the landll, with worms and chemicals gnawing away at them day and night. Frinstance, why are vehicles made mostly out of steel, which rusts just as a result of sitting around? And rusts even more when its exposed to water and salt. Why cant the steel be replaced by something that wont rust, like stainless steel or aluminium, or even plastic? Even kitchen sinks are made of stainless steel, for crying in a (plastic) bucket. Why cant vehicles be made of the same sort of stuff? Maybe it would cost more to use stainless steel, but exactly how much more is the question. Grade 304 North American stainless steel costs these days (December 2011) between $2,000 and $3,000 per tonne, and aluminium costs around the samewhile ordinary steel costs between $450 and $900 per tonne. But in the average car, which weighs about a tonne and a half, theres only about a tonne of steel to begin with; the rest of the car is made of other things. So even if all of the steel were replaced with stainless steel or aluminium, the entire car might cost only $1,500 to $3,000 more. In a car selling for over $30 grand, thats really not a lotespecially given that it would increase the life of the car from ten years to twenty! Better still, lets use carbon bre. Its one-fth the weight of steel and would accomplish the same purpose, and do it betterso even if it costs ve times as much as steel, pound for pound, it would be worth it. Besides, a lighter vehicle is more fuel-efcient: a mere 10% reduction in weight results in a 6% to 7% increase in fuel economy, so imagine what a 30% to 40% reduction in weight could do to drive down the cost of owning a vehicle. The total cost of owning a vehicle over its lifetime is in large part the cost of the fuel needed to drive it: a car giving 33 mpg driven for 200,000 miles over a ten-year periodwhich is reasonablewith gasoline costing $3.50 (US) per gallon would cost, over its lifetime, $21,212 in fuel alone. If the fuel consumption were to be reduced to 40 mpg (thats, like, a 12% increase in fuel economy), it would result in total ten-year fuel cost of $17,500, which means a saving of over $3-and-a-half grandand thats assuming fuel prices stay the same over the same ten-year period, which is highly unlikely. (And thats what would be the savings in the US, which has some of the lowest gas prices in the world; the savings elsewhere in the world would be much more dramatic). Even in the US, $3-and-a-half grand would go far towards paying for the replacement of the major portion of the cars steel with carbon bremaybe even all of it. Not to mention that a car made largely out of carbon bre would last a lot longer than ten years, because it wouldnt rust out; and the longer it lasts, the greater the savings. The same economic argument would work for civil engineering projects also. The Akashi Kaiky Bridge in Japanthe longest suspension bridge in the world todaycost the equivalent of $4.3 billion to build (and that was in the late nineties; if built today it would cost much more). It weighs around 120,000 tonnes, most of which is steel. Even at todays steel prices, the cost of that steel would only be between $50 million and $100 million (and when it was actually built, steel was much cheaper than it is today). In other words, the actual cost of the steel in the bridge could have been as low as one-eightieth of the total cost of the bridge! That, not to put too ne a point on it, is next to nothing. Let me repeat it: next to nothing. If all the steel had been replaced with carbon bre, it might have made the bridge three or four times lighter than it is and due to the weight savings it would have needed far less carbon bre to begin with, which means it might actually have been even lighter, and so even cheaper, since much less material would have been needed to begin with, then transported to site (reducing the transportation costs), and then manoeuvred into place (thus reducing the manufacturing costs). Not to mention that it would never had needed painting and re-painting (carbon bre looks great naked). Or for the same overall cost they might have been able to make it much wider than it is, and thereby allowed it to transport many more vehicles per dayand
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remember, the demands on it in this regard are only likely to increase over time not to mention that since they charge a toll for every vehicle that crosses it, they would have been able to recoup the costs sooner. Anyway, though its too late to switch the Akashi Kaiky over to carbon bre, the material ought to be tried for the next big bridge, like the one planned over the Straits of Gibraltar connecting Spain with Africa, or the one over the Bering Straits connecting Siberia with Alaska, which might be a good idea too. Even smaller civil engineering products should last longer. For instance, theres absolutely no reason we in Canada should have to re-do the roof every fteen or twenty years. Mine cost eight grand to redo just a few months ago. Thats totally absurd. They dont need to redo the tiled roofs of adobe huts in Guatemala, do they? Nor, for that matter, have they ever redone the dome of the Pantheon, built more than 2,000 years ago. The trulli in southern Italys Puglia region dont need their conical stone roofs redone, so why should we? Make roofs out of indestructible materials, and Bobs your uncle! It also makes sense to use indestructible materials for much smaller things, like bicycles. Todays bicycle framea bicycles largest partis often made of carbon bre, which is great. So why do they have to make its smaller partslike chain, pedals or wheel spokes and hubsout of steel at all? Why not make them too out of non-corrosive materials, like titanium or stainless steel, so that you can ride the bike in all kinds of weather without it being ruined? If you live in a snowy place like Ottawa and want to ride your bike in the winter, even the sales people at the bike store will advise you to buy a clunker, because a bike worth a thousand bucks is going to be ruined by the salt on the roads. Why, in heavens name? Cant they make a bike that wont corrode? If they can make a watch out of stainless steel that wont corrode and sell it for a measly ten dollarsand even make a prot doing thatsurely they can do the same for bicycle parts. Anyway, you get the point. Make everything last forever (except plastic bagsthose should be biodegradable) and youd reduce the amount of junk that has to be junked hugely. Its good economic sense (read the next chapter to understand why), and its also good ecological sense!
Heres some white empty space. Jot down a few notes if you want. Better still, sketch something.
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10. Heirlooms
n the old days, people used to pass possessions on from parents to children. Furniture, tableware, artwork, and, of course, houses were often inherited rather than bought new. They were heirlooms.
These days, though, its not like that. My Dads 1930s Harley is now rusted-out junk, and so is his old Lancia. I never got to ride the one or drive the other. There are a few things of my Dads that are still as good as new. They are my Dads 1930s Mauser hunting rie (in fact its probably worth even more now than it was when new), his BSA 12-bore shotgun from the same decade, and his Colt automatic pistol from the 1940s. They all work perfectly. Theyll probably work perfectly a thousand years from now, if properly maintained (which basically means just storing them clean and well-oiled, and actually using them every now and then). Now ask yourself: why should such longevity be the exclusive prerogative of weapons of destruction? Why cant everything be made like guns, land mines and samurai swords? Why cant all vehicles, for example, be made that way? Admittedly some vehicles do last for a very long time: especially aircraft and seacraft. The B-52 and the DC-3 are still going strongand could go on strong, for all we know, quite indenitely. Likewise many yachts built prior to WW-II. Vim, a 12-metre yacht designed by Olin Stephensthe best yacht designer of all time, and MITs most famous dropoutwhich was built for American railroad tycoon Harold S. Vanderbilt in 1939, is at the present being offered for sale for 1.4 million. But upkeep for such things costs an arm and a leg: Vim was completely retted with no budget limits in 2003, as the seller says, which is why its in immaculate condition and still racing in the most important Classic Yacht regattas. Thats no good, now is it. Things should last long without a huge amount of periodical upkeep and renovation, and their associated crazy cost. Its all a matter (again!) of nances. The actual cost of owning a thing is directly proportional to its upkeep, and inversely proportional to its longevity and resale value. A Stradivarius violin bought directly from old man Stradivari would have been a splendid asset, because it would last pretty much for ever with a minimal amount of care taken in its use and storage. Even a Steinway grand can last a very long time, though admittedly it needs expensive tuning periodically. Picassos and Van Goghs go for millions, because they are investments, not expenditures. People who use money wisely buy them with the sure knowledge that they are not spending their money, they are saving itindeed, very likely increasing it. Houses are one such investment, which pretty much everybody goes for these days. Middle-class people routinely go into hock for thirty years to by a half-million-dollar home, even though they might pay half a million dollars in interest alone over those same thirty years, on top of having to pay back the halfmillion-dollar principal. Its still worth it, because many homes last pretty much for ever: Tudor homes are still being bought and sold (at premium prices, I might add). Likewise furniture: Tudor tables were often two or three inches thick, and made of oakno wonder theyve lasted. If in the time of Queen Elizabeth The First they could build stuff that would last till the time of Queen Elizabeth The Second, theres absolutely no reason we cant do it today. But when you buy a new car today, itll have lost a quarter of its value as soon as you drive it off the lot; and in ten to fteen years itll be worth dick-all. The same thing applies to appliances. Buy a range or a fridge or a washer-and-dryer, and in a few years its worth next to nothing: in fact, you might even have to pay someone to haul it away if it stops working. Does that make any sense to you? Were simply used to it, so we dont rebel against it. But its a consummate disgrace. The stock argument is that manufacturers want you to buy new products from them every so often, so they design their products so that theyll fall apart after a short time. But how does this square with the stock argument for capitalism, which is, that competition brings down product prices and drives up their quality? Either there is no such thing as competition, and all rms collude to keep their products as crappy as possiblein which case all the economists in all the universities should be red!or else theres room for at least one company in every eld of manufacture to make their products last forever, and, as a result, demolish their competitors by loudly and widely advertising the fact. That this is not happening is surely a sign that something is rotten in the state of Denmark and in the states of California, Michigan, Ohio and
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Texas (among others) as well. I leave it to yall to gure out where the stench is coming from. (Ohand let me know when you do, please.)
Love and war in ancient Greece. Gays in the military were the norm, not the exception. It was those effeminate straight guys, who went in for mathematics and philosophy and all that other mind stuff, who were NOT drafted to ght the Trojans.Masters and Johnson, see http://tinyurl.com/be7ql3r. These were the gays, remember, who whupped the collective ass of the greatest empire of their timethe Persian Empirenot just once but t h r e e times: at " " " Marathon, at Salamis and nally, and decisively, at Gaugamela.
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11. Put Your Money Where Your Mouth is
f course its no use making your product last forever unless your customers know about it. And what better way of doing so than offering a no-questions-asked lifetime warranty?
Thats what Sears does for its Craftsman brand tools. They offer a lifetime warranty on them. And its so easy to get them to honour it that all you have to do is bring the broken item back. Theyll give you a new one on the spot, whether you have the receipt or not. Craftsman brand tools are, therefore, among the most desired tools on the planet. Why should Sears get all the benet, though? Why cant all products be made with a life-timeor even an afterlife-timewarranty, like the Great Pyramid? You might say Its not really feasible with many products, but no, thats not really so. All you need to do is start giving your productwhatever it may bea lifetime warranty right from the get-go. Then, when it breaks down, it will, natch, come back to you for repairs. You make a note of which part has broken down, and beef up that part so much that it wont break down again. In a rather short time, that way, all the parts will be beefed up so much that your product will virtually never break down. (I say virtually because, yes, given some freak occurrence it may break down, in rare instances, but in such cases, the cost of repairs will be so small as to make little difference to your bottom line. And your sales will have gone up so much to compensate, that you wont mind in the least.) But of course you can always design it robust enough not to break down in the rst place. Russian ghter planes have always been designed with landing gear capable of allowing them to land on grass airelds, for instance. It was a directive from TsAGIthe Russian counterpart of NASAand all the Soviet aircraft designers had to follow it. Im guessing thats because even Russian paved airelds are full of potholes. If their ghters couldnt land on Russian grass elds they probably couldnt land on Russian paved elds either. If American ghters had tried to land on them theyd likely have been destroyed without a shot being red. And the Russians would, of course, have been laughing their heads off. The same thing with Russian space rockets, which are routinely launched in sub-zero temperatures. If the mercury falls to almost freezing at Cape Canaveral they cancel the launch. But at Baikonur in Kazakhstan, where the Russians have their launch pad, its sub-zero half the year, so they cant afford to cancel a launch just because it gets a bit chilly. Of course the Russians are used to this sort of thing. In Oymyakon in Siberiaone of the two coldest continuously-inhabited settlements in the worldthere is, I understand, a single boiler for heating water for all the houses. (Only a few hundred people live there, so its no big deal.) The hot water is piped to the houses through insulated pipes. The boiler simply does not break down. It gets so cold in Oymyakonthe name is probably Russian for OMGthat if you wear glasses outdoors they freeze to your face, and truck owners have to light a bonre under their fuel tanks to bring the diesel fuel from a solid to a liquid state in the morning. (Im not kidding: thats what it says in National Geographic.) So if the hot water boiler were to break down it would be a disasterthe pipes would all freeze and burst and theyd have to wait till summer to replace them. So the boiler doesnt break down. Its designed not to break down. This sort of engineering is not conned to Russia, either. Some American fridges built in the fties are still running. Theyre not very energy-efcient, but thats due to old technology. The point is that they still run. And, of course, steam engines built in the nineteenth century are in perfect working order. They are in museums, because its uneconomical to actually use them, but they could be used. And its not just big robust things that can be made to last forever: delicate mechanisms can be made to do the same. Chronometer watches made in the days when ships actually sailed the oceansI mean, sailed with sailsstill work and work accurately enough to calculate the longitude. Yes, we have more accurate chronometers now, and GPS allows us to forgo calculating the longitude anyway, but those old watches still work. In fact, in days gone by the one thing you typically inherited from your Dad was his watch. At least if you were the eldest son. (If you were the daughter you probably inherited the crockery, from your Mum.) Though neither the watch nor the crockery carried a lifetime warranty, they could have. So why cant carsand the roads they drive onbe offered with lifetime warranties? Theres absolutely no reason they cant be. And the rst company to do so would probably corner the market. Who
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would buy a car with a measly ve-yearor even ten-yearwarranty if they could buy one with a warranty that would outlast them? Other rms would have to follow suit, or else lose customers by the millions. And, of course, roads made with lifetime warranties would never have to be repaired: theyd be made tough enough to start with, because if they werent, the contractors would go out of business constantly repairing them under warranty. And, of course, the rst contractor to offer to build roads with lifetime warranties would get all the contracts from the municipalities. Not only would the municipalities save on periodical repairs, but wed be spared the trafc jams, delays and aggravation that result from construction always going on in the streets. Itd be a win-win situation!
Original sketches like this superb one by Rodin have been auctioned for thousands of dollars. (And thats cheap, even so.)
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12. Maintenance
ts simply not right to require that after you pay for an item, you also have to payand often, pay through the noseto maintain it. WTF?
Things should not require maintenance. Or, if they absolutely have to have some, it should be as little maintenance as possible, and it should be automated wherever possible. By as little as possible I mean just that. If as little as possible means zero maintenance, then thats what it should be. If its possible, say, to avoid having to replace the battery in a ashlight, it should be unnecessary to do so. If its possible to avoid replacing the oil in a car, it should be unnecessary to do so. Unfortunately its not possible to avoid replacing the fuel in a carat least not yet (though in the far future, when radiation-proof nuclear engines come into existence, fuel replacements could be decades apart)so when you need to replace the fuel it should be possible to do it automatically. In a small way we are doing this sort of thing already. In the old days people had to go to the well with a bucket to get water for the kitchen. These days water is piped continuously to the kitchen, both hot and cold. In the old days people had to haul rewood for heating their homes; now we heat our homes with gas, oil or electricity continuously delivered to us. (Parenthetically, theres absolutely no reason why this trend cant be universalised. Why, for example, should we have to put our car out of commission for fteen minutes every three months to have its oil changed? The car should contain a reservoir of fresh oil, which we could top up at our convenience in a matter of seconds at the gas stationor even in our own garageand when the time comes to change the oil, the old dirty oil should be automatically pumped into a disposable reservoir and the fresh oil pumped into the engine. We should not even have to do this consciously: it should be all done by the cars own systems when the time is right. If the oil lter also needs to be changed, the same sort of thing should happen: there should be a stack of fresh lters in the car, and a fresh one should be moved automatically into place when its time, with the old dirty one being moved in turn into a disposable container which can later be, well, disposed of when its convenient for us, not for the car. (If I had my way, in fact, I would even apply this sort of thing to groceries, like milk and eggs. If we lived in an enlightened world, we would never have to go out shopping: wed only go shopping when we wanted to. Why cant regularly-used groceries also be delivered to our homes regularly, just like water, electricity, natural gas and heating oil are today? If we know we are going to go through X amount of milk, butter, bread, rice, spaghetti, cooking oil, lettuce, onions, garlic, potatoes, tomatoes, coffee and eggs in a week, then X amount should be arriving at our home automatically every week. Only if we wanted caviar, foie gras or trufes would we then need to go shopping for food.) Maybe this will never happenthough for the life of me I cant think why notbut all this is a side issue. What Im trying to say is, that we can at least automate a lot of the routine maintenance we do on our stuff. Especially our vehicles. Cars are the worst-designed things in the universe. Theres absolutely no reason for them to require maintenance every so often. Airplanes, too. Some say the Concorde cost too much to maintain. Why, for chrissake? It was developed at a cost of billions. Its engineers should have gured out a way of eliminating, or at least minimising, the maintenance. If Fridges, TVs and watches can be designed to go without maintenance for years on end, then surely everything else can be, too. Maintenance is expensive and in addition, often requires us doing without the thing which is being maintained: at least for a while. But why should it? Maintenance can be automated. Better still, very often maintenance can be eliminated. My father-in-law once had a refrigerator from the fties at his cottage. It worked just ne, and never needed maintenance. He sold his cottage, and I dont know where the fridge is now, but it could have lasted indenitely without maintenance. So, surely, can everything else!
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The breast. Bunged in here because its cool.
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13. Coolth
he word warmth is, according to Webster, The state, sensation, or quality of producing or having a [certain] degree of heat: an agreeable warmth in the house.
The word coolth is, according to me, The state, sensation, or quality of producing or having a [certain] degree of desirability: the iPhone has a great deal more coolth than any other phone. I disdain the word coolness, as indeed I disdain the modern habit of tacking the sufx -ness to any and every adjective to turn it into a noun. The ness-ness of a thing is not made any cooler by calling it a nessness. The sufx -ity is somewhat betteras in curiosity and luminositybut coolity just sounds weird. I think coolth sounds a lot cooler than coolness, anyway; so coolth it shall be in this book. Everything should have coolth. It was one of the rst things the Creator designed into nature when he created it: everything natural is naturally cool. Its also one of the rst things Steve Jobs used to look for in any new Apple product, and its one of the rst things you ought to look for in yours too. In fact, if your stuff isnt as cool as Apple stuff designed under Steve Jobs, you ought to be thoroughly ashamed of yourself as an engineer. Thats the least amount of coolth your stuff should have. Preferably, in fact, it should be cool enough to be exhibited in a museum like the Guggenheimas the Ducati 916 and MV Agusta F4 motorbikes designed by Massimo Tamburini were. In fact it could be even cooler, like the Britten V1000 racing motorcycle designed and built by maverick John Britten and a few lay buddiesall the work being done in Brittens garage in Christchurch, New Zealand during the early 1990s (and on a shoestring budget, at that: the shoestring being made of carbon bre, of course)but maybe thats asking too much of professional engineers: pros dont work like that. No wonder all of these commanded, and still command, premium prices. People just love coolth: so much so that theyll put up with a great deal of crap from a cool product. Not that I am advocating creating products with a great deal of crap designed into them, but it shows how important coolth is in engineering. Enzo Ferrari knew this. His cars were, more often than not, the epitome of cool. Many of them might have been hard to drive and costly to maintain, with the clutch often too stiff to hold down at the intersection while waiting for the light to change, and the gated shifter often clunky. But Ferraris were, and still are, cool, and their owners forgave them their trespassesand still dobecause of their coolth. These people would never have put up with such BS from a Honda or a Toyota, but they put up with a lot of BS from Ferraris because they were Ferraristhat is, because they were cool. And they paid megabucks for the privilege. But coolth is not restricted to the toys of the rich and famous. The original VW Beetleone of the bestselling cars of all timewas cool: it was the cutest thing on wheels and had an air-cooled engine in the back. It was so cool, in fact, that even 60s peaceniks forgave it for having been inspired by Hitler. It wasnt expensive; it was in fact very affordable. So affordable indeed that its still being made and sold in Mexico and places farther south. The Citron 2CV was also cool. It bounced along merrily by the millions on French roads, and when you got to where you were going you could pull out its seats and sit on them to enjoy your rillettes spread on slices of baguette accompanied by cornichons and washed down with a glass of vin ordinaire while watching the 24-hour race at Le Mans. Plus it was half the price of the VW Beetle. Both these inexpensive vehicles were as much the epitome of cool as Ferraris, and as a result they sold like hot cakes. Coolth is not restricted to mechanical things either, or even modern things. The coolest thing ever made was, arguably, the Great Pyramid. Its ve thousand years old forcryingoutloud. When it rst stood there all by itself in what was then nothing but desolate desert in every direction, clad in gleaming white limestone with a glittering gold pinnacle, it must have been totally, but totally cool. On a cool wall, like the one on BBCs Top Gear, it would have been so far to the right in the sub-zero section that it would have exited the studio. It was all the cooler for serving no earthly purpose, even when brand new. Its intended purpose was, as far as we know, altogether otherworldly, and well only nd out if it achieved this purpose or not when we reach the otherworld ourselves. If we ever do. If not, well never know. Thats life. Or rather, thats death. If the Great Pyramid had any earthly purpose at all, that purpose must have been to simply sit there looking far, far, far cooler than anything anywhere. And that purpose it certainly achievedin spades.
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No wonder the Pharaoh spent twenty per cent of his nations GDP every year for twenty years running to have it builtwith his people solidly behind him. Thats what Im talking about! Make your products really, really coolso cool as to blow away the competitionand people will ock in their thousands (and not just thousands, but millions, even billions) to get their hands on them. You can even charge a premium. How can you lose?
RodinJe suis belle. Cool, eh? (I absolutely LOVE the way Rodin has done the guys sexy bits.) The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.The Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who for a time was Rodin's secretary. Rodin taught him the value of objective observation, and under this inuence Rilke dramatically transformed his poetic style from the subjective and sometimes incantatory language of his earlier work " " " " into something quite new in European literature.Wikipedia.
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14. Quark
o you remember Quark? I mean the quirky character from Star Trek: Deep Space 9. He was a bit of a douchebag, but nevertheless even Odo, his arch-nemesis, came to (begrudgingly) like him. Why? Well, the answer seems to be that Quark had some quirks that made him loveable. You might say the same thing about Denny Crane from Boston Legal: William Shatners best role even better than his role as Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek. Denny Crane was a right-wing maniac, but he had a quirky, loveable quality that made even the liberal Alan Shore accept him as his BFF. There are untold numbers of such charactersand even real-life peoplewho, despite being what your would normally call not-quite-all-that, nevertheless were all that. French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, for example. Ugly as all hell, but beloved by millions of Frenchmen (and swooned over by millions of Frenchwomen). Barbra Streisand, with her prominent proboscis (and associated deviated septum). Louis Armstrong, with his gravelly voice. Danny DeVito, shorter than most schoolchildren. There are thousands of such people, who are loveable not in spite of, but because of, some quirk they have. Take a cue from this. What you, as an engineer, need to do is to make your product loveable. Its very important, if you want to sell enough of it. (And if you dont want to sell enough of it, why are you in the business in the rst place?) What you want to do is not merely create products, but sell them. And to sell them, one of the best things you can do is make them loveable: make people fall in love with them. And one of the best ways to make people fall in love with your products is to introduce some quirk into them, so that when people see them they exclaim Oh how cute! and Oh, how sweet! and, of course, the clincher: I love you to bits. Thats the important thing. People often buy stuff based on their emotions, not reason. If they love it, they will yearn for it for days on end ahead of time, and go for it when they see it in the store, even if they cant really afford it. A prime example is the Porsche 911. The engine is in the back, which is a no-no in modern automobile engineering: the engines weight tends to cause the car to swing around like a pendulum when cornering. No other modern car is designed like that, and for good reason. Besides, its looks have stayed pretty much the same for well nigh fty, count em, fty years. No other car has had such a long run looking the same except its granddaddy, the VW Beetle, on which it is based. Its also ridiculously overpriced. But it sells like hot cakes, and has been doing so for decades. It has millions of fans who drool over it even when they dont have much hope of ever owning one or driving one. (I knowI am one of them myself.) This is not despite, but because of, its quirks. And quirks it has many. Indeed, every 911 model is a bit unique in that each has its own set of distinctive features and quirks that the owners come to know and love (or hate) over time. Among them, with regard to the last of the air-cooled models, made between 1993 and 1998, are the following: its side mirrors arent symmetrically positioned; the steering wheel is slightly off-centre relative to the drivers seat; and the cars body isnt mounted on a chassis in the centre, its slightly towards the passenger side. Quirky or what. 911s arent just loved: they are also hated. By some. Paradoxically, this fact often makes them all the more loved by their fans. They feel a certain superiority at knowing that there are people who havent the ability to appreciate the qualities of the 911: much like the superiority Wagner acionados feel over those who cant sit through a performance of the entire Ring cycle. Which goes to prove the old adage, Theres no such thing as bad publicity. Even more quirky are the cars built by Horacio Pagani, a native of Argentina who, armed with a letter from ve-time Grand Prix winner Juan Manuel Fangio, emigrated to Italy when he was 20 years old to work for Lamborghini. He later quit that rm to found his own car factory. There he created the Zonda and its successor, the Huayra: both million-dollar supercars. Top Gears Richard Hammond fell in love with the amboyant Zonda, saying a supercar should have a sense of pantomime and theatre, and adding I would sell my house, buy one of these and live in a tunnel! And when I myself saw the pictures of its successor, the Huayra, I was so blown away that I can hardly fault Hammond for saying what he did. The Bugatti Veyron might have a bit of a performance edge on the Huayra, but there just isnt any other car
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which is so fantastic-looking inside. In the Huayra, form does not follow function, especially inside. Its interiorand especially the instrument cluster and shift leverlook like a collection of jewels; and if youre going to ownor even just drivethe car, you are going to feel like you need to be dressed in the proper attire: something, I fancy, along the lines of one of Ozwald Boatengs equally amboyant Saville Row suits a mere Armani or Zegna would be much too drabperhaps suitable only for owners of Veyrons. (That said, I have to mention that Boatengwho designed many of the clothes for the Matrix movies, especially Morpheuss fantastic outtsand Armani are great friends, despite the fact that Armani generally looks down on Saville Row and vice versa.) Im betting that in a hundred years time, when the Veyron will have been eclipsed by supercars many times more technically advanced, the Huayra will still look drop dead gorgeous, and command high premiums over all its rivals. Go look at its pictures on the internet. The Porsche 911 and the Pagani Zonda and Huayra arent the only examples of quirky products that have become loveable because of their quirks; nor is this advantage restricted to high-end items costing more than most people can afford. The very rst 1984 Macintosh computer was as cute as a button. It cost $2,500 at the time, but people bought it by the millions. The rst iMacthe one that looked like a colourful gumdropwas in its day even cuter: my teenage niece fell in love at rst sight with the one I acquired in 1999. These were both quirky machines: the mouse had only one button (so that you couldnt press the wrong button by mistake, the company originally claimed), and the keyboard didnt have a numerical keypad. But people loved them. Some things with quirks go for thousands of dollars, even when they are tiny. Consider the Breguet Grande Complication Tourbillon Messidor wrist watch, so named as a tribute to the Breguet companys Tourbillon invention, patented on the 7th day of the month of Messidor in the Year IX according to the French calendar that came into force with the Revolution: thats June 26, 1801 by our calendar. It has a transparent front and back so that you can see all its internal gears and workings. Because of this, the watchs hands are difcult to seeand theyre all the more difcult to see since they are tiny and cover less than a quarter of the watchs face to begin with. Besides, its a wind-up watch: if you forget to wind it, it will eventually stop. Despite all thisor perhaps because of itit retails for over a hundred grand, whether youre talking dollars or euros! Im not kidding: check out http://tinyurl.com/7ag3gu6. The Breguet people must be laughing all the way to the bank. The Dyson Fan is another example of a cool and quirky product selling for way more than the competitionand yes, its a product most people can afford, unlike the Breguet Grande Complication Tourbillon Messidor although I admit it is way overpriced for what it does. But then, people will pay more for a really cool and quirky product: which is exactly the point I am trying to make here. The Dyson Fan is bladeless, and totally super-cool-looking to boot. Its not really bladeless: the blades are hidden in the body of the fan. But you dont see them. Because of this quirk, and because its super-cool, it sells for up to ten times the price of other fans of similar air-moving ability. People are willing to pay this premium because they fall in love with it. One reviewer at gizmodo.com writes: Dysons newest invention, a window fan with no blades, is the most opulent, most eye-catching and most ludicrously overpriced gadget the company has released yet. And I sort of love it. [] $300 for a fan is far, far from an upsell when I can get 95% of the experience for $10 at Walmart. Even as a good fan even as a beautiful fan even as a clever fan that blocks less window light even as a safe fan that your toddler or pet can examine without injury I'm downright humiliated for liking it, especially in this economy. But like it, I do. BTW: the fan topped the summer gadget sales in the UK in 2010, despite its lofty 200 price tag. Thats the way to do it! Create stuff people will fall in love with, and you too, like the people at Breguet and Dyson, will be laughing all the way to the bank.
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15. Whats in a Name?
ctually, almost everything. At least when it comes to product names.
Just think. Who would have bought the iPod if it had been called The MP3 Player? Whod have bought the Walkman if it had been called The Portable Tape Recorder? Who would buy Hagen-Dazs ice creamor at least pay a premium for itif it werent called that? Dont imagine that your work as an engineer is to simply create the product, and its someone elses job to give it a namea name thatll ensure that it sells, and sells well. If your product doesnt sell because someone else gave it a lousy name, you will be the one to get the sack, not the guy who named it. Thats how management works. Managers are never to blameits always the managed. Cool names sell products. Think iPod, iPhone, iPad and, of course, iMac. Think Rolex. Think Nike. Think Coca Cola. Think Lego. Some products even become synonyms for their entire class of product. Think Kleenex, think Windex, think Xerox, think Band-Aid, think Post-it, think Scotch tape, think Frisbee. Now thats marketing! Be careful, though, when naming your product: be certain beforehand that it will deliver on what the name promises. As the Harvard Business Review says:
Names set expectations. Above all, make sure your product delivers on them. Because it had a new name, Microsofts Vista operating system primed consumers to expect dramatically new capabilities that the software did not actually have. The company thus mismanaged expectations.
You dont want that happening. Nor do you want to name you product in a way that might turn people off. Admittedly some products that have been unfortunately named have become best-sellers despite the factlike the Wii and Grey Poupon mustardbut thats just luck. Dont count on it. Anyway, product names are important. A great name can make the difference between prot and loss and just ask your CFO how important that is!
The Bellman, from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll. Drawing by Henry Holiday. (This wasnt one of the nine sketches by Holiday which were actually published, though. I wonder why. Hes absolutely gorgeous-looking.)
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" " " " " Heres an excerpt from the The Hunting of the Snark:
The Bellmans Speech

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies Such a carriage, such ease and such grace! Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise, The moment one looked in his face! He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. Whats the good of Mercators North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines? So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply They are merely conventional signs! Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But weve got our brave Captain to thank: (So the crew would protest) that hes bought us the best A perfect and absolute blank! This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out That the Captain they trusted so well Had only one notion for crossing the ocean, And that was to tingle his bell. He was thoughtful and gravebut the orders he gave Were enough to bewilder a crew. When he cried Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard! What on earth was the helmsman to do? Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes: A thing, as the Bellman remarked, That frequently happens in tropical climes, When a vessel is, so to speak, snarked. But the principal failing occurred in the sailing, And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed, Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East, That the ship would not travel due West!
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16. Something Old, Something New
mage is very important. An ounce of image is worth a pound of performanceor so, famously, wrote Laurence J. Peter, author of The Peter Principle.
Just think what it does to your rms image when your products start to look crappier and crappier as time goes by. They may have been spanking good looking when new, but if they start looking more and more decrepit, what are people to think? I dont want that brand, thats what they are going to think! Unless you are making cars, of course, because all cars made today look crappier and crappier as time goes by. Car companies havent yet cottoned on to the fact that they could make an absolute killing if they didnt make their cars to look that way. (The exception that proves the rule is, as I already said earlier, the Pagani Huayra, the car with the best looking interior in over half a century. Im pretty sure that a hundred years from now it will look just as kewl as it does today. Thats the one I would buy if I were a gazillionaire.) Firms that make things which look just as good old as new make a fortune. Think of the Leica M3. Originally made in 1954, it and its successorsmade with minor changes between modelsare so highly prized that the ones made forty years ago and more, if they come with an original Leitz lens, are offered for sale for two grand plus. The body alone can go for over a grand, and the lens likewise. This for a forty-yearold camera, and a lm camera to boot! eBay writes: Leica lenses are highly regarded for their longevity and quality, as well as their speed [...] In addition to their use as functioning cameras, Leica cameras are highly prized as collectibles. Cameras and accessories from the earliest years of production are especially valued. I wish I could afford one, but I cant. No wonder Fuji is offering a digital look-a-Leica for twelve hundred bucks nowadays. And a genuine digital Leica M9 goes for six-and-a-half grand right nowand thats with a rebate. Now thats image! And be it noted that Leicas command their high price despite their shortcomings. Heres a list of the fairly serious shortcomings of the latest, the M9: - Capable of only 1-2 frames per second - Lack of weather sealing - No live view - No integrated dust removal system - Absence of any video mode And the worst shortcoming, as described in November 2009 by camera reviewer David Lykes Keenan in The Digital Journalist:
The M9 is generously rated at two frames per second. Okay, but after seven or eight exposures, the camera clogs up and forgets about taking more for what can seem like an eternity if you're missing the actionjust watch the blinkity-blinkity of the red LED for awhile. During this time you can rationalize why its okay to miss the pictures you cant take right now because the M9 is so cool and/or explain to your subject that they can take a break while the camera is thinking. This is not a matter of a larger frame buffer in the camera. A larger buffer would also eventually ll up and youd have to wait even longer. This is a matter of an under-powered image processorbasically, the M9s brain is way too slow.
In spite of all this, people are buying it. Because Leicas have cred. Old or new, theyre as cool as cucumbersif not even cooler. And of course, because of their history. The older the rm gets, the more costly its latest cameras get. And yet people lap them up. Theres often even a waiting list. Superior still are those products that are themselves even better old than new. Chippendale furniture is a case in point: its highly prized by collectors of antiques. Stradivarius violins, violas and cellos also come to mindthey actually improve with age, so they command millions. But Thomas Chippendale and Antonio Stradivariand their descendantsdidnt benet from that, so lets think of actual engineering products made by companies still in existence today. Holland and Holland have been making hunting ries for the last century and a half. Their top-of-the-line Royal double barrelled hunting rie retails for over a hundred grand, and thats pounds sterling were talking, not mere dollars. And two of the very last shotguns ever produced by 200-year-old London luxury goods rm Asprey were sold at Christie's in London for over $120,000. TIME magazine wrote in February 16, 2011, under the heading Forget Gold: Why Investors Are Targeting Guns:
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The market for English shotguns is as hot as the casing of a spent cartridge, with gun prices reaching new highs. Auctioneers say the boom was triggered by the September 2008 collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers, during the Great Recession. Spooked by the unpredictability of the stock market, a growing number of investors, mainly those already into game-bird hunting, wanted to diversify their portfolios and saw top-end shotguns not only as a safe investment with reliable returns, but one with actual utility. There is a lot of similarity between our market and the classic, vintage car market, Gardiner says. Guns are an investment you can use and enjoy. Adds Elworthy: If it is reasonably [unaltered], is serviced and looked after, an English gun should do nothing else but increase steadily in value.
There is, in fact, no reason why everything, if reasonably serviced and looked after, shouldnt do likewise. Its not as if guns are not used roughly, whether internally or externally. Bullets have to withstand upwards of 150,000 gs when red: nothing in a fridge or washing machine or air conditioneror even private jetcomes close. And hunting in Africa means going out into the bush for chrissake. Theres dust, rocks, thorns and wild beasts. Your gun is not going to be mollycoddled. But it can take the heatboth literal and gurativeand actually come out looking all the better for it. If thats the case, why cant your car, your appliances and your house do likewise?
So. Think about what I said, and draw your own long-lived product here:
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17. The Eliminator
kea has a philosophy, according to one of its posters, which goes something like this: A design means nothing unless theres a price attached to it.
Darn right. Sure you can design something spectacular; that by itself is not hard. But at what price? In other words, will the customer say Yikes! when he sees its sticker? If he will, you could be a loser. It bears repeating: You have to sell your product. Unless you are making something for yourself, you are making it for someone else. (Duh!) That someone else has to like itlike it enough, in fact, to part with hard-earned cash for it. In most cases anyways. I dont mean to imply, by the way, that your product must be the cheapest possible. But I do mean that there ought to be a target price to which you design your product. Its a bit like a college take-home assignment. Your essay must t into so many double-spaced pages. On occasion a bit of leeway may be allowed, but not much. You cant hand in a fty-page essay to a prof who wants it ve pages long and expect to get an A, no matter how good it may be. (Nevertheless, with some profs you might get an A all the same, especially if shes in a good mood on the day of markingfor whatever reason. But youd be taking a huge risk, and you know it.) Think of your customer as your prof. Your product must be sellable to your target customer, or you wont have succeeded as an engineer, irregardless of how good your product is. (BTW: irregardless of the grammar police, Im still going to write irregardless.) Mind you, this doesnt mean that overpriced products are necessarily failures. Sometimes you can jack up your products price in the safe and secure knowledge that your customer will pay, because you have him by the balls. That happened, for example, with the Concorde. It ended up waaaaaaaaay over budget, but the manufacturers knew the British and French governments would pay, mainly because they couldnt afford not to pay: the Concorde was the product of an international treaty, and breaking the treaty would have been too damaging politically. Besides, it was the taxpayers money anyway, not the politicians. (That said, it wasnt really a waste of money, despite being horribly overpriced: it was an engineering rst from which a lot was learned, and served for 27 years as the worlds only supersonic airliner, commanding such a high price per ticketup to $10,000 one-waythat it paid for itself despite the cost overruns.) But you arent always going to be lucky enough to work on a project like the Concorde. (Mind you, if you work for the American military you might get that luckytheyve been known, on occasion, to cheerfully pay $100 each for hammers, $600 each for toilets, $3,000 each for coffeemakers and $720 million dollars in late fees for storage containers.) But normally youd work for someone whose customers are a bit more discerning. Youve got to be discerning too. Its not too hard. If you end up like most engineers, youll be given the responsibility of designing, not an entire gizmo, but a part of one. Whats so hard about making your part inexpensive to make? For instance, suppose youre given the job of designing a distributor for a car. I had to replace the distributor in my car a few years ago, and it cost a couple of hundred dollars. And that was just for a Honda Civic; a Porsche 911s distributor costs three times as much, and a Ferraris even more: and lets not even ask about the Veyrons. Thats ridiculous for a gadget that simply makes sure each cylinder res on time. As its name implies, a distributor distributes high voltage current to the correct cylinder so that the spark plug in it res when it should. All it is, basically, is a cap and a rotor. The current is sent to the rotor, which spins inside the cap. The rotor spins past a series of contacts, one contact per cylinder. As the tip of the rotor passes each contact, a high-voltage pulse comes from the coilthats the transformer which turns the lowvoltage current from the cars battery into high-voltage current so that it can make a spark. The pulse arcs across a small gap between the rotor and the contactthey dont actually touchand then continues to the spark plug installed on the appropriate cylinder. Now what exactly is the rationale for such a simple device to cost a couple of hundred dollars? Okay, it has to be super-reliable, which requires beeng it up in size, but hardly in complexityreliability can only go down with complexity going up. All it is, is one thing whirling around inside another at a precise speed. Dont tell me you cant design it to be made for twenty bucks. You can sell the idea to your boss by calling the savings prot.
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But thats not the best you can do. If youre a good engineer, you should be able to eliminate the need for a distributor altogether, and so save the entire cost of one. Some bright chaps have done just that, in fact. Distributorless ignition is the way of the future. Instead of one main coil, these systems have a coil for each spark plug, located directly on the spark plug itself. The engine control unit (ECU) controls transistors that break the circuit on its ground side, where sparks dont y. This gives the ECU total control over spark timing. It doesnt just save the cost of a distributor, but also allows the spark timing to be adjusted automatically, thus optimising spark timing depending on engine speed and loading. In addition, highvoltage spark-plug wires are also not needed, which too wear out and need to be replaced every so often. The coils on the spark plugs, being simple transistors with no moving parts, never wear out. Its all good. Well, you lost the chance to eliminate somethingnamely, a cars distributorthis time around, but cant you think of ways to eliminate other things? Like home air conditioners, for instance. Every house has cold water being pumped to it 24/7 via the citys mains. In summer, the water is approximately 10 to 15 degrees Celsius cooler than the ambient air, because the pipes are underground, and so are insulated by the earth. Why cant this temperature difference be used to cool down the house, using radiators: just like warm water pumped through radiators can heat up houses? Feed the cold water from the mains, as it enters the house, to radiators, which can be located anywhere: say, in the homes air vents. Let it cool the house down, and only then feed it to your water heater and toilet and showers and faucets. Sure the cold water taps will then spew forth room-temperature water, but so what: you dont need them to spew forth water thats any colder. Youre not going to be taking cold showers now, are you? (If you do plan on doing that, have a separate feed to the showerand the shower alonefrom the mains.) For drinking water, keep a jug in the fridge. For all other purposes, including gardening and ushing the toilet, room temperature water ought to be plenty cold enough! Yes, the system may cost a bit to set up, but will cost next to nothing to run, so saving electricityquite a lot of electricity, in fact, especially during peak hours. The city ought to be so happy about it, in fact, that it ought to subsidise such systems. So should the electricity company. Take a look around you. Isnt there something you can eliminate? There must be. Identify it, and youre well on your way to engineering success!
Matisse has eliminated everything thats unnecessary from this sketch. It sold at auction for over $25,000. No kidding. No one has ever looked at Matisses painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than " " " " he.Picasso. Id advise you to look just as carefully.
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18. The Sum of its Parts
pparently it was Aristotle who rst talked about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The notion appears in his Metaphysics, Book H, Section 1045a. But if you examine his contextsee http://tinyurl.com/7yu9bdhyou will see that he was talking about men, not machines. But thats not how it should be when youre talking about machines, and certainly not when you are talking about their price: not if you make the machineor other engineering productand want to be competitive when selling it. Thats because if someone else makes a competing product that costs no more than the sum of its parts, you could be out of business! Ikea knows this. They got to be the worlds biggest furniture company by making stuff thats not much more expensive than the sum if its screw-together parts. Their furniture is often half the price of similar furniture sold by its competitors. They make thousands of items this way, and their variety and numbers increase every year. Theres no reason, in fact, why everything cant be made like that. Mind you, Ikea stuff isnt perfect. As author Ethan Trex wrote in Mental Floss magazine (Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix, see http://tinyurl.com/5xy8j7): If its possible to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture without cursing at the top of your lungs, Ive never seen it happen. Ikeas way of putting their stuff together leaves much to be desired, and they could certainly learn a thing or two from the principles outlined in this book. But they are denitely on the right track regarding the notion that the price of a product should not be greater than the sum of the prices of its parts. That way they keep their costs down and thereby outsell their competitors. So could you. Consider a house. Building materials are not very expensive: just check out the prices of lumber and tiles at the nearest Home Depot. So why should hard-working people have to go into debt for a whole generation just to have a roof to raise their families under? It should not be like that! If Ikea were to go into the housing business, it would supply us with houses made in parts that can be tted together just like their furniture can be tted together. It could, of course, do better than just that, and make the tting together of the houses a lot easierand quickerthan it does with its furniture. But the principle remains the same: build-it-yourself houses that cost a lot less than ready-made houses of similar size and quality. Theyd sell like hot cakes. The idea has the potential to completely revolutionise the housing market everywhere. Well, if Ikea doesnt do this, step into the gap and do it yourself! You could be sitting on a gold mine. But houses arent the only things that can be made not much more expensive than the sum of their parts. Everything can be made that way, especially if the parts simply snap together like we said before. That includes such things as fridges, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens, air conditioners, and even cars and planes and helicopters. If a part of the product breaks, due to abuse, crashing, terrorists ring machine guns randomly at it, or indeed any reason, all you should need to do is replace the part, not the entire product. And the part should be priced realistically: as much as it costs to make and sell, plus a decent percentage by way of prot for the manufacturer and sellerbut not an outrageous prot, the way auto parts are priced these days. If you make your product like that, trust me, people will buy it over your competitors, especially if you advertise this fact loudly and widely. About thatsee the next chapter.
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Now heres where you think up your own great idea, write it down and sketch it.
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19. Dont be Shy
ts no use having a great product if no one knows about it: not if you want it sold. You have to advertise it. And not be shy about doing so.
Some things, admittedly, advertise themselves. Ferraris, for example, win Formula 1 races, so people know about them. You dont see paid Ferrari ads on TV or in magazines, do you? They get plenty of publicity from racing. The same thing applies to McLarens and Bugattis. McLaren doesnt run ads for its latest model, the MP4-12C, but that car is drooled over by millions all the same. As was the F1, the rst McLaren road car. As for the Bugatti Veyron, BBCs Top Gear awarded it Car of the Decade at the end of 2010, and it sold for two million dollars without any advertising or even participating in racing. It was the fastest car in the world at the time, which was enough to generate a waiting list even for the rich and fabulous. If youre lucky you might be able to create a product like that, which doesnt need any advertising because its in the public eye all the time. But most likely youll end up creating something that needs to blow its own horn. So dont be shy. Blow it! Steve Jobs knew the value of this. When he created the very rst Macintosh in 1984, he commissioned what some have called the most iconic TV ad ever made: the 60-second Big Brother commercial shown in movie-quality during the Super Bowl. It was so memorable that people remember the ad even when they dont remember who won the Super Bowl. But thats not all: Jobs also bought all of the advertising space in a 1984 issue of Newsweek. This was the rst time, and possibly the only time, that this had ever happened. And one of the rst things he did when retaking control of Apple in 1998 was think differently about computer advertising with the Think Different campaign. It was clearly aimed at IBMs campaign motto Think (as in ThinkPad), and became a crucial factor in Apples turnaround. It won an Emmy award, a Belding award, a Silver Lion and a Gold Lion at Cannes, and an Efe award for marketing effectiveness. Its now a marketing case study, and some people have called it one of the most successful campaigns in the history of advertising. Although Jobs didnt himself create the Think Different slogan, he was smart enough to run it, and run it loudly and insistently, when another guy, Craig Tanimoto, did. Jobs was also smart enough to hire TBWA\Chiat\Day, the ad rm Tanimoto worked for, as Apples main horn-blower. (Thefact that TBWA\Chiat\Day were smart enough to have their HQ designed by Frank Gehrydescribed by Vanity Fair as the most important architect of our agemight also have had something to do with it.) Learn something from this. When you advertiseand in most cases you mustdo it with panache, do it with style, do it in a way that will make people talk. Remember that word of mouth is still the best way to advertise: its because people talk about Ferraris and Bugattis that Ferrari and Bugatti dont have to pay to advertise. Mind you, it wouldnt hurt them to do so, unless they like sitting at the bottom end of the market in terms of units sold. (Which, by the way, they just might: fewer Veyrons sold makes them all the more exclusive, and the Bugatti brand is just a huge advertisement for its parent company, Volkswagen, anyway.) But if you want to make your product as popular as the iPod, iPad and iPhone, you must tell the world about how wonderful it is. Make sure everyone knows that its inexpensive, easy to put together and to x, lasts forever, doesnt need maintenance, doesnt lose its looks or its value over time, can be moved around without machinery, and is, above all, cool. People must know this: otherwise why would they buy it?
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Picasso. Hot. And expensive.
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20. K.I.S.S.
y K.I.S.S. I meanand I think you knowKeep It Simple, Stupid!
Im guessing this was one of the rst things they taught you when you entered engineering school, right? (If they didnt, shame on them. They should have. It was invented by one of the greatest engineers of the 20th century, Clarence Kelly Johnson, the man behind Lockheeds Skunk Works.) But how many engineers take this principle to heart? Look around you. Everything, but everything, is getting more and more complicated. To use a cell phone you almost need to take a university course, and clock radios take an age to set to the right time. When was the last time you bought something quite as simple as a hammer or a sickle? Ill bet, never unless of course you were buying a hammer or a sickle. The Soviets appreciated the K.I.S.S. principle. Theres a widespread story that the Americans spent a million dollars developing a pen that could write in space, while the Soviets used pencils instead. While this story is a total myththe space pens, which were developed by a private American company, actually cost NASA less than two bucks each, and the Soviets used them toothe principle still applies. It applied, for example, to Soviet guns. Their AK-47 (made in 47, of course), hadand still hasa wooden stock and steel bits. The Americans didnt catch up till 63 with their M16, and it had a plastic stock and some aluminium bits. Sure it had a much greater range and accuracy than the AK, but it was more complicated than the Soviet gun, and less reliable. Heres what one American user says about each:
AR-15s [as M16s were called before they entered the US military system] are nicky beasts. Mine works wellmost of the time. That's really saying quite a lot. If I scrub the parts, use Break Free to clean all the goop and then get rid of the excess Break Free, and repeat that procedure every hundred rounds, my rie is 98% reliable. With an AK, the procedure is like this: throw it in the dirt. Shoot it 300 times until it jams. Lock the bolt back and clean out the chamber with the only hose God gave you. Continue ring. You don't win matches with AKs, but you can count on them to keep you alive.
And another guy says:

In Vietnam, most soldiers choose to loose [sic] the M-16 & use an AK that was left laying around by some dead dude because they were more reliable. We're talking about close combat weapons here not sniper ries.
The same thing applied to Russian space rockets. The Soviet-era Proton Rocket was one of the most reliable launch systems ever designed. Its been going strong for almost half a century. It has an almost 88% reliability rate, vs. around 50% for the new American Delta IV Heavy. And the Soviet Soyuz rocket is, if anything, even more reliable than the Proton. According to the European Space Agency, the Soyuz launch vehicle is the most reliable launch vehicle in the world (see http://tinyurl.com/7zdo37g). Indeed, the entire Soyuz space system, including all its modules, developed in the mid-sixties, is still in use as one of the most reliable ever. The Encyclopedia Astronautica writes (see http://tinyurl.com/7o2xzv6): the Soyuz system worked and obtained reliability through its very simplicity. My guess is that this simplicity was inherent in Soviet designs because their designers had KGB agents looking over their shoulders all the time. The designers had to keep their blueprints simple enough for the agents to understand, or they could nd themselves in Siberia. Im just guessing, though. But there might be an additionalor more realisticexplanation. The Soviets had what they called design bureaus. A few highly skilled engineers designed the stuff, which they accurately specied down to the last nut and bolt. But then the blueprints were given to any old factory to turn into the nished article. The same factory could be producing ghter planes in one section and refrigerators in another. (Im not making this up: I read it somewhere. I just dont remember where.) That factorys workers were hardly the most skilled in the world, so even the most advanced stuff they made had to be simple to make. Well, we in North America are in much the same situation today. We get our stuff made in China and India, right? It costs too much to make it here. And although I have no doubt that the Chinese people are mad intelligent by natureas, indeed, are the Indian peoplelots of them havent actually been trained in
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modern manufacturing techniques. (I speak from experience, having spent the rst 21 years of my life in India.) If you make it hard from them to manufacture what you design, they might nd it too hard. And theres an additional benet getting your stuff made by less expert workersit keeps your costs down. Which is what you want to be competitive, right? Wheres the point in manufacturing something if your competitors prevent it from being sold? What you want is to keep your product competitive, and part of making it competitive means keeping it cheap to make. And it stands to reason that the simpler it is, the cheaper it is to build. Why wouldnt it be? True, designing something to be simple to build is sometimes a bit of a challenge, but thats what engineers are fordesigning the product well to begin with. The people who make the stuff thats been designed by engineers dont have to be engineers themselves. But youre going to be an engineer, right? Thats what theyll be paying you for, so make sure you earn your paycheck!
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie. (William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis.)
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21. Deliver Us
t bears repeating, over and over: You have to sell what you make. Even if you make just one thing, like the Taj Mahal. If you cant sell your product, you might not only nd yourself out of a job, but alsoif your customer is the Mogul Emperorout of this world, and squarely in the next. It can get that serious, so take it seriously, okay? Suppose youve done everything weve talked about up to this pointmade your product cool and inexpensive, great value for money, carrying a lifetime warranty, all thatand yet not made it easy to buy. How can you hope to see it succeed? Admittedly most things are easy to buy. Kind of. You drive to the store (or go by bus, or bike if its good weathermost likely the store isnt within walking distance), pick out what you want from a shelf carrying a limited selection of similar items, stand in line at the cash for what feels like an eternity, and pay for it. Then you bring it home. After that, youll most likely have to assemble it, dispose of the packaging in the proper recycling boxes, and thenif what you bought is electronictry to gure out how to make it work. Sometimes you even succeed at doing all this. Huh? You call that easy? No, man. In this day and age, thats not called easy. Thats an efng headache! Simply making your product cheap and good and cool isnt necessarily going to make it a bestseller not if you make your customers jump through hoops to take it home and start using it. Youve also got to make it easy for them to do so. Pizza joints knew this long ago, so they invented Delivery. Get your pizza in 30 minutes or less, or its free, they claimed. (Theyve had to stop making that claim to prevent their delivery guys speeding, but the principle remains in force.) And they made sure their phone numbers were easy to remember. Plus when you got your pizza, all you had to do was eat it. Hot. None of that laborious assembly and whatnot. (You do have to dispose of the carton, though, afterwards. Thats a bitch. They might want to work on that.) Why cant everything be delivered that quicklyand that well? No reason! No reason whatsoever. They just dont do it. But it can be done. Especially for big-ticket items. (I can understand not wanting to sell a toothbrush or a comb like that.) Delivery costs can be recouped from increased sales volume. Thats what L.L.Bean does. They will deliver anything in their catalogue or website anywhere in the US or Canada at no extra charge. Plus its guaranteed to last. Our products are guaranteed to give 100% satisfaction in every way. Return anything purchased from us at any time if it proves otherwise. We do not want you to have anything from L.L.Bean that is not completely satisfactory. Thats how they put it. L.L.Bean VISA card members even get free return shipping by using a prepaid return label they can print off their computer. And, of course, you can pay in a number of ways: PayPal, credit card, and coming soon, debit card. Cash is the only option not available. Not to mention that theres live help. You sit at your computer and L.L.Bean reps will talk to you using a videophone. You can see them, even if they cant see you. You can even shop via your cell phone. Theres an app for that. The only thing they dont doyetis deliver your order within 30 minutes or less. But they sure could! All it would take is for them to have outlets in every city within 30 minutes delivery distance from all their customers. Thats how Dominos Pizza does it, didnt they know? Its easy. And it would even save them in shipping, because the vast majority of their merchandise would be shipped to every city in bulk. Only the local delivery would be tailored to each purchase, and the cost of that would be a pittance compared to what it is now, across the continent. And they could even allow you to pay with cash, like Dominos does. All this could be done, not just by L.L.Bean, but also by you. Well, not by you personally, but by your rm. And dont try to tell me that because youre an engineer you dont have any control over sales. If your rm fails, where does that leave you? You dont seriously want to start looking for another job so soon, do you. Find a way to talk to your marketing and sales people; and, if they wont listen, go over their heads to the CEO and pitch the idea to her. (That is, if your rm has broken through the glass ceiling, as it should have in this day and age; if not, you may have to pitch the idea to him instead.)
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Whatever the case, if nobody listens, start getting ready to abandon your sinking ship, because any competitor who sells the same kind of stuff your rm makes, but sells it better, will put your rm out of businessits just a matter of time!
Picasso. Early erotic sketch. Circa 1910. (I think.) Really turns me on.
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22. Easy, Pal!
t all started in the seventies. A good friend had lost a watch I had given him to get xed, so he offered to replace it with a watch of my own choice. I was thinking of three at that time: a Rolex (with a mechanical movement), an Omega (also mechanical) and a Casio (electronic and digital). After much thinking on my part the Casio won out, because it had many functions the others just didnt. I think my friend was relieved, because it cost a fraction of the others. (I didnt know that at the time, though). He bought it for me. When I got it, the manual was several pages long. I realised that one had to have a Ph.D. just to use the watch, let alone to repair it. I was totally fascinated. But not for long. Pretty soon everything was complicated enough to require you to have a Ph.D. to use. Even calculators. My rst digital calculator, which cost over $400, just did the basics: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It didnt even have a memory. That was in the mid-seventies. By the eighties, though, calculators had become so complex that they would have put MANIAC, one of the very rst-ever computers (created at huge taxpayers expense by the Los Alamos National Laboratory) to shame. I didnt actually mind, because Im a techno-geek like Sheldon Cooper (unlike him, though, Im big on sexas you can seeand can understand sarcasm), but WTF? Pretty much everything these days is hard to use. The hardest, arguably, are aircraft. Aircraft are very hard to yand its been that way since, like, forever. For the rst few millennia they were actually impossible to yprobably because they didnt exist. But at least they werent dangerous: again, probably because they didnt exist. Then there was a short period of time, right after the Wright Brothers, when any idiot was allowed to y them, and many idiots didbut any idiot could also crash them, and many idiots did. So they enacted laws: you had to take lessons to y aircraft, and get yourself certied. Its been like that ever since. And these days the lessons and certications cost megabucks. Is this stupid, stupid, stupid or what, in an age when computers can y aircraft better than humans. Most modern ghter planes, in fact, cant be own by unaided humans at all: without a computer to correct every instability, they would fall out of the sky like stones. Its been like that since the early seventies, when the F-16 prototype rolled out. And its a little-known fact, but humans dont land airliners these days, either: the on-board computer does. The airline pilot just sits there pretending hes in charge, for the benet of the more nervous passengers. But computers are much, much better at landing planes than any human pilot. (Ifound that out from my son, who attended a class in Human Factors Engineering at university, where this was one the rst things he was taught.) Mind you, computers can also land the Space Shuttle, and do. And its been like that since the seventies. Thats alongtime ago. Its not as if these computers are terribly advanced, either. The one originally installed in the F-16 would be worth maybe ten bucks today, and those in the Shuttle, maybe worth twentyif that much. An iPod has more computing oomph. Well then: what would be so hard in putting a computer and a GPS inside every airplane, connected wirelessly and continuously with ground control, which would automatically bring the plane back inside its assigned virtual corridor in the sky whenever it strayed out of it? The pilot wouldnt need to know how to y the plane at all, though he could if he wanted to. Punching a big red throbbing backlit button marked A on the dash he could simply activate the autopilot, and relax. Within his assigned corridor, if the pilot wanted to and had the skills, he could do whatever he wantedor if he didnt, he could just use the autopilot. Each corridor could have several virtual bubbles in it, each bubble having just one plane in it: mid-air collisions would be a thing of the past. The corridors would be automatically assigned by ground control, on the y. The ground control computer could be as large and advanced as you wanted, and upgraded periodically no big deal, since it would be (duh!) on the ground. It could deal with thousands of planes at a time, maybe even millions. Air trafc on Earth could look like on Coruscant, the Galactic Republics capital city-planet. Only better, because each corridor and bubble could be a lot bigger than those shown in Star Warsso each Earth aircraft would have a lot more space to fool around in than those on Coruscant. This system could be made mandatory in every aircraftairplane as well as helicopterjust like pilot licensing is today. It would, in addition, be much easier to enforce. Technically, we could have this system in place tomorrow. Well, maybe not tomorrow tomorrow, but next year or next decade, easy peasy.
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And airplanesas opposed to helicopterscould be made even easier to use. Once landed, a plane has to get somewhere, even if only to the terminal. The autopilot might not help here: the human pilot might have to take charge on land. But an airplanes controls arent like those in a car: in a plane, one steers with the feet, and accelerates and brakes with the hands. To most people whove been driving cars for years, thats totally counterintuitive. With y-by-wire, though, a planes controls can be anything: they could even be like those in a car. One could steer with a steering wheel, and accelerate and brake with ones feet. Pulling or pushing on the steering wheel could control the pitch, and pulling one side of the wheel while pushing the other could control the yaw. And a button or switch on the dash could decouple yaw from roll when the pilot so wanted (normally the computer would couple roll with yaw to enable smooth turns to be made just by turning the wheel, like in a car.) These three would be the only additional things one would have to know to y an airplane. And the computer would automatically prevent novices from pitching or yawing the plane excessively. Anyone who could drive a car could then y an airplane right out of the box. Simple, innit. Yet not even otherwise-brilliant aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan has thunk of designing aircraft like this. Im guessing this is because those, like Rutan, who know how to y, imagine its easy. Yes, it is easy after years of practice. It isnt, though, for rst-timers. And it isnt, not because it needs to be: it isnt because aeronautical engineers have made it hard! In reality its childs play to y any and every kind of aircraft, whether planes or helicopters: and the proof is that many children actually do y themwhen they are made in the form of toys. But think about this: if aircraft can be made easy to use, why cant everything? (Mind you, spacecraft have been easy to use since day one: even chimps have gone into orbit and come back down to earth, and Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn just went along for the ridethey werent actually ying the spacecraft, even though they had the right stuff a bit redundantly, if you ask me.) The point is, anyhow, that anything can be made easy to use: engineers just have to use their brains!
[] one element that can contribute to erotic arts being good is its capturing or portraying some of the things that might make sex good, such as the joy and/or pleasure it can cause, such as the excitement and the calm it can bring, such as its sometimes gentleness, such as its allowing a communion or sharing of spirits or feelings or moods, such as its art to allow the simultaneous giving and receiving of pleasure, and any of the vast variety of things there are that make sex sometimes a wonderful, erotic artistic experience. # # From A Philosophy of Erotic Visual Art by Rick Garlikov, http://tinyurl.com/937nnwk.
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23. Play it Again, Sam
few years ago I found a store called Play It Again Sports. They sold sports equipment that people had got tired of. They would sell it to the store, and the store would then sell it to someone else who wanted to use itat a bit of a mark-up of course, but still a lot cheaper than new sports equipment. What a great idea, I remember thinking. But why should this apply only to sports equipment? Why cant everything be sold by its rst owners and sold at a handsome price, too? Of course the stuff you makeaccording to the principles given in this text bookis going to be highly durable and look good even when used and carry a lifetime warranty and all that. It wont depreciate, at least not much. At worst it will slowly get out-dated, but in the case of most things other than computers, this will be very slowly. It will be worth almost as much used as newbut if the user has no way to re-sell it, whats the advantage? People are likely to buy your stuff more readily if they know they can get a good chunk of their money back after theyre done with it. So why dont you offer to take it back yourself? Heres what you do. You design all your products so that they can be taken apart in a matter of seconds (assault ries can be taken apart in a matter of seconds, so you should be able to do it with anything). Then, when someone brings back one of your products after having used it for some timemaybe even yearsyou dismantle it, examine each part, and evaluate it. If every part is as good as new or better, you offer them a price that will cover your time and effortincluding overheadfor accepting the product back and reselling it. If one or more parts are not worth putting back together, you replace that part and charge the customer extra for it/them. Then you resell your product! This way you make money both going and coming. Plus you get many more customers than your competitors, because your customers consider your product to be better value. They save money and you make money. Its a win-win. Whats not to like? Its an extension of the principle car dealers use to lure you into their showrooms. They offer to buy your current car if you are willing buy one off their lot. Of course they try to take your car for as little as they can get away with, because they dont have a huge reputation to preserve. But if your rm is a big and reputed one, the monetary value of that reputation can be huge, so youd want to make sure it doesnt tank: IOW, dont gouge your customers. Pay a decent price for the used article, and your customers will remain loyal. Admittedly this is a nancial trick, not an engineering one, but it bears repeating: you have to sell your product. Which means you have to pay attention not only to the product itself, but to what your customer thinks of it, and of your rm. As Steve Jobs used to say, Build more brand-deposits than brandwithdrawals! It made Apple the richest company in the world, and it can do the same for yours, too.
Gustav Klimt is famous for saying All art is erotic. And Picasso said the same thing, too. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
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Discobolus, by the Greek sculptor Myron, circa 450 BCEaround the time the Parthenon was built. This depicts a 2nd century Roman copy of the original, which has been lost. By sheer intelligence, Sir Kenneth Clark observed in The Nude (1956): Myron has created the enduring pattern of athletic energy. He has taken a moment of action so transitory that students of athletics still debate if it is feasible, and he has given it the completeness of a cameo. Sexy, too. No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feelingSir Kenneth Clark.
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24. Upgradability
ne problem Stradivarius didnt have, but we do, was that what he made never got out of date. The violins, violas and cellos he made were exactly like the ones we make today. Only better.
But violins, violas and cellos are unusual in that respect. Most modern things get upgraded eventually and some things get upgraded within the year. Many people, including me, suffer from LAGSLatest and Greatest Syndrome. If they dont have the latest and greatest gadget they get uncomfortable. Some not me, thoughget so uncomfortable that they just have to buy it, whether they can afford it or not. Then they curse the manufacturers who caused them to declare bankruptcy. Well, heres you chance to put these stupid manufacturers out of business. You loudly and widely advertise your product as being innitely upgradeable. Then you make it so. As you know, of course, houses are innitely upgradeableor as nearly so as makes no difference. Houses made many centuries years ago are still in use. Entire cities are like thatthink of Siena in Italy, the walled centre of which was built entirely in the Middle Ages. Plumbing, sewage, electricity, central heating and air conditioning have been added as afterthoughts. Everything works fabulously well. So well, in fact, that Prince Charles thinks that Siena is the most beautiful and liveable city in the world. As, indeed, doI, having lived there for a while. Theres no reason everything cant be like that. Even laptops. The way it is these days, a laptop made last year is worth zilch today. Well, maybe not zilch, but you know what I mean. Theres no reason why it has to be like that. Maybe we cant design laptops to last a thousand yearsin any case, in a thousand years humanity will likely be extinct, since well all be cyborgs with computers embedded in our brains, so we wont need laptopsbut we can surely make them so that they stay useful for ten years or thereabouts without turning into so much junk. The trick is to try and foresee trends. We all know, for example, that (a) chips will get faster according to Moores Law (doubling in power every year-and-a-half or less), (b) better displays are coming (like retina displays la todays iPhone and MacBook Proand even, maybe, 3D displays), (c) more storage is coming (and it will most likely be solid state storage or ash drives), (d) better wired connections are coming (like Thunderbolt), and (e) better wireless connectivity is coming, like WiGig (todays wi sucks: gamers wont even use it for many games). Besides, laptops themselves are on the way out, and tablets are on the way in. More than one in ten iPad owning business professionals have indicated that Apple's touchscreen tablet has become their portable device of choice, completely replacing their laptop. Another 54 percent said the iPad has partly replaced their laptop, and instead complements it on the go. Thats from AppleInsider, January 16, 2012. So what do we do. Heres what. First of all we make our laptop a laptop-plus-tablet, by making the display detachable from the rest of it. That way, whenever we want it we have just a tablet, but when we want better performance we hook it up to the body of the laptop. The hook-up could be as simple as the way an iPad cover can be put on: magnetically. Hooked up to the body of the laptop, wed have a proper keyboard and mouse or trackpad to use when we want to write. Of course wed make the display a touchscreen, and give it multigesture capability. When the display is used as a simple tablet, it will have to have its own chip and maybe even its own OS on it. When its hooked up to the body of the laptop it can take advantage of the chips and OS in the laptop case, which is likely to be much more powerful. Then we make the laptop totally modular, by creating slots for each of the other things. All chips should be upgradeable by simply slotting out the old and slotting in the new. That goes for the chips controlling the video, too. Of course storagehard disks or ash drivesshould be replaceable but not the way they are today, needing unscrewing and the like which can take half an hour to do and undo: each storage module should just slide out of its slot and the new ones should just slide in. The same thing with the wireless card, so that you can upgrade it when newer technology comes along. As for wired connections, thered be a module for it, and the module would be upgradeable. All the modules would have magnetic connections like the power adapter for Apple MacBooks: youd just put the module approximately in place, and a magnet would draw it into its exact place so that all the connectors line up precisely.
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This would take care of everything that you could have foreseen. But, you might ask, what about things that couldnt have been foreseen? Easyprovide some empty slots for them! Remember that computerrelated items become smaller, not larger, as time goes on. So as long as you provide reasonable-sized empty slots, they will accommodate anything that comes along over the years. A laptop like this will clearly be upgradeable for many, many yearsprobably all the way till laptops and tablets are themselves outdated, by, say, cyber-implants directly embedded into the body which, of course, might not happen for decades. As long as people nd a use for laptops or tabletsor boththis sort of computer will be useful. Yes, it will cost a bit over its lifetime to keep it upgraded, but in most cases the cost will not be nearly as great as buying a new laptop and/or tablet every few years, as we do at present. Thats because your customers will only need to upgrade those things that they want to upgrade! If one of them doesnt want more storage or a better display, they wont be upgrading those things, will they? They can choose what to upgrade, and when. Besides, since its only one single part, and not the whole laptop, thats being upgraded, each upgrade will be much more affordable. No longer will your customers have to dig deep into their bank account for a new laptop simply because their old one simply cant hack it. All other things like cool design, ease of use, charm, durability and all the other stuff we talked about in this book being equal, who would buy any other laptop, especially if you loudly and repeatedly advertised the fact that yours was innitely upgradeable? Youd corner the market, wouldnt you. Now think about it. If we can make a laptopone of the most rapidly-outdated products in existence easily upgradeable, what couldnt we make upgradeable? Heres an idea: for the near future, plan on making an upgradeable wristwatch. The way things are going these days, the computing power of todays laptops will be possible to squeeze into a wristwatch in a few years. You will wear your computer on your wrist. It will also double as your cell phone and mp3 player, by wirelessly streaming calls and music to earbuds. When youre in the vicinity of a screen that happens not to be in useeven a TV screenit will wirelessly stream whatever needs to be displayed to the screen. When you are in the vicinity of a keyboard and mouse, it will wirelessly connect to them too, so that you can work with just a keyboard, mouse and screen wherever you are. For the road, you could carry a small screen, the size of an iPod Touch, in your pocket or purse as the case may be. The screen, being just a screen with wireless capability, wont be too expensive. In a more distant future you wont even need the screen, keyboard and mouse: you will wear glasses which will allow you to see your web pages oat right in front of your eyes. Hand gestures in the air will allow you to move the cursor and click and double-click, and if you write something with even a stick held in your hand, it will automatically recognise the handwriting and turn it into printed text. The watch will also double as a 50- or 100-megapixel camera, so you can take photos: even of documents, capturing every tiny detailthereby making scanners obsolete too. And of course you will be able to pay for your purchases over the internet with your watch, so you need not carry around your wallet. It will have a ngerprint and retina scanner, so that only you can activate it, by simultaneously putting your nger on it and looking at it: you wont have to remember passwords. If you need to, the watchs strap will come off, and you can click it to your waistband or belt instead, or carry it in your pocket. And, of course, the watch will also tell time. It will be all you will ever need. You wont need to carry around multiple credit cards, drivers license, ID, cell phone, or money. Or have a computer at home. Dont let Apple beat you to this!
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25. The Numbers Game
hen you rst said you were going to be an engineer, someone told you youd have to be studying a lot of maths, right? (Maths, math, whats the difference.)
Well, they were right. This is an engineering text book, and it wouldnt be complete without the maths. So heres some. Suppose you make a product, and your annual prot margin after taxes and all other expenses is a slim 3%. (Any slimmer than that and you might be well advised to get out of the business of manufacturing altogether: you wouldnt even keep up with ination!) And suppose that the product you make isnt even all that good: lets say that about one in a thousand units will need xing within a year or so. And suppose further that you offer only a one-year warranty which is par for the course these days. Now look at it through your customers eyesthe customer who got the dud unit that failed after the warranty period. What do you think hes be muttering under his breath? (Dont answer thatits a rhetorical question!) Okay. Heres what you should do in such a situation. You should offer to x anything of yours that fails, no matter w h e n it fails; and while youre xing it, offer a temporary replacement of equal or higher value, so that the customer still gets to use what he bought, or something even better. And Ill tell you why it wouldnt be a problem for you: crunch the numbers. Suppose you have to actually junk the dud: even so, youll only be 0.1% (i.e., 1/1,000) down. But your prot margin in even just one year is 30times greater! (And over two years its 60 times greater, and over three years, 90 times greater, etc.) Do the math. Suppose you make a million units of your product in a year, and you sell each unit for $99. You gross $99 million a year, and since your yearly prot margin is 3%, you have $2,970,000 in your pocket free and clear at the end of the year. Now, since about one in a thousand units will be junked, you will lose about $100,000 every year, which means your prot will go down to about $2,870,000. The difference is next to nothing. But the good will youll have generatedthe brand deposit youll have made, in the words of Steve Jobsby giving any customer a replacement while you x their unit, will be worth much, much more. Even if you were to bump up the price of your product by less than a dollar, to a mere $99.99, youll gross $99,990,000 in a year, which means your 3% annual net prot will turn into $2,999,700, which is $129,700 more than you used to net before. Thats more than enough to cover the $100,000 annual loss from junking your dud units! And the likelihood is that you could bump up your sale price by much more than that, and still gain customers, because who wouldnt choose your product over your competitors if they could be sure of never having to do without? But we can do better than that. Suppose your product is made the way weve talked about: out of snapin parts. Suppose there are ten parts in your unit, and suppose it takes an unskilled workerlike a college studentten whole minutes to take them apart and snap them back together: and thats a lot of time to take apart and then snap together just ten parts, but lets suppose. The cause of the failure of your product is likely to be just one of the ten parts, right? So all you have to do is junk that one dud part, replace it with a new one and snap the parts back together. Assuming on the average that each part costs only a tenth as much as the nal product, and assuming that ten minutes of an unskilled workers time costs you at most ten bucks, you have spent only twenty bucks repairing the customers unit. For a thousand units thats just $20 granda fth of what it would have cost you if you had junked the entire unit and not just a part of it! Even better for youin the long runis the opportunity you get to beef up the parts that went kaput. (We already talked about this in a previous chapter, didnt we.) Redesign and remake each part that breaks down in such a way that it wont fail again, and next year youve got a product that simply keeps going, and going, and going so that you never have to spend time xing anything again, and everyone is happy. There you have it. The study of engineering requires a background in maths, and the most important maths in engineering is the maths that highlights the bottom line!
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From http://tinyurl.com/d7z5ugs : A new study suggests the brain is quickly turned on and tuned in when a person views erotic images. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis measured brainwave activity of 264 women as they viewed " " " " a series of 55 color slides that contained various scenes. When study volunteers viewed erotic pictures, their brains produced electrical responses that were stronger than those elicited by other material that was viewed, no matter how pleasant or disturbing the other material may have been. This difference in brainwave response emerged very quickly, suggesting that different neural circuits may be " " " " " involved in the processing of erotic images.
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26. Recycling
aybe some day whatever you made will really have to be junked. Either it will be outdated, or it might be destroyed due to an accident, or deliberately damaged by terrorists, or whatever. Yes, you built it to last forever with normal use, but it can also suffer from abuse. But even as junk, your product these days will most likely contain valuable materials. We need to be able to salvage them from the scrap heap. A friend of mine found out some years ago that junked cars had catalytic converters, and catalytic converters had platinum in them. He started buying up junked catalytic converters and selling them to people who extracted the platinum, and got so rich doing this that he now owns a million dollar mansion in a posh suburb of Toronto. (Way to go, Joe!) Now, why would you not want to cash in on all this stuff yourself? After all, you put it there in the rst place. And shelled out moolah to do so. Why let someone like Joe get it all? What you want to do is encourage people whove bought your products to bring them back to you, so you can extract anything valuable that you originally put in them, and put it back into something else. Or else sell it. Dont let someone else get the money! Whenever you sell something, tell the buyer that youll buy it back at any timeat a price the buyer will be happy to sell it. In other words, not for peanuts. Give the buyer an incentive to sell it to you, rather than to someone else. And make sure the buyer knows that. Make it part of your advertising. Heck, say so clearly on the product itself. The price is important. People arent going to take the trouble to bring back stuff if they arent going to be compensated for their time. So make sure they are, handsomely. Remember, you are going to make more money out of it than you give them. In fact, even if you dont make a single penny on the exchange, you would still be ahead of the competition, because of the good will youd have generated. People will buy your product because you are offering to buy it back. At any stage. You will be making what Steve Jobs called Brand Deposits. As Klein Consulting, a rm which helps companies launch new products and attract and acquire new customers, writes at http://tinyurl.com/9udtf8d:
Brand Bank deposits and withdrawals are happening constantly on a company-to-customer level. Customers who have positive sales experiences, are pleased with their purchases, or have satisfying customer service calls will all make Brand Bank deposits. When company-to-customer interactions leave buyers angered or frustrated, withdrawals are made. The Brand Bank framework is one that all CMOs and VPs of Marketing [and, I might add, everyone else responsible for products, including engineers] should adopt, regardless of whether they work at forprot and non-prot organizations. [They] should anoint themselves Chief Brand Investment Ofcers. Whether they are building a lead generation strategy, developing a sales program or deploying a development campaign, Chief Brand Investment Ofcers must consider whether their initiatives are going to add to the Brand Banks balance and how to avoid triggering withdrawals.
Bob Iger, Disneys CEO and Chairman, concurs. He sees his job as buildingto repeat the words of his friend the late Steve Jobsmore brand deposits than brand withdrawals. This is the philosophy that, in August 2012, made Apple the most valuable company in human history, surpassing Microsofts 1999 record of $620-billion market capitalisation. Think about it. And then think about it some more, until it sinks in.
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The Three Graces or Charites. I guess they were called Faith, Hope and Charite; the greatest of themthe one on the rightbeing Charite. No; seriously, they werent. Charite is actually a Greek word pronounced Khrite, and they were Greek goddesses and had nothing to do with St. Paul, who would probably have disapproved of them: a, because they were pagan goddeses, and b, because they were obviously quite happy to take their clothes off. They were goddesses of such things as charm, beauty and creativity, so Im thinking it would be good to take advantage of them! This is a Roman copy of a Greek original, now in the New York Met. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen, Wikimedia commons.
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27. Cool it, Man!
verything should make the best possible use of the available energy. You might think this was obvious, but do we follow that principle? No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!
The worst offenders are, arguably, buildings, including homes. Do you know how much you spend on energy? If you live in the West, its probably a huge chunk of your income. Why? Why? Theres s-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o much energy all around every building that if properly used, it might even make money for the occupants. But do we design buildings to actually use this energy? Just the opposite! In the winter, in fact, we even heat up our homes at considerable expense, and then install a fridge and freezer in our heated house to cool our food at even greater expense! How crazy is that? What would be so hard to include in every house design a fridge/freezer room which could be used in colder months to keep our food fresh? Sure we could also provide a cooling system for this fridge/freezer combo, so that we could use it during the summer also, but at least half the year it would save on our electricity bills! And it could be a lot larger than your present fridge/freezer combo. No matter where you live, just a few feet underground the temperature is almost always a comfortable 12 to 18 degrees Celsius, regardless of the weather. This means that under your home its cool in summer and (comparatively) warm in winter. Thats the good news. The much better news is that the underground extends for miles and miles in every directioneven down: especially down. And for the rst few miles down its all coolquite literally. (It gets a lot hotter when we go a lot deeper, and we can take advantage of that too, but thats another story.) So what would be so hard to dig two holes about 100 metres deep under each house, the holes in the shape of a V meeting at the bottom? Line the holes with a copper tube and ll the tube with a cheap coolant like brine. (Make a calculation: two tubes, each just 100 square cm in cross section and 100 metres deep, would contain over two tons of brine! And if thats not enough, we can dig the holes even deeper, or dig more of them.) In the summer, to cool the house we would circulate the coolant through radiators located strategically throughout the house; and in the winter, we would circulate it through radiators located under pathways and driveways to rid them of snow! Heck, the city could do this for all the roads and sidewalks too, thus avoiding snow-clearing costs (which are considerable and recurring)and also eliminate salt from the roads, which would save the taxpayers a bundle in automobile repair costs. The economics of such a system speak for themselves. Suppose the cost of each home were to go up by as much as 10% due to the installation of such a system. In a $500,000 home that would be $50,000: but it would be just a one-time cost. Spread over, say, a 50 year lifespan (easily achieved through robust engineering), thats just $1,000 a yearcompared with the cost of electricity for conventional air conditioning of upwards of $3,000 a year for a home that size (and thats not even counting the cost of the air conditioner). And most likely the installation of such a simple system would actually be much lower than $50,000. But theres more. In the summerwhen air conditioning is needed mostthe roof gets awfully hot. Pipes painted black and laid in a pattern all over the roof, with liquid circulating in them, could heat up to many tens of degrees Celsius. Then, given that there would be quite a temperature difference between the liquid from the roof and the underground liquid, we could generate electricity using a Stirling engine! Stirling engines are enormously efcient, and can make use of really small differences in temperature: some can even use the temperature difference between the palm of a hand and the surrounding air to produce rotary motion. Yes, it would be have to be a fairly large Stirling engine, but it wouldnt matter because, (a) it would be on the ground, or even buried in it, and (b) Stirling engines are very quietthey are so quiet that they are even used in military submarines. Plus (c), they last for centuries, so the cost of even a large one could be amortised over a very long period. This would, in fact, be a kind of poor mans solar power! Actually the potential underground is absolutely enormous. Architects in Mexico City have designed an underground earthscrapera multi-storey building dug under the ground instead of going up. You can see pictures of it at http://tinyurl.com/3u7tx64. In the future, entire cities could be built for utilising the vast energy reserves and cool temperatures that start just a few feet underground pretty much everywhere. But buildings arent the only candidates for energy savings. Consider the most ubiquitous energy hogs: road vehicles. They work on the infernal combustion engine, which is up to 80%, thats eighty fucking
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percent, inefcient. Out of every buck you spend on that increasingly-more-expensive gasoline, only twenty cents goes towards getting you where you want to go. Four times as much simply goes up in smoke. Well, not exactly smoke these days, because of better combustion and catalytic converters, but heat, anyway. Yall know, right, that its the brakes that generate a lot of that heat: that when braking, a cars forward motion is converted into heat, which is all lost? Well, why not recover some of that energy instead? Lets install a generator-cum-electric-motor in line with the driveshaft, coupled to a capacitor and connected to the drivetrain via a clutch, so that when you depress the brake pedal the clutch engages and the generator starts to generate electricity, slowing the car down because of the resistance offered by the generator. (In fact, we could also use the same generator for recharging the battery when needed, and so eliminate the other generator and we could also use the same electric motor for starting the car, and so eliminate the other electric motor which is normally used to start the car.) The electricity generated when braking would be temporarily stored in the capacitor, and when we want to accelerate again, it would all get dumped back into the drivetrain via the generator, which would now function as an electric motor. A capacitoror better still, an ultracapacitorhas an advantage over a battery in that its much lighter in weight, and can be located just about anywhere in the car: even under the seats, for example, or in the trunk surrounding the spare tire. Besides, it dumps all its juice very rapidly, and so has the ability to provide a fearsome amount of acceleration when the light turns green. In the words of the philosopher Clarkson, how hard can it be? And it wouldnt add more than a few hundred bucks to the cost of the car, while saving thousands in fuel costs over the cars life. (My car, which cost me $25 grand to buy, might easily burn $50 to $100 grand worth of fuel in just ten years, depending on how much driving Imight do, and how much gas prices might go up in the future.) For truck and bus companies, in fact, this sort of system might mean the difference between protability and bankruptcy. (Its true that some hybrid and electric cars sold todaylike the Toyota Prius and the Tesla Roadster already have such a system: its called called regenerative braking. But even in them, conventional brakes are also used; and of course, when they are used they waste a lot of the energy of motion as heat. And they dont use capacitors or ultracapacitors, either. But theres absolutely no reason why all cars couldnt have what Im talking about above. In fact, theres very little reason why it couldnt be retrotted into all existing cars, trucks and buses, thus saving lots of gas.) And vehicles arent the only candidates for utilising all the available energy. Every gadget that is, or can be, carried by a human being has a free energy source available to it: the human beings own muscles! How many times have you to had to say Ill call you backmy cell phone just died, I forgot to recharge it? What would be so hard to provide wind-up cell phones and laptops and mp3 players and computers and even power tools that can be recharged no matter where you areeven out in the boondocks? Weve had wind-up clocks and watches for centuries, for heavens sakeits not like its a totally new idea! In fact, you should even be able to recharge your cell phone by just shaking it for a few seconds, like automatic watches rst invented as early as 1780, which were kept wound up while the wearers were simply going about their daily business, during which they got a few shakes every few minutes. (Just think: they were invented in the 18th fucking century!!!) Which is not to say that your cell phone or mp3 player shouldnt also be capable of being recharged by being plugged in, but at least in a pinch the user shouldnt be left high and dry. Heckyou could even recharge your cars dead battery that way, if only theyd provide a crank for the generator! You wouldnt have to call AAA. As Nicola Tesla once said,
Electric power is everywhere present in unlimited quantities and can drive the worlds machinery without the need of coal, oil, gas, or any other of the common fuels. [] I can now state that I have succeeded in operating a motive device by means of [cosmic rays]. I will tell you in the most general way, the cosmic ray ionizes the air, setting free many chargesions and electrons. These charges are captured in a condenser which is made to discharge through the circuit of the motor. [] All peoples everywhere should have free energy sources.
Look around youyou should be able to nd many, many sources of energy which you overlooked!
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28. The Dark Side
ne of the worst things that can happen to you when youre xing something is to have a part of it roll down under the couch, where its dark. Ever notice that?
And its not just parts. Have you ever shed around in the trunk of your car at night? Even when they provide a light for the trunk its often not enough to nd what youre looking forespecially if you, like me, carry around a lot of stuff there. What youre looking for is most likely behind some of your stuff, so that the rest of the trunk is in the dark. As for things like cell phones and pens and coins inside a womans purse, dont get me started. Even worse is entering a room when its night-time and hunting for a switch to turn on the light. Are switch-makers stupid or what? You need the switch m o s t when the room is dark, for gawdssake! Shouldnt the switch glow in the dark, or something? Its already connected to the current, isnt it? When things go over to the Dark Side, you should say, Let there be light! These days its not hard to make everything shine, either by its own light or by reected light. A dab of reective paint on every part should make it easy to locate when it rolls down under the couch. More expensive things like cell phones should be easy to locate at night by giving off their own little lighteven when their battery is dead or theyve been turned off (a tiny auxiliary battery should do the trick). Bicycles are often the most dangerous offenders. Lots of people ride them in the dark without lights, and if you drive a car, you dont even see them until you almost hit them. What would be so hard to mandate that all bicycle wheel rims, at leastif not also their frameshave reective paint on them? Indeed, what would be so hard to mandate that cars also have reective paint or stripes or stickers on them on all sides, so that if the driver has forgotten to turn the lights onand even I have done that on occasion, and Im pretty sure you have toothey can be seen by other drivers? And whats with the darkness inside cars at night? Why cant the inside of a car light up properly when you are getting into it, so that you can actually see what youre going to be sitting on? Its not as if they cant have adequately bright lights inside cars: the brightness of modern headlights prove that. Automotive engineers have simply decided that you should step into the gloom when you step into your car. Its also not just total darkness that prevents you from seeing the light. Kitchen cabinets are another offender. Why cant they build lights into them all, so that you can see what you are looking for? Some corners of my kitchen cabinets are dark enough for me to require a ashlight when Im hunting for something. Ovens are also pretty bad. The lights in them are generally dim, and often dont shine all over the oven because of some of your food getting in the way, so if you really want to see if you roast chicken is ready or not, you actually have to pull it out. Besides, the bulbs in them burn out very frequently: I have no idea why. Would it really be impossible to make a bright, permanent light in an oven so that you can actually see what youre cooking? Pretty much all appliances are terrible in this respect, with the possible exception of fridges and microwave ovens. Why do clothes dryers not have lights in them, so that your socks dont get lost? And its not just appliances. Closets, wardrobes, bookcases, desks, ling cabinets, even medicine cabinets generally come without lights in them. Why? Do their makers not know that its mostly dark inside them? Resist the temptation to go over to the Dark Side. Remember what happened to Darth Maul.
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And heres where you can do your own erotic art. Or whatever.
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29. Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers
hat happens if you lose something? Are you a nder or a loser?
It can be as large a thing as a car. Remember the Seinfeld episode The Parking Garage, where Jerry, Kramer, George and Elaine all get stuck in a parking garage for hours when they forget where they had parked? As for the TV remote, when (not if, but when) it gets lost, youre going to need an eight-step process to nd itsee http://tinyurl.com/8xymgfe. And even then, as they say there,
You won't always nd your remote the rst time looking, but just repeat the procedure until you nd it. If you regularly lose the remote, consider buying a remote control holder and keeping it in there. Alternatively, you could just apply a velcro strip to the back of the remote and attach the matching opposite velcro strip to the TV and keep the remote rmly attached to the velcro strip on the TV when not in use. Another good idea is to apply a strip of dayglow tape to the remote to make it more visible. It may also help if you buy a cheap universal remote controla device which can operate most television brands and keep it in a safe place as a backup. Did you throw it out with the newspaper? Check the recycling bin! Consider sewing/buying a remote holder for your couch arm to prevent this form happening again.
Gawd! Cant they incorporate something into everything which enables you to nd it if it gets lost? These days, how hard can it be? Better still, there are ways to make sure that things dont get lost. When I was a kid at school (hey, kids lose things all the time, right?) I had to have the keys to my bicycle and desk attached to a keychain which was in turn attached to my pants. That way they never got lost. (Sometimes, in fact, I wonder why adults dont do the same thing. The other day I had guests over for dinner, and after they left to go back home I found their house keys in my kitchen, obviously left there by mistake. Luckily for them they had relatives still partying at my house who were going their way later, so they got their keys eventually. And luckily for them also, it wasnt a cold night. But bummer. Why do we put up with such things even being possible?) The thing of it is, with modern technology the keychain doesnt have to be physical. Everything that can get lost should have a wireless connection to a Finder, the button of which when pressed will cause the lost article to start beeping. We already have such a system for cordless phones, so why not for cell phonesand in fact for everything that can get lost, even your keys and wallet and TV remote? By the way, the argument against it being available for cell phones is that you can always call your own number, and your cell phone will ring and let you know where it is. I just dont understand why people cant see the stupidity of this argument. For one thing, suppose you had turned the ringer of your cell phone off like if you had been to a movieand then forgot to turn it back on again. Worse still, what if the cell phones out of battery power. There ought to be another battery in the cell phone,something small, like a battery of a wristwatchwhich only activates the beeper. It should not be used for anything else, so it wont run down: at least not any time soon. It also wont take up too much space, and wont cost more than a few bucks: which, for a cell phone which, if lost, would set you back hundreds of dollars, is a very good investment. You might want to consider putting such a thing into your wallet also. But things can get much more than lostthey can get stolen. Well discuss that in the next chapter.
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Rodin could make even a lump of clay look sexy. The Age of Bronzenot that this copy is actually made of bronze. The original, however, was also made of plaster. It was so lifelike that an article in L'Etoile belge claimed that it had been cast from a live model. No, it wasnt. This one is located in the " National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Photo by AgnosticPreachersKid, Wikimedia Commons.
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30. Its a Steal
ust about everything can be stolen: a fact well known towellthieves. So why arent engineers making an effort to address this problem?
Obviously Im not talking about things that are too cheap to be worth stealing, let alone worth bothering to recover if stolen. But anything that retails for more than, say 50 bucks is surely a candidate for an RFID chip imbedded into it which would uniquely identify it. What would be so hard in embedding such a chip into, say, every laptop, tablet and cell phone? In fact, with anything retailing for more than a few hundred bucks we could go even farther, and have the chip periodically send out a signal saying Im stolen! (or something like that), or else stop the gadget from working unless its in the proximity of another item the owner always carries, and with which it must be in constant RFID contact. So if a fence tries to sell the stolen item, it either wouldnt work, or it would drive the buyer mad with its incessant whining. That would be huge disincentive against people stealing it. When it comes to things that are much more expensive, such as vehiclescars, trucks, motorbikes, boats, aircraft and the likein which each part can be worth a few hundred bucks or more, we could implement an even better strategy. We could have a computer chip embedded in each part, like in modern credit cards; and the vehicles Vehicle Identication Number (VIN) could be encoded into each chip. Each chip could even have GPS trackability, which the owner could activate remotely via cell-phone orin the near futurevia satellite. At start-up, the vehicles drive-by-wire computer would check every chip in every part of the vehicle to see whether the VIN encoded into all the chips matches the vehicles own VIN; and if any part doesnt have a chipor if there is a part whose chip doesnt have the correct VIN encoded into it the computer would simply not allow the vehicle to start. So it would become pointless for a thief to steal the vehicle for its parts: if stolen, they could never be used. To prevent thieves from manufacturing their own chips and installing them into stolen parts, each chip could be encoded by the manufacturer with a secret Chip Identication Numberlets call it a CINwhich would not be the same as the cars VIN, and which the vehicles computer would also be required to recognise in order to allow the vehicle to be started. If the entire vehicle were stolen, the customer could, with the help of a password known only to himself or herself, activate the GPS tracking devices embedded into the chips, so as to easily and rapidly locate the vehicle, and contact the police with its location. (The police wouldnt know the owners GPS password, of course, in order to safeguard the owner's privacy.) If a vehicle needs a new part or parts, the dealer selling the part(s) would encode the chip in the part being sold with the VIN of the vehicle into which it is intended to be tted, using a PIN (Personal Identication Number) known only to the dealer; and at the rst re-starting of the vehicle with the new part in it, the owner would be required to activate this new parts chip using his or her own separate PIN, known only to him or her. Then the part would have the vehicles VIN permanently and irreversibly encoded into its chip. As a result, it would be next to impossible for a thief to install new parts into a stolen vehicle: hed have to know both the dealers PIN the owners as well, and its highly unlikely that hed know both. As a result, a strong deterrent against being stolen would be built into every vehicle, since thieves couldnt realistically hope to get away with it often enough to make it protable. Sure it would cost a few hundred dollarsmaybe even moreto install the chips and GPS, but since pretty much all vehicles are insured, their insurance rates would most likely go down sufciently to make it cost-effective all the same. In medieval times books were all handwritten, and therefore hugely expensive: so they were chained down in libraries to prevent them being stolen. Today we have much better technology: we can make our expensive stuff incapable of being used if stolen, and easy to nd when stolen!
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White space. VERY valuable.
From http://zenhabits.net/space:
The principles of white space

Some of the things white space accomplishes in design: greater legibility feeling of luxury breathing room & balance more emphasis
Achieving white space

In theory, achieving white space isnt difcult: you remove non-essential items from your life, your workday, your surroundings, your possessions, and leave the essential items with space around them. But of course in practice its a bit different, and requires experimentation, learning, practice. Id suggest starting small, with one area of your life, and making small bits of white space. Start by identifying whats important, and the slowly removing the non-essential things to create the white space. Some ideas: Breathe. Simply take a couple minutes between tasks, meetings, anything that you do, to breathe. After a meeting, for example, return to your desk and just sit still for a couple minutes, focusing on your breath going in and out. When you get home, pause and breathe. When youre done with a task on the computer, close everything and breathe, before starting on the next task. This creates space between tasks and allows you to focus on each one. Schedule. Dont overschedule. Leave space on your schedule, between tasks, instead of putting things back-to-back. The space gives you time to go between tasks, to recover, to refocus, to breathe. Projects. Do fewer projects at a time. Instead of juggling a bunch of projects at once, try to do one for as long as you can before switching to the next (sometimes you need to switch because youre waiting on information or on someone else to do something). If you can, take a short break between each projectas long as you can afford. Sit. Start your day with the white space of just sitting still for 10 minutes. It can be a meditation session, or simply sitting still with a cup of coffee or tea. If you like this, try putting it in the middle and end of your day as well. Remove clutter. Pick a few important things on your desk, or in your home, and remove the rest. This will give you visual space and create a more peaceful atmosphere. Savor. Slow down and savor everything you eat, everything you do. Breathe before you take each bite, and enjoy each bite.
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31. Check this out!
nce upon a time pilots just used to get into their planes and y off.
Then, in the 30s, planes grew horribly complicated, especially the bigger ones; to such an extent that one of Americas WW-II bombersBoeings Flying Fortresscrashed too often, even with the most expert pilots at the controls. People thought it was too much airplane for one man to y. It needed the pilot to attend to too many things: four engines, a retractable landing gear, new wing aps, electric trim tabs that needed adjustment to maintain control at different airspeeds, constant-speed propellers whose pitch had to be regulated with hydraulic controls, and more. One of the rst pilots who crashed it, while attending to all the above, had forgotten to release a new locking mechanism on the elevator and rudder controls. Boeing nearly went bankrupt. A group of test pilots came up with a solutiona checklist. Armed with a checklist, the Flying Fortress ew for 18 million miles without mishap. Eventually 13 thousand Flying Fortresses were ordered. It was a major bomber used against the Nazis. It became a legend. Today no pilot would dream of taking off in any plane without a checklist. So why do engineers dream of making things without one? Everything should be made with a checklist a mile longand it should get longer and longer as time goes by and people think of things to add to it. Think of everything you product is supposed to do, and list it! Then make sure it actually does it. Most importantly, the checklist should grow with time. Case in point: I used to own a 1995 Honda Civic. Great car, obviously made by people who used checklists. I only had some small complaints about it: and one of them was that the clock was located in a position which was obscured by my hand when I was gripping the steering wheel in the ten-to-two position, as I normally do. I had to move my hand to see the clock. Small annoyance, you might say, but everything counts. There should be a box to tick off on the checklist that says Make the clock visible under all conditions. Better still, Make the clock visible to everybody in the car under all conditions. Its not just the driver that needs to see the clock. The best position for the clock is bang in the centre of the dash, like in my current Subaru WRX STi. Even in my car its not ideal, because its a small digital readout. Better might be a proper clock face with hands and all, about two inches in diameter, mounted on the dash where the stopwatch in the Porsche 997 Turbo is located. The point is that niggling annoyances will come to light over time, and these should be rectied in future models. But they wont be, unless the design of the product is nalised only after checking off all the boxes in a long checklist that grows longer and longer over time!
LOrigine du MondeGustave Courbet, 1866. Ab fab: I L O V E it. His model here was Joanna Hiffernan, also known as Jo. Her lover at the time was James Whistler, the famous American painter and friend of Courbet. Goes to show.
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Tabula Rasa.
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32. Autopilot
ou know that airliners have an autopilot, right? The point is, basically, that theres no point in burdening humans with more tasks than they need to carry out. Its worked splendidly till now. Airline ying is the safest mode of transportation in the world, thanks at least partly to autopilots. Airline pilots are notorious for suffering from jet lag, and Im sure autopilots have saved many a passenger from a pilots drowsiness. This happens to small-plane pilots too. One small-plane pilot, Bill Cox, writes in Plane & Pilot magazine, online at http://tinyurl.com/7kls6qm:
I fell asleep on [a] 600-mile flight [], somewhere over the Colorado River. I overflew the LA Basin and woke up out over the Pacific, about 50 miles southwest of Catalina Island. Fortunately, I had plenty of fuel and a good autopilot, and was able to reverse course and return to the coast without problems.
He adds: It may seem counterintuitive for macho pilots, but an autopilot will nearly always do a better job than you will. Okay. So why isnt this system used more extensively? Consider cars, which crashand Im not kiddingmillions of times every year in North America alone. According to http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/stats.html,
There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United Statesone death every 13 minutes.
And the gures are rising every year! Is this appalling or what. Its ten times the rate of fatal workplace injuriesaccording to the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, August 25, 2011, http://www.bls.gov/iif/:
The preliminary count of fatal work injuries in the U.S. in 2010 was 4,547, about the same as the final total of 4,551 in 2009.
Today cars that will parallel-park themselveswithout crashing into nearby cars, mind you!are available to the mainstream buyer: so what could be so hard to prevent them crashing into other cars while being driven normally? One extremely easy way to do this would be to mandate a wi- transceiver in every carjust as seatbelts and airbags are mandated. Each car would communicate with cars in its vicinity, and a mandated computer installed along with the wi- would apply the brakes well before any collision could take place. Even if the cost of wi--plus-computer, and all their peripherals, is as high as $2,000 per carwhich is what a very good laptop with built-in wi- coststhe annual total would be a pittance: only $11 billion or so (since about 5.5 million cars are sold in the United States every year). Compare that with twenty times as much, $230 billion, which car crashes cost the US economy every year (and that was in 2005now its probably higher). And thats not even counting the lives saved and suffering prevented. Not a bad trade, is it? (Yeah, I know what youre going to say: its not your job, its the legislators. Sure it is, but theyre not going to do anything until engineers show them it can be done, are they? They dont know whats possible and what isnt, engineering-wise. Its for you to make them aware of the possibilities!) But theres more. The principle behind the autopilot can be used even more effectively: not merely to control a gadget, but also to enable it to adjust, repair, restore and upgrade itself automatically. Take for instance computers. When computers break down its mostly due to a software issue, not a hardware one except for a few things like hard disks crashing or screen pixels going dead. (And hard disks are soon going to go the way of the oppy, being replaced by solid state drives; and screens pixels going dead are becoming more and more of a rarity.) Theres absolutely no reason, therefore, for a computer not to run a software diagnostic test on itself every now and then, and repair any burgeoning problems automatically. If something is causing the computer to slow down or lag, for example, it could run the necessary diagnostic, download the repair software from the Internet, and install it automatically. A similar thing could apply to cars, most of which are already have a computer to control actuators in the engine to ensure optimum running. The cars computer could easily be beefed up to do a running diagnosis of the car, and whenever something is getting out of whack, the driver could be alerted well before serious damage takes place, so that the car could be taken in and the problem xed at relatively
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small cost. Some things, in fact, could be xed on the ylike, if a tire springs a slow leak, it could be easily kept pumped up until it could be taken to some place where it could be repaired. And some things can be adjusted automatically. For example, virtually all cameras are used once in a while on a tripod. And all cameras these days contain batteries. It wouldnt be hard to provide an electric motor for levelling the camera automatically on the tripod, would it now. The point is, these days, with computer chips embedded into most products as they are, we can automate pretty much everything. Which is not to say that everything should be automatedfor instance, manually shifting gears in a car is more fun, at least most of the time (and for most true car acionados) than using an automaticbut there are plenty of other things that can be automated. Why not, for example, automatically cause a cars wipers to come on when it starts raining, or its headlights to come on when it enters a tunnel? Why not have the lights in your room come on automatically when you enter, and turn themselves off when you leave? Why not nd a way to automate just about everything that has to be done manuallylike taking out the garbageunless you enjoy doing it manually?
Klimt. Again.
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33. Its Standard
hen you go to a dealer to buy the lowest-level Porsche 911the base model of which costs close to one hundred grandyoull be presented with a long list of options. Ticking off every box in that list will close to double the price. Contrast this with the base model Bugatti Veyron. There is no options list, except for you to pick the colours of the exterior and the interiorand whichever colours you pick, it costs the same. (Of course, if you offer enough money, Bugatti will customise your Veyron in almost any way you want.) Admittedly the Veyron costs upwards of twenty times as much as a 911, but all the same, its the principle that counts. Okay, I do understand the Porsche approach. Some people cant afford much more than the base model 911, so its stripped down to make it affordable. Stripping down a Veyron, on the other hand, would just be silly. Besides, if youre looking to buy a Veyron, if you have to ask its price you cant afford it. But what about much cheaper items, like computers, cell phones and the like? Take the iPad, for example. The rst thing anyone does after buying an iPad is to buy a screen protector for it, because its a touch screen, and touch screens easily get scratched. The same applies to the iPhone and iPod Touch. Why do they not come standard with screen protectors? It would hardly drive up the cost of manufacture by more than two or three bucks, if the screen protection is applied at the factory. Or even better, make the screen scratchproof, like the crowns of watches. Even my cheap $10 watch has a crown that seems to be scratchproof: in more than a year of pretty rough wear theres not a single scratch on it. My $200-plus iPod Touch, on the other hand, is scratched all over, and especially on its screen. Why is Apple being so stingy? The same thing applies to the warranty. The standard warranty for computers and the like is 90 days phone support and one year parts and labour against defective manufacturing. If you want a longer warranty you have to pay extra. But nobody buys a computer, cell phone or tablet to keep it for only one year. Most people hope to keep it for at least three, and if possible, ve. Why should the longer warranty cost extra? Shouldnt the warranty at least cover the time the customer expects to own the damn thing? At one time cars were offered with very short standard warranties, like three yearsif you wanted to extend it, you paid extra. Then automakers wised up to the fact that if they offered longer warranties as standard, people would switch to their brand. Today the longest standard powertrain warranty is ten years, offered by Korean carmakers Hyundai and Kia. (Mind you, people will prefer to buy a product that never needs xing in the rst place, rather than bring it in to be xed even under warranty, because during the time it spends being xed they wont have their toy to play with. So make your product last long from the get-go. It will also help you, the manufacturer, if your products never break down, since the warranty can be as long as you want: youll never have to full its terms, since no one will bring their products in for repairs. But all the same, the principle holds good: other things being equal, people will buy the product with the longer warranty.) And warranties arent the only things that should come standard. If anything you offer isnt realistically much of an option, it should come standard. Should seatbelts be optional? Should airbags? Air conditioners? In fact, once upon a time A/C was an option. Automakers have now realised that realistically speaking it isnt one. Pretty much every car is offered with A/C standard. At least in industrialised countries. Remember, when everything in your product comes standard, people come to like your product. You make brand deposits. Its crucial to do so. Here is an explanation of that phrase from the book Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apples Success:
He [Steve Jobs] believed that a companys brand works like a bank account. When the company does good things, such as launch a hit product or a great campaign, it makes deposits in the brand bank. When a company experiences setbacks, like an embarrassing mouse or an overpriced computer, its making a withdrawal. When theres a healthy balance in the brand bank, customers are more willing to ride out the tough times. With a low balance, they might be more tempted to cut and run.
You want this. Trust me, you want thisbecause your boss wants this. And your bosss boss, and so on up the line to the CEO. (And if the CEO doesnt want it, be sure your company will go under soon!)
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In Italian they call this Fare la bella gura, which can be loosely translated into English as I make this look good! Michelangelos David, genitals proudly front and centre. Jonny Pollock, father of two boys and pastor at a church in North Belfast, asks: Was Michelangelo a Pornographer? ... pornography is not a thing but an argument [which goes something like this:] art is any creative expression of the selfintended to inspire emotion in an audience. Sexual arousal is an emotion, and sexuality is a part of the self just as worthy of expressing creatively as any other. Pornography is a basic genre of art, no different from comedy, tragedy or drama. Whether David is pornography depends entirely on whether Michelangelo intended primarily for it to be sexually arousing. Which is obviously hard " " " to know for certain at this point. Photo by Rico Heil, Wikimedia Commons.
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34. Waterproof
hat could be so hard about making pretty much everything waterproof, so that it can be used in the rain, or on board boats, or even while drinking coffee when working with it? For heavens sakes, watches have been waterproof for almost a century now! We already talked about cleaning stuff with soap and waterlike in a dishwasher, or in a washing machineor with just plain water. It should be possible to do that with everything, we said: didnt we. We made the paper version of this book waterproof, just to emphasise the point. You can clean the pages just with water, or a wet rag. But booksmost of them, that is: not this one, of coursearent the only things that cant stand water. What about electronic gadgets? Spill coffee on your laptop and its often a hundreddollar-plus repair. Is this ludicrous or what. Who doesnt drink coffeeor some other beverage: for most programmers I guess its Jolt, or some such high-caffeine drinkwhile working away at a computer? Im doing that right now, for gawds sake! Whats wrong with computer designers, who probably do the same thing themselves?!? Why cant they design all computers to be waterproof, or at least water-resistant? Even worse, arguably, are mp3 players. Everybody takes them outdoors, for running, jogging, biking, hiking, you name it. Many people buy them just for that purpose. Some people would even like to take them swimming. Sure you can buy water-resistantand even waterproofcases and earphones for them, but shouldnt they come standard? Imean, what were their designers thinking? That its always sunny? As pointed out, thats only in a rich mans world! (OhI forgot: the guys who commission them are rich, like Steve Jobs. They probably couldnt care less what impoverished students have to spend to repair an iPod damaged by rain or snow. Or else they live in Southern California, where it seldom rains and never snows. I told you, didnt I, that even Steve Jobs wasnt up to snuffat least not by ideal standards. Else its a mystery why he didnt insist on Apple making sure the iPod was waterproof to begin with, so you could go swimming with it.) And think about iPads and other such tablets. Soon they will be mandated for all school students everywhere in the world. (If they arent, then they should be, to save on the awful wastage of trees for making paper textbooks and notebooks. I mean, what are our educators thinking, telling our kids, on the one hand, to make every effort to save the environment, and then themselves doing the exact opposite in the most blatant manner possible?) And are school students going to keep their tablets away from liquids whether in the cafeteria, lab or playground? Are you kidding???) Its not like you need to be a genius to gure this out. And yet, I cant think of many products that are waterproof: except of course watches, which were made waterproof a hundred years ago. Laptops certainly arent. Neither are cell phones. Nor, for that matter, are cameras: even digital ones. (Good news, however: some camcorders, though by no means all, are now being offered in waterproof versions.) As for cars, they are waterproof only from aboveyou can leave them out in the rain, and thats about it. But drive one through even a three-foot-shallow stream and itll conk out. Nor can you hose down its engine bay: not unless to take great pains to isolate the electricals. Even planeswhich cost upwards of a hundred grand each (and Im talking about the cheapest ones the price just goes up from there!)are only waterproof, like cars, in the rain. Dunk a plane in a lake, and its kinda no longer waterproof. Whats with that? If youre going to charge that much for your product, why cant you gure out how to make it properly waterproof? I know, I know: youre not supposed to dunk your LearJet or Veyron in a lake. But youre not supposed to dunk your iPhone in a lake either. So efng what? Shit happens! Deal with it.
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Emptiness, which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness, is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.Zen Master D.T. Suzuki
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35. The Rotary Club
e often deride the infernal combustion engineheck, we just did, by calling it infernal!but really, just because an engine has internal combustion doesnt make it bad and if it has truly infernal combustion, as hot as all hell, it might actually be quite good: at least if its parts can stand the heat. The problem is not where the combustion takes place, but the way combustion creates motion. In a reciprocating engine, much of the energy of combustion is wasted. As Mary-Sue Haliburton, a journalist at Pure Energy Systems, points out in an online article at http:// tinyurl.com/fcjnz:
[A] traditional cars engine uses up to about 65% of the energy potentially available from the fuel, just to move all its parts such as pistons and cams, plus what is wasted generating excess heat. Then the transmission uses 6%, the accessory load 2% and idling losses come to about 11%, leaving about 16% of the energy actually engaged in making the wheels turn. Because of the weight of all these structures, the engine block, crankshaft, gears, transmission, etc., that 16% of the energy is having to move a vehicle weighing perhaps a ton and a halfwhich may have only one person sitting in it, weighing only 150 lb. There is a lot wrong with that 100-year-old picture. It should be laughed off the road as unsuitable for the 21st century.
The amount of energy wasted is the real reason we call the engine infernal. The 1,001-horsepower Bugatti Veyron, for example, wastes so much of its fuels energy as heat that it has tencount em, ten radiators! The only purpose of these radiators is to let all this heat escape into the atmosphere, otherwise thered be a general meltdown of both car and driver. Gas turbine engines, howeverwhich also work on internal combustion, and use much the same kind of fuelare so efcient that all of them put together have zero, count em, zero, radiators. And some of them can develop a hundred times as much power as the engine in the Veyron. Admittedly in many jet aircraft a lot of the heat escapes as exhaust, but gas turbines are used in many other applications, not all of them requiring an exhaust hot enough to melt steel. Or even just to soften it. And the power-to-weight ratio of gas turbines is way above that of reciprocating engines. A 1,001 horsepower turbine engine could weigh just a fraction of the Veyrons W16 reciprocating engine, which weighs 882 lbthus making about 1.13 horsepower per lb. Compare that with the F414 jet engines in the F-18 Super Hornet, each of which weighs only 2,445 lb but produces an estimated 50,000 horsepowerso making more than 20 horsepower per lb. One problem with turbine engines in automobiles is that they dont have instant response. You give the engine gas and nothing happens for a while. It takes time to spool up. So even though cars have been built with turbines, theyve never been popular. But there are ways around this. One simple way would be to use the turbine to generate electricity, which could be temporarily stored in a battery or (better) a capacitor or supercapacitor. The car would be driven by electric motors, not directly by the turbine engine. That would give it instant response. Or the turbine could spin a ywheel, and the car would draw power from the ywheel via a clutch. Then theres the Quasiturbine, invented by a retired nuclear physicist in Quebec. It works almost like a turbinehence the namebut also has instant response. It is also simpler to make than a normal turbine engine. It has less than ten moving parts. Google it. Its not on the market yet, perhaps because there hasnt been enough funding available to develop it, but it could be. Perhaps a few kinks may need to be ironed out, but it could be your ticket to a much more efcient engine. Another inventor, Raphial Morgado, has invented another type of rotary engine which he calls the Mighty Yet Tiny Engine, or MYT Engine (pronounced Mighty Engine) for short. It also goes round and round, but uses pistons and cylinders just like a regular piston engine. So, effectively, it works like a regular reciprocating engine but without many of the drawbacks of the regular reciprocating engine. In fact Morgado claims it has a power-to-weight ratio as high as that of a turbine, or higher. With that sort of power-toweight ratio, a Veyrons engine would weigh only about 50 lb; and even more signicantly, a Honda Civics engine would weigh less than 10 lb! Look it up.
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Of course Felix Wankel invented a rotary engine long ago, and the Mazda motor company has been using it for decades in its RX-7 and RX-8 sports cars, and even won Le Mans with it once. However, both the Mighty Engine and the Quasiturbine have several advantages over the Wankel engine, not the least of which is that neither of the former engines require a transmission: theres no need to change gears while the car is being driven. That eliminates a large amount of weight and makes the car much more efcient. Then theres another, even more modern rotary engine called the Di Pietro engine, conceived by former Mercedes-Benz experimental engineer Angelo di Pietro, who had previously worked on the Wankel engine. Right now its designed to work only on compressed air, but thats not too bad: compressed air is cheap, since it can be compressed using electricity. It may even be possible to work the Di Pietro engine using liquid air, which can be transported in tanks in the car just like gasoline. When air is cooled to minus 160 degrees Celsius, it liquees. This liquid air can be injected into the engine instead of gasoline. Because the engine components are at ambient temperature, the liquid air would expand into a gas, thereby creating pressure. Only cold air would be emitted as exhaust, which would make this engine one of the greenest ever. In fact, some of the cool air could be used for air-conditioning, thereby eliminating an air conditioner as well, and saving even more weight. It even uses a thin lm of air to lubricate its internal moving parts, so there is no wearing of surfaces: it could, theoretically, last pretty much forever, and never need oil changes. And like the Quasiturbine and the Mighty Engine, the Di Pietro engine also gives instant torque at zero RPM, and can be precisely controlled to give a soft start and acceleration control. It is intended to be mounted immediately beside the cars wheels, with no intermediate transmission, so almost all the energy in the compressed or liquid air is actually used to power the wheels itself. The advantage of all rotary engines over reciprocating engines is that they exhibit a greater degree of efciencythere is no stopping of the pistons at top dead centre and bottom dead centre, with a reversal of direction following. As a result, much less of the energy of the fuel is wasted as heat. In fact, some rotary engines like the Quasiturbineif not, indeed, most of themare so efcient that making them hybridas in todays hybrid carswould be totally unnecessary, and might even make them less efcient. (One doesnt make ordinary turbines hybrid, does one? Nuff said!) It is true that at this time, rotary engines are not nearly as widely used as reciprocating engineswith the notable exception of gas turbines, which are used quite widely, but not in automotive applications. It may be that some kinks need to be worked out with rotary engines, which are relatively recent compared with reciprocating enginesthe latter have had over a century to have their kinks worked out by the millions of engineers who have created the billions of engines based on this basic system. However, horrible inefciency is inherent in the basic system, so its about time it was abandoned!
Klimt. My Pleasure. Mine, too.
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36. Friction
ontrary to what most people imagine, friction is mostly good, not bad. For example, our clothes stay together due to friction: if there werent any friction between the cloth bres, they would all fall apart. Friction is important even in automotive applications: if there werent any friction between the wheels and the road, cars would be skidding all over the placeas, in fact, they do when the roads turn icy. Heck, without friction between our shoes and the ground we wouldnt even be able to walk. Most of the time we want to maximise friction, not minimise it. But there are indeed some situations when wed be better off minimising friction. The drivetrain of an engine is a good example. Between 10% and 20% of the horsepower produced by a cars engine never reaches the wheels, because of the frictional losses between the crankshaft and the wheels themselves. Brake horsepower is always higher than effective horsepower, a.k.a. wheel horsepower. The way we usually minimise friction is with lubricantsmostly oils. Its messy, but it works. Mostly. But there are problems. The oil usually needs to be changed every so often, because it gets dirty with the bits of metal that wear out. It also loses its lubrication over time. And it isnt cheap. One alternative way of lubricating stuff is with graphite. But it has problems too. It is needs moisture from the air to act as a lubricant. At high altitudes and in space its useless. And its corrosive to aluminium. Plus, you cant use it in places where combustion takes place, because it burns away. (Of course oil does that too, but oil can be much more easily replenished.) There are other solid lubricants, but they too have their disadvantages. They have a higher coefcient of friction and wear compared to liquid lubricants; a lower stability of the lubrication lm; and they are a less convenient system of lubricant delivery. In contrast, liquid lubricants can be continuously supplied, ltered and cooled. Gases are better for lubrication than either liquids or solids. This is dramatically demonstrated by blowing airor some other gas like CO2through tiny holes in ships bottoms. The resistance of the ships progress through water decreases signicantly, despite the fact that in the absence of the gas, the resistance is created by just water. Large companies like Mitsubishi are using this technique. Instead of air, the exhaust from the ships engines can be used: it saves the expense of air pumps. It creates a layer of tiny bubbles that allow the ship to glide over the seawater with less friction. Air bearings also reduce friction in rotary application. An external supply of air is fed under pressure between the two surfaces being kept apart. Or the supporting lm of air is generated by the relative motion of the two surfaces being kept apart. The latter dont work well at low rpm, but when rpm is higher than about 1,000, they are just as good as the former, and wayyyy better than bearings lubricated with oil. At really high revsas high as 300,000 or even morethey are virtually indispensable. Their few drawbacks are that they arent as resistant to shocks, and they cant bear loads as high, as oil bearings or ball bearings. And of course they cant be used in space, because theres no air there. But in general they are excellent. They provide extreme radial and axial rotational precision, and since there is no mechanical contact, wear is minimal, so accuracy remains constant. Bearing life is also dramatically increased. And only minimal maintenance is required. Even better than air bearings, however, are magnetic bearings. They use magnetic levitation: magnets push against other magnets, with a small space between them, so the moving parts never touch. They have no known maximum revs. Most use active magnetism, in which the amount of magnetic repulsion has to be controlled from moment to moment by means of an electronic controller, using gap sensors to provide feedback. Together they control the position of the rotor within the stator. This makes the bearings a bit complicatedthough with the prices of electronic gadgets rapidly falling, just because they are complicated doesnt mean they cant be cheap. But an even simpler kind of magnetic bearing is emerging, called the electrodynamic bearing. The principle on which these bearings are based is called Lenzs Law. Basically it means that when an electrically conducting material moves in a magnetic eld, a current will be generated in the conductor, and that current will generate a magnetic eld opposite the original magnetic eld. The conducting material acts as a kind of magnetic mirror. Since the 1990s, kinks in this design have been ironed out, and now these kinds of magnetic bearings can be made just as stable as the active kind. They
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do have a problem in that if there is little or no rotation there is little or no magnetism, and hence little or no separation between stator and rotor; but temporary touch-down bearings which hold the stator and rotor apart at low revs can easily be incorporated into the mix. The structure of the electrodynamic bearings is simplicity itself, and in time they should be very cheap to manufactureif they are not so already. But bearings arent the only sources of friction. Another very signicant source is gears. These too, however, can be made friction-free, using magnetic gears. They use permanent magnets to transmit torque between input and output shafts, without mechanical contact. Besides reducing or even eliminating friction losses, they also allow for a bit of misalignment of shafts, since they are contact-less. Besides, they are silent, or virtually so, thus eliminating one source of annoyancenoise. And of course they are lubricationfree. Moreover, they inherently protect against overloads by harmlessly slipping if an overload torque is applied, and automatically and safely re-engaging when the overload torque is removed. Magnetic gears can be rotary or linear. And a single magnetic gear can have a ratio as high as 1:1,000, thereby eliminating the need for multi-stage mechanical gears. And the icing on the cake is, that magnetic gears can be made in continuously-variable ratios as well. Look it up! Lest you think all this is not terribly important, let me remind you of the bottom line: dollars and sense. Suppose your car gives 25 mpg, and over its lifetime you drive it for 250,000 miles. (Thats about average.) Assume that gas will cost you $4 a gallon over the life of the car (thats also about average today). Then by the time you junk the car youd have spent $40,000 in gas. (Do the math.) If by reducing friction you could increase your mileage by just 10%, youd save $4,000 in gas alone. And thats not even counting wear and tear, or the cost of oil and other lubricants. So: by the year 2050 all bearings and gears will be magneticor at least ought to be. It makes no sense for them not to be!
Picasso. (Youd never have guessed, right?)
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37. Wireless
f course we all get royally ticked off at the jumble of wires behind the computer, the TV / VCR / DVD combo, and even the small appliances in the kitchen. And do you know theres hundreds of miles of wiring in an Airbus A380? Its 300 miles or something like that. Absurd. Tesla had it right all along. Besides inventing the wireless (Marconis claims to the contrary notwithstandinghistory shows that Tesla was the real inventor of the radio), he also gured out a way to transmit electrical power without wires. Or so he claimed. The problem is, we dont know how he thought to do it, exactly. The secret seems to have died with him, because no one does it nowadaysat least not over long distances. Nevertheless its well worth trying to gure it out, because those overhead power lines are an eyesore. Not to mention frightfully expensive. Besides, over very short distances we can and do transmit electrical power wirelessly, and have done so for donkeys years. Its called induction. It works like this: a current is made to run through a coil of wire, and it induceshence the term inductionanother current in a nearby coil of wire, one which isnt actually touching the rst coil. That, in case you didnt know, is how all transformers work. I dont mean Optimus Prime, but the really big ones sitting out in some eld on the outskirts of town: you must have seen them. The turn low-voltage electricity into high-voltage electricity, so that those pesky overhead transmission lines dont lose too much of the electrical energy by way of heat. (I hope you know by now, since you are all engineers, that an electrical current in low-voltage, high-amperage form generates a lot more heat than the same amount of electricity in high-voltage, low-amperage form when passing through the same thickness of wire? I mean, every schoolboy knows thator should.) Induction is used in many home appliances. Your electric toothbrush, for instance, can get recharged by sitting on a tiny plastic post at its recharging station. The post is covered with plasticif you touch it you wont get electrocuted. Heck, Volkswagen even have an entire car factory in Dresden where all the power tools are recharged via induction, using electric current running under gleaming hardwood oors, with no wires whatsoever in sight. The factory is so neat and clean its a tourist attraction, for gawds sake. Why cant they do this for everything? You shouldnt need to plug in your laptop, your tablet, your mp3 player or your cell phone to recharge it. Just put it on a surface which recharges it via induction, and pick it up again when you want it. You should be able to buy recharging pads at the Ofce Depot. (Actually, you can.) Theres huge potential to this technology. Imagine roads with electrical cables imbedded into them, and vehicles with electricity-pick-up pads under them, these being separated from the road by just a few millimetres using tiny wheels. Or they can even just touch the road surface, as long as they are made of a hard enough material so that it doesnt wear out with the constant friction. Then you could have vehicles that run on electricity without needing batteries! No infernal combustion engines and no batteries. And no overhead wires either. Of course the roads would have to be smooth enough for the separation between the pick-up pads and the road surface to always be optimal, but roads should be smooth in any case: the Pharaoh would never have put up with workmanship like whats displayed by todays roads, so neither should we. He lived in the stone age for gawdssake. Or almost. Or imagine homes in which electricity ows like a river under all the oors. Youd never need to plug in your oor lamps, vacuum cleaners, fridges or washing machines. Just place them wherever you like, and theyd draw electricity from the oor just like the power tools in Volkswagens Dresden factory. In 2007, MIT engineers even found out a way to transmit power over fairly substantial distances wirelessly: a million times more efcient than the simple induction method described above. They use a principle called resonance. Its like when a singer can break wine glasses by simply singing at them. The wine glasses vibrate due to the sound waves, and if their rate of vibration matches that of the sound waves, they vibrate with ever increasing amplitude, so that the glass eventually breaks. The same principle is used here, with the vibrations being those of a magnetic eld generated by an electrical current. The MIT team refers to its concept as WiTricity (like WiFiI guess theyll eventually shorten it to WiTri). They use two coils of wire. One of the coils, attached to the power source, is called the sending unit. It uses electricity to generate a non-radiative magnetic eld oscillating at megahertz frequencies. The other coil, called the
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receiving unit, is specially designed to resonate with this eld. The resonant nature of the process ensures that there will be very strong interaction between the sending unit and the receiving unit, while the interaction with the rest of the environment remains very weak. Enough power to run a computer can be transmitted over room-size distances. A laptop located anywhere in a room containing a suitable sending unit would not even need to have batteries. In fact, once the kinks in this technology have been ironed out, virtually nothing that runs on electricity in a home or ofce would need either batteries or a power cord. Apple thinks its a good idea, and seems to have backed it. Lemme tell you a true story. Last year I bought a forty-year-old house. It transpired after I bought it that the previous owner had done a lot of the electrical work himself, and what he had done was so slipshod that it didnt meet code. I had to spend over twelve thousand dollars of my own money to get the electricals redone so that it would pass inspection. My nancial advisorwho also happens to know a lot of real estate stufflater told me that the electrical wiring in a house is sometimes the most expensive part of a house. With WiTri all this expense would be reduced to next to nothing. One outlet in each room would be all that would be needed. Again, consider the bottom linewhats more expensive: wiring enough to go around the world a gazillion times over, or wireless everywhere? Its a no-brainer, really it is.
I Modi (The Ways), also known as The Sixteen Pleasures, or under the Latin title De omnibus Veneris Schematibus, is a famous erotic book of the Italian Renaissance in which a series of sexual positions were explicitly depicted in engravings. The original edition was apparently completely destroyed by the Catholic Church, but fragments of a later edition have survived. The original engraver worked extensively with Renaissance master Raphael (not to be " confused with the Ninja Turtle of the same name). This engraving is entitled Bacchus and Arane.
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38. Swiss Army Knife
nce upon a time, every cigar was just a cigar. It was Freud who came up with the notion that it could also be much, much more than that.
Of course, the idea that things should have more than one use is not new. In olden days, a palace or a cathedral or a temple wasnt just the House of the Lord (or the LORD), it was also a marvel to behold and a tourist attraction; a noblemans attire wasnt just meant to ward off the cold, it was also meant to impress the churls (and the girls); and garlic wasnt just an ingredient of aioli, it was also a vampire-repellent. (Not to mention a repellent of another sort, in the bedroom.) But most things still had only one use. (Or two, if you count the fact that at a pinch, pretty much everything that had any weight could be thrown against an assailanta book, a stool, a frying-pan, you name it.) A sword was, in mediaeval times, only a sword: it wasnt a kitchen-knife as well. A breastplate was only a breastplate, not a serving-tray at banquets. Even a helmetwhich on rare occasions was admittedly used by Vikings to drink mead fromwas not normally used as a drinking cup. Perhaps it was the Swiss Armys generals who thought, why not make a penknife thats not just a penknife, and issue one to every Swiss soldier? Enter the Swiss Army Knife, which scared Hitler so much he didnt so much as think of attacking Switzerland. (Remember that before it was invented, neither Hannibal nor Napoleon had any qualms about sending their troops over the Alps. That proves something, doesnt it.) Well then. Why dont we make things that have multiple uses too? Most of our products also have only one use. (Or, as I said, two, if you count the fact that at a pinch, pretty much everything that has any weight can still be thrown against an assailanta laptop, a camera, a TV remote.) I am not suggesting that all the uses should be optimal. The primary use of every product should be optimal, while the secondary uses may be suboptimal: just like in a Swiss Army Knife, whose primary use is as a penknife, and in which use it performs just as well as any other penknife of similar length; while its secondary purposesas screwdriver, scissors, saw or whateverare suboptimal. But at least they are there, usable in a pinch. And of course, if you can make the secondary uses optimal too, itd be a bonus. So, for example, why cant we have a roof which doubles as a garden and patio, or doors that double as windows (and vice versa), or a cartop carrier which doubles as a boat when you get to the cottage? It may not be an optimal boat, but it beats having no boat at all. We already spoke about making a laptop that doubles as a tablet, by just making the display detachable. But thats not the only candidate. Why not build highways that double, at least in stretches, as emergency runways? (In Sweden they already do that, but theres no reason it has to be conned to Sweden.) How about wardrobes that double, when the owner dies, as cofns? (have you checked out the prices of cofns these days?) The prime candidate for multiple uses is the cell phone. An iPhone has more computing power than most laptops of a decade ago, so theres absolutely no reason why it cant double as a computer. Provide it with the proper connectionwhether wired, like Thunderbolt, or even better, wireless: or better still, both! and make it possible to hook it up to any computer, if youre near oneor even to just a computer displayand then use it just like any other computer, with a proper keyboard and mouse or trackpad. (Are you listening, Apple?) You should even be able to hook it up to a TV screen. And of course to an audio systemagain, preferably wirelesslyso that you can hear your music loud and clear. Of course on the road youd use it just by itself, but surng the web or examining a spreadsheet on that tiny screen is suboptimal at best. Plus you should be able to pay for purchases with it, by the manufacturer entering into some sort of arrangement with credit- and debit-card companies and banks to hook it up to credit- and debit-card readers. You should not need to carry a wallet anywhere, or cash. On top of that you should be able to hook it up to your car, and get all the cars diagnostic information on it when youre travelling, so you know if your car breaks down whether its a minor or a major problem. You should be able to go anywhere with just your cell phone, and have access to anything youd have at home. Even your medical recordspassword protected, of course. And daisy-chaining a number of iPhones should enable you to use the combo like a supercomputer. (As you geeks may know, a supercomputer essentially differs from an ordinary computer only in having many more chips, all networked together.)
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And as I said, in a not-too-distant future all this capability could be provided in an even smaller package ones wrist-watchthereby enabling you to say goodbye even to your cell phone. Voice recognition would make keying in text unnecessary, and ngerprint-and-retina recognition make passwords history. The point is that you should be able to add a whole lot of functionality to your product in a relatively inexpensive way. So why not do it?
Leonardo da Vinci, "Angelo Incarnato" (Angel Made Flesh), Charcoal on paper, 1513-1515. This is the only surviving erotic drawing by Leonardo [...]. According to some sources other (homo)erotic images " existed but were destroyed by a French priest after Leonardos death to keep his dignity intact. The Angelo Incarnato once belonged to the Royal Collection, but vanished mysteriously only to show up again in 1990, causing a stir: No one liked it, no one wanted to see it, and whenever it was shown, it was shown cropped to hide the obvious. It wasnt the rst time either that it was tampered with, as is visible by the smudge marks over the " " " erection, where someone at some point in time tried to erase it. Nykolai (a.k.a. The Leonardian).
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39. Ouch!
hats up with manufacturers making things in such a way that that you get hurt using them?
The worst culprits, in my experience, are wheelchairs. Not so much for those who ride in them, but for the attendant care people. I know: my late wife was in a wheelchair, and I got hurt innumerable times when helping her. (And, to add insult to injury, the wheelchair cost almost as much as a small car.) Hard corners, sharp edges, places where skin can get caught between hard bits of metal or plastic, pots and pans with handles that can get too hot to handleyou name it, manufacturers clearly dont give a damn how much their products hurt the people who have to handle them. What, as I asked beforeand I ask againis up with that??? Well, youthe engineersare the front line in humanitys defence against this outrage. What you need to do is step in right from the beginning, and make everything safe. Arguably the easiest thing to rectify is hard edges and corners. They do hurt, and theres absolutely no reason why anything that can come into contact with skin should have them. In this respect I applaud the dishmakers: all cups and saucers have rounded edges, and have had them for centuries. The question is, why hasnt everything else also been designed that way? Its not like it would drive up the price of your product by a million dollarsno matter what your product may be. Another sore spot is places where you can get burned. This mostly applies to objects in the kitchen, like pots, pans, oven racks and stoveswhile using them you easily get burned by them when theyre hot. Surely theres a way to put guards in place that would prevent this from happening: guards made out of silicone, say, that would not get hot no matter how hot the food gets! Cookware is designed to be put on the stove or in the oven for chrissake. Would it hurt to make it so that lifting it off the stoveor even just lifting the lid to see if the stew is donedoesnt burn the cook? Fortunately some cookware manufacturers are taking this principle to heart, by providing heat-resistant silicone handles to all their cookware: but by no means all. Of course one can get also burned repairing or checking things like car engines, which also get hot. Why dont they design car engines with burn-protection installed, by covering those parts which need checkinglike the oil-reservoir capwith silicone as well? (Of course the best thing would be for engines to not need checking or xing at all, as we discussed earlier.) Anyway, the point is, we should not have to put up with this nonsense. Nobody should get hurt using a product. Not children, not adults, not seniors with Alzheimers, not even idiots who dont know how to use it. It bears repeating: S A F E T Y F I R S T !
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I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inict pain on others in the selsh pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion, and elimination of ignorance, selfishness, and greed The Dalai Lama
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40. Square Peg in Round Hole
heres a saying in matters of sex: Its not the size that counts, its the t.
Indeed. Some things are just too large to t into the hole meant for them. Of course, some others are too small. Thats actually not such a bad thing. When the t isnt right, well, the t isnt right, and one can decide to move on. Its when the t is almost right that problems arise. Not so much in sex, but in engineering. Thats one of the problems with so many power adapters these days. Each electronic gadget comes with a different-size hole, and woe betide you if you lose, or even just misplace, the adapter. The problem is aggravated by the power adapter almost never having a label telling you which gadget it belongs to. Youll never be able to recharge your gadget again. Well, thats not exactly true. You can buy, as a replacement, a universal power adapter which comes with a bunch of different ends, one of which will t your gadget. But why should this have to be the case at all? What you need is for all male-female connections made in such a way that its not the size that matters, its the t. Nuff said!
Egon Schiele: Two Friends. A protg of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a major gurative painter of the early 20th century. [] The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize Schieles paintings and drawings mark the artist as an early exponent of Expressionism. [] The Leopold Museum, Vienna houses perhaps Schieles most important and complete collection of work, featuring over 200 exhibits. The museum sold one of these, Houses With " Colorful Laundry (Suburb II), for $40.1 million at Sothebys in 2011.Wikipedia. Jeez.
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This text book is LGBTQ-friendly.
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41. Paint Job
id you know that a good paint job on a car can cost upward of ve grand?
Im not joking. Yes, sure you can get a paint job done on your car for a few hundred bucks, but itll look like crap when nished. Youll see overspray (thats paint where it shouldnt be), peeling, dust under the paint, and lines from the sanding process. And in time, a cheap paint job will fade much more quickly than a good one. Well, why should things need painting in the rst place? Why not make everything out of materials that dont need painting (unless you want to change the colour)? As long ago as 1934 Germany raced Grand Prix cars which were unpainted, calling them Silver Arrows. Legend has it that at weigh-in, the cars were just a tad over the limit, so they had the idea of scraping off all the paint and running them in naked aluminium, unpainted. In 1991, Audi exhibited its totally unpainted AVUS Quattro aluminium concept car at the Tokyo Motor Show. It was an absolute stunner. Look it up. In recent times theres Jim Glickenhauss P4/5C Competizione race car, all unpainted carbon bre and fantabulous-looking. Such cars show that paint on a car is not a sine qua non. And its not just cars. Many planes have been left unpainted, and still are. Unpainted planes are more cost-effective and environmentally friendly than painted ones, Japan Airlines said Monday after a nearly 10year study on the performance of an unpainted 747 cargo plane. The plane, introduced in August 1992, has helped the company cut back on paint and other chemicals, and has saved up to 2 million yen a year on fuel expenses as it is about 200 kg lighter without paint. This is from a 2002 Japan Times Online article. And in WW-II, USAAF policy established in 1944 dictated that P-38 Lightnings be left unpainted, since the reduction in weight and drag was a bit of an advantage in combat. So why do we need to paint anything? Buildings have been left unpainted for millennia, at least on the outside, and see how good the cathedrals of Europe, and the mosques and temples of Asia, look after centuries of standing out there, exposed to the elements summer and winter. If walls dont need to be painted on the outside, why do they need to be painted on the inside? And its not as if steel structures need to be painted, either. Steel containing approximately 1.5% copper and up to 1% nickel, no more expensive to produce than other construction steels, taking no longer to produce than other alloys and less difcult than other alloys to fabricate, can be left unpainted. It has a structural strength superior to commonly used structural steel (70,000 psi compared with 50,000 psi in the latter). It was developed by Morris Fine, Professor Emeritus of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, and his colleague, Research Professor Semyon Vaynman. Because its weather resistant, the North Milwaukee Avenue Bridge in Illinois built with it was left unpainted. This resulted in about a $300,000 savings in the initial cost, and will lead to even greater savings in the future because the bridge will not need the maintenance that is typically required for painted steel bridges. Remember that most layers of paint are just a few thousandths of an inch thick. Thats not much protection anyway, and needs periodical repainting. And it wouldnt matter if the paint could be replaced easily, but it aint easy. Painting the Golden Gate Bridge is an on-going task even today: its the primary maintenance job there. Even repainting the inside of your house will set you back a grand or so, and will take days. Youre not getting a top notch paint job done, mind you: just going over the walls with a roller. Jeez. And its not as if painted stuff looks better than unpainted stuff: the opposite is the case. Watches, which are worn as jewellery, arent painted, are they? The snazziest computers these days are Apples Macintoshes, also unpainted. Theres a principle that many architects tryand have tried throughout the agesto follow: its called Truth to Materials. By that is meant that stone should look like stone, wood like wood, brick like brick, concrete like concrete, plaster like plaster, metal like metal and even plastic like plastic. The point being that the materials themselves are, when in the right place, inherently beautiful: so why gild the lily? Makes a lot of sense. It seems to have made a lot of sense even two thousand years ago, because the Pantheon in Rome, commissioned by Marcus Agrippa as a temple to all the gods of Ancient Rome, and rebuilt by Emperor Hadrian in about 126 CE, is unpainted, and always was: and still looks fabulous after all these
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centuries. And this principle makes sense, not just in architecture but in all manufacturing, as the 1930s German Grand-Prix Silver Arrows andin more modern timesthe iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad have clearly demonstrated.
Guess who. (Hint: its Picasso, not Klimt or his protg Egon Shiele!) And check out the decorations on the bed and wall, too.
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42. Break Down
hy do so many things we buy break down under normal use???
Some stores and manufacturers even expect them to break down under normal use. They want you to sign up with themat an outrageous pricefor an extended warranty, the basic warranty being something totally ridiculous like 90 days, or a year at most, so that if the item they sell you breaks down in, say, three years (which itself is a ridiculously short time), they will x it for free, or replace it if they cant x it. Even Apple Computer is like thatand was so even under Steve Jobs. I mean, come on, now. When we buy something, shouldnt it be a given that it wont break down, at least not under normal use? Isnt it like the manufactureror selleradmitting that the product you are buying is crap, at least if you are merely paying full price for it? Why on earth should we have to pay more than full price to make sure it isnt? We already discussed the fact that extended warranties should be standard. But thats just the tip of the iceberg. Why should anything break down at all, in normal use at least? Or even in somewhat abnormal use? Doesnt the term overengineered mean anything to engineers these days? In the old days, everything was overengineered. Grandfather clocks from your grandfathers days have been ticking away happily since, well, your grandfathers days. Roman aqueducts and baths are still in use in some places in Spain and Britain. Samurai swords are still operational after centuries; and even some of those asymmetrical Japanese bamboo bows, called yumi, are in operation after a century or more, despite the fact that bamboo deteriorates with age. Hundreds of Soviet T-34 tanks, introduced during the Second World War, are still in usealbeit as rich mens toys in private hands. The idea was that you passed down your wealth to your children, so things had to last. But today? Your toaster will be toast after just ten or twenty years and so, most likely, will your fridge, stove, washing machine and dryer. Why? Why in heavens name??? And dont give me that planned obsolescence crap. Any company that makes a light bulb that lasts forever will easily corner the market for light bulbs. Any company builds an identical productwhatever that product may bewhich will not fail after a set number of years, will simply demolish all the other companies which offer the same product at the same price, which will fail after a set number of years. Economists know that planned obsolescence only works in the absence of real competition. You have to be a monopoly, or at least a member of a powerful oligopoly, to pull it off. When there is competition, you dont stand a chance against a competitor if they decide to make products that will outlast yours, at least if the products you make and they make are sufciently similar, and sold at a similar price. You dont want your rm to be the losing competitor, do you? You might be out of a job if it is. So try your best not to lose!
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Antinos. Lover of the Emperor Hadrian. Handsome or what. (Was he bi, or just gay? Just wondering.)
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43. Deterioration
ne of the worst things about most of what we buy is that what we buy deteriorates just because of the passage of time. You buy something at exorbitant cost, and then in a few years timeor at most a few decades timeits worth zilch. Long before youre ready to die, its dead. Not, mind you, that it has to happen. The Pantheon in Rome has been in continuous use for two thousand years without deteriorating. (I said that already, didnt I.) It still holds the record for the worlds largest unreinforced concrete dome. Its interior is even open to the sky: rain falls in, the sun shines in, everything. But it hasnt deteriorated. All it has needed is routine maintenance. The Taj Mahal hasnt even needed that. Mind you, its only been standing for a few hundred years, not a few thousand, but the marble its made from, and the semi-precious stones imbedded into it for decoration, are all still OEM. Why cant everything be made like that? Oh yes, I can hear you saying: itd be too expensive. Bullshit. The cost of a thing should be offset by the number of years its expected to last. If a $2 million mansion lasts 200 years, the actual cost is only ten thousand dollars a year: less than the rent on a onebedroom apartment. And buildings made of stonemade properly like the Incas made theirsdo not deteriorate. Nor do things made of stainless steel or titanium or carbon bre. Heck, even ordinary plastic doesnt deteriorate: one of the problems with cheap plastic bags is that they dont break down in the landll. It takes special effort, and extra manufacturing expense, to make them deteriorate. So why does anything we buy have to deteriorate? Okay, some materials will deteriorate: like cotton cloth, genuine leather and wooden oors. But in this day and age we have synthetics that look and feel and even, when needed, smellexactly like them, but wont deteriorate. These substitutes are, in fact, cheaper than the materials they replace. And, thankfully, many manufacturers are using them more and more. And even if the materials are more expensive, if something doesnt deteriorate it holds its value longer, so the bottom line is that its cheaper. Whats cheaper: a car that costs only ve grand but lasts only ve years and then needs to be junked and replaced, or a car three times as expensive but lasts six times as long? Its a no-brainer. Yes, some materials do deteriorate: thats just the way they are. For example, cloth, leather, paper and, to some extent, wood. Japanese temples made of wood have stood for hundreds of years only because the pieces of wood they are made from, when they deteriorate, are regularly replaced with new, identical wood pieces. Paint, of course, also deteriorates: thats why renaissance art masterpieces like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel have needed restoration. For such things, the best you can do is make sure they are restored every so often. But the vast majority of materials dont deteriorate. Yes, steel and iron rust (unless well taken care of: witness samurai swords and 100-year-old hunting ries!but these are exceptions.) Most other materials, however, dont deteriorate. So why not make your products out of these, except when, for one reason or another, you have to use deteriorating materials?
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The question you have to ask yourselfand othersis Why?, always Why? And also, Why not?
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44. Corrosion
here are corrosive environments. The ocean is one of them. Thats why on most yachts the ttings are made of stainless steel or bronze, which dont rust. Large ships are still made of rust-friendly steel, but thats because the amount of steel involved is huge, and to replace it with non-rusting materials is still more expensive than to just keep painting them. But most of the stuff we ordinary plebes can afford is small enough to not require megatons of steel. So why do we use it at all? You will say, its cheaper. But as we pointed out about the Akashi Kaiky bridge, the actual cost of the steel in it is only one or two percent of the total cost of the bridge, so just how much cheaper could it be? But rust isnt the only way things corrode. The other way things can corrode is by electrolysis; and this can happen to non-rusting metals too. When two dissimilar metals come into contact and are exposed to moisture, especially salty moisture like from the sea, or salt used to melt ice on the roads, an electrolytic process takes place which causes the materials to corrode. (The same reaction is, in fact, used in batteries to generate current.) This happened, for example, in the Statue of Liberty, which is made from an outer copper skin and an inner wrought iron structure. Its not that the wrought iron structure rusted. It didnt: it was made at a time when you could get real wrought iron: wrought by hand. It incorporated a lot of slag bres into the iron, which gave it elasticity and also gave it a lot of protection against rust. Nearly all ferrous metals rust, but wrought iron does a better job at handling it. As rusting takes place, the slag bres tend to disperse the rust into an even lm, which gives the metal a natural brownish appearance. This lm repels the scattering spotty rusty attack that shows up in other kinds of iron and steel. But in the Statue of Liberty, corrosion, not rusting, took place. The corrosion had actually been anticipated by the designer, Gustave Eiffel (the same guy who designed the Eiffel Tower), and the wrought iron skeleton and copper skin had originally been separated from each other using shellaca natural resin, secreted by a bug, which in Eiffels days was used for making such things as varnishbut the shellac deteriorated over time, and began to fail. A restoration process, replacing the ancient shellac with modern PTFE, was undertaken; and now the Statue of Liberty is no longer corroding. Its easy to overlook this kind of corrosion. Designers who want to prevent corrosion usually like to make structures and devices out of corrosion resistant materials. But thats not good enough. They have to also consider the interaction between the different materials that they choose. Consider seagoing boats, for example. Some aluminium alloys do not corrode very fast in seawater, and are used for high-end boat hulls. Some bronze alloys also do not corrode very fast in seawater, and are often used for propellers. Both are corrosion-resistant alloys. As long as the propeller does not come in contact with the hull, everything is hunky dory. But if the two come in contactsay, through a bearing, gearing, or the boat enginein such a way that electricity ows from one material to the other, corrosion will start. The aluminium, being electrically negative compared to the bronze, causes a current to ow through the two materials, causing the aluminium hull to corrode, and, eventually, fail. Even expensive stainless steel will fail in this way. All stainless steelsexcept the very best of specialty alloyssuffer from pitting or crevice corrosion when immersed in seawater. Stainless steels get their corrosion resistance by the formation of a very thin surface lm, called passive lm, which forms on the surface. But this only happens in the presence of oxygen. Therefore, stainless steels usually have poor corrosion resistance in low-oxygen environments, such as under deposits, in mud, or in tight places, called crevices, where structures or hardware are attached. Even painting it wont stop the corrosion: a scratch in the paint will start the corrosion process. The way to prevent this happening is to ensure, rst of all, that the danger is recognised at the design stage. Once recognised, a number of steps can be taken to prevent the corrosion. One way is to separate the two materials using an insulating material like plastic, rubber or ceramic. This is actually the best way. A less expensive way is to connect all metal parts electrically, via a copper wire or strip, to a block of sacricial metal such as zinc, which will corrode away instead of the parts you are protecting. The block will, of course, have to be replaced periodically.
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Unfortunately, electrical interaction between different types of metals is still poorly understood, and the latter method doesnt always work against all forms of electrical corrosion. There is an even faster-acting type of corrosion called electrolytic corrosion (which is actually a bit of a misnomer, because the word electrolysis refers to the breaking-down of the uid conductorin this case seawaterand not of the metals through which the electricity passes; but never mind that for now). Electrolytic corrosion is caused by stray electrical current from faulty electrical equipment. Sacricial zinc anodes will prevent galvanic corrosion but not electrolytic corrosion. The biggest problem is, however, the fact that engineers simply dont think about it. Even some Mercedes Benz engineersGerman engineers, the very best of them!didnt think of the possibility, for example, that such corrosion can occur between an aluminium alloy wheel and the steel hub to which the wheel is bolted: as one CLK owner found out to his dismay (see http://tinyurl.com/9y7olbc). The point is that this type of corrosion is easy to prevent, if you remember that it happens at the design stage. So remember it!
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45. Rock and Roll
ne of the worst things I nd about medicine is that the pills and capsules it comes in roll off the table or counter or dresser where Ive put them down. Dont you just hate it when that happens?
Why cant they make pills that wont roll away when they are left for a moment on a at surface? Yes, some pills are made that waynotably Viagra and Cialis (way to go, Pzer and Lily!)but why should any of them be made in such a way that they can roll off and then require you to search for them on the oor? Imean, some of the damn things are even expensive. And its not just pills. Pens and pencils, screws and screwdrivers, even chopsticks roll off when you put them down, and then you have to pick them up off the oor. Which would perhaps be okay if the oor was clean enough to eat off, but normally its not. (Well, it is in my house, but not in everyones.) Is this stupid or what. Only things that are meant to roll, like ball-bearings and wheels, should be made so that they can roll. Why should, say, bottles roll if laid on their sides, especially if they are fragile enough to break when falling to the oor? The extra virgin olive oil I buy comes in square(-ish) bottles: so why cant everything? (BTW: I could never gure out what gives someone the right to call themselves extra virgin never even been kissed, maybe?but lets forget about that for now.) And bottles arent the only things. Sometimes coins are just as bad. Why do coins have to be round? In India in the old days they had some square(-ish) coins. They did not roll off; they stayed put when you were counting them off. But in the west it seems to be taken for granted that coins have to be round. Why in heavens name? They arent wheels!!! So. Take a good hard look at your product and, if you see something in it that can roll off, change its shape! Unless it is intended to rollin which case, of course, dont.
Verrochhio. Head of an angel. Suuuwwweeet. (Leonardo apprenticed under him, you know.)
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Civilization has not yet arrived at the point where one can go stark naked, as ancient Diogenes wished. Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo
If I weren't Alexander, I should like to be Diogenes.Alexander the Great.
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46. R.T.F.M.
hat stands, as you should knowand shame on you if you dontfor Read The Fucking Manual.
Most people wont read the manual, and then they complain about the blinking 12:00 12:00 12:00 . Anybody who has read the manual can nd out how to x that, but who wants to read it? But theres a very good reason why they dont want to read it. Most people own so many gadgets that if they were to read the fucking manual for every one of them, theyd spend all their fucking time reading the fucking manuals. Which would be, of course, a huge waste of fucking time. Well, why should they have to? Cant all things be made so that they dont need a fucking manual? (As a matter of fact, I dont think there actually is a fucking manual: most people can, I imagine, fuck quite well without one. Though I do think that if there were a fucking manual most people would be able to do it much better. Iguess the Kama Sutra, for instance, qualies as a fucking manual, especially the illustrated versions. As do Japanese and Chinese Pillow Books. Yeah, well, those fucking manuals, I would read cover to cover. As, I suspect, would most peopleeven if only in private. Its not entirely a huge waste of fucking time.) Anyhoo. The point I am trying to make is that just as a fucking manual is not needed if you want to fuck, no manual should be needed for anything. It may be good to have one, but it should not be needed. Everything should be designed in such a way that their controls are intuitively understood. You dont need a manual to use a chair or a table, a spoon or a condom, do you? You just know. (Well, maybe not condoms. Otherwise there wouldnt be so many YouTube videos showing people how its done. That said, I never had any problems in that regard myself. Hands up those who did.) But, you will no doubt complain, todays gadgets are really, really hard to use, not like chairs and tables and spoons and condoms. Yes, they are. But they are also more easy to automate! So what would be so hard to automate them right from the get-go? Steve Jobs clearly knew this. When I bought my 27-inch iMac a few months ago, it came in a giant box, but the manual it came with was a tiny little booklet only about ve inches square and about 80 pages in length most of which were totally unnecessary to get it to work. The computer came with just one power cord, already attached to the machine, which I plugged into an electrical socket; and as soon as I did so, on-screen instructions came on to guide me to the rest of the way, step by step. I did read the manual, because Im the sort of guy who will read the manual even for kitchen scales, let alone the fucking manual; but I didnt need to, any more than I needed to when I rst lost my virginity. Thats what Im talking about. You shouldnt need the manual. For anything. It may be good to have one, but it shouldnt be needed. This, in my view, should taken to an extremeeven in law. One of my favourite TV lawyers, Horace Rumpole (Rumpole of the Bailey), once said I always found knowing the law a bit of a handicap for a barrister; and he was right as the real-life American lawyer Lysander Spooner has illustrated at great length in his Essay on the Trial by Jury. I mention the law here because theres an impression among people that products have to include safety warnings, so as to avoid the potential of lawsuits arising from idiots not using them properly. Thats bullshit: the law doesnt work like that. An American law rm which claims to be nationally-recognised, the Miller Firm LLC, says this about product liability (see http://tinyurl.com/c3uw5ut):
In most product liability cases, the injured party must show that the product was reasonably dangerous or somehow failed to meet consumer expectations. To deem a product reasonably dangerous, its risks typically must outweigh its intended benets. When a product is more of a risk than a benet to consumers, it can be considered defective.
Note carefully the word reasonably. Any half-competent lawyer can make an argument that, for instance, no reasonable person will imagine oven mitts to be driving gloves, so if you get into an accident driving you car while wearing oven mitts to keep your hands warm, the mitt-maker isnt really liable. Besides, remember that just because you have something written down in your manual doesnt mean you are shielded from lawsuits. What if your customer didnt read the manual? What if the safety warning was written in such frustrating legalese that your customer couldnt understand it? What if the rst buyer
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resells the item second-hand without including the manual? That half-competent lawyer we spoke of above should be able to handle these situations too. (I happen to know a bit about the law, since by late wife was a lawyera prominent one, too, dealing in lawsuits involving claims that ran into literally billions of dollars.) Anywayforget about the law for now. In engineering there should be a principle, If your product needs a manual (and were not talking about safety warnings here), its denitely not ready for prime time!
Write or draw something here that tells your prof Imway smarter than you!
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47. Pinch Me
hen I was a very young schoolboy, over half a century ago, there used to be a very corny joke that went something like this:
First schoolboy: Inchme and Pinchme went for a walk. Inchme died. Who was left? Second Schoolboy: Pinchme. At this point, the rst schoolboy pinches the second schoolboy. Well, it looks like engineers have taken this joke to heart. Theres virtually no tool or gadget that hasnt pinched someone sometime. My personal beef is with salad tongs, which have pinched me more times than I care to remember when I was helping myself to the lettuce. (Okay, did did nd a pair of really cool salad tongs yesterday which dont pinch, but they cost ten times as much as my regular ones, so I said Yikes! and passed.) Some people have even died, by having their heads pinched in heavy machinery: see http://www.isplonline.com/pinchpoints.htm. Just about everything that has hinges or swivels on a pivot or moves one way against another can, at a pinch, pinch. Pliers, scissors, doors, windows, lids (those on hinges), folding ladders, you name it. Archimedes famously said Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum for it, and I could even pinch a whale. And he was right. Its really not hard to pinch someonemostly inadvertently. Nor is it hard, on the other hand, to prevent things from pinching people inadvertently: install a guard around the thing that can pinch. It can be a simple rubber or leather cover, like the kind found around gear shift knobs of cars with manual transmissions. Or it can be more complex, made of plastic or metal, which is shaped in an appropriate manner to allow the necessary movement. You nd these around the hinges of some of the better designed doors, like in expensive cars. Better stillat least in expensive itemsis to install sensors which can tell whether something is likely to get pinched or not, and prevent it from happening: like those installed in most elevator doors. And it should never be possible to slam a door or a drawer: why, even some kitchen cabinets are made these days in a manner that doesnt allow their doors and drawers to be slammed shut. But one way or another, inadvertent pinching can be prevented. And yet so many things are still made in such a way that they can pinch people inadvertently. Can someone tell me why??? Its so fucking preposterous that I am just going to stop talking about it and instead give you a good look at a drawing of two people fucking.
Few men have represented the female body as well, nor in such an openly sexual manner, as Rodin. One could think of Picasso or Schiele, of course, but Rodin was in this respect a forerunner. If Rodin is best known as a sculptor, he clearly considered his drawing work as a nished part of his art, to the extent that he organised several exhibitions of his drawings, organised according to themes, during his lifetime: for example in Berlin in 1903.David Cobbold, whose interests are Wine, literature, painting, motorcycles, rugby, cricket, building, gardens, food, people, music, " " " poetry, landscape, trees, dancing. My kind of guy.
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The Vulva. My favourite picture in the book. Fab, innit.
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48. Shocking
am a fairly good handyman. I can x lots of things around the house, and have even built some of the stuff in my house. But one thing I stay away from is electricals. Except for changing light bulbs and plugging in the power cord of appliances and computers, I dont touch anything electrical. I am afraid if I try to x anything electrical, even such a thing as small as a wall switch, Ill get the shock of my life. Its not as if I dont understand the mechanical parts of any electrical device. I could x a wall switch, if I were assured that theres no current owing through it. But since I cant be so assured, I just dont touch the damn thing. Well, as a consumer I have to ask myself, why should this be the case? Nowadays pretty much everything has an electrical component: even some modern picture frames (and who would have thought, twenty years ago, that youd have to plug in your picture frame?) So why cant we simply unplug anything electrical that isnt working, x it, and then plug it in back again? Why, for instance, cant we do that with wall switches and ceiling fans? In fact, why isnt there a small LED light attached to all these things which lights up when its live, and goes off when theres no current owing though it, so as to indicate that its safe to now try and x it? They have such things on computers and cell phones, and even on some exceedingly cheap pocket calculators and digital watches, so why cant they have it on everything connected to a live current? I know what youre going to say: we shouldnt let just anybody x electrical things, because they may x them in a dangerous way: we should only let licensed electricians x electrical things. But that ship has already sailed. Ordinary people already can x anything that can be unplugged: even electric toasters (than which there is hardly anything more dangerous around the house, but well let that pass for now). The only question remaining now is, why isnt everything unpluggable? Or unscrewable, like light bulbs? (As an aside, even light bulbs should not require screwing in: nothing should require screwing in. Dont get me started on my favourite rant: against screws. Screws are the absolute worst invention in the history of engineering. For one thing, they come loose with vibration: in fact, racing motorcycles have to have all their screws and nuts and bolts drilled and threaded with wire which has to be tied securely to the bikes frame, because race organisers are afraid of the screws coming loose while racing, causing accidents. If this can happen in a two-hour race, just imagine what can happen in a lifetime of riding. Then theres the near-impossibility of nding a screw that has come loose and fallen somewhere inaccessibleor even lost altogether. The hardware store has a gazillion replacement screws and bolts and nuts, no doubt, but good luck nding the correct one from among them, especially if the part into which it needs to be threaded is xed to your bike or car, and so cant be taken into the store to try them all out. Of course screws also need tightening every now and then, as IKEA proudly (!?!) reminds its customers in every single one of its instruction pamphlets. Then theres the possibility of stripping the screws head or threads while trying to get it loose, which often happens when the screw has been in for a long time and maybe even gotten corroded. Once that happens, good luck trying to get the screw outand even if you succeed, its nearimpossible to get a replacement screw back in. Of course screws also roll off the table just like pills, pencils and chopsticks, about which we complained earlier. Then, inserting a screw into something above your head using only one hand, while holding onto your ladder for dear life with the other, can be, to say the least, challenging: screwdrivers arent built to actually grip the screw they are driving. Of course, screws also require lots of turns of the screw, which makes them time consumingand admittedly that problem is somewhat alleviated with electric screwdrivers, but why should you need one in your toolbox? Trust me, for all these and a dozen more reasons, every time you incorporate screws into your product you are screwing over your customers; and they are not going to like that. The only time screwing is good is when screwing.) Anyhow. Where were we. Yes, plugging electricals in. Everything electrical can, and should, be made easily plug-in-able and plug-out-able: just like an iMac. That also goes for the electricals in your car. It should not be hard to do. Youre the engineers: gure it out!
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Shocking! (Just kidding.) Rodin, once again. Now look! What is this drawing? Not once in describing the shape of that mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it. Not a thought about the technical problem of representing it on paper could be allowed to arrest the ow of my feelings about " " " " " " it, from my eye to my hand.
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49. Leaks
emember the Exxon Valdez disaster? Of course you do. Or at least you know about it, even if youre too young to remember it.
It wasnt the rst leak in history nor, unfortunately, will it be the last. But it should have been. The last leak in history, I mean. Will engineers never learn from previous engineers mistakes? Leaks are, unfortunately, still a part of life. Most of them arent as big as the Exxon Valdez one. But they are still expensive. A leak in a water line necessitated me paying a hundred dollars for a plumber to x it. Leaks in gas lines can actually be much worse: though, again, not as bad as the Exxon Valdez disaster. Even tiny leaks can add up to huge costs, at least over the long run. At the website of the online magazine Machinery Lubrication, in an article under the heading The Real Cost of Fluid Power Leaks, we read, among other things:
Hydraulic systems are often considered perennial consumers of oil and in turn, makeup uid is an inherent cost of operating hydraulic equipment. But what is the real cost of one or more minor leaks on your hydraulic equipment? To answer this question, the costs associated with the following factors need to be considered: Makeup uid Cleanup Disposal Contaminant ingress Safety [] Consider a piece of hydraulic equipment losing [just] six cubic centimeters of oil per minute. Over 24hours, the loss is 0.9 liters, which perhaps is not a signicant amount. But over a month this equates to 27 liters, and 330 liters over the course of a year. Assuming a uid cost of three dollars per liter, the annual cost is around $1,000. [] In a recent case study, the pneumatic systems of two plants were surveyed for leaks using ultrasonic leak-detection equipment. In the rst, which took two hours to survey, 27 leaks were discovered in a small plant. The calculated energy cost of these leaks was $9,000 per year. In the second, a much larger plant, which took two days to survey, 260 leaks were discovered. The calculated energy cost of these leaks was more than $90,000 per year!
But why should things that contain uids leak at all? Surely its an engineering principle that things should actually perform the tasks they are designed to do, and not break down while doing so. Bridges, for example, should not fall down, especially when trafc is moving on top of them. Even covered wagon bridges made out of wood and wrought iron by the Pilgrims satised this requirement. Barns raised by the Amish, who shun fancy things like electricity, also do not fall down while cattle and people are inside. So why do engineers today not follow this principle when building stuff that has to contain liquids or gases? Dont tell me its beyond our engineering abilities. Roman aqueducts and baths are, in some places at least, still standingand they are leak-proof. If Romans could build leakproof channels that ran for miles, surely we can build leakproof lines that run for just a few feet or yards? And dont tell me its too expensive. As you just read, a single piece of hydraulic equipment can cause a leak costing upwards of a thousand dollars in leaked uid alonenot to mention the cost of the cleanup, disposal, contaminant ingress, and safety concerns. And these costs dont even include the cost of repairing the faulty piece of machinery. If the engineers who designed it had spent just a hundred dollars making it leakproof, this huge cost would never have to be incurred! Even worse is leaking storage tanks. The Boulder Area Sustainability Information Network (BASIN) writes at http://tinyurl.com/7avnrpy:
The boom in automobile sales following World War II was closely followed by the construction of thousands of gasoline stations across the country. At these new stations, bare steel tanks were installed
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underground to store gasoline. The average life expectancy of a steel tank was 30 to 50 years depending on the rate of corrosion of the steel. Since the early 1980s, corrosion of steel tanks, along with faulty installation and operation, have resulted in nearly ubiquitous groundwater contamination by gasoline. Because nearly half of all Americans depend on groundwater for their drinking water [], leaking gasoline tanks represent a signicant public health hazard. Leaking gasoline tanks can also present the risk of re and explosion because vapors from leaking tanks can travel through sewer lines into buildings.
Is this horrendously horrifying and appalling, or what. And theres absolutely NO reason for it to happen. If whisky can be stored in wooden barrels for decades without even one tiny drop leaking out, surely containers for any liquid can be made which will not let even one tiny drop leak out. Its ancient technology: centuries if not even millennia old. And its not as if whisky barrels are expensive, either. The whisky is expensive, but not the barrels in which it is stored. Theyre made of wood for heavens sake. New ones cost around $250. Thats nothing, for a container that can store whisky for 50years or more: it comes to a mere $12.50 a year. Each barrel can store 53 gallons of whisky (or any other uid), which makes the cost of storage less than 25 cents per gallon if you store the uid for 50 years. If you store the uid for a shorter period of timelike, say, one month (which, Im guessing, is the maximum amount of time a gas station might store gasoline before the storage tank gets empty and needs relling)the cost goes down to less than 0.0004 cents per gallon. Yes, you read that right: less than four ten-thousandths of a cent per gallon. So dont tell me that stainless steel gasoline storage tanks, covered on both sides with plastic or glass and which, as a result, could never corrodewould, even if they cost ten times as much per gallon of storage capacity as whisky barrels, break the bank. So. Just as you dont want leaks in your political campaign, you dont want leaks in your engineering products. Every time you design something that has to have any uid in it, think about your expensive scotch, aged to perfection in oak barrels which never leakand design your gadget right!
Jean Gabriel Domergue, c. 1924. He was appointed a Chevalier of the Lgion d'honneur, the highest honour in France. Domergue changed the way women were portrayed, breaking the traditional melancholic and vapourish poses. " " " " " " " (Merci, M. Domergue!)
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50. The Future is Where Youll Be Spending the Rest of Your Life
ut most engineers seem to be forgetting that, dont they.
You are going to be engineers. That means that the future will largely be what Y O U make it. Why, then, are you not designing most of your stuff for tomorrow, instead of for today? I was just looking over some car magazines I had bought ten years ago. The cars they describe arent much different, in quality or performance, from the cars described in the car magazines I see today. Even after ten years! Groan. Why do engineers design things for today rather than for tomorrow? My son Cyrus has a theory about that: they arent, for the most part, sci- fans. He said, all engineers should read sci-. I concur. Those who dont study the future are doomed to repeat the past. (Mind you, those who dont study the past are also doomed to repeat the past; but thats a separate issue, to be introduced in another text book, to be entitled Common Sense 101: History.) What you need to know is that you need to study the future, avidly. And where you will study it best is, in my humble opinion, sci-. Did you know that arguably the greatest master of sci-, H.G. Wells, virtually singlehandedly invented, a hundred years ago, much of today? Well, maybe invented is too strong a term, because he didnt have all the details worked out, but he came up with a whole bunch of ideas for things to make waaaay before they were made. It was he who came up with the ideas for nukes, lasers, aerial bombing, even e-mail and the telephone answering machineand combined the last two, which even we havent done, at least with landlines. He also came up with the idea of recreational tabletop war gaming, like todays Warhammer. He came up with the idea of gene engineering, much along the lines of Jurassic Park. He lobbied for a league of nations, met with Roosevelt and Stalin in the 30s, and during World War II created the rst draft of what would become the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Indeed, he pretty much invented the idea of sci itself. There certainly were other sci- authors before himmost notably Mary Shelly, author of Frankenstein, and Jules Verne, who wrote about submarines and the Moon Landing more than a century before either of these became realitybut no one as prolic as Wells so singlehandedly invented the future. But he was not alone among sci- writers in coming up with great engineering ideas. Famed sci- author Arthur C. Clarke is credited with thinking up the idea of the communications satellitein fact the geostationary orbit is now named after him: its called the Clarke orbitand for inspiring the creation of the World Wide Web. The original Star Trek series, aired in 1966-67, popularised the communicator, a ip-top device that later saw real-life service as Motorolas rst clamshell cell phone. More recently, sci- author Neal Stephenson, in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has reinvented the wheel, a simplied version of which was actually made a few years later by the Michelin company and marketed under the trade name Tweel. (Another version of Stephensons reinvented wheel, more faithful to his original idea, is described at http:// tinyurl.com/9e2yhes.) The point is that throughout history, sci- has come up with great ideas long before the technology to put them into practice was available. And technology, generally speaking, becomes whatever we put our minds to bringing into existence. Sometimes the technology for this or that gadget isnt available only because engineers havent yet put their minds to it. In fact, a lot of technology thats already available isnt in widespread use, simply because engineers are too lazy to do the research. Case in point is La Macchina: the most advanced automobile ever conceived. Pretty much all the technology that will enable us to build it is available today: some of it has been available for decades. If built, it would be the most powerful, most technologically advanced, fastest, quickest, smartest, safest, most reliable, most ergonomic, most durable and most upgradable car in the world. Some goals for it are: a top speed of 500km/h (311 mph) or more; a 0-100 km/h (0-62 mph) time of0.3 seconds or less; and a quarter-mile elapsed time of 3 seconds or less. It is also intended to be able to lap the Nrburgring Nordschleife in less than 3minutes. In comparison, the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport has a top speed of 431 km/h or 268 mph; a 0-100 km/hor 0-62 mphtime of 2.5seconds, and (with respect to
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the standard Bugatti Veyron), a quarter-mile elapsed time of 10.2 seconds: so its not even in the same league as La Macchina. Not to mention that the Veyron is also many times more dangerous to drive, and a gazillion times as expensive to buy, and to x if anything goes wrong (which, in La Macchina, it wouldnt in the rst place). And theres much more to La Macchina: stuff that would blow the minds of even such men as Enzo Ferrari, Horacio Pagani, Ferdinand Piech and Ron Dennis. Read all about it at http://tinyurl.com/9e2yhes. The point to be stressed, though, is that La Macchina was conceived by two guys who are both avid sci-natics: one of them being very well known to the author of this book, and the other, his son. Was it possible to conceive of it if they were not? Of course it was. Possible, that is. But would it have been? Highly unlikely! Compared to Warp Drive and Dyson Spheres, such a car is next to nothing. Heck, even compared to Eugen Sngers Silbervogel (about which we spoke earlier) and Wernher von Brauns putting a man on the Moon, it is next to nothing. And both Snger and von Braun in their youth avidly read, from cover to cover, Hermann Oberths Die Rakete zu den Planetenrumen (By Rocket into Planetary Space), which was self-published in 1923 after its rejection as Oberths doctoral thesis. (Okay, strictly speaking it wasnt sci-, but given its date it might as well have been.) In fact, it is at least debatable that even the Pyramids of Egypt were intended to have been launch pads for the ka or life force of the Pharaoh to the stars. So even Imphotep, the man behind the very rst Pyramidand arguably the greatest engineer who ever lived, the engineer to whom this book is dedicated might have had his young mind full of visions of space travel of some sort while he was growing up; and maybe thats what inspired him to build the Pyramid in the rst place. Maybe. The point, anyway, isthink B I G ! In the words of Steve Jobs address to the staff and students of Stanford University on October 6, 2005:
Here's to the crazy ones. The mists. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. Theyre not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you cant do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. [] Your time is limited, so dont waste it living someone elses life. Dont be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other peoples thinking. Dont let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. [] Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Remember, the least you can do is to do the best you can do. (Its also true that the best you can do as the Chinese sage Lao Tz advised over 2,000 years agois to do the least you can do; but well park that thought for the moment, since I intend to introduce it in another text book, to be entitled Common Sense 101: Common Sense.) And the best you can do is stay foolish. Let me illustrate. The three guys who host BBCs TV show Top GearJeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James Maygive the impression that they are utter idiots. (They may not actually be idiots, but they sure seem to give the impression on the show that they are.) Well, they have thought of at least two absolutely excellent ideas that engineers should have thought of long ago. Not in spite of their idiocy, but because of it. The rst is the idea that since it snows very rarely in Englandand its therefore not cost-effective to keep snow ploughs on hand to clear the snow on highways and runways during maybe two days in a yearcombine harvesters owned by farmers around the country could be rented from them, and outtted with the plough ends of snow ploughs; and these could be used to clear the snow on those few snowy days. Clarkson, Hammond and May actually tried doing it on the show, and succeeded. They even took one of their contraptions to Norway, where they used it to plough a stretch of highway the Norwegians themselves dont normally plough. Another brilliant idea they had was that it should not take weeks to repair just a few miles of highway, as is normally the
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The Future is Where Youll be Spending the Rest of Your Life
case in pretty much every country in the world (including, I daresay, your own). So they did an experiment: they undertook to repair a one-and-a-half-mile stretch of British highway in just 24hours all by themselves, along with a few amateur volunteersand again succeeded brilliantly. Apparently the delay, as they found out, was due to cement and asphalt trucks not arriving in a steady stream to the site, so that workers were often just standing around with nothing to do. They leaned on the suppliers of the materiel to deliver them in a steady stream, and hey presto, the work was all done in 24 hours. By rank amateurs. In fact Clarkson wasnt even doing anything: he was simply shouting random orders over a megaphone, which no one followed anyway. Just goes to show how well foolishness works. Jobss advice to stay foolish is, therefore, very sound. You need to take his words to heart. Think of the most foolish thing you can invent, and then invent it! You can hardly do worse than keep on creating the crap engineers are currently creating all around the globe. Terabits-per-second internet? In Clarksons words, how hard can it be? Perpetual motion? It sure exists in nature, otherwise electrons couldnt perpetually whizz around the nuclei of atoms for gazillions of years, with no way to make them stop; and besides, Heisenbergs famous Uncertainty Principleaccording to which it can be concluded that one can never bring a subatomic particle to absolute rest, even at a temperature of absolute zeroalso implies the existence of perpetual motion. Reactionless engines, which will allow you to lift cars off the ground totally silently, and then propel them horizontally to Mach speeds just as silently? Easy-peasyjust Google it! Tapping the universe for free energy, which Tesla said was so abundant that it would be too cheap to selland then transmit it wirelessly to every home and gadget and ying car? Hey: if Tesla already thought of it a hundred years ago, why cant we? Finding a cure for the common cold? If we can create programs to ght computer viruses, why cant we do something to ght human viruses? Sure all these sound foolish; but are they any more foolish than making cars that are just so much junk within a couple of decades, and light bulbs that burn out and have to be replaced every so oftenas we are doing right now? If the above seem to be impossible, theres a good reason for that: most things that are possible have already been thought of. Such as maglev trains that run in vacuum tubes laid around the globe, moving at thousands of miles an hour, and capable, therefore, of moving people and freight from any point on Earth to any other within an hour or less. Such as a magnetically-suspended ramp going upwards at a gentle slope as high as one wants, constituting a veritable stairway to heaven, which would allow one even to walk to space. (The actual inventorswho are in fact the same guys who invented maglev in the rst placeintend to magnetically propel space vehicles in a vacuum tube suspended in that ramp, which is planned to be a thousand miles long and reach a height of 22 km above the Earths surface, where most of the atmosphere would be left behind. Since the vehicle exiting the tube would have an exit speed greater than orbital, by the time it got to orbit it could be at just the right speed for staying there. They call their invention Star Tram, and even NASA is thinking about it seriously: it would reduce the cost of putting stuff into orbit by a factor of ten thousand.) Lots of possible things have already been invented, so I think youll have better luck inventing those that are, quote-unquote, impossible. In fact, theres precious little thats really impossible. Ye canna change the laws of physics? Why not, Mr Scott? Wheres the ironclad proof that its impossible to do so? Icertainly never saw one! Did you? Also, dont think you always have to succeed at what you attempt to accomplish. Success is nice, but its not great: certainly not as great as attempts to do something really, really wonderful, even if you fail atit. Ive spoken about Steve Jobs in glowing terms quite often in this book, but I dont think hes in the rst rank. At best hes in the second rank. He wasnt even an engineer, strictly speaking. He was a great salesman, sure but an artist above all. Mind you, I said in this book that engineers should be artists and salesmen. The Parthenon was designed by a great artist, Phidias: not by engineers or builders. Likewise the buildings designed by Michelangelo, arguably the greatest artist who ever lived. When I was an impoverished youth wandering around Italy, I used to sit on the steps of the Capitol in Romedesigned by Michelangelo, of coursefor hours on end at night, my heart bursting with the beauty of it, and of its amazing setting. But Steve Jobs wasnt in the rst rank even as an artist. Certainly he wasnt in the league of Phidias, Michelangelo or Rodin. In the rst rank of engineers, anyway, Id include such people as Imhotep, who used to hang out with the King in his home town, Memphis; Eugen Snger and his girlfriend Irene Bredt, who designed the Silverbird (see Chapter 2), a plane so advanced that almost a hundred years after it was designed we still dont have one that even comes close to it in performance; Theodore Nelson, the inventor of hypertext,
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whose concept of itcalled Xanaduis far, far ahead of todays Internet; and K.Eric Drexler, who thought up whats arguably the absolute ultimate in engineering, namely Nanotechnology (ultimate, because after it comes into existence, technology itself may well become obsolete). None of their ideas has yet been put into practice (with the exception, of course, of Imhoteps and Michelangelos) but thats the fault of society, not of these bright people. Leonardo da Vinci was also in the rst rank of engineers: he came up with ideas for stuff that couldnt be implemented for centuries after his time. Such are the people Jobs was referring to in his speech at Stanford, saying Here's to the crazy ones. The mists. The rebels. What you want to do is aim high; and if you aim so high that you havent a hope in hell of accomplishing it in your lifetime, all the better! And dont worry about how you will make a living. There are plenty of other ways to earn money. Crunch the numbers: if you make a product in one single dayhowever simple that product may befor a measly dollar, and sell it the next day for just $1.01, and reinvest the money you make that way again and again, producing and selling more and more such products at that same slim rate of prot day after day, a compound interest calculator will reveal that youll become a millionaire in less than four years, and (drum roll, please!) a billionaire in less than six! IOW, aim for (a) low, l o w, l o o o o o o w w w w w per-item prot margins, so as to help you stay real competitive, coupled withand this is the important point (b)extremely quick turnover, measured in days if not even hours (preferably, in fact, in mere minutes!), plus (c) reinvest every penny you make and youll have the market cornered in almost no time at. Come to think of it, you dont even have to actually make the products: you can just buy them and resell them! How else do you think Walmart got so big so soon? So really, dont worry your head too much about where your next meal is going to come from. (That said, however, how much you make by way of earthly wealth is probably dependent on your karma anyway, so take what Im saying above with a pinch of saltunless of course you dont believe in karma, in which case it wont make much difference to you what I say about it.) Whatever you do, though, dont waste your time: not only because your life is short, but because you dont have much time left to invent anything. In a couple of hundred years or thereabouts humanity will most probably have reached what sci- writers call singularity, and as a result become extinct. It might even happen in your own lifetime, if you work at it. So you really need to get a move on. Of course it could be rather risky for you to take Jobss adviceor mine. You might actually go hungry. Iknow I did, on occasion. Or you may have to beg, borrow or stealwhich I didnt, except on occasion for a bit of begging. (Maybe I shouldnt be advising people to actually steal although its debatable whether stealing from the rich to give to the poorin this case, the poor would of course be yourselfis a genuine ethical no-no, especially when you are also benetting others: consider the TV show Leverage.) But in any case, what do you want to be saying when you reach a ripe old age and are talking to your grandkids around the replace? Do you want to say I spent a whole lifetime building crap, and ended up middle-class, or do you want to say Iinvented faster-than-light travel? Do you not want to hear your grandkids reply: Way to go, grandma?
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Write or draw something. Be an artist, be a creator!
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Portrait of the author. Shows hes got balls.
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About the Author
he author is a nobodyhe doesnt actually exist in reality. A graduate of the School of Hard Knocks, after he got the Third Degree he said Screw it, and start thinking for himself. This book is a result of all that screwing er, thinking.
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The Definitive Engineering Text Book

Common Sense 101 - Engineering - 16 Dec 2012

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Common Sense 101: Engineering

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