Reinforced Wood

Wood is a great building material. It's fairly cheap. It's fairly light. It's fairly strong. What else could you ask for?

Well, wood is a little weak in tension and very weak in shear. Being that it is very commonly used in bending, a great application of its large cross section, this can be a problem. The solution: reinforced wood.

Essentially, wrap a steel mesh around the trunk of a young tree. As the tree grows larger, it will push through the mesh. Eventually, you will have an ordinary looking tree with steel mesh running through it. Chop it down and cut it up. Now, you have steel reinforced wood that is great in tension and shear and just about anything!

(I have to give credit to my father for this one, as it was his idea.)

On God

I hate to infuriate the 75% or so of people who believe in some kind of god, but I am going to do it anyways.

God can do the impossible. He is beyond reason, correct? Well, I'm not. I'm an engineer. I better have good reasons for everything I do. If I design a plane and it fails, I won't get much sympathy for claiming that God informed my decisions while making it.

I'm sure their families will feel the same way...

So, that's my philosophy about religion. If I can't use it as an engineer, why should I use it to engineer my life?

More on Gravity Transport: A City on a Clam-Hill

When it comes to riding a bicycle, the old saying should be: "what goes down, must ride all the way back up."

Couldn't have said it better.

What if there was a place where you could always ride down hill? "Impossible", you say? Hck-Ptooey! I spit on impossible. 

Imagine a hill that is shaped like a clam shell. Essentially, there is a cliff on one end and a shallow slope on the other that raps back around to the base of the cliff.

Just in case you don't remember what a clam looks like...

Now, just put a few elevators along the cliff.

I have attempted, with surprising success, to draw a contour plot
 of the clam-hill. The red circles are elevators.

The flow of traffic would always move downhill from the top of the cliff to the base.

A flow chart... The red cylinders are elevators.
The rectangular prisms are buildings.
Don't judge me. 

Now, that is a place where I would want to ride a bike! Obviously, it would only work for a small city, but it is still a really neat idea.

The Kind of School I Would Like To See (Cont'd.)

As the geniuses amongst you may have figured out already, I am an engineering student. This means that I do lots and lots of work. Did I mention that I do a lot of work?

What grinds my gears is that all the work I do is used for a total of zero useful things. Nadda. Zippo. Straight into the smiling trash cans.

"Me happy, because me love engineering student homework..."
(Yes, that is how trash cans speak!)

In my fictional school, actual companies collaborate with professors to assign useful work to the students. Nonetheless, professors only give assignments that are relevant to the class and are useful in teaching the material. Otherwise, people might not want to take their class, which, in this school, actually has consequences.

Students who do good work are recognized by these companies. Some even get paid to do it. Many use this recognition to get a job after graduating.

It seems I have solved the "GPA/Degree" problem with room to spare!

By "room to spare," I mean that I have also solved the high tuition prices problem. Teachers wont need to be paid much by students if they are being sponsored by companies. "Corruption," you dare say? Every student has a completely voluntary choice on the classes to take and the teachers to choose in my school! Why shouldn't they choose the class that is cheaper and might get them job offers?

To be fair, there is one - I repeat: one - class at UF that does this to a very minor extent. It's called Integrated Product and Process Design and I will be taking it next year. So, expect another post on this in a little over a year...