Genius Engineers: Don't Settle.

"It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest." - Buckminster Fuller, 1970

Two disclosures. First, I'm an egotist. I've worked really hard to get where I am and that has helped me, but my character is a proud one and I feel like I matter in the sense that my actions have far-reaching consequences, good or bad. I like to think I am a growing influence in the world of engineering, in Kansas City, and in the world. Second, my first engineering job after grad school was laying out ductwork and plumbing at a MEP firm in Lenexa, KS. It was honest work, and I loathed every minute of it. Worse yet, I did not proudly walk out of there to a better job; I was laid off in 2009, and only by a stroke of luck (and a couple good interviews) landed one of the best engineering gigs in the city. It's all been a party since.

All that being said, I want to speak an irritated word of lament for a promising young engineer who settled. I met this young engineer when I was at KU in grad school, and she was an incoming freshman. I mostly noticed her because she was pretty, and pretty girls in an engineering school stick out like the Woman in the Red Dress.  I bravely introduced myself, at some point, but that was about it. Four years later, she was featured on the cover of the KU Engineering magazine, carrying the Engineering School banner at graduation, beaming. I found out she'd basically aced life, and had decided to go to grad school. Score! Another engineer bucking the easy way out (entry-level industry) and diving into a more dedicated path of continued specialization. She told me she was going into computational mechanics, or something. I honestly don't remember it exactly, but I got that she was analyzing mechanical designs on very powerful computers using very advanced mathematics. I remember being impressed.

So I hatched a plan. I was going to hire her. Maybe it was selfish of me, but I dreamed that I'd be in a managerial role by the time she finished whatever advanced degree she wanted to get (she suggested she'd go all the way: PhD) and I could hire her. I thought "now there's the kind of human being I want to have working with/for me: a socially adept, genius engineer that excels at basically everything and clearly has ambition.

I found out a couple weeks ago that she took a mechanical design job at XXXXXX.* Two caveats. First, working at XXXXXX is a pretty glamorous job here in Kansas City. It's supposedly a great workplace, it has great benefits, and the company is healthy and vibrant and utilizes leading edge technology. Second, I don't want some XXXXXX engineer to read this and go "what a shitty asshole" because I clearly appear to be gearing up to trash XXXXXX engineers. Look, someone made the computer on which I am typing this, and for that I am grateful. Someone designed the roads on which I drive, and for that I am grateful. Someone builds GPS units that make the world a safer place for transit, and for that I am grateful.

Nevertheless, XXXXXX is a place for engineers who want to do a job designated to them by someone else, making products designed by someone else, so that other people get credit for their hard work. XXXXXX engineers are cogs in a large corporate machine. At XXXXXX, your managers hype team-building nonsense like "Corporate Challenge" and management periodically has all-staff meetings (live-streamed to everyone's desk so they can keep working while they listen in). No engineer at XXXXXX right now, especially not an entry-level one, will make a breakthrough that will support ten thousand.

That is why I lament my young engineer friend going there. The engineering world was her oyster. She had stellar grades, two degrees, was the toast of KU's engineering school (literally) and at the end of that run she planted herself in a cube in someone else's large, ponderous company. She could have been the one in ten thousand that shook the world.

Part of me is bitter. I have high hopes for my company and for the engineering department, and I am irritated a really good engineer slipped through my fingers. But the other part of me is...disenchanted at finding someone with all the tools and none of the ambition.

Granted, it's early in her career. She's been a real engineer 2 weeks. Maybe in a year or two she'll visit my company website and drop her resume. And I'll get my wunderkind.
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But please. You in the back. Yes, you. The 19 year old engineering student with the bright eyes and the messy apartment. I read you have a 3.9 GPA and are thinking about double majoring in electrical and computer engineering just for kicks. And because its easy for you.

Send me an email. You'll never be just a cog in my machine.



*The original version of this named the company. After thinking about it, I've redacted the company name out of respect for a great man I knew named Paul. I will say it is a company of about 5,000+ employees that is headquartered in Olathe, KS.
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Circumcision, Ctd UPDATED

I'll just put this right here...

I'd bet good money that this article is never mentioned by Andrew Sullivan.

Wow, Sully took the bait:

I remain of the view that this is best decided by the human being whose body is being permanently mutilated - before he becomes sexually active. But the religious and cultural traditions are too deep to be banned in a free society.

I remain, as ever, completely fine with my parents decision to permanently mutilate me.

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My (NASA) Day Has Come!

NASA is asking the public to weigh in on their strategic vision and budget! AW YISS.

My opinion of NASA's "strategic vision" and budget here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Me saying nice things about NASA here, here and here.

(Disclosure: I ranted against the Mars Science Laboratory here. My opinion on that has evolved.)

TL;DR: NASA should:
1. Pay theoretical physicists to exhaustively prove faster-than-light travel is impossible. Conversely, if a feasible method of FTL travel is hypothesized, aggressively research it.

2. Pay scientists to identify and harness Dark Energy and Dark Matter.

3. Pay astronomers to develop methods to identify currently habitable extrasolar planets and then start identifying them.

4. Pay engineers to continue robotic exploration of the solar system.


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Into the Cool Dawn Air; I Am But A Spectator

It's 5:58 AM. I am standing in my front yard, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, with my 4 month old puppy on a leash in front of me. Seconds ago, she was oscillating in front of the door, waiting for me to let her out.
When we first get up in the morning, the combination of a good night's rest and a full bladder turned Niki into a 20 pound helicopter, spinning and gyrating so wildly that at times all four of her feet simultaneously leave the ground.
Our mornings have become routine. About 5:30, she politely starts making "I'm awake" noises in her crate, like the rhythmic scratching of an ear, or a deep, impatient sigh. At 5:45 my alarm goes off and she's instantly sitting up, confident my rise and her release are imminent.
After I stumble into some clothes, I let her into the backyard, where she relieves herself. Then, like a heat-seeking missile she arcs at top speed back to me and we go inside. A quick drink of water and she begins orbiting around me, her entire back half wagging, waiting for the leash. I put it on her and let her drag me to the door. I've been up barely 10 minutes, can't even really see out of my foggy eyeballs yet, but she's bright-eyed and ready to run a marathon.

So there I am, 5:58 AM, in my front yard. We step forth into the cool morning air and she takes three lunges off the porch and freezes like a statue. A bunny is crouched in our yard, near the mailbox. My puppy has spotted it, and forgotten all else. I do not matter, the rest of the world does not matter, and the morning walk is forgotten.
My dog is a Brittany, and her two favorite activities are running and pointing. In this case, the running has been furloughed for a few minutes in favor of holding absolutely still, legs stretched forward to their fullest, eyes a bright unblinking stare at a rabbit in the yard. Hundreds of years of careful breeding has made it essentially impossible for her to move.
Once the sleepiness has left my eyes I realize that my little dog isn't holding still after all...she's vibrating. Pulses of energy appear to be traveling up and down her torso in waves, and every second or so she let's out a little squeak. Her feet, however, have been cast into the concrete of the front stoop. Her little brown nose wobbles back and forth as she gulps in rabbit-scented air.
Then the rabbit bolts, and my dog becomes a projectile after it. She's thrown up into the air when she hits the end of the leash, but comes down on all fours, never having taken her eyes off the retreating bunny. She stands still again, watches the bunny for a minute, and then when I murmur "Let's Go, Niki," she turns and leads me down the street, nose to the ground.

These mornings are fun for us both, I think. All too often before I got the puppy, the pre-commute hours were filled with nothing but sleep-to-the-last-minute and then a quick shower packing a lunch and rushing out the door. I've added an extra 45 minutes onto the front end of my morning, for that little dog, and it's amazing how different life is for me.
But really, on these walks, I'm just along for the ride. Niki moves forward and backward on the leash, left and right, running out ahead of me, stopping to smell something, falling behind, then racing to catch up. She doesn't so much go for walks with me...it would be more accurate to say she is in some sort of erratic orbit around me.

And yet, she's under control. At cross-streets we stop to check for cars, and she sits down calmly next to me and waits for permission to go.

But still; having been awake for only a few minutes I am numb. Cars go by and I do not notice them. Niki stops to smell things I did not smell or even see. She finds every bit of trash and investigates it. No rabbit, no bird, no squirrel is safe from her piercing gaze and intense focus. Honestly, I'm just a dumb automaton plodding through the dawn air. I'm not entirely unnecessary, however. When a motorcycle passes by, its loud exhaust frightens Niki and she comes running to my side. Then after it passes she wags her tail excitedly at my side for a moment, as though to say "Did you see that?! Crazy!" before returning to her adventure.

There's a lesson here, I know there is. Maybe I should see the zest for life that my dog has and remember my own, rekindle it, and go forth a little lighter...a little more curious. Maybe what I should do is see the energy in my young pup and lament my own lost youth. Maybe I should follow her example and be a bit more aware, a bit more chipper in the morning.

Or maybe I should just breathe in that cool dawn air, watch the sun rise over the back of my dog, and enjoy being alive. In this moment, in this place, I am alive.


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Celebrate.

Human ingenuity, realized:

This is one of the first images taken by NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars the evening of Aug. 5 PDT (morning of Aug. 6 EDT). It was taken through a "fisheye" wide-angle lens on the left "eye" of a stereo pair of Hazard-Avoidance cameras on the left-rear side of the rover. The image is one-half of full resolution. The clear dust cover that protected the camera during landing has been sprung open. Part of the spring that released the dust cover can be seen at the bottom right, near the rover's wheel.

The things I've seen in my lifetime...
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Facebook Monetization Strategy

As of writing this, Facebook's share price is hovering around $20, about half of what it cost at the IPO. The problem many investors are having (explaining the subsequent drop in share price) is that Facebook's ability to generate revenue is questionable, and as their userbase plateaus in some areas...and is found to be fake in others...doubts arise about their value as a company.

This morning I got a text from a mystery number. Clearly the person knew me, and was aware of the goings-on of my Facebook profile because the text referenced something I had posted on a friend's page. But I did not know this person. Either they had a new number, or I'd lost the contact info when I flashed Jelly Bean onto my GNex, or both.

And after I found out which friend it was, I realized something: Facebook contacts never vanish. My sister gets married and changes her name...she still shows up in my friend list. My friend moves to Ohio and has a new address, he still shows up in my friend list. My buddy quits Verizon and moves to AT&T and gets a new cell phone number, he still shows up in my friend list. Despite changes in the data within it, our Facebook Friend List is immutable. And essential too; I was able to 'sync' my friends list with my phone and get cell phone numbers off of that sync.

Why aren't you charging for that, Facebook? Of course I appreciate things that are free. But having a list of all my contacts (that the contacts themselves helpfully update for me) and making that available to me, anywhere, is a pretty handy technology to have. One I'd pay a buck or two a month to keep. If Facebook could further refine it, say, by including a "Work People List" or something of that nature...I'd pay $10/month.

Facebook, are you listening?


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Mars!

By this time Monday, one of the most important events in space exploration will have occurred. Whether you are cognizant of it or not, the Mars Science Laboratory has been trekking through the empty blackness of space since this past November. What is the Mars Science Laboratory? Why, here's a fantastic video about it (just watch the first two minutes):

This is obviously a complicated procedure. Because Mars' atmosphere is thin, simple parachute landing won't work. Because the Curiosity Rover is so heavy, it can't do the balloon landing like the previous two rovers. So this convoluted parachute-retrorocket-drop from a cable plan was devised.

I won't say much more than that about the mission. But with NASA having spent $2.5 billion on this mission, pray with me, Saturday night, that the landing is a success. Successfully proving that heavy cargo can be deposited on Mars would open the door for future human missions there.


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In The Face Of An Old Dog

There's something in the face of an old dog, isn't there? An old wizened expression, as though the 10-20 years of its life were filled with experiences long to tell.

But when we look at an old dog's face, we see the imminence of mortality looking back at us. Our own death, premature or a long ways off yet, stares right back at us through the hazy, cataract-filled eyes of an old dog.

Our evolutionary process and that of dogs became intertwined tens of thousands of years ago. We evolved whites in our eyes to help us non-verbally communicate with them. They evolved barking to help prove invaluable and earn free food from us. So it's no surprise that their lives, though shorter, follow the same path as ours. Born helpless mammals, they age quicker than we'd like, and soon enter a 'rebellious teenager' phase. After a couple years, they mature and live relatively healthy, stable, productive lives until they grow old.

And then eventually death comes for them, just like us. As our domesticated partners, they don't have the luxury that wild animals do of slinking off to a private, hidden place to die. Just like us, they don't get predated before they are tired and arthritic and tumorous. Just like us, the old ones are usually mostly-blind, mostly-deaf, and mostly-sleeping.

This little charmer joined my family 2 months ago. When I brought her home, she was nine pounds, now she weighs nearly 20, and is only half grown. By this time next year, she'll look something like this:

And then, someday, she'll get old. That satisfied, grey, cloudy expression will take over her face, just as it takes over the face of every old dog. And she'll die. And I'll miss her.


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