school (not inbox) adventures!
Nov. 23rd, 2004 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kodalaiTwo stories of E4.
Okay. E4 is the vernacular for Engineering Section 04, which is the code for Introduction to Engineering Design. It's a very fun class, mostly focusing on problem-solving and on managing the design process rather than on tenets of engineering -- good thing since I don't know all that much about engineering. >_>;
The class final project is to take small jobs from various clients, arranged by the school, and design engineering solutions. (For engineering majors, they do a similar thing on a larger scale in their senior year, but those tend to be much more serious, with actual money involved.) One of the problems placed this year was by an ear, nose, and throat clinic, who wanted us to design a restraint device for the head to hold it steady while they took larynscopies (for the layman, stick a tube down your throat and take pictures.)
So the the team was presenting their design for the device, and it included this little spring-loaded thing, not unlike a horse's bit, to hold the mouth and chin open while the larynscopy was taking place.
I, being the inappropriate little brat that I am, put my hand up at this point and said, "Have you by any chance seen 'Saw'?"
It was easy to tell, by their reactions, who in the class had.
Story two: Last Wednesday we had a guest speaker. He was a lot of fun; an older guy, maybe in his 60s, more than a little bit swishy. He started out his lecture by asking if everyone in the class was over 18; upon hearing the answer was yes, he went on to describe the "good old days" at Harvey Mudd when the student body threw regular porn parties in Galileo and around easter time held crucifixion parties in East. Anyway.
His talk was on engineering and liability, to complement the talk on engineering and ethics we'd had last week (a good discussion, btw) which is something any engineer will need to know if they go out into the world and take jobs at corporations designing products for people. The big example in his lecture was this device he presented -- cute little thing, really -- which was an escape device from skyscrapers in case of fire. Basically, a pair of harnesses on a slow descending grapple.
He showed it to us, took it apart and let us look, explained how it was designed to work. Very nice. Then he showed us the videotape of the demonstration for this thing at the, I believe it was, Ohio State Fair. This demonstration involved hitching a man and a woman into it, raising them up a couple stories in a crane cage, and attaching the other end of the device to the edge of the cage. At this point I thought, but did not say, "I predict a fall and a splatter."
I was extremely grateful for my restraint thirty seconds later when that was exactly what happened.
This class is always interesting.
Okay. E4 is the vernacular for Engineering Section 04, which is the code for Introduction to Engineering Design. It's a very fun class, mostly focusing on problem-solving and on managing the design process rather than on tenets of engineering -- good thing since I don't know all that much about engineering. >_>;
The class final project is to take small jobs from various clients, arranged by the school, and design engineering solutions. (For engineering majors, they do a similar thing on a larger scale in their senior year, but those tend to be much more serious, with actual money involved.) One of the problems placed this year was by an ear, nose, and throat clinic, who wanted us to design a restraint device for the head to hold it steady while they took larynscopies (for the layman, stick a tube down your throat and take pictures.)
So the the team was presenting their design for the device, and it included this little spring-loaded thing, not unlike a horse's bit, to hold the mouth and chin open while the larynscopy was taking place.
I, being the inappropriate little brat that I am, put my hand up at this point and said, "Have you by any chance seen 'Saw'?"
It was easy to tell, by their reactions, who in the class had.
Story two: Last Wednesday we had a guest speaker. He was a lot of fun; an older guy, maybe in his 60s, more than a little bit swishy. He started out his lecture by asking if everyone in the class was over 18; upon hearing the answer was yes, he went on to describe the "good old days" at Harvey Mudd when the student body threw regular porn parties in Galileo and around easter time held crucifixion parties in East. Anyway.
His talk was on engineering and liability, to complement the talk on engineering and ethics we'd had last week (a good discussion, btw) which is something any engineer will need to know if they go out into the world and take jobs at corporations designing products for people. The big example in his lecture was this device he presented -- cute little thing, really -- which was an escape device from skyscrapers in case of fire. Basically, a pair of harnesses on a slow descending grapple.
He showed it to us, took it apart and let us look, explained how it was designed to work. Very nice. Then he showed us the videotape of the demonstration for this thing at the, I believe it was, Ohio State Fair. This demonstration involved hitching a man and a woman into it, raising them up a couple stories in a crane cage, and attaching the other end of the device to the edge of the cage. At this point I thought, but did not say, "I predict a fall and a splatter."
I was extremely grateful for my restraint thirty seconds later when that was exactly what happened.
This class is always interesting.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-23 06:49 pm (UTC)It was easy to tell, by their reactions, who in the class had.
Died laughing. You=evil.