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More convinced than ever that engineering 101 should really just be shopping 101 Every class would just be a teardown of some random junked thing, build up a bill-of-materials, spreadsheet of parts and what they do, links and prices. Then you’d shrink or cost-down the design.
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While in undergrad I interviewed at a power electronics company. One portion of the interview was a sheet of paper with chip company logos and no names. “What are these companies called?” — I aced it, then asked why?: “to see if you’ve ever read a datasheet / done practical eng.”
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I know at least one person who finished a mechanical engineering masters degree about a year early by being willing to call McMaster and leverage their applications engineers for design advice, and buy instead of build. She’s a genius.
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The apogee of this thinking seems likely in toy design or appliances: the heighth of commodity production. But this is also a very production-oriented view of the world. Is it wrong that engineering school focuses on training the innate knowledge (calculating..) vs the external?
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That is: being able to assemble the world’s building blocks, even in an optimal fashion, isn’t really engineering compared to calculation, measurement, design. (And I do recognize at the same time that practical engineering is often accelerated by having great facility at it)
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I wouldn't call it an apogee because that implies a cyclic return to a more first-princples pedagogy. I think this is a secular shift because so much has been commoditized and more importantly, built into software. Nobody will invert more than 2x2 matrix by hand anymore.
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There is a growing complexity problem. The sorts of examples you work out in the calculation-oriented textbooks (as in physics laws, not datasheet calculations) are basically orders of magnitude simpler than even trivial practical designs.
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ie... we used to distinguish among math, applied math, and engineering. Now we need to do 4 levels of abstraction: math, applied math, paper engineering, physical engineering. The third category has been reduced to the level of thought experiments at this point.
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They are, but without those mechanistic basics, it is very hard to predict the behavior of all of those lovely components you're plugging together, and then you are in a position where you can only perform exactly those tasks the vendor envisioned you using the components for.
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