New Google Scholar search engine

[Rich Grise]

On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 17:02:48 +0000, Guy Macon wrote:

Pig Bladder wrote:

Oh, I'm not worried about killfiles. I've just taken on a
couple of monickers to kind of separate out serious shit,
metaphysical/magickal shit, and really really off-the-wall
shit. It seems people get confused so easily. Rich does
know a bit of electronics, so I didn't want him to get
buried in my own noise. ;-)

That's actually a very innovative and thoughtful way to do it.
It allows the reader who only wants to read what Rich The
Engineer writes to avoid the other posts.

Heh. Thanks for this, Guy, but just because I'm addicted to the
illusion of integrity, I have to report that I'm not a "real" Engineer.
The closest I could really technically get might be "de facto" engineer,
with a lower-case 'e', but things like "engineering technologist,"
"engineering consultant", and so on might sound impressive, but the
"highest" I've ever "officially" got along those lines has been
engineering tech.

Although, realistically, I'd be happy to pit myself against a real
engineer in certain kinds of contests. ;-)

<The Philosophizer wishes to interject:>
There are a couple of levels at which one could look at the Zeno Paradox
presented as the three guys in the room with the babe on the other side.
Mathematician/scientist/engineer? The point is, one of them realizes that
it converges on a limit within finite time, so just walks across the room
and wins.
Whatever the f that has to do with anything.
<The philosophizer thanks you for your time>

Thanks!
Rich

 

[Guy Macon]

Rich Grise wrote:

Heh. Thanks for this, Guy, but just because I'm addicted to the
illusion of integrity, I have to report that I'm not a "real" Engineer.
The closest I could really technically get might be "de facto" engineer,
with a lower-case 'e', but things like "engineering technologist,"
"engineering consultant", and so on might sound impressive, but the
"highest" I've ever "officially" got along those lines has been
engineering tech.

Time to expose this fraud... <grin>

Folks, I had lunch with Rich one fine day. Don't believe what he
say above; he knows more than quite a few who have "engineer" as
their job titles.

As for education, consider Michael Faraday, the discoverer of
electro-magnetic induction, electromagnetic rotations, the
magneto-optical effect, diamagnetism and much else. Faraday
had no formal education at all, yet he was the greatest
scientific lecturer of his day, who did much to publicize
the great advances of nineteenth-century science and technology
through his articles, correspondence and the Friday evening
discourses which he established at the Royal Institution.

Faraday discovered, in 1831, that a change in a magnetic
field can induce a current, he performed a series of experiments
that showed clearly that the induced EMF is equal to the rate
of change of magnetic flux. Also, generalizing from the patterns
formed by iron fillings around magnets, he invented the concepts
of magnetic and electric field lines. Faraday knew little about
mathmatics and found this concrete approach to electricity and
magnetism much more useful than equations giving the forces
between charges or currents. Faraday's concepts of electric and
magnetic fields were the groundwork that led Maxwell to write
his equations.

Faraday invented the first electrical generator, which consisted
of a copper disk rotating between the poles of a magnet. He
discovered the correct laws of electrochemistry after proving
that earlier theories disagreed with experiments. He studied
optical phenomena and found that when light passes through a
medium, a magnetic field will rotate the direction of the
oscillating electric field. Ignoring scorn from his
contemparories, he attempted unsuccesfully in laboratory
experiments to find a link between gravitation and
electromagnetism. Such a link was observed seventy years
later in a test of Einstein's general theory of relativity
when light rays passing near the sun were found to be deflected.
He invented the explosion-safe mining lamp qand proved that a
gas was transformable to the liquid state by liquefying chlorine.

All without a scrap of formal education.