Engineering

Leave a comment Posted on April 28, 2015April 25, 2016 General

An Up-and-Down Career: Roller Coaster Engineer

The Original Structural Analysis in the Cloud?

Last week I was chatting to my daughter about my blog.

“Your articles are OK,” she said. “But why don’t you write something that would appeal to someone my age, a 20-something?”

“Like what?” I asked. “What aspect of structural engineering might interest a 20-something?”

“How about Roller Coaster Tycoon?” she suggested. Continue reading →

Leave a comment Posted on October 28, 2014June 18, 2017 Holiday

Happy Halloween: Nature’s Greatest Structural Engineer

Is it Real, or is it CloudCalc? Only the Spider Knows for Sure

Well it’s Halloween (and how appropriate — this is my 13th blog post!), so I’ve been trying to think of a seasonally appropriate structural engineering topic for this week’s CloudCalc blog. In order to get inspiration, I walked down my street looking at the decorations on the neighborhood houses. A Jack o’ Lantern? No, that’s not a good representative, since after a few days they typically become so mushy that they can’t even support themselves. There’s a ghost – or actually a sheet of white plastic hanging from a tree. The best engineering analogy that brought to mind was Tyvek wrap covering a half-built structure. Over there, a couple of witches…probably not, a blog on aerospace engineering might be a better place to discuss women who manage to get broomsticks to fly.
Continue reading →

Leave a comment Posted on October 21, 2014June 27, 2017 General

Engineering, on the Way to San Jose

Dominic Kinnear, fellow traveler on the road west

“Will you live in the Bay Area January through March 2015, if we fund you?” – Last Tuesday night I came to the moment of truth on the application that I was filling out, in my attempt to get CloudCalc selected as a member of the Winter 2015 class of YCombinator, the world’s preeminent technology accelerator — the birth place of such luminaries as Dropbox, Reddit, and Airbnb. Now they were asking the clincher – if selected, did I promise to relocate for 3 months from Houston to Silicon Valley? Continue reading →

4 Comments Posted on September 26, 2014June 27, 2017 General

Engineering or Art: Why not Both?

Dubai Skyline – Engineering or Art?

“Filling a space in a beautiful way. That’s what art means to me.” – Georgia O’Keeffe

This past weekend my wife and I were in Providence, visiting our daughter for the purpose of meeting her new boyfriend. Walking through our hotel I noticed an interesting diptych among the artwork decorating the hallway – two pieces celebrating the nearby Exchange Bridge. One piece, an engineering drawing used in the construction, had many characteristics – clean lines, geometric patterns, symmetry, and interesting ornamentation – usually associated with many purely artistic works. The other piece was a photo capturing the beauty of the resulting tangle of structural steel that was the bridge itself. The photographer, coming upon this utilitarian object, recognized that it had “filled a space in a beautiful way” – and thus was art, to Georgia O’Keeffe, to the photographer, as well as to many others who walk the streets of the city (or the halls of that hotel) every day. Continue reading →

3 Comments Posted on September 12, 2014June 27, 2017 General

One Engineer Remembers the World Trade Center

Yesterday marked the 13^th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center, an attack that destroyed both towers, killed nearly 3,000 innocent people, decimated New York City’s first responders, and in many ways changed the world forever. The date September 11 will always conjure up, for those who lived through it, horrible memories — of the sights, the fears, the concerns for loved ones, and above all the concern and sorrow felt for those nearly 3,000 who we did not even know.

This blog article is an inadequate place to try to honor the memory of those who lost their lives on that day, so I will not even try. Rather I would like to celebrate the too brief existence of two buildings – two buildings which hold a significant place in my life.

Continue reading →

2 Comments Posted on September 5, 2014June 27, 2017 General

First and √100 – an Engineer’s Guide to Football

As if the real JJ wasn’t big and scary enough

This weekend the pro football season starts across America. Sunday will find me at NRG Stadium alongside 72,000 Houston Texans fans, joining 1,000,000 others in 15 NFL stadiums across America, as well as 100 million viewers parked in front of televisions watching their favorite teams. Today, hope is alive for every NFL fan – every team is still undefeated (late edit: except the Packers), and every fan dreams of the feats that their favorite players will use to win the Lombardi Trophy at Super Bowl XLIX in February. I know the Texans fans are salivating over their expectations of all the times that JJ Watt and JD Clowney will combine to drive the opposing quarterback into the turf. I hear the callers to sports talk radio swearing that Ryan Fitzpatrick (recently named by Sports Illustrated as the 5^th smartest athlete in sports — so he could have been an engineer, too) will erase the memory of Matt Schaub’s pick-sixes by connecting on touchdowns to Andre Johnson. And the entire Houston community believes that new coach Bill O’Brien (another guy smart enough to have been an engineer) will finally turn the team’s long simmering potential into real wins.

But engineers are logical thinkers. We know that only one of 32 teams can win the Super Bowl, and thus “our” team (anyone’s team) has a 97% chance of being a loser. So why get our hopes up with the action on the field when we know that there is virtually no chance of success? So what’s an engineer to do for entertainment while attending a football game? Well how about checking out that engineering wonder that we’re sitting in, the modern football stadium?