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Hydrogen Properties for Energy Research (HYPER) Laboratory Cool. Fuel.

Forget space elevators, we need a space pipeline!

A few years ago I attended a seminar on using extremely long carbon nanotubes for a space elevator. And so I started thinking…

Here’s the wiki for the space elevator concept. Here’s a graphic:

To be clear, space elevators may be harder than controlled thermonuclear fusion to achieve (that’s at least 50 years out). Although carbon nanotubes may have the strength to make it possible, the very best we can do could be ~1m in length. Compare that to the image above and you see how far we have to go. Not to mention running an … » More …

Lessons learned from the first five years: What to teach

A letter came in the mail the other day that I’ll be granted tenure in August… and so it goes.

Looking back on the last and first five years at WSU there are a lot of lessons learned.

One of the most important being what to teach. Dr. Chuck’s adage is best, “Always remember what you’re teaching your students, because all they remember is confidence.” That’s confidence in both you and themselves. Even that simple word, confidence, is complicated.

I was lucky that my first class was undergrad thermodynamics — a foundational class with a well established process, one that I was well prepared to deliver. … » More …

Lessons learned from the first five years: How to spend your startup

A letter came in the mail the other day that I’ll be granted tenure in August… and so it goes.

Looking back on the last and first five years at WSU there are a lot of lessons learned.

One of the most important being how to spend your startup. This is one of those things that everyone has an opinion about, so listen politely, do what you think is best. What I’m about to tell you is something that I was not told, nor have heard, which is why I’m telling you.

The first and most important thing to do when you get to WSU … » More …

1. Focus, 2. Flow, 3. Flourish.

Are the three things every researcher needs to achieve.

We’re always told to focus, as a verb, to pay particular attention to something. The steady march of improving technology always ensures a greater ability to focus in finer detail. Drill down to derive a more discerning definition. The epitome of our legalistic research milieu.

Your reward for being good at focusing is being doomed to just that. You’ll get more projects requiring more of your focus in more areas with more people. This fractioning of your time into smaller and smaller fractals of focus can’t be good. After enough fractioning, pretty soon your not focusing at all, … » More …

Using design theory to explain the future of personal fitness routines

It’s well known and accepted that physical fitness is key to big beautiful brains over the course of our lives. I have spent a considerable portion of my life experiencing physical fitness routines over a contrasting array of styles, mostly stemming from my athletics background. As I’ve aged, and watch countless patrons of our Student Recreation Center make similar mistakes to those of my youth, began to realize that design theory can help us to inform of trends on the future of personal fitness. Perhaps more importantly, design theory can help us to contextualize personal fitness routines by a non-traditional value taxonomy that can help us … » More …

The Grand Challenges of Restructuring Engineering Departments

I recently posted about a new concept for the NSF Restructuring Engineering Departments (RED) program that extended CSU’s approach and mapped the core threads to spiral memes (SD). One of the results of this was the ability to work with the WSU Grand Challenge research themes. In this post I’ll specify what this mapping could look like in a hypothetical WSU Mechanical Engineering Curriculum. Note that this is not intended to serve as an actual ME curriculum and is simply intended to stimulate conversation.

Ideally the transformation works with our existing curriculum to the greatest extent possible. The current ME course listing is here. … » More …

A concept for Revolutionizing Engineering Departments

Thank you to the National Science Foundation for initiating the Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program! These $1.5-2 million grants are intended to fundamentally restructure engineering education to increase participation and retention by under-represented groups. This restructuring approach is likely required. Despite substantial programs and efforts to increase participation from these groups, improvements have been modest, at best, and in some cases remain stagnant.

I was recently inspired during a presentation by Tony Maciejewski, Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering departments at Colorado State University (CSU), who received one of the early awards. CSU is restructuring around three core ‘threads’ that transcend the … » More …

Telling vs. Showing by Theory

“Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I’ll understand.” ~Lao Tze

A traditional engineering homework assignment wants you to tell us the answer. Need proof? Look at a calculator and see how hard it is to plot a function or curve. Calculators are typewriters and should have vanished long ago. Asking someone to tell us an answer is much easier than plotting a trend or curve. Plotting requires spatial awareness of the physical interplay of operators within your mathematical function. Explaining plots shows us that we understand why trends appear.

Showing by theory is essential in complex systems … » More …

Conformance vs. Compliance

 

The difference is subtle:

Conformity

 

and one is used to define the other —

Compliance

 

— but from a design standpoint the difference is essential. Where conformance must follow an algorithm, compliance can follow a desire, wish, or even yes, a rule or process. Dr. Chuck has a great piece on how companies tend to follow a design progression from mystery –> heuristic –> algorithm. We emphasize heuristic’s over algorithms in ME 316 because we tend to engineer things that are … » More …

Recorder vs. Reporter

A ritual hazing practice in many organizations (including department meetings) is to ask the newest person in the room to “take the minutes”, “secretary” is too loaded of a term now, so we call them a recorder:

Recorder

 

12 years ago I thought I was novel for typing meeting minutes in an e-mail window in real time and sending to the team at the close of the meeting. After awhile though I realized that nobody went back and read the minutes. Thank goodness they didn’t! My recording was sloppy relative to the free audio recorder apps on most cellphones nowadays.

… » More …