…are starting to realize their entire industry is worthless.
There are certainly some things of value, but they may be offset by all of the negative value.
…are starting to realize their entire industry is worthless.
There are certainly some things of value, but they may be offset by all of the negative value.
Disregard anything called a ‘science’ if it does not require at least calculus, a full year of chemistry with lab, a full year of classical physics with lab, and a full year of biology with lab.
Disdain anything called -studies.
And if the 5-year job market of recent grads tops out at Barista, then it’s worthless.
So,,, disregard everything? I don’t know of any degree that requires all four.
Ruh-roh!
An Electrical Engineering degree here at the U requires only one semester of Chemistry, no Biology.
Electricity isn’t science, it’s wizardry.
Rubber soled shoes on a good carpet in low humidity whilst holding a knitting needle. Pointy hat is optional….
One of the times I remember my Dad getting really pissed:
Brand spanking new carpet.
Dad gone for a week in the summer.
Mom not paying attention and happy the kids were occupied somehow.
Static Electricity, what fun!
–> Dad comes home and new carpet isn’t new anymore.
Especially that AC stuff Tesla ‘discovered’.
Aliens, man.
I was thinking the same. No college level Biology was required for my degree. It wouldn’t have been a problem if it was, as I passed the AP exam for a year’s worth of it, as I took 3 years of Biology in HS. Then again, I thought my HS Calculus, Chemistry, Physics, and Biology were better than what I got in College. I have test scores that showed my Chemistry decreased after a year of Chemistry 101. During orientation, we could take the final from the previous year, and if we passed with an A, we could get full credit. I missed by 1 question. I didn’t do so well when I took the final after attending the class. I think the difference was having a classroom of 30 students in High School versus an auditorium with 200 students in college.
The huge classes at UT my freshman year were a big part (but not the entirety) of my “troubles” during my early college years. Managed to get kicked out twice, but from what I remember of those years they were a lot of fun.
Eventually I did get my act together, and all of my degrees bear honors. The BA in Int’l Business & Economics fueled my career in banking and finance, a field I’m glad I left and have no desire to return to. My Master of Space Studies fueled some interesting times, but didn’t really pan out. Most likely because my passion is the Moon and the Cislunar Econosphere, and we’re just not there yet. Still, I’m happy to be doing things like helping to organize Moon Day events, so I’m not completely disconnected from the field.
People always tell me I should be a teacher. No way I would go into that field. Since I’ve got a Masters I considered that I could teach some undergrad classes, but the move to Adjunct Professors for everything makes that unappealing. High School? Ha! As if.
So I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, which is opening ridiculously successful stores for the Midwestern SME I work for. It’s a fascinating exercise in microeconomics compared with the analytical work I did at the macroeconomic scale back in my banking days. Retail is, of course a bear, but I got the first store to profitability in about 1 1/4 years and to $1.0Mn in sales in three years. Got my current store to $500K in sales in our first eight months.
One thing of note: I did all of my studies on my own dime, and worked my butt off. When I got my BA (after seven years) my total debt was $500 on a credit card from my semester in Paris. I had $0 debt after my Masters degree. Given the uncertainties in the world and the job markets, I could just never commit to borrowing the money for an easy time at school.
Oh, and FWIW, I do teach math. When kids do transactions I’ll ask them what their change is, and help walk them through how to figure it out, rewarding them with $2 bills and $1 coins in their change, but with a reminder to pay attention in math class, ’cause if they like money, they like math.
As much as I despise Hillary Clinton, she was right in that it takes the effort of the whole village to raise the children. We, all of us, together are responsible for shaping the future citizens of this nation. And yeah, our educational system, amongst many others, needs a good overhaul. Not holding my breath on that though given the current acrimony seemingly overtaking the public discourse.
It is amazing to me the difficulty in making change. That level of math was taught to me in elementary school, but I’ll be honest that the speed of solution came from many more years of practice. I tried to buy a few bags of ice on Christmas morning. It came up $8.97. I gave a $10, and the machine told him to give me back the $1.03. Unfortunately, when I went to get the bags, they were empty, so I needed my money back. The cashier wanted to give me back $8.97, because he didn’t know what to do when I gave him back the $1.03.
As for “it takes a village”; I’m somewhat ok with the notion that a child learns from the myriad of people in their lives. It sounds nice and correct. The problem is with Hillary Clinton. It seems to be a camel sticking her nose in the family tent, with the ultimate goal of getting back to Barack Obama, “you didn’t [raise] that”.
The degree of innumeracy that I see is borderline horrifying. At one point I put together a 6-question retail math quiz for interviewees. Things like “Used toys are 33% off. Customer has an $11.99 item. What is the $ amount of the coupon applied?”
I stopped using it because the results were so disheartening, even a bit soul crushing for a guy enamored with the beauty of celestial mechanics and orbits. I do ascribe this appalling level of innumeracy in part to the rise of scam culture in our society.
The reason I became an astronautical engineer in college, rather than going straight into medical school was an organic chemistry class with 800+ students in it. I simply couldn’t handle it as a freshman (I tested out of general chem).
But, OK. Air Force, UPT, then medical school and 40 years in medicine. One door closes, a little C4 and another opens.
I could call you an over-achiever. But instead it sounds like you got to pursue your dreams…
I think the author is an optimist. Until the universities in this country are removed from all government payrolls, nothing will change.
When I finish redoing the plumbing in my two bathrooms (sinks and showers/tubs) I’m going to tackle the wiring issues. So, if you never hear from me again, I either drowned or fried.
My experience is that plumbing is easy.
Electrical? I call the pros.
At the U, a professor from Nuclear Engineering was non-plussed why my EE colleague, an expert in control theory, had to be excused from a College-level committee meeting because he “had to be home because the electrician was coming there to replace a light dimmer.”
Nuclear Engineering professor asked Electrical Engineering professor, “I thought you guys knew how to do that.”
A related story is when our expert in Information Theory, another highly abstract and mathematical field, related how he replaced the CV joints on his Honda parked in the street in his city neighborhood where houses didn’t have garages. After he left us in order to get jobs for himself and his spouse, another colleague took me aside, “Paul, did you know who he was? He was the grandson of the founder of the MIT Draper labs.” So I guess there is that.
Well there is wiring to code and just wiring.
Wiring three phase delta-to-wye, how to splice to a junction box, wiring a three-way switch (to code folks), proper wiring through studs, no 90 degree bends, knowing about how ohmic heating works (wire gauges), and then the color schemes for traveler wiring, isolated grounding, GFCI outlets or adding a GFCI circuit at the breaker box and a whole lot of other stuff that fills a pretty thick book covering the US NEC. Any one simple violation which could void your fire insurance.
No I’ll handle an outlet or light fixture where I can see what the electrician did and just follow their example.
No I don’t to transfer switches. I have one. My willingness to work on things like that is inversely proportional to the thickness of the copper bars involved.
I don’t work on anything that requires a pump handle and several strokes to engage it.
I learned about hot vs neutral the hard way when I had as a kid a two-tube 100mW AM transmitter that wired neutral straight to its metal chassis (cabinet? what’s that?) with the other lead running through an enormous wire-wound resistor and w/o an isolation transformer. Of course at the time we only had two wire electrical outlets and nothing was phased. About 50% of the time it was a rather unique experience.
The worst was installing an indoor timer on an outdoor light on my sisters new house, where the damn timer/switch filled the whole switch box front to back and moving those damn wires sideways to make room a major PITA. Ended up a wire popped loose in the box and disconnected an outdoor outlet. I got the light to work on the timer (along with a dimmer on another switch) but she eventually called an electrician to fix the outdoor outlet disconnect because it happened after I had to return home from vacation. I may be a EE but I **totally** respect the master electrician.
Speaking of Ohmic Heating. When I did a stint at SiCortex the SC5832 used three phase power that ran through a power distribution box. The initial version used wire connectors that were not quite up to the load in the max configuration. And my boss at the time used an IR thermometer showing the metal housing of the distribution box on our first prototype getting well above 50C. He patched the issue by tightening the crimping screws on the mains leads, but eventually the connection scheme was re-designed and replaced.
Ditto on plumbing. And some electrical is easy, like replacing stuff: 1) Flip the breaker (this works great) 2) Put the wires on the new thing exactly where they were on the old thing.
But drywall repair? Forget it.
C’mon, drywall repair is not hard at all.
The hardest thing is getting the 4X8 sheets (some are longer) home, both having a vehicle big enough to carry it from the home products store and a back strong enough to lift it (it isn’t called sheet rock for nothing).
Once past that, it scribes and breaks–for rectangular pieces, you don’t even need to saw it. It fastens on to your studs with drywall screws for which it helps to have a power screwdriver. Then you use these products called drywall tape and drywall compound to smooth over the seams. As the compound is setting, you can smooth it with a wet cloth of sponge.
And after that, you paint it like you would any other wall covering. What is good about drywall as a wall covering is that it helps you escape your house with your life and loved ones if your house catches fire.
You see, gypsum is hygroscopic, and when exposed to the heat of a fire, it releases water vapor, giving you about 15 minutes to escape the fire.
Then you use these products called drywall tape and drywall compound to smooth over the seams.
Which requires the skill of Rodin, the patience of Job, and the temperance of Gandhi.
On electrical, I recommend the video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jeP1d8PC1I
I probably made some of these mistakes myself and I shall view this again before my next project.
Believe it or not, wire nuts (twist-on solderless connectors) come with instructions on the size of wire nut to use with which wire gauge along with proper procedures to get a good connection. The guy in the video is essentially giving a scolding to “read the directions”, something we research engineers skip because we know everything.
Wire nuts from the home product store actually come with the directions printed on the package for doing it right? Who knew!
You mean it’s not just lefty-loosy & righty-tighty?
Almost always, except for the plastic nut holding on the toilet handle.
And propane. Don’t forget propane.
I used to build and maintain my own bicycles. Knowing where the left-hand threads were hiding was kind of important. Left pedal threading into crank arm, left bottom bracket (English standard), freewheel lockring.
I had a 1962 Chrysler Newport that had left-handed threads on the left-side wheel lug nuts. There was a big L engraved on each nut.
I’m not a babe in the woods on this stuff. In the years BC (before computers) I had many blue-collar jobs, some dangerous, mostly mechanical. I recently had a roof leak, and after repairing the roof damage, had to cut out some drywall to get at the wall damage. Although I’ve done a fair amount of drywall work in new interior construction (I added a pantry and coat closet to this house), I was aggravated by the tape and mud activity. I’m trying an experiment tomorrow, sealing some tightly butted joints with Kwik Seal. I tried it on a corner joint, over fiber tape, and it seemed to work.
Regarding the plumbing, I think I’m going to bench assemble the valve body and fittings, including thread seal, on the bench, and try to swap it whole for the old one. When I did the test fit on my bench, the damned thing looked like a movie or TV prop hyperdrive ship.
Electrics? Weeeell, I guess I need to buy a new and better multimeter…
There are a lot of things that need fixed. I don’t think the supremacist route offers many/any solutions.