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Nanotechnology will enable the design of nanobots: robots designed at the molecular level, measured in microns (millionths of a meter), such as “respirocytes” (mechanical red-blood cells).33 Nanobots will have myriad roles within the human body, including reversing human aging (to the extent that this task will not already have been completed through biotechnology, such as genetic engineering).
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Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology)
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An architect is a generalist, not a specialist-the conductor of a symphony, not a virtuoso who plays every instrument perfectly. As a practitioner, an architect coordinates a team of professionals that include structural and mechanical engineers, interior designers, building-code consultants, landscape architects, specifications writers, contractors, and specialists from other disciplines. Typically, the interests of some team members will compete with the interests of others. An architect must know enough about each discipline to negotiate and synthesize competing demands while honoring the needs of the client and the integrity of the entire project.
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Matthew Frederick (101 Things I Learned in Architecture School (The MIT Press))
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Writers have come to master nearly every trade. They are inventors and entrepreneurs of character, plot, and dialogue. They are the eager scientists that can’t wait to try out their new experiment. They are the maestros of the symphony that plays in their head, conducting what happens, where, and at what precise moment. They are engineers and architects that design the structure of their piece so it stands the test of time and continues to fire on all cylinders. They play mechanics and doctors in their revisions, hoping they prescribe the correct diagnosis to fix the piece’s 'boo boos'. They are salesmen who pitch not an idea or a product, but themselves, to editors, publishers, and more importantly, their readers. They are teachers who through their craft, preach to pupils about what works and what doesn’t work and why. Writers can make you feel, can make you think, can make you wonder, but they can also grab your hand and guide you through their maze. Similar to what Emerson stated in 'The Poet,' writers possess a unique view on life, and with their revolving eye, they attempt to encompass all. I am a writer.
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Garrett Dennert
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There is no “grand designer” who orchestrates infections, plagues, or pandemics or engineered our defenses to them. All these mechanisms that we attribute to a battle between good and evil are in actuality biological traits that we have inherited from preexisting populations. Therefore the interactions we are witnessing (infection, inflammation, phagocytosis) are based on previously established conditions of coexistence, and we should not expect to find any sort of unique perfection in our immune system. After all, these systems are not at some end point of evolution; they are still evolving. Rather we should expect to find ancient cellular systems from distant ancestors that have come together to work synergistically.
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Greg Graffin (Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence)
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In order to understand how engineers endeavor to insure against such structural, mechanical, and systems failures, and thereby also to understand how mistakes can be made and accidents with far-reaching consequences can occur, it is necessary to understand, at least partly, the nature of engineering design. It is the process of design, in which diverse parts of the 'given-world' of the scientist and the 'made-world' of the engineer are reformed and assembled into something the likes of which Nature had not dreamed, that divorces engineering from science and marries it to art. While the practice of engineering may involve as much technical experience as the poet brings to the blank page, the painter to the empty canvas, or the composer to the silent keyboard, the understanding and appreciation of the process and products of engineering are no less accessible than a poem, a painting, or a piece of music. Indeed, just as we all have experienced the rudiments of artistic creativity in the childhood masterpieces our parents were so proud of, so we have all experienced the essence of structual engineering in our learning to balance first our bodies and later our blocks in ever more ambitious positions. We have learned to endure the most boring of cocktail parties without the social accident of either our bodies or our glasses succumbing to the force of gravity, having long ago learned to crawl, sit up, and toddle among our tottering towers of blocks. If we could remember those early efforts of ours to raise ourselves up among the towers of legs of our parents and their friends, then we can begin to appreciate the task and the achievements of engineers, whether they be called builders in Babylon or scientists in Los Alamos. For all of their efforts are to one end: to make something stand that has not stood before, to reassemble Nature into something new, and above all to obviate failure in the effort.
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Henry Petroski
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So this summer, this first summer when he was allowed to have “visitation rights” with his father, with the divorce only one month old, Brian was heading north. His father was a mechanical engineer who had designed or invented a new drill bit for oil drilling, a self-cleaning, self-sharpening bit. He was working in the oil fields of Canada, up on the tree line where the tundra started and the forests ended. Brian was riding up from New York with some drilling equipment—it was lashed down in the rear of the plane next to a fabric bag the pilot had called a survival pack, which had emergency supplies in case they had to make an emergency landing—that had to be specially made in the city, riding in the bushplane with the pilot named Jim or Jake or something who had turned out to be an all right guy, letting him fly and all.
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Gary Paulsen (Hatchet (Hatchet, #1))
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It would be difficult to find a man still on the early side of his thirties who had acquired wealth and power at the speed that Tom Severin had. He'd started as a mechanical engineer designing engines, then progressed to railway bridges, and had eventually built his own railway line, all with the apparent ease of a boy playing leapfrog. Severin could be generous and considerate, but his better qualities were unanchored by anything resembling a conscience.
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Lisa Kleypas (Devil's Daughter (The Ravenels, #5))
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Project managers don’t write code, they don’t test the use cases, and they’re not designing the interface. You know what a good project manager does? They are chaos-destroying machines, and each new person you bring onto your team, each dependency you create, adds hard-to-measure entropy to your team. A good project manager thrives on measuring, controlling, and crushing entropy. You did this easily when you were a team of five, but if you’re going to succeed at 105, what was done organically now needs to be done mechanically.
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Michael Lopp (Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager)
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PayPal to a confident CEO who commands the respect of thousands. “I think there are ways he has dramatically improved over time,” said Thiel. Most impressive to Thiel has been Musk’s ability to find bright, ambitious people and lure them to his companies. “He has the most talented people in the aerospace industry working for him, and the same case can be made for Tesla, where, if you’re a talented mechanical engineer who likes building cars, then you’re going to Tesla because it’s probably the only company in the U.S. where you can do interesting new things. Both companies were designed with this vision of motivating a critical mass of talented people to work on inspiring things.
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
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Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?
First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his first mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.
Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”
Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.
Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something; sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.
Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.
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Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
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Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers. My wife, Meia, likes to point out that the aviation industry didn’t start with mechanical birds. Indeed, when we finally figured out how to build mechanical birds in 2011,1 more than a century after the Wright brothers’ first flight, the aviation industry showed no interest in switching to wing-flapping mechanical-bird travel, even though it’s more energy efficient—because our simpler earlier solution is better suited to our travel needs. In the same way, I suspect that there are simpler ways to build human-level thinking machines than the solution evolution came up with, and even if we one day manage to replicate or upload brains, we’ll end up discovering one of those simpler solutions first. It will probably draw more than the twelve watts of power that your brain uses, but its engineers won’t be as obsessed about energy efficiency as evolution was—and soon enough, they’ll be able to use their intelligent machines to design more energy-efficient ones.
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Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
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The creation groans from all the pain and sorrow that surrounds us. We have a strong sense that life is not the way it’s supposed to be.[4] We cry out at injustices, rail against inequalities, long for things to get fixed. The long march for racial, gender, and economic equality is an ongoing struggle. Progress is rare. When it comes to electronics, the advances seem to arrive on a regular basis. Every holiday season, we’re greeted by upgrades, by a new network from 3G to 4G to 5G. Products make progress seem easy and inevitable. The hard work of design and engineering is hidden. Yet, even the latest, greatest technology breaks down. Unfortunately, we don’t know how to fix our gadgets. The mechanics that drive our devices often defy our comprehension. We toss out our old computers and cell phones, and we embrace the new and improved. Replacing isn’t the same as redeeming.
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Craig Detweiler (iGods: How Technology Shapes Our Spiritual and Social Lives)
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Bad design with good materials may give you the designed fatigue life, but a good design with bad materials will never give you the designed fatigue life.
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Kartik Srinivas (Dynamic Properties of Polymer Materials and their Measurements)
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Except for practices that incorporate design as the way they practice—for example, architecture and engineering—the art of design is not incorporated into students’ experiences in schools, despite its superiority in many situations, even to such analytical problem solving as scientists employ. The power of design as an instrument of learning is almost completely overlooked by the educational system. For example, the best way to learn how an automobile (or any other mechanism) works and to gain understanding of why it works the way it does is to design one. Moreover, it is in design that people learn what they want.
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Russell L. Ackoff (Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track)
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it provokes him to think that his profession will become the exclusive province of programmers, mechanics, engineers, and the autonomous systems they design.
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Linda Nagata (The Last Good Man)
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In order to draw mechanical vibrations and relieve the stresses that build up within the Earth, we would need an object that would respond sympathetically with the Earth's fundamental frequency. This object would need to be designed in such a way that its own resonant frequency was the same as, or a harmonic of, the Earth's. In this manner, energy transfer from the source would be at maximum load. In harmony with the Earth's vibrations, this object would have the potential to become a coupled oscillator. (A coupled oscillator is an object that is in harmonic resonance with another, usually larger, vibrating object. When set into motion, the coupled oscillator will draw energy from the source and vibrate in sympathy as long as the source continues to vibrate.)
Because the Earth constantly generates a broad spectrum of vibration, we could utilize vibration as a source of energy if we developed suitable technology. Naturally, any device that attracted greater amounts of this energy than is normally being radiated from the Earth would greatly improve the efficiency of the equipment. Because energy will inherently follow the path of least resistance, it follows that any device offering less resistance to this energy than the surrounding medium through which it passes would have a greater amount of energy channeled through it. Keeping all of this in mind and knowing that the Great Pyramid is a mathematical integer of the Earth, it may not be so outlandish to propose that the pyramid is capable of vibrating at a harmonic frequency of the Earth's fundamental frequency.
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Christopher Dunn (The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt)
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The Moffat Tunnel is a cathedral to engineering. Its simplicity occludes its sophistication, with the creation of nothing from something—the deliberate absence of rock amid incalculable weight. The finalized engineering marvel has a ventilation system that performs a complete air exchange within the tunnel in 18 minutes. The seemingly endless stone archway has intricately designed and perfectly positioned “umbrellas” to disperse alpine lake seepage to either side of the tracks. During construction, on February 15, 1925, tunneling progress stalled 1,100 feet directly under Crater Lake as 1,800 gallons per minute of water began flowing into the tunnel. At the suggestion of electrician K.S. Weston, crews ventured to the lake, cut through three feet of ice, and poured in 10 pounds of chloride of lime. Shortly thereafter, the presence of lime was detected inside of the tunnel. In an attempt to close the seam, a stick of dynamite was tossed into the lake, and the flow rate dropped drastically to 150 gallons per minute and then slowed to a trickle. Multiple times per day, the visceral vibration of mechanical thunder reverberates through the bowels of the earth.
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B. Travis Wright (Rollins Pass (Images of America))
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Dan Corrieri trained in engineering graphics, statistical process control, accounting manufacturing methods, finance, management, engineering economy, marketing, design processes in technology and engineering mechanics. Daniel Corrieri was a veteran of the United States Marine Corps Reserves with an honorable discharge. In addition, Daniel Corrieri has gained plenty of volunteer experience with Toys for Tots through the Marine Corps, community service for the American Cancer Society, church service and other excellent opportunities.
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Dan Corrieri
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I see Elon Musk as a combination of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs, of our time. In his entrepreneurial pursuits, he has played the role of a programmer, industrial designer, product architect, mechanical engineer and physicist.
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Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
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How do companies, producing little more than bits of code displayed on a screen, seemingly control users’ minds?” Nir Eyal, a prominent Valley product consultant, asked in his 2014 book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. “Our actions have been engineered,” he explained. Services like Twitter and YouTube “habitually alter our everyday behavior, just as their designers intended.” One of Eyal’s favorite models is the slot machine. It is designed to answer your every action with visual, auditory, and tactile feedback. A ping when you insert a coin. A ka-chunk when you pull the lever. A flash of colored light when you release it. This is known as Pavlovian conditioning, named after the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who rang a bell each time he fed his dog, until, eventually, the bell alone sent his dog’s stomach churning and saliva glands pulsing, as if it could no longer differentiate the chiming of a bell from the physical sensation of eating. Slot machines work the same way, training your mind to conflate the thrill of winning with its mechanical clangs and buzzes. The act of pulling the lever, once meaningless, becomes pleasurable in itself. The reason is a neurological chemical called dopamine, the same one Parker had referenced at the media conference. Your brain releases small amounts of it when you fulfill some basic need, whether biological (hunger, sex) or social (affection, validation). Dopamine creates a positive association with whatever behaviors prompted its release, training you to repeat them. But when that dopamine reward system gets hijacked, it can compel you to repeat self-destructive behaviors. To place one more bet, binge on alcohol—or spend hours on apps even when they make you unhappy. Dopamine is social media’s accomplice inside your brain. It’s why your smartphone looks and feels like a slot machine, pulsing with colorful notification badges, whoosh sounds, and gentle vibrations. Those stimuli are neurologically meaningless on their own. But your phone pairs them with activities, like texting a friend or looking at photos, that are naturally rewarding. Social apps hijack a compulsion—a need to connect—that can be even more powerful than hunger or greed. Eyal describes a hypothetical woman, Barbra, who logs on to Facebook to see a photo uploaded by a family member. As she clicks through more photos or comments in response, her brain conflates feeling connected to people she loves with the bleeps and flashes of Facebook’s interface. “Over time,” Eyal writes, “Barbra begins to associate Facebook with her need for social connection.” She learns to serve that need with a behavior—using Facebook—that in fact will rarely fulfill it.
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Max Fisher (The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World)
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His favorite request dates back to 2004. SpaceX needed an actuator that would trigger the gimbal action used to steer the upper stage of Falcon 1. Davis had never built a piece of hardware before in his life and naturally went out to find some suppliers who could make an electro-mechanical actuator for him. He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, ‘That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’” Davis spent nine months building the actuator. At the end of the process, he toiled for three hours writing an e-mail to Musk covering the pros and cons of the device. The e-mail went into gory detail about how Davis had designed the part, why he had made various choices, and what its cost would be. As he pressed send, Davis felt anxiety surge through his body knowing that he’d given his all for almost a year to do something an engineer at another aerospace company would not even attempt. Musk rewarded all of this toil and angst with one of his standard responses. He wrote back, “Ok.” The actuator Davis designed ended up costing $3,900 and flew with Falcon 1 into space. “I put every ounce of intellectual capital I had into that e-mail and one minute later got that simple response,” Davis said. “Everyone in the company was having that same experience. One of my favorite things about Elon is his ability to make enormous decisions very quickly. That is still how it works today.” Kevin
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
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Initially working out of our home in Northern California, with a garage-based lab, I wrote a one page letter introducing myself and what we had and posted it to the CEOs of twenty-two Fortune 500 companies. Within a couple of weeks, we had received seventeen responses, with invitations to meetings and referrals to heads of engineering departments. I met with those CEOs or their deputies and received an enthusiastic response from almost every individual. There was also strong interest from engineers given the task of interfacing with us. However, support from their senior engineering and product development managers was less forthcoming. We learned that many of the big companies we had approached were no longer manufacturers themselves but assemblers of components or were value-added reseller companies, who put their famous names on systems that other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) had built. That didn't daunt us, though when helpful VPs of engineering at top-of-the-food-chain companies referred us to their suppliers, we found that many had little or no R & D capacity, were unwilling to take a risk on outside ideas, or had no room in their already stripped-down budgets for innovation. Our designs found nowhere to land. It became clear that we needed to build actual products and create an apples-to-apples comparison before we could interest potential manufacturing customers.
Where to start? We created a matrix of the product areas that we believed PAX could impact and identified more than five hundred distinct market sectors-with potentially hundreds of thousands of products that we could improve. We had to focus. After analysis that included the size of the addressable market, ease of access, the cost and time it would take to develop working prototypes, the certifications and metrics of the various industries, the need for energy efficiency in the sector, and so on, we prioritized the list to fans, mixers, pumps, and propellers. We began hand-making prototypes as comparisons to existing, leading products.
By this time, we were raising working capital from angel investors. It's important to note that this was during the first half of the last decade. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, and ensuing military actions had the world's attention. Clean tech and green tech were just emerging as terms, and energy efficiency was still more of a slogan than a driver for industry. The dot-com boom had busted. We'd researched venture capital firms in the late 1990s and found only seven in the United States investing in mechanical engineering inventions. These tended to be expansion-stage investors that didn't match our phase of development. Still, we were close to the famous Silicon Valley and had a few comical conversations with venture capitalists who said they'd be interested in investing-if we could turn our technology into a website.
Instead, every six months or so, we drew up a budget for the following six months. Via a growing network of forward-thinking private investors who could see the looming need for dramatic changes in energy efficiency and the performance results of our prototypes compared to currently marketed products, we funded the next phase of research and business development.
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Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
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Within just a few thousand years-a millisecond in evolutionary time-humans had developed much more complex tools, and the intellectual theories to support them. Newtonian physics, the industrial revolution, and the nineteenth century age of enlightenment spurred tremendous technological development and transformed our social mores. A consequence of this paradigm shift, however, was that humanity's view of the world changed from an organic to a mechanistic one. Early engineers saw the potential of breaking up any system into components and rearranging the parts. Innovations in machinery and materials led to mass production: making thousands and then millions of exactly the same forms out of flat metal plates and square building blocks. However, for all its positive impact on the economics and culture of the era, the industrial revolution's orientation was shortsighted. In the rush to understand the world as a clockwork mechanism of discrete components, nature's design genius was left behind-and with it the blueprints for natural, nontoxic, streamlined efficiency. A new set of values emerged, such that anything drawn from nature was dismissed as primitive in favor of human invention. Just as the pharmacology of the rain forests, known to indigenous people for millenia, has been largely lost to modern science, so too were the simple rules of natural design obfuscated. A our societies became more urban, we went from living and working in nature and being intimately connected with its systems, to viewing nature as a mere warehouse (some might say, whorehouse) of raw materials waiting to be plundered for industrial development.
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Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
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Over the next couple of years, we built and tested a series of prototypes, started dialogues with leading manufacturers, and added business development and technical staff to our team, including mechanical and aerospace engineers. Our plan was that PAX scientific would be an intellectual-property-creating R & D company. When we identified appropriate market sectors, we would license our patents to outside entrepreneurs or to our own, purpose-built, subsidiaries. Given my previous experience on the receiving end of hostile takeovers, we were determined to maintain control of PAX Scientific and its subsidiaries in their development stages. Creating subsidiaries that were market specific would help, since new investors could buy stock in a more narrowly focused business, without direct dilution of the parent company.
We were introduced to fellow Bay Area resident Paul Hawken. A successful entrepreneur, author, and articulate advocate for sustainability and natural capitalism, Paul understood our vision of a parent company that concentrated on research and intellectual property, while separate teams focused on product commercialization. With his own angel investment backing, Paul established a series of companies to market computer, industrial, and automotive fans. PAX assigned worldwide licenses to these companies in exchange for up-front fees and a share of revenue; Paul hired managers and set off to sell fan designs to manufacturers.
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Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
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These comments recall Turkle's distinction between two kinds of "transparency" in technological cultures. Modernist transparency is the notion that users can and should have access to the inner workings of a technology. It evokes the aesthetic of early relationships with cars in which one could "open the hood and see inside." Turkle contrasts this with an opposing, post-modern meaning of the term - the notion that something is transparent if you can use it without knowing how it works. Post-modern transparency allows the user to navigate the surface of a system without ever having to access its underlying mechanics. Are young engineers more susceptible to post-modern ways of seeing simulation?
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Yanni Alexander Loukissas (Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture)
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GrabCAD is an online community of more than one million mechanical engineers. Hardi Meybaum, a young entrepreneur from Estonia, founded the venture-funded company to serve as a place where mechanical engineers much like him could share their computer-aided design (CAD) 3-D models.
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David Meerman Scott (The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business)
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Doom, meanwhile, had a long-term impact on the world of gaming far exceeding even that of Myst. The latest of a series of experiments with interactive 3D graphics by id programmer John Carmack, Doom shares with Myst only its immersive first-person point of view; in all other respects, this fast-paced, ultraviolent shooter is the polar opposite of the cerebral Myst. Whereas the world of Myst is presented as a collection of static nodes that the player can move among, each represented by a relatively static picture of its own, the world of Doom is contiguous. As the player roams about, Doom must continually recalculate in real time the view of the world that it presents to her on the screen, in effect drawing for her a completely new picture with every frame using a vastly simplified version of the 3D-rendering techniques that Eric Graham began experimenting with on the Amiga back in 1986. First-person viewpoints had certainly existed in games previously, but mostly in the context of flight simulators, of puzzle-oriented adventures such as Myst, or of space-combat games such as Elite. Doom has a special quality that those earlier efforts lack in that the player embodies her avatar as she moves through 3D space in a way that feels shockingly, almost physically real. She does not view the world through a windscreen, is not separated from it by an adventure game’s point-and-click mechanics and static artificiality. Doom marks a revolutionary change in action gaming, the most significant to come about between the videogame’s inception and the present. If the player directs the action in a game such as Menace, Doom makes her feel as if she is in the action, in the game’s world. Given the Amiga platform’s importance as a tool for noninteractive 3D rendering, it is ironic that the Amiga is uniquely unsuited to Doom and the many iterations and clones of it that would follow. Most of the Amiga attributes that we employed in the Menace reconstruction—its scrolling playfields, its copper, its sprites—are of no use to a 3D-engine programmer. Indeed, the Intel-based machines on which Carmack created Doom possess none of these features. Even the Amiga’s bitplane-based playfields, the source of so many useful graphical tricks and hacks when programming a 2D game such as Menace, are an impediment and annoyance in a game such as Doom. Much preferable are the Intel-based machines’ straightforward chunky playfields because these layouts are much easier to work with when every frame of video must be drawn afresh from scratch. What is required most of all for a game such as Doom is sufficient raw processing power to perform the necessary thousands of calculations needed to render each frame quickly enough to support the frenetic action for which the game is known. By 1993, the plebian Intel-based computer, so long derided by Amiga owners for its inefficiencies and lack of design imagination, at last possessed this raw power. The Amiga simply had no answer to the Intel 80486s and Pentiums that powered this new, revolutionary genre of first-person shooters. Throughout
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Jimmy Maher (The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (Platform Studies))
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This polymath thinker is what IDEO’s Tim Brown has called a “T-Shaped Person.” T-shaped people have innate technical skills, along with empathy, curiosity, and great observational skills. “They have a principle skill that describes the vertical leg of the ‘T’—they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well.
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Andrew Jones (The Fifth Age of Work: How Companies Can Redesign Work to Become More Innovative in a Cloud Economy)
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If you go back to a century ago, the major problems of electrical and mechanical engineering had to do with how to place a huge gun on a moving platform, namely a ship, designing it to be able to hit a moving object, another ship, so naval gunnery. That was the most advanced problem in metallurgy, electrical and mechanical engineering, and so on. England and Germany put huge efforts into it, the United States less so. Out of associated innovations comes the automotive industry.
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Noam Chomsky
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Controls are the mechanisms that you use to align with other leaders you work with, and they can range from defining metrics to sprint planning (although I wouldn’t recommend the latter). There is no universal set of controls—depending on the size of team and your relationships with its leaders, you’ll want to mix and match—but the controls structure itself is universally applicable. Some of the most common controls that I’ve seen and used: Metrics26 align on outcomes while leaving flexibility around how the outcomes are achieved. Visions27 ensure that you agree on long-term direction while preserving short-term flexibility. Strategies28 confirm you have a shared understanding of the current constraints and how to address them. Organization design allows you to coordinate the evolution of a wider organization within the context of sub-organizations. Head count and transfers are the ultimate form of prioritization, and a good forum for validating how organizational priorities align across individual teams. Roadmaps align on problem selection and solution validation. Performance reviews coordinate culture and recognition. Etc. There are an infinite number of other possibilities, many of which are specific to your company’s particular meetings and forums. Start with this list, but don’t stick to it!
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Will Larson (An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management)
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However, they do not seem to grasp that what they mean by design—perfectly engineered mechanisms—would be at home only in a frozen rather than dramatically fluid world. Along with Christian antievolutionists, Darwinian materialists are so preoccupied with design that they fail to feel the drama going on beneath their feet.
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John F. Haught (Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life)
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There’s no on-board starter on the car. If you spin and don’t manage to keep the engine running, you have two problems: first, the engine’s stopped, so you’ll need mechanics armed with a pit starter motor to get back in business; second, it’s stuck in whatever gear you were in at the time, and because the gear shift is hydraulically powered, it’s not until the engine is running that you can then go back down through the gears. But, of course, the mechanics can’t start the car in gear, because it would race off away from them. They need to come to the car with a little ratchet spanner and manually rock the car backwards and forwards while working the spanner on the end of the gear-shift barrel until it gets back down to neutral. Only then can they put the starter in and restart the car and off you go again.
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Adrian Newey (How to Build a Car: The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Formula 1 Designer)
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The Very Difference Between Game Design & 3D Game Development You Always Want to Know
Getting into the gaming industry is a dream for many people. In addition to the fact that this area is always relevant, dynamic, alive and impenetrable for problems inherent in other areas, it will become a real paradise for those who love games. Turning your hobby into work is probably the best thing that can happen in your career.
What is Game Designing?
A 3D Game Designer is a creative person who dreams up the overall design of a video game. Game design is a large field, drawing from the fields of computer science/programming, creative writing, and graphic design. Game designers take the creative lead in imagining and bringing to life video game worlds. Game designers discuss the following issues:
• the target audience;
• genre;
• main plot;
• alternative scenarios;
• maps;
• levels;
• characters;
• game process;
• user interface;
• rules and restrictions;
• the primary and secondary goals, etc
Without this information, further work on the game is impossible. Once the concept has been chosen, the game designers work closely with the artists and developers to ensure that the overall picture of the game is harmonized and that the implementation is in line with the original ideas. As such, the skills of a game designer are drawn from the fields of computer science and programming, creative writing and graphic design. Game designers take the creative lead in imagining and bringing to life video game stories, characters, gameplay, rules, interfaces, dialogue and environments.
A game designer's role on a game development outsourcing team differs from the specialized roles of graphic designers and programmers. Graphic designers and game programmers have specific tasks to accomplish in the division of labor that goes into creating a video game, international students can major in those specific disciplines if desired.
The game designer generates ideas and concepts for games. They define the layout and overall functionality of the Game Animation Studio. In short, they are responsible for creating the vision for the game. These geniuses produce innovative ideas for games. Game designers should have a knack for extraordinary and creative vision so that their game may survive in the competitive market. The field of game design is always in need of artists of all types who may be drawn to multiple art forms, original game design and computer animation. The game designer is the artist who uses his/her talents to bring the characters and plot to life.
Who is a Game Development?
Games developers use their creative talent and skills to create the games that keep us glued to the screen for hours and even days or make us play them by erasing every other thought from our minds. They are responsible for turning the vision into a reality, i.e., they convert the ideas or design into the actual game. Thus, they convert all the layouts and sketches into the actual product. It may involve concept generation, design, build, test and release. While you create a game, it is important to think about the game mechanics, rewards, player engagement and level design.
3D Game development involves bringing these ideas to life. Developers take games from the conceptual phase, through *development*, and into reality. The Game Development Services side of games typically involves the programming, coding, rendering, engineering, and testing of the game (and all of its elements: sound, levels, characters, and other assets, etc.).
Here are the following stages of 3D Game Development Service, and the best ways of learning game development (step by step).
• High Concept
• Pitch
• Concept
• Game Design Document
• Prototype
• Production
• Design
• Level Creation
• Programming
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GameYan
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Almost three decades had passed since Paolo Cortazár and the breakaway fleet had passed through Laconia gate. Time enough to build a little civilization, a city, a culture. Time enough for him to confirm that alien engineers had designed the protomolecule as a bridge builder. They had thrown it into the stars like seeds to hijack whatever organic life it encountered and create ring gates into a pocket universe, a nexus between worlds. Until they died out, the slow zone and its rings had been the hub of an empire that defied human comprehension. And now, it would be again. A little bridge-building mechanism that overcame locality changed everything for all humanity
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James S.A. Corey (Persepolis Rising (The Expanse #7))
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SALVAGE USED PART
Looking for the best OEM (original equipment manufacturer) parts for your vehicle you are at the right place. There could be instances where your vehicle has faced significant damage, maybe regular wear and tear (which is in most cases), or might be an accident (which we wish could be avoided) there is a need for replacement parts. It is scary to know that each year in the US there occur More than six million car accidents and according to the NHTSA, about 6% of all motor vehicle accidents in the United States result in at least one death. The reasons for these accidents could be many but one of the significant being design defects. It is a well-known fact that automobiles have hundreds of parts, and any of those defective parts can cause a serious car accident. It may sound easy to visit the mechanic and get it done, but in actuality, there are various factors to be considered to claim the insurance in full.
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Salvage Used Parts
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Human actions are based on imagination, belief, and faith, not on objective observation – as military and political experts know well. Even science, which claims its methods and theories are rationally developed, is shaped by emotion and fancy, or by fear. And to control human imagination is to shape mankind's collective destiny.
Beyond the question of the physical nature of the UFOs, it is imperative that we study the deeper problem of their impact on our imagination and culture. How the UFO phenomena will affect, in the long run, our views about science, about religion, about the exploration of space, is impossible to measure. But the phenomenon does appear to have a real effect. And a peculiar feature of this mechanism is that it affects equally those who "believe" and those who oppose its reality in a physical sense.
For the time being, the observation can be made that it is possible to make large sections of any population believe in the existence of supernatural races, in the possibility of flying machines, in the plurality of inhabited worlds, by exposing them to a few carefully engineered scenes the details of which are adapted to the culture and symbols of a particular time and place.
Could the meetings with UFO entities be designed to control our beliefs? Consider their changing character. In the United States, they appear as science fiction monsters. In South America, they are sanguinary and quick to get into a fight. In France, they behave like rational, Cartesian, peace-loving tourists. The Irish Gentry, if we believe its spokesmen, was an aristocratic race organized somewhat like a religious-military order. The airship pilots were strongly individualistic characters with all the features of the American farmer.
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Jacques F. Vallée (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact)
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In 1901 the Maybach-designed Mercedes 35 was the first essentially modern motor vehicle: still without any roof but including four cylinders, two carburetors, mechanical inlet valves, an aluminum engine block, a gear stick in a gate, a honeycomb radiator, and rubber tires.
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Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
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As he shifted from one foot to the other, he recalled the fully mechanized saloon, he, Finnerty, and Shepherd had designed when they'd been playful young engineers. To their surprise, the owner of a restaurant chain had been interested enough to give the idea a try. They'd set up the experimental unit about five doors down from where Paul now stood, with coin machines and endless belt to do the serving, with germicidal lamps cleaning the air, with uniform, healthful light, with continuous soft music from a tape recorder, with seats scientifically designed by an anthropologist to give the average man the absolute maximum in comfort.
The first day had been a sensation, with a waiting line extending blocks. Within a week of the opening, curiosity had been satisfied, and it was a book day when five customers stopped in. Then this place had opened up almost next door, with a dust-and-germ trap of a Victorian bar, bad light, poor ventilation, and an unsanitary, inefficient, and probably dishonest bartender. It was an immediate and unflagging success
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Player Piano)
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As mentioned, this conceptual knowledge, generated through the Scientific Tradition, has come to be used in the creation of designs in practical fields, such as mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, medicine, clinical psychology, social work, and education. It is easiest to measure the impact of scientific research on the economy. A study looked at the impact of research on economic growth in 65 countries over the period 1980–2016.19 They found that the amount of research output in a country increased economic growth, primarily through structural changes favoring the industrial sector. They found that academic knowledge was applied in a broad set of industries and that social and physical sciences impact economic growth the most. The impact of the research output of clinical and health sciences, and arts and humanities was characterized by low levels of applications, although they also led to positive economic growth.
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Robert Kozma (Make the World a Better Place: Design with Passion, Purpose, and Values)
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Of course, the word machine here is being used in its broadest definition, i.e., as the systematic organization of designs for the transmission of power. And since power can be social as well as mechanical it is important to remember that machines can be institutional in addition to being material. For this reason, we speak of political machines as well as the mechanics of government as comfortably as we discuss how many speakers our stereo contains or how many words per minute we can type. But when the persons who design, implement, and repair these machines, social and mechanical, are thought of as social types, this broader definition of machine often vanishes. Somehow the common usage of the word machine in its many modes does not extend into a consideration of the humans behind the machines. Instead, these persons are sequestered into diverse occupational categories: engineer, economist, radiologist, technician or political scientist. Yet, historically there is a sense in which a segment of this diverse collection of experts attained a uniformity of thought and action sufficient to justify a more unified categorization. And, indeed, it is the intention of this work to demonstrate that there were experts who had in common, from the beginning of the American machine age, the desire to sell society on their expertise by providing plans for systematically organized devices for the transmission of power in production and in politics.
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Donald Stabile (Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America)
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platforms cannot be entirely planned; they also emerge. Remember that one of the key characteristics that distinguishes a platform from a traditional business is that most of the activity is controlled by users, not by the owners or managers of the platform. It’s inevitable that participants will use the platform in ways you never anticipated or planned. Twitter was never meant to have a discovery mechanism. It originated as simply a reverse-chronological stream of feeds. There was no way to seek out tweets on particular topics other than by scrolling through pages of unrelated and irrelevant content. Chris Messina, an engineer at Google, originally suggested the use of hashtags to annotate and discover similar tweets. Today, the hashtag has become a mainstay of Twitter. Platform designers should always leave room for serendipitous discoveries, as users often lead the way to where the design should evolve. Close monitoring of user behavior on the platform is almost certain to reveal unexpected patterns—some of which may suggest fruitful new areas for value creation. The best platforms allow room for user quirks, and they are open enough to gradually incorporate such quirks into the design of the platform.
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Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
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Games are simpler and more mechanically elegant when everyone mindlessly fights to the death.
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Tynan Sylvester (Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences)
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Leveraging emergence means crafting mechanics that don’t just add together, but multiply into a rich universe of possibility.
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Tynan Sylvester (Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences)
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To create an experience that mirrors that of a character, we construct it out of three parts. First, we create flow to strip the real world out of the player’s mind. Second, we create an arousal state using threats and challenges in the game mechanics. Finally, we use the fiction layer to label the player’s arousal to match the character’s feelings.
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Tynan Sylvester (Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences)
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A MECHANIC IS A rule about how a game works. The A button makes Mario jump is a mechanic. So are the rules characters walk at one meter per second, pawns capture diagonally, and players alternate taking turns.
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Tynan Sylvester (Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences)
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Game designers don’t design events. We design systems of mechanics that generate events.
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Tynan Sylvester (Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences)
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While M-strengths receive little emphasis or nurturing in most school curricula, they play an essential role in many adult occupations. Designers, mechanics, engineers, surgeons, radiologists, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, builders, skilled artisans, dentists, orthodontists, architects, chemists, physicists, astronomers, drivers of trucks, buses, and taxis, and computer specialists (especially in areas like networking, program and systems architecture, and graphics) all rely on M-strengths for much of what they do.
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Brock L. Eide (The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain)
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The pinnacle of game design craft is combining perfect mechanics and compelling fiction into one seamless system of meaning.
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Tynan Sylvester (Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences)
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First edition, July 2016 Cover art © 2016 by Joy Ang Cover design by Phil Falco Excerpt from Wings of Fire Book Eleven: The Lost Continent by Tui T. Sutherland. © 2018 Tui T. Sutherland. Wings of Fire Book Eleven: The Lost Continent cover illustration by Joy Ang e-ISBN 978-1-338-05364-7 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
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Tui T. Sutherland (Darkstalker (Wings of Fire: Legends, #1))