Engineer = freak?

Quote from Dilbert comic strip,

You're an engineer, everything you say is abnormal.

I'm not sure how true is this statement, if it's not 100% true, then I think it should not less than 90% :)

Engineer is like detective, we talk based on logic and facts, and sometime we are magician, whether to hide the truth or to amuse the client is not part of this discussion. Therefore, the manager look at us like freak, abnormal person, cause they never know what are we talking about.

We don't know how tell the manger about the thermodynamic, PID control, Reynolds number, Kirchoff's law, etc. For them, how can a person only talk about numbers and dead peoples name can consider normal. A normal person shall talk about money, cars, womens, watches, pub, drink, etc.

The different between an engineer and the manager is that engineer don't lie but manager did.

And don't lie didn't mean will tell the tru :)

Joanna Wang - Let's Start from Here

She's 19. Very talented single. her name 王若琳 Joanna Wang.

Summer Snow - Sissel

Every time when I heard this song, I just get blue. Remind me a lovely story.

Did you missed something?

当我们同在一起 - 王羚柔

Brunei

Visited to Brunei last week and nothing much I can show since it's a business trip. Only took the panorama photo in front of the hotel.

What I can say about Brunei? I think I would like to use the word WASTED.

According to wiki, the Sultan owned 531 Mercedes Benzs, 367 Ferraris, 362 Bentleys, 185 BMWs, 177 Jaguars, 160 Porsches, 130 Rolls-Royces, and 20 Lamborghinis (reported on 26 Oct. 2007). Ok, what the fuck, almost 2000 cars. I don't know how much is the cost of these cars but I know I can't even own one of these for the rest of my life.

Some more,

... the sultan has a Boeing 747-400 furnished with gold plated furniture, and
his official residence is the Istana Nurul Iman, with 1,788 rooms, 257 bathrooms, and a floor area of 2,152,782 square feet (200,000 m²), undisputedly the world's largest palace.

Is Brunei people rich? I doubt that. If the king is so rich, why can’t he make their country and the peoples rich? After listen to one of the contractor, I think I understand why. In order to control your man, make them happy and don't give too much.

Sound familiar? Ya, I’m working in this kind of company. I'm freely running around, the salary wouldn't make me hunger nor make me rich. And it's dangerous actually. Too much of spoon feeding make you lost of native skill to fight the world.

Anyway, it's a nice trip, hope next time I can go to the “Brunei bay” and take some photos for you all.

Pluck from the sky

When talking about engineering, we deal with numbers. Most of the time, beside formula, we use also constants and factors. For non-technical person, they are wonder where we get the figure, but for us, we know we didn’t pluck it from the sky.

Where we get those figures?

There are many ways. First, from books, research papers, published technical information. Normally we call these kinds of numbers as constant. Like speed of light, c, is equal to 299792458 m/s. How to get this figure is a long story and if you interested, you may read the following wiki.

The other way of getting the number is from experience, rule-of-thumb and common practice. For example, we use 1 pa/m friction loss when sizing the air-cond duct. Why? Well, it just a factor that everyone is practice when sizing the duct. For different application, we use different factor in sizing. There is a math and theory behind it but we are just engineer not scientist, therefore, using a practiced figure shall not be harmful, unless you choice it wrongly.

And the final way to get the number is by trial-and-error. Well, this is a hard way, but when both the two mentioned methods to get factor/constant are not available, we need to do some guessing or a better word is reverse engineering. This is commonly use when study people’s design and when not much of detail information left by the designer. In this case, guessing and reverse engineering is the only way to know the mind of a designer. It needs a wise guy to guess the mind of a genius /wahaha. If you knowledgeable enough, most of the time, you can hit very near to the target.

So, after this, if you saw some numbers pop up from the words, please don’t say we are pluck from the sky, it is not so easy to get all these numbers and we also don’t have time to tell or explain to you how to get these since you may not from engineering stream. And actually, there is nothing left on the sky already /XD

Shaolin Girl

Directed by Steven Chow. Haven't watch the movie, but I think it is either a Japan style of Shaolin Soccer or Shaolin Soccer part II. Anyway, got pretty Kou Shibasaki (柴咲コウ) :)