Design Judging

[Will M]

Hi Bill,

I don't want to misunderstand you by guessing what the lyrics mean to you.
Could you say what you meant plainly?

I recently saw a funny TV show where people had wildly different interpretations of the song "Cat's In The Cradle".
(not letting time slip away / revenge on a crappy father / revenge on a crappy son)

Many Thanks,
William

[BillCobb]

To me, the song hits a feeling that I'm reminded of all the time. The growth of human evolution seeds the future with new priorities, new problems and new solutions to old and new problems and wishes. Think music, mathematics, astronomy, Hollywood, social networking, recreation, and 'involvment'.

In the case of this Forum, the 'pressure' has been to 'perform' at almost unimaginable precision to accomplish WHAT ? ' Racing' isn't in vogue now. It is environmentally unfavorable, it has a reputation for being dangerous, its BORING, its dominated by spendthrifts and egocentric personalities.
Competition here sets performance goals that are unreachable and un-managable in the time-frame of our parents. Online intellect smears the accomplishments of 'average' individuality. What has kept it going is/was a 'promise' of great riches and salutations by peers. (Peers are people who live near you, not people who think like you). So, Globalism has opened the blinds to those in the dark, and yet WE are seeing the 'Exclusive club' trying to drive them down the same path as we took. As in Jurassic Park: Nature finds a way. Tomorrow's engineers, scientists, artists, astronomers etc. will use newer tools, A.I. neural nets, 3D printing, nanobots and Dark Matter to entertain their minds, and lift their spririts.

Hey, take a look at the Facebook MarketPlace in your area: They take a handmade piece of furniture, crafted from solid wood, one of a kind artisan ordained and what happens ? 'They' (those folks usually with hyphenated names) buy it from an estate sale, paint it with chalk paint in phlegm green mixed with flour, spank it with chains and gravel, then advertize it on Facebook with words like "gorgeous", "amazing", "spectacular", "beautiful", etc. To us it may be butt-phuk ugly. To the next generation its "incredible", "awesome", and "glamerous". I'm horrified, but accept the inevitable. Next take music, or games, or movies, or food, sports, etc. Things are different, every few years there too.

Look, when I was a student, I learned to program an IBM 1620 in machine language. I punched a card deck 1" thick to solve for the roots to a quadratic equation. I worked on a analog computer to design a stick balancer using amplifiers, potentiometers, resistors, and wires. The outgrowth of that was a digital simulation running in real time to control a column of flimsy fuel tanks with 3 men on top of the stack (called Saturn-5). When I hired into GM, guys would run a TTY to get an estimate of steering gain, understeer and response time, taking about a half day to prepare and run the sim. I can currently run thousands of these per second using a tire database, and K&C database and and inertia estimator. The results are so accurate, we don't even have to run road tests anymore.

So, the ways of elders are provocative, sometimes enlightening, and usually uninteresting to the next crowd. As life/survival becomes easier, the challenges people face also become easier because better ways of doing things get developed. OR, you don't need to bale hay anymore because we don't ride our horses to work. Now about that Frank Sinatra album I found in the garbage... Remember the 'good old Days ?' Well they weren't really so good. OK that was a Red Bull moment !

[Will M]

Well said.

I am confident that FSAE* has a role to play in developing young engineers.
And that its experienced members have wisdom to share.
But I have found** that relatively few FSAE students*** are deeply interested the 'traditional FSAE' engineering problems.

Consider how many teams have two or three students that do all of the suspension, chassis, and powertrain work?
How many teams show up that have developed their of software?
Or some other 'side' project that is only tangentially related to building a FSAE car?

I submit that these students are not stupid but rather solving problems that the FSAE competition does not reward.
The effort required to do better at the competition is far greater than the reward.
So they rationally pursue projects that 1) interest them 2) advance their career prospects

Additionally traditional FSAE engineering problems have been beat to death.
For many students there are solutions to these problems that are good enough.
If suspension, chassis, and powertrain are not interesting to a student then they can just copy an existing functional design.
This lets them tackle the problems that they find actually interesting and challenging.

To wrap up I hope that FSAE can adapt to the changes and continue to grow.
And that its experience members (here and elsewhere) will support the students in whatever challenge they choose to tackle.

- William

*and the Collegiate Design Series overall
** my first survey
** let alone engineering students in general