Suggested Readings for Engr Students 40

[braxtonlewis]

Quite a few of my undergraduate students from this semester have been asking me to recommend to them 'books' or other readings that will help them toward their development as a human being as well as an engineer. So I created my first ever blog to answer this question.

http://braxtonlewis.blogspot.com/

The books listed are the one's that I seem to recommend most to just about everyone. Would you mind taking a look and letting me know what you think? What else would you recommend to me and to our students?



Braxton V. Lewis
Morgantown, WV

 

[KENAT]

Not sure that's an unfair advantage John, having the sense to find a job somewhat related to your field of study, and being able to apply what you learned there to your studies seems reasonably fair. Unusually sensible for a youngster sure, but unfair, I don't think so.

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[jmw]

Re Ayn Rand, there is an article over at BNET "Top 10 Reasons Ayn Rand was Dead Wrong"

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[jmw]

If most students are keen to work with high tech machines and make high tech things, perhaps they would benefit by understanding how people made the things they needed using basic equipment and whatever materials were to hand.
A very fine illustration of the ingenuity of earlier generations in the USA is found in the Foxfire books Foxfire, museum and books
They may be inspired enough to want to make some of the things for themselves just to see if they can make what their ancestors made.


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[jmw]

Foxfire book five is perhaps the most interesting, covering such topics as:

Ironmaking and Blacksmithing
[ul][li]BLAST FURNACES[/li]
[li]BELLOWS[/li]
[li]FIREPLACE POKERS[/li]
[li]FORGE SHOVELS[/li]
[li]FROES[/li]
[li]COWBELLS[/li]
[li]HORSESHOES[/li][/ul]

Gunmaking
[ul][li]BLACK POWDER[/li]
[li]BARREL MAKING[/li]
[li]SILER LOCKS[/li]
[li]FLINTLOCK RIFLES[/li]
[li]MODERN GUNSMITHS[/li]
[li]TURKEY SHOOTS[/li]
[li]THE NMLRA[/li][/ul]


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[lacajun]

To supplement JohnRBaker's point....

http://www.isa.org/Template.cfm?Section=Books3&Template=/Ecommerce/ProductDisplay.cfm&ProductID=9889

Pamela K. Quillin, P.E.
Quillin Engineering, LLC

 

[bridgebuster]

"I don't think his [Orwell's]fiction is politically relevant anymore."

Really? Animal Farm may have been about the Communist, however, the warning "all animals are equal but some are more equal than others" will always be true.

"...Darwin was a very good, professional scientist..."

The trouble is society can't seem to make a distinction between the science of evolution and the philosophy of evolution.

Here's an interesting book: "New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy" by Robert Spitzer.

 

[drawoh]

bridgebuster,

Again, I strongly recommend Decline of the English Murder. The book is a collection of essays, mostly book reviews. It shows you where George Orwell's head was at as he prepared to write 1984 and Animal Farm. His pieces on Dickens, Salvadore Dali and Rudyard Kipling are worthwhile reads.

It is also a good look at the intellectual culture of the WWII period. People had a lot of enthusiasm for brute force, and very little concern for the consequences. This made possible the Stalinist purges, the Holocaust, and the Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot.

I do not think we face tolitarians anymore. The Chinese Communists are still with us, but their leaders are people who survived the Cultural Revolution. They know.

Right now, we are dealing with religious extremists, objectivisits and other intellectual types who are too convinced of their own correctness.

JHG

 

[jmw]

The AGW types. Orwell couldn't have foreseen them and the money making bonanza they have made of it.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[JohnRBaker]

It is also a good look at the intellectual culture of the WWII period. People had a lot of enthusiasm for brute force, and very little concern for the consequences. This made possible the Stalinist purges, the Holocaust, and the Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot.

To say nothing of firebombing Dresden and various Japanese cities, or even the rational behind using nuclear weapons to end the war.

Although I'll have to admit that with respect to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the people working on the Manhattan Project, while they understood the dangers of nuclear radiation they were totally unprepared for the consequences of fallout as that concept never crossed their minds.

In the books I've read on the subject the consensus among the people at Los Alamos was that anyone close enough to the blast who could have suffered from the effects of radiation would have been killed instantly and since the blasts were air-bursts there was this idea that actual radioactive debris would be minimal. In fact when the reports first started to come in concerning people becoming ill and dying not from the blast itself but something else, it was suggested that this was simply the Japanese government fabricating these claims so as to make the case that the United States was using chemical or biological weapons against civilians in the hope of gaining some sympathy with the rest of world when it came time to negotiate a peace treaty. It was not until American medical personnel were able to enter the area after hostilities had ceased before it was confirmed that this was NOT the result of some bio-chemical event but rather was linked directly to the effects of the bombs themselves.

While it's only my personal opinion, I think it was the sudden awareness of the consequences of 'fallout' that turned many of the scientists who worked on the original Manhattan Project into anti-nuke activitists. In other words, if nuclear bombs had turned out to be nothing more than just highly efficient and effective weapons based on their albeit horrendous blast damage and nothing else, I think people's opinions of them would have been very different. Later there was research into 'clean bombs', and I even understand that some of the early work with Hydrogen Bombs, which were 'fusion' weapons as opposed to Atominc Bombs being 'fission' weapons, was based on the hope of them being cleaner in terms of fallout, which of course proved to be incorrect.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[jmw]

We should remember that like many innovations, there was a race to the atomic bomb.
The German work is probably well more well known but that Germany was sharing technology with Japan and that Japan had its own program, most people either don't know or do not acknowledge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_program

A lot of people tend to neglect this when they condemn the US dropping these bombs.

If the US was not the first or chose not to drop the bombs, what might have been the outcome?
Most people do not include a scenario where Japan was able to complete their program and explode an atomic bomb either over the US Mainland (what kind of delivery system? submarine maybe?) or over a concentration of US forces in the Pacific? or perhaps symbolically, Pearl Harbour again?



JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[KENAT]

(what kind of delivery system?)

Balloon.

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[jmw]

Well I was going to include balloon because that was a delivery system the Japanese had tried with more conventional munitions, but a system very susceptible to the vagaries of the wind and would it carry an atom bomb?
And while it may be feasible to saturate the air with balloons and conventional bombs such that one or two might get through, you probably only have one atom bomb or two maybe, and you need a more certain way to deliver it or them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon

300 out of 9000+ reaching the USA is not a very good system.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[JohnRBaker]

Now please, I never suggested that Truman made the wrong decision when he decided to go ahead with using the two bombs that we had in our arsenal at that moment.

My comment was to point out that there was feelings in this country during the war, particularly in the case of Japan, that ANY use of force was justified. However, I believe that the President and the military leaders were taking into consideration the human cost, on both sides, which would have to be paid if we were forced to invade Japan's homeland (we already had a taste of that on Okinawa whom many Japanese considered one of their 'home islands') so they were making a 'shorten the war' decisions. That being said, I suspect that the man on the street would have taken a very different view of this. If people had been aware of the existence of atomic weapons, even with respect to the horrific effects of fallout and lingering radiation sickness, the average joe-sixpack would have 'voted' to use the bombs on Japan, even if they were about to surrender on their own. It was a combination of revenge for Pearl Harbor, as well as the idea that the 'Yellow' race was inferior, if not even sub-human, and therefore it was not the same as if this were a decision to nuke Berlin or Rome.

I still believe that if the scientists, the President and the military leaders knew exactly what was going to happen with respect to the civilians not killed in the blast but who succumbed to or suffered for years from the effects of the radioactive fallout that perhaps the suggestion that a 'demonstration' blast would be more appropriate would have been given more consideration, which is what many scientists had assumed was going to be the course of action. And remember, many of them were still thinking that it may have to be used against Germany and that would have presented larger moral problems then if they had known that Japan would be the only target right from the start.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[KENAT]

Well, the fire balloons were fairly 'cheap & cheerful'. Perhaps a Rolls Royce version could have had a higher reliability than ~ 10%, but yeah fundamentally a fairly unreliable way to deliver a very expensive warhead. (Just because only $300 were detected doesn't mean more didn't make it.)

On the other hand, a nuke explosion almost anywhere in the US would have been pretty alarming.

However, way off topic.

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[jmw]

John,
my point was that, post war, a lot of people have judged this as if the US and the US alone had a nuclear weapons program. They tend, with their rose tinted glasses, to discount the worries about what might have happened to POWs in Japan had Japan been invaded as must surely have had to happen otherwise and they tend to not consider that had the US not used the bombs and the Japanese Atom bomb program been more advanced allowing them to bomb their enemies. AT that time I think we should agree, the Japanese would have had less compunction about using the bomb even had they been aware of the fallout issues.

On the other hand what I don't know is how aware the US and Truman were of the Japanese program and those elusive WMDs... certainly the allies were aware of the German program and destroyed their heavy water plants.
Certain too is that they were aware of the Japanese scientific capability. the only real uncertainty would have been how advanced their program was.
Remember too that Japan had access to a lot of territory to find raw materials and they could not be certain that they hadn't found some sources in China, for example.

In a very true sense, the nuclear arms race had begun early in the war if not before though many people seem to think the only Atom bomb development was the Manhattan project and that the nuclear arms race didn't begin till the cold war.

No doubt though that you are correct about the anti Japanese feelings at the time and we should also remember a certain US general who wanted to drop the big one on North Korea.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[jmw]

PS I suggested submarines carefully.
The ability of mini-subs to enter well guarded harbours was well demonstrated during the war by such as Buster Crab and the Italians.
The Japanese might also have tried to insert a minisub into Pearl Harbour, San Diego, San Francisco etc.
Indeed, in 1941 they did attempt to enter Pearl Harbour with one.

http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/HURL/midget.html

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2009...-have-found-WWII-mini-sub/UPI-88961260188651/

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[bridgebuster]

drawoh -

Let me clarify my statement on Animal Farm. I wasn't referring to communists, fascists, etc.

I was thinking of the political climate in the US with too many ideologues - as you put it: religious extremists, objectivisits and other intellectual types who are too convinced of their own correctness.

To me, these types are as much of a danger to the nation as a Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.

 

[TheTick]

The Irregulars was an interesting read. Roald Dahl and other Brit officers (including Ian Fleming) spying on the US before and during WW2.

 

[hydrac]

One that I'm glad my professor made us read was " The Practical Oceanographer.

http://fermi.jhuapl.edu/book/

Deals with what it takes working offshore, how to plan before implementation, and dealing with uncertainty.

 

[bridgebuster]

Young people might enjoy "Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity" by Bill O'Reilly. He really captures what typical American life was like in the 50's and 60's.

There is a factual error in the book: Gerald Ford wasn't the Speaker of the House, but I'll cut him some slack. After all, any one who remembers the movie "Not of this Earth" (the original version not the two remakes)deserves a break.