Refuse to Sign

I just heard about a campaign among clergy who are refusing to perform any marriages, or sign marriage licenses, until states will recognize the rights of homosexual couples to get married as well. [Salon.com] I have to say, I was a little surprised to hear that there was an equal marriage rights movement among clergy. Generally speaking, the people who are against gay marriage are usually Christian conservatives or some other religious group. Really, I haven't heard any arguments against gay marriage that aren't related to religion in some way. You hear a little bit of bullshit about "traditional family unit" and "family values" but, until there is some hard science behind it, that is just bullshit code for "Jesus doesn't want gays to marry."

I'm so glad to have heard about this movement, and I applaud the clergy who are taking part. The article mentions that people who aren't clergy are encouraged to support the Refuse to Sign campaign by having their marriage license signed by a judge or a court clerk. I would suggest going even farther, and simply forgoing marriage altogether until there is equality. It would be the modern day equivalent of the bus boycotts during the civil rights era. Unfortunately, gay couples aren't allowed to marry, so the boycott has to be heterosexual couples. Morally, it is a simple argument, if you believe people are being unfairly excluded from marriage rights then you simply do not use the same unfair system. Of course, that is easy for me to say, as a young single person with no serious girlfriend to have me thinking about marriage in any significant way. Still, I would like to think I'd have the same resolve if I had a serious girlfriend. This is a fundamental issue of equality, and I would go so far as to say an issue of love as well. So, for what it's worth, I'll be boycotting marriage until there is equality.

Michael Jackson Memorial

I caught a bit of the Michael Jackson memorial service today. It was very well done, and all of the performers did a fantastic job. The most devastating part of the service was the end, where Michael's daughter spoke. It was heart-wrenching to watch this little girl have to say goodbye to her father. In the end, that's what really affected me. Say what you want about Michael Jackson's legal problems, or his strange behavior, whether you loved him or hated him, none of that matters. At the end of the day, there are 3 children who lost a daddy and that is terrible.

Picture Issues

Sorry about the pictures being clipped in posts recently. I'm going to look into it. I never had a problem with posting pictures until recently, so I hope it is something that can be fixed.

Confidence

Shouting Fire

I just saw Shouting Fire on HBO, and you need to see it. It is an examination of the freedom of speech in this country. Specifically, it examines free speech in this country during times of war. It is one of those films that will make you righteously indignant, liberal or conservative. You here the expected stories, protesters being arrested at anti-Bush rallies and the like. You also hear about a boy who was wrongfully disciplined for wearing an anti-gay shirt during a LGBT "Day of Silence" demonstration at a high school. The point of the documentary is that if you want free speech, you have defend it even for speech you are against. You can't protest the right of someone else to protest, and I think that is something that everyone, left, right, and center needs to remember. If you like being able to protest war, then you have to let the Neo-Nazis march too. If you want a pro-life rally, then you have to tolerate the gay pride parade. It is a documentary that will make you proud to live here, and incredibly embarassed at the same time. Most importantly, it will make you think about what freedom means in this country, and we all need to have some new thoughts about that after the last 8 years.

Programming

In general, I have been very happy with my coursework at Purdue. I find that it has prepared me to meet most of the technical challenges that I have been presented with, which is all that one can ask for. Yesterday I wrote about what I thought was a shortcoming of my education, the lack of biology coursework. Today, I would like to address the other shortcoming that I perceive; programming knowledge. Thus far I have been required to study C programming for one semester in my freshman year. Beyond that, I have taken 3 classes that required serious MATLAB knowledge. That is the extent of my ability to program.

In the traditional sense, one wouldn't expect a mechanical engineer to need much programming. Any project that I would be involved in that required a significant amount of programming would have a computer scientist or an electrical engineer on the design team. I'm not saying that mechanical engineers need to be able to audit an operating system's source, or need to know how to write a compiler, but we need to be able to interact with computers. We need to be able to know what they are capable of, and how they work. The best way to learn that, in my opinion, is to learn how to program. The same way they teach us the tools we need to engineer with CNC machining, we need to know how to use computers effectively. We need to have those computational tools at our disposal in almost every industry.

Of course, like biology, it is entirely possible to learn how to program on your own. I have decided to learn Python. I am honing my skills by solving the problems at Project Euler. Even then, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers agrees with me.

Even though basic parallel programming is becoming more common, especially in scientific communities, the skills required to get performance—e.g., scalability—are still highly specialized. [Mechanical Engineering]

In order to understand these tools that we use for finite element analysis, or any of the other numerous computer tools engineers use, we must understand how computers see math and data. It isn't essential at this point, but I am sure that advanced programming skills will be in the very near future. My statics teacher told us something that I have kept in mind whenever I schedule courses or think about my future college career. He said, "You can never know too much math, it is the language of the universe." Well, programming is the way computers understand math. If we want to use those mathematical tools in any meaningful way we need to know how to program. Of course, I'm no expert on engineering education, but this is where I see the world headed from my spot in the trenches.

Biomimicry

I have been thinking a lot about biology lately, mostly as a symptom of engineering. One of my good friends is a double major in biology and mechanical engineering, and lately I've been thinking that may have been the way for me to go as well. The reason for this is something I have been researching in my free time called biomimicry. It is the practice of incorporating ideas from biology into design, much like the concept of SONAR is informed by echolocation in bats and dolphins.

It seems that almost every design I read about lately has some sort of biomimicry tie in, and a lot of fascinating research is happening in tissue engineering and manufacturing nanomachines that have applications in biology. A lot of exciting research is happening in biotechnology, and it has been so great to explore. I saw a TED Talk about genomics recently, and after watching the video I thought, "This is the future." If we can make cells that eat carbon dioxide and poop oil, what can't we do with biological processing and engineering? Life is incredible in this way. It is a design that has been refined with nature's genetic algorithm for billions of years. Even a single cell is incredible with what it does to survive, let alone macroorganisms like animals and us. We just found out that bacteria can learn, and we haven't even begun to understand the complexity of things like the brain. Imagine what else might be out there in the biosphere.

Unfortunately, I have been able to go this far in my engineering education without the requirement of any undergraduate level biology coursework. Biology is the only hard science that I am not required to study for at least one year. I think that needs to change. Too much of design and nanotechnology is informed by biology, not to mention medical devices and other areas of biologically related applications for products that are made. I would guess that in the very near future, not having some biology knowledge will put mechanical engineering graduates at a huge competitive disadvantage in the job market. Maybe it is time to throw a year of biology into engineering education, just to lay the fundamentals for future study. So, if you are looking at going into mechanical engineering I would recommend taking at least one semester of biology. If nothing else, it will give you another approach to think about when you consider engineering problems.