@kevinjkircher.com
Engineering prof (mechanical + electrical) at a big Midwest state school. Energy, climate, buildings, power grid, control, optimization, data science. He/him. Personal account. https://kevinjkircher.com/ Email: my last name at purdue dot edu
In your opinion, what are the best and worst things that each engineering discipline has done for (or to) the world?
- Civil
- Mechanical
- Chemical
- Electrical
- Biological
- Computer science
- Others
This ordinance is about utility-scale solar farms
🤣
fair
lol, yes!
It can, especially if paired with batteries.
If you are into climate action (esp. in higher education), check out the new climate action milestone framework just released by Second Nature that offers a useful framework for staff, faculty, and student efforts. A few highlights (🧵).
secondnature.org/climate-lead... (pls share!)
a banger in my household as well
So far the war on Iran has cost $9.4 billion.
That's $1 billion per day.
$41,666,667 per hour.
$11,574 per second.
Thousands of lives lost.
People don't want this. They want a living wage. They want healthcare. They want to be able to afford a home. They want their basic needs met.
If you can't beat 'em, don't let people vote for 'em.
From the always on-point Sue Halpern, a good catalogue of GOP efforts to disenfranchise voters. It's what they've got left.
www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...
Good words of warning here. AI models are generally designed to read and incorporate (and, in a sense, believe) virtually everything they find online, with very few guardrails. The information can get divorced from its original source, context, & rebuttals or retractions. That's a really big problem
"Others"!
Civil
B-Sanitation infrastructure; W-Urban hwy systems
Mechanical
B-ICE; W-Machines of war
Chemical
B-Haber–Bosch process; W-Chemical weapons
Electrical
B-Grid; W-Mass surveillance infrastructure
Bio
B-mRNA; W-Biological weapons programs
/1
What if a law required each LLM company to provide a free, simple way for anyone to check whether their LLM generated some or all of a given document, image, video, or sound file?
When geopolitical stability is treated by the markets as a free good, this is what shareholders get, MAGA incompetence and broken supply chains..
A #PreventableSurprise of global importance.
In FY2022 the federal government spent $21 billion on universal free school meals (breakfast and lunch) to K-12 students across our whole beautiful country from sea to shining sea for the whole year.
That’s like 3 weeks worth of this stuff 👇🏻
Oh but we do... We always joke about how your B2 bombers are the reason you chaps don't have free healthcare
nice white butt!
🤣
lol whoops!
If the DoD were its own state, it would be the 11th largest country in the world, by budget expenditures. Ahead of Russia. The DoD budget is larger than Russia’s entire government budget 🫠
Civil:
-first to demonstrate engineering contributions to society
-roads & bridges
-wastewater management & treatment
![Mississippi River designs
See also: Port Eads, Louisiana
The Mississippi in the 100-mile-plus stretch between the port of New Orleans, Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico frequently suffered from silting up of its outlets, stranding ships or making parts of the river unnavigable for a period of time. Eads solved the problem with a wooden jetty system that narrowed the main outlet of the river, causing the river to speed up and cut its channel deeper, allowing year-round navigation. Eads offered to build the jetties first, and charge the government later. 12] If he was successful, and the jetties caused the river to cut a channel 30 feet deep for 20 years, the government agreed to pay him $8 million. The jetty system was installed in 1876 and the channel was cleared in February 1877.[13]
Journalist Joseph Pulitzer, who had known Eads for five years, invested $20,000 in this project. [14) In 1879 the Eads design of jettys at the mouth of the Mississippi River proved to be successful. [15] A flood in 1890 brought calls for a similar system for the entire Mississippi Valley. A jetty system would prevent the floods by deepening the main channel. However, there were concerns about the ability of water moving through a jetty system to cut out the rock and clay on the river bottom. [16] The development of navigable channels at the mouth of the Mississippi River made Eads famous.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5ofjru6xowuavtpl2gh5wqha/bafkreicfnl34ehm6vdubmffozpakfhdpkntlvfeayuyirkp6ijq4jdkyke)
Mississippi River designs See also: Port Eads, Louisiana The Mississippi in the 100-mile-plus stretch between the port of New Orleans, Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico frequently suffered from silting up of its outlets, stranding ships or making parts of the river unnavigable for a period of time. Eads solved the problem with a wooden jetty system that narrowed the main outlet of the river, causing the river to speed up and cut its channel deeper, allowing year-round navigation. Eads offered to build the jetties first, and charge the government later. 12] If he was successful, and the jetties caused the river to cut a channel 30 feet deep for 20 years, the government agreed to pay him $8 million. The jetty system was installed in 1876 and the channel was cleared in February 1877.[13] Journalist Joseph Pulitzer, who had known Eads for five years, invested $20,000 in this project. [14) In 1879 the Eads design of jettys at the mouth of the Mississippi River proved to be successful. [15] A flood in 1890 brought calls for a similar system for the entire Mississippi Valley. A jetty system would prevent the floods by deepening the main channel. However, there were concerns about the ability of water moving through a jetty system to cut out the rock and clay on the river bottom. [16] The development of navigable channels at the mouth of the Mississippi River made Eads famous.
Could add flood control too
Civil engineers were heros of 19th century, showing what analysis and design could do.
Eads was multi-faceted genius. I particularly like his solution to dredging the mouth of the Mississippi - have the river do the work
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_B...
Civil - [Best] infrastructure (bridges, water and waste water) are all good. [Worst] mega projects like dams with huge ecological footprints.
Mech - [Best] Hvac and pumps (transportation is pretty good too) [worst] war planes etc.
pic of a white-butt eagle with an accurately white butt
Saw 5 bald eagles fishing as I crossed the Wabash on my way to work this morning and look they're not even bald (that's vultures), their main feature is big white butts. Our national bird is the white-butt eagle
I don't think most people grasp the insane amount of resources that the US allocates to weapons and war machines. The list of better things we could do with the military budget is nearly endless.
At ~$1 billion/day, the US has spent as much on the war in Iran in ten days as the entire FY25 budget for the National Science Foundation ($10 billion).
Trump's FY26 budget request for the agency declined to $3.9 billion, due to a "realignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment."