Has Anybody Noticed...

Yeah. The one that got me recently asked how to design the lighting for a highway tunnel. It's complex job for an experienced lighting engineer, and the questioner seemed to think a paragraph or two from some completely anonymous source (given NO details about the length, shape or structure of the tunnel) would be adequate.

Yes...the lumen guy from India. That was a showcase post.

Lately? This has gone on forever.

People either want us to do their homework, or much less ethical, their real work for them. Then they get huffy when we won't do their job for them.

Oh well, just ignore them and let them crash and burn I say.

I don't really need to know anything as long as I have an Internet connection. That way I don't have to worry about holding anything in my head! It truly is a magic box!

I dont even have to knows how to use the search engines there. I knows that someones wil hlp me and give me the gud links!

Engineers make it look easy. Of course when you see the Discovery or History channel show on building bridges, skyscrapers, tunnels or whatever technological wonder, they gloss over the minutia of detail that has to be addressed.

No, when you can build an aircraft carrier in one hour, space telescopes or robots that can traverse Mars, people seem to lose the sense of time and effort that it took to do it.

Now, I do recall as a 12 year old, wanting to write a letter to Motorola asking them to build me a micro transmitter. Alas, 12 is a very naive age. It didn't take long to realize the complexity and cost of such a task. For an adult to ask for something like that, to me it's more mental laziness. They don't even know where to look. Forget about actual research, they don't even know how to ask the question.

I'm all for helping newbies learn. They do, however, have to do their homework first!

Personally, I like the ones typed in all caps demanding an answer. I'm not the nicest bit in the binary word, but even I'm more polite than that.

Maybe we can get a rating scheme like the GA's only maybe call it a HA (Homework Answer) or WA (Work Answer).

Why struggle when there is Google ?

fire invention

[CR4 Admin: deactivated broken link]

(Apologies to those who have seen it before, but it is On Topic i think )

Cute. Definitely on topic.

The story goes that an Engineer once gave Henry Ford a bill for $10,000 for fixing his revolutionary Model T Ford vehicle assembly production line.

Henry requested a cost breakdown (as $10,000 was a lot of money in those days). The Engineer wrote back the (gist of the) following

$1.00 for parts

$9,999.00 for knowing what to do with them

Henry paid the bill.

Says it all, but sometimes people think the answer to a complex question is simply use part A in location G. A good example is one of the CR4 guests requesting we provide him a complete substation design.

There are a number of stories along that line. I think the first one was Charles Steinmetz at GE. He charged $1 for making the chalk mark and $9,999 for knowing where to put the mark.

http://www.rotaryfirst100.org/philosophy/scientists/steinmets.htm

Thank you for the link. I had heard his name here and there, but found it very interesting that I didn't know more about him. I have read several books about Nikola Tesla and I am a member of several Tesla-oriented web sites. I thought I would know more about Steinmetz given his and Tesla's employment history, yet I haven't seen Steinmetz's name mentioned nearly as much as it should have been.

I will have to rectify (ha-ha) that.