Scales of Engineering

-

Morning routine. SESIG meeting spanning 3D scanning to locomotive restoration. Exercise. Amazon order extraction progress. Editing photos from Joey's December shoot. Beer:30 with familiar faces. Formal Logic lecture on syllogisms.

SESIG conversations, Beer:30 connections, and structured thinking

Events and activities that occurred on Friday, January 30, 2026

The SESIG meeting ranged across an impressive technical landscape. Larry demonstrated his new 3D scanner for capturing compound curves—the kind of precision work needed to create Kydex molds for his projects. The scanner produces meshes compatible with Fusion 360, which the group confirmed remains the gold-standard CAD tool and is free for hobby use. Jon then shifted the conversation to an entirely different scale: his locomotive restoration work on a 750,000-pound Streamliner capable of 105 mph. The first steam-up is planned for around February 10th, and he walked through the fuel systems (diesel or Bunker C oil), water requirements giving roughly 200-300 miles of range, and the safety protocols involved in fuel tank work.

The conversation turned to AI's impact on work and education. Bill described CS50's transformation after introducing an AI teaching assistant called DUC, resulting in a tenfold enrollment increase. The group explored which roles AI might reshape: consensus emerged that positions requiring deep understanding and problem-solving remain valuable, while simpler translation tasks face more pressure. I shared my own experience developing systems in days that previously took weeks, alongside the ongoing challenge of getting consistent email summarization from different AI tools.

Christmas socks finally arrived. :-)
The afternoon brought physical work: three 45-second planks, fifteen bird-dogs, five stretches, and fifteen curls. Between tasks, I edited a few photos from the December shoot with Joey and pushed forward on the Amazon order extraction project, processing several more pages of transaction history.

Beer:30 at Block 15 drew many familiar faces. I spent most of the time talking with Joe Monteleone—need to get him signed up for the Philomath Salons. Tim offered a ride home, providing good conversation along the way. The evening wound down with a Formal Logic lecture drilling into syllogisms.

The day's range of scales stuck with me—from Larry's millimeter-precision scanning to Jon's 750,000-pound locomotive, from the intimate craft of photo editing to the broad societal questions of AI reshaping education. Engineering problems come in every size, but the satisfaction of understanding them feels remarkably consistent.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is Humanity Worth Saving?

-
Image
It's an interesting question given humanity's propensity for shortsighted and self-destructive decision making.  Glibly, the answer is no.  It's not worth saving and should get exactly what it deserves.  It is not earning its way as a responsible contributor to the universe.   That, of course, begs the question of what does the universe want? Other than a few fantasies that we've crafted it's unclear. We have values as humans such as order, beauty, and joy.  Science is the objective pursuit of discovering order in the universe.  Beauty straddles a line between the objective and subjective.  Much of what is considered to be beautiful are objective observations with subjective assessments.  Joy is entirely subjective and tends to be generated by the orderly and beautiful. These are potential self-centered reasons for humans to continue to exist, but in an of themselves don't answer the question of what the universe wants. What does the universe...
Read more

Understanding

-
One of the more entertaining aspects of the current conversations around AI is how much it challenges what we've believed, perhaps for centuries, about the nature of thinking. We've discovered that we don't currently possess objective and testable definitions for words like sentience and consciousness.  For reference, here are a couple of current definitions... Sentience - feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought. ( Merriam-Webster ) Consciousness - the state of understanding and realizing something. ( Cambridge Dictionary ) Words like feeling, sensation, perception, thought, and realizing don't add a lot of value and tend to make definitions circular, but if you distill them you end up understanding as a component of each.  "Understanding" is a word worth exploring. Just for reference here are some of Merriam-Webster's definitions of the word " understand "... : to grasp the meaning of : to grasp the reasonableness of ...
Read more

Identity

-
I recommend the book ... Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment  by Francis Fukuyama In fact,  I'll even elevate it to the status of Lonnie's Core Educational Books that everyone should read.
Read more