Common Sense 101 - Engineering - December 16, 2012 Edition

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Common Sense 101: Engineering Tabula Rasa. Page 64
Y 32. Autopilot ou know that airliners have an autopilot, right? The point is, basically, that there’s no point in burdening humans with more tasks than they need to carry out. It’s worked splendidly till now. Airline flying is the safest mode of transportation in the world, thanks at least partly to autopilots. Airline pilots are notorious for suffering from jet lag, and I’m sure autopilots have saved many a passenger from a pilot’s drowsiness. This happens to small-plane pilots too. One small-plane pilot, Bill Cox, writes in “Plane & Pilot” magazine, online at http://tinyurl.com/7kls6qm: I fell asleep on [a] 600-mile flight […], somewhere over the Colorado River. I overflew the LA Basin and woke up out over the Pacific, about 50 miles southwest of Catalina Island. Fortunately, I had plenty of fuel and a good autopilot, and was able to reverse course and return to the coast without problems. He adds: “It may seem counterintuitive for macho pilots, but an autopilot will nearly always do a better job than you will”. Okay. So why isn’t this system used more extensively? Consider cars, which crash—and I’m not kidding—millions of times every year in North America alone. According to http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/stats.html, There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States—one death every 13 minutes. And the figures are rising every year! Is this appalling or what. It’s ten times the rate of fatal workplace injuries—according to the “Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries”, August 25, 2011, http://www.bls.gov/iif/: The preliminary count of fatal work injuries in the U.S. in 2010 was 4,547, about the same as the final total of 4,551 in 2009. Today cars that will parallel-park themselves—without crashing into nearby cars, mind you!—are available to the mainstream buyer: so what could be so hard to prevent them crashing into other cars while being driven normally? One extremely easy way to do this would be to mandate a wi-fi transceiver in every car—just as seatbelts and airbags are mandated. Each car would communicate with cars in its vicinity, and a mandated computer installed along with the wi-fi would apply the brakes well before any collision could take place. Even if the cost of wi-fi-plus-computer, and all their peripherals, is as high as $2,000 per car—which is what a very good laptop with built-in wi-fi costs—the annual total would be a pittance: only $11 billion or so (since about 5.5 million cars are sold in the United States every year). Compare that with twenty times as much, $230 billion, which car crashes cost the US economy every year (and that was in 2005—now it’s probably higher). And that’s not even counting the lives saved and suffering prevented. Not a bad trade, is it? (Yeah, I know what you’re going to say: it’s not your job, it’s the legislators’. Sure it is, but they’re not going to do anything until engineers show them it can be done, are they? They don’t know what’s possible and what isn’t, engineering-wise. It’s for you to make them aware of the possibilities!) But there’s more. The principle behind the autopilot can be used even more effectively: not merely to control a gadget, but also to enable it to adjust, repair, restore and upgrade itself automatically. Take for instance computers. When computers break down it’s mostly due to a software issue, not a hardware one —except for a few things like hard disks crashing or screen pixels going dead. (And hard disks are soon going to go the way of the floppy, being replaced by solid state drives; and screens pixels going dead are becoming more and more of a rarity.) There’s absolutely no reason, therefore, for a computer not to run a software diagnostic test on itself every now and then, and repair any burgeoning problems automatically. If something is causing the computer to slow down or lag, for example, it could run the necessary diagnostic, download the repair software from the Internet, and install it automatically. A similar thing could apply to cars, most of which are already have a computer to control actuators in the engine to ensure optimum running. The car’s computer could easily be beefed up to do a running diagnosis of the car, and whenever something is getting out of whack, the driver could be alerted well before serious damage takes place, so that the car could be taken in and the problem fixed at relatively Page 65
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Common Sense 101: Engineering Laser
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Common Sense 101: Engineering by La
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T Dedication his book is dedicated
Page 9 and 10:
T The No-Small-Print Warranty he pr
Page 11 and 12:
I Introduction am not an engineer.
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25. Everything should be easy to ge
Page 15 and 16:
E 1. Good Intentions verything shou
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Good Intentions The boom problem co
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T 2. Oh, the Humanity! here’s a d
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M 3. Come Together, Right Now ost t
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A 4. Do it Yourself nd when I say
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T 5. Get Lost here’s also another
Page 27 and 28: T 6. I Like to Move it, Move it ake
Page 29 and 30: O 7. You C A N Take it With You f c
Page 31 and 32: T 8. Cleanliness is Next to Godline
Page 33 and 34: T 9. The Pyramids here’s an Arabi
Page 35 and 36: I 10. Heirlooms n the old days, peo
Page 37 and 38: 11. Put Your Money Where Your Mouth
Page 39 and 40: I 12. Maintenance t’s simply not
Page 41 and 42: T 13. Coolth he word “warmth” i
Page 43 and 44: D 14. Quark o you remember Quark? I
Page 45 and 46: A 15. What’s in a Name? ctually,
Page 47 and 48: I 16. Something Old, Something New
Page 49 and 50: I 17. The Eliminator kea has a phil
Page 51 and 52: A 18. The Sum of its Parts pparentl
Page 53 and 54: I 19. Don’t be Shy t’s no use h
Page 55 and 56: B 20. K.I.S.S. y K.I.S.S. I mean—
Page 57 and 58: I 21. Deliver Us t bears repeating,
Page 59 and 60: I 22. Easy, Pal! t all started in t
Page 61 and 62: A 23. Play it Again, Sam few years
Page 63 and 64: O 24. Upgradability ne problem Stra
Page 65 and 66: W 25. The Numbers Game hen you firs
Page 67 and 68: M 26. Recycling aybe some day whate
Page 69 and 70: E 27. Cool it, Man! verything shoul
Page 71 and 72: O 28. The Dark Side ne of the worst
Page 73 and 74: W 29. Finders Keepers, Losers Weepe
Page 75 and 76: J 30. It’s a Steal ust about ever
Page 77: O 31. Check this out! nce upon a ti
Page 81 and 82: W 33. It’s Standard hen you go to
Page 83 and 84: W 34. Waterproof hat could be so ha
Page 85 and 86: W 35. The Rotary Club e often derid
Page 87 and 88: C 36. Friction ontrary to what most
Page 89 and 90: O 37. Wireless f course we all get
Page 91 and 92: O 38. Swiss Army Knife nce upon a t
Page 93 and 94: W 39. Ouch! hat’s up with manufac
Page 95 and 96: T 40. Square Peg in Round Hole here
Page 97 and 98: D 41. Paint Job id you know that a
Page 99 and 100: W 42. Break Down hy do so many thin
Page 101 and 102: O 43. Deterioration ne of the worst
Page 103 and 104: T 44. Corrosion here are corrosive
Page 105 and 106: O 45. Rock and Roll ne of the worst
Page 107 and 108: T 46. R.T.F.M. hat stands, as you s
Page 109 and 110: W 47. Pinch Me hen I was a very you
Page 111 and 112: I 48. Shocking am a fairly good han
Page 113 and 114: R 49. Leaks emember the Exxon Valde
Page 115 and 116: B 50. The Future is Where You’ll
Page 117 and 118: The Future is Where You’ll be Spe
Page 119 and 120: Write or draw something. Be an arti
Page 121: T About the Author he author is a n
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Common Sense 101 - Engineering - December 16, 2012 Edition

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