I am a retired engineer who had a long and interesting career. The one thing that stands out in my mind is how much writing is involved in a technical career. Being able to do the work is often not enough. You have to be able to communicate with coworkers, managers, customers, and many others. The acronym STEM is in some places being replaced by STEAM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math. The phrase, "State of The Art" is heard often in engineering circles and most people do not understand that engineering owes as much of its heritage to Art as to Science. All of the basic machines were in use long before there was any science to understand them. The Romans, and before them probably the Babylonians, built amazing aqueducts without knowledge of the science of Fluid Mechanics. The steam engine was invented and put to use before the science of Thermodynamics was developed. However, it is only when Science/Engineering is combined with the Arts do we have the amazing burst of invention that has characterized the last century or a bit more.

Whether it is called STEM or STEAM one problem is that too many people think in terms of training and not education. There is a huge difference, and only when both Art and Science are taught with the goal of imparting a true and deep understanding of how the world works is it really an education.

A simple way to remember the difference is to ask yourself one question. "Would you prefer to have your teenaged daughter enrolled in a sex education class or a sex training class?"

Problems with injector design and combustion instability go back to to the Germans and the V2. They may have even been a problem for Goddard. The V2 engine is really a bunch of small combustion chambers at the top feeding into the main engine bell. I believe this was done, at least in part, to reduce the problems with combustion instability.

A much better and more efficient way to accurately simulate this process can really offer a lot in many areas, not just rocket engines.

My first "personal computer" was a PDP-8i at Georgia Tech in the late 1960's. The ISy school had one in a small room in the basement with an ASR TTY (33 I think). There was another room with at least one more TTY with punch and you would code on that machine and after signing up for time on the PDP-8i you would take your paper tape in and after toggling in the boot sequence and loading the BIN tape then the Assembler you would run your tape to punch out your assembled program to run on the machine. I may be leaving out a number of steps since that was a while back.

in any case that was my first taste of writing any code in a machines assembly language and even then I dreamed of having my very own PDP-8.

This is a cool project and even for an Old Man I can fully relate to why it was done. I think this experience led to a life long career working with computers ranging from Big Iron mainframes to PC's networks and a variety of internal and Internet facing Servers. Yes, even though retired, I have a couple of Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's around to play with! Learning new things has kept me going all these years.

This does, somehow, seem to be applicable.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
--- Richard P. Feynman

The experiment is in progress. Nature will give us the answer in time, but by then it will probably be too late do do anything about it if we don't like that answer.

My main gripe about the changes back and forth are when they occur. Early March is too early to Spring Forward, even down here in the south, and early November is too late to Fall Back. I am old enough to remember when we DID go DST all year. I think it was in 1973 during the first oil embargo, and the idea was to save energy. Not really sure how, or if, that worked at all. I do know that in central Ohio, where I was at the time, it stayed dark until pretty late in the morning, and everyone was talking about the kids at the bus stop at Zero Dark Thirty.

There have been studies that show an increase in traffic accidents during a period after the transition, and other studies that we are more refreshed if we wake up to a slowly increasing level of light in the morning. I know I do.

Now, since this is a SAVINGS plan we really need to get some interest on the savings. We could save all that daylight during the summer when we have plenty and get it back in the winter when we need it!

I do plan to give it a test and may well migrate to it. I am still using Opera 12 for some things that it does better than any other browser I have tried.

Uh, The spark gap transmitters used by Hertz and Marconi were digital (Morse code is a digital protocol) and for the most part the only tuning was done by the antenna. Latter there was some sort of tank circuit or resonant tuning added, but I don't think so in the beginning.

This may be true for a meeting with all or mostly technical types, but throw in a pointy haired manager or two and the information exchange bandwidth goes asymptotically towards zero.

The cat is out of the bag and they keep trying to stuff it back in

About 16 to 17 hours for sound at STP, but that would have been one damn loud DNS server! There would still be some latency in the A to D conversion (that's audio to digital).

I read the article in the link in this post and it seems to be a complete disconnect from the post. Did he even read it? I don't disagree with Nye at all and everyone needs to have some basic understanding of science or else everything the least bit technical in this world is just magic.

A decade or more ago I had a temp working for me who was a CS student at a nearby university. He was good at the routine stuff, but one question and his reason for it blew my mind. It had to do with how a change in our DNS server got to all the other DNS servers on the Internet in just a few hours. After some discussion on how this worked I realized that his primary misunderstanding was that he did not realize that the speed of light was a wee bit faster than the speed of sound.

Guess they didn't notice what happened to Radio Shack after they morphed into a cell phone store.

I dumped Turbo Tax for a competitor when they used DRM at least a decade or more ago. I do my own taxes with TaxAct and have been using it since then. I am retired and have Social Security, some retirement income from a defined benefit plan that is still around and investment income. I could afford to hire a CPA or anyone else to do my taxes, but I don't want to. I use the process as an opportunity to review my investments and how they impact my taxes and make changes that benefit ME. As a retired engineer the way taxes are calculated drives me nuts, but what do you expect when Lawyers try to do math?

Georgia has the BEST durn govment that MONEY can buy ---- and believe me it HAS been bought

I have often spent more time and money repairing something when it would have been much easier and cheaper to replace it. I am 67 and from the generation just after the Great Depression and I guess I learned that sort of frugality, or perhaps now false frugality from them. However, my late wife used to lament that I never just fixed something I would redesign or re-engineer it. And, yes I am an engineer.