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The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski

Sometimes you do things when you’re not sure and you just have a hunch.  Sometimes you don’t know the logic or the reasoning behind your decisions – you just know it makes sense.

 

SWIVL recommends a wonderful book, The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski for your September – October reading that provides an excellent summary of science and engineering, their differences and similarities.  This is a well written book, easy to understand, and quick to the point on how and why we make decisions; decisions based on experiences, common sense, and just plain human ingenuity. For example, Petroski tells the story of the Wright brothers and their invention of flight.  These brothers knew what to do but not why.  Here's a little bit of their story:

 

"The airplane is another classic example of a thing being designed, built, and operated before there was a complete scientific explanation of its working principles. The Wright brothers were neither scientists nor engineers in any formal sense, but that is not to say that they did not apply scientific and engineering methods to develop a machine capable of powered flight.  They read what they could find on the problems, experience, and phenomena associated with flight, and they experimented with different designs and profiles for wings and propellers, which they thought of as rather complicated rotating wings, to find the best shape for their purposes.  . . . When a Wright propeller broke in flight, it revealed a weakness that was fixed by a redesign.  What the brothers could not appeal to in their quest was a fully predictive engineering science of aerodynamics.  The development of that would follow the existence of airplanes whose powered flight begged for analysis.  Indeed, airplanes would be flying for decades before there was a full physical and mathematical explanation of why wings worked."

Petroski has taken a subject that at first glace might seem to be rather esoteric and limited to a scientific audience, and shaped it into an important story about how science and engineering have singularly and together created the wonders of our world today.  Equally important is that Mr. Petroski has provided numerous metaphors and analogies to help us understand how invention takes place not just in the physical and material world but also how we can reinvent ourselves to be more productive and successful in society. Click here to purchase a copy of the book.  As you read this book please feel free to add your own comments below.

SWIVL to be at Animal Rights Conference

Dr. Kathleen Wishnick will represent SWIVL at the Animal Rights (AR) Conference 2010, the world's largest and oldest animal rights gathering.  The Conference will take place in Washington D.C., July 15-19^th.  AR 2010 is the animal rights movement's annual national conference.  No external contributions to SWIVL were used to support Dr Wishnick’s attendance at the AR Conference.

Animal Rights 2010 is a forum for sharing experience, giving information, reporting on progress, discussing what works, networking, learning new strategies, training, and education.  The Conference brings together a diverse set of individuals and organizations concerned about ending the oppression of animals.  Wishnick is specifically interested in finding out about volunteer recruitment and intern programs, fundraising strategies, and the latest in farmed and companion animal facilities and equipment.

Your Contributions Provide Shelter from the Arizona Sun

Lila and Katie have a new shelter thanks to the generous contributions of SWIVL supporters.   Constructed by local builders, SWIVL works with teachers, parents, and community members to develop strong relationships driven by a mutual respect for all sentient beings.  All tax deductible contributions go directly to SWIVL services and programs.  According to SWIVL Co- Founder, Dr. Kathleen Wishnick, It did not take long for these two sisters to find their new shelter – free from the Arizona desert sun.  Wishnick, who rescued Lila and Katie in California and drove them back to Arizona, is grateful to the people that made this shelter possible.  

Lila and Katie are two of the lucky ones.  They are loved and most of all respected.  It is estimated that 90% of all pigs, like Lila and Katie, spend their lives in factory farms. Lila and Katie, like their brothers and sisters everywhere, are highly social, affectionate and intelligent creatures, and suffer both physically and emotionally when they are confined in narrow cages where they cannot even turn around.

Many pigs become crazy with boredom and develop vices like mouthing, and nervous ticks; others are driven to fighting and cannibalism because of their frustration.   Factory farm pigs never see daylight until they are shipped for slaughter. Dust, dirt and toxic gases from the pigs' waste create an unsanitary environment that encourages the onset of a number of diseases and illnesses, including pneumonia, cholera, dysentery and trichinosis. 

Please make a tax deductible contribution to help us save and protect more companion and farmed animals.  SWIVL desperately needs to build shelters, including water and sanitary facilities, in order to rescue and protect other animals from the harsh Arizona summer.

July Book of the Month – “Hope for the Flowers” by Trina Paulus

Don’t let the cover fool you.  There is more philosophy, common sense, and optimism in this tiny book than you'll find in a year’s worth of CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times combined.  Hope for the Flowers describes a world of potential and possibilities where responsibility, self-reliance, and independence fuels life and life experiences. There are no entitlements, handouts or victims in this book.  Click here for a link to Trina's personal web site to find out more about Hope for the Flowers, other work that Trina and her team are doing, and most important   .   .   .   hope.   Hope for the Flowers should be read by every child – no every adult.

 

A Serious Man: Finding Purpose & Meaning in a World with No Answers

For the month of July 2010, SWIVL recommend the film, A Serious Man.  A Serious Man tells the story about one person’s search for answers to existential questions about the purpose of life and its meaning.  In many ways the film it is a philosophical and theological wrestling match where history intersects with the future to determine the present.

A Serious Man is a modern day story of the biblical figure, Noah.  For Noah, storm clouds are on the horizon. A funnel cloud threatens to return creation to chaos. Apparently this is a fitting punishment for a society bathed in violence and bloodshed. We all know that Noah hearkens to God’s commands; he builds an ark and helps animals enter two by two. But who is Noah before the flood? What is the young Noah like?

In his book, Sages and Dreamers, Elie Wiesel, recipient, paints a picture of Noah as a character who leaves much to be desired. He never acts, he only reacts. He never aspires to grandeur; he is mired in routine. To paraphrase Jean Paul Sartre, he took great events and reduced them to small circumstances.

However, when the storm hits, Noah is all action. Ignoring the calamity around him, he builds an ark. Noah is responsible for his family; he cares for the animals and is committed to life. This is Noah at his best. He is selfless, devoted, and tireless.

A Serious Man reminds us that though we may kick and scream, though we may protest or try to hide, there are times when despite our best effort, we cannot stop or change the future. In those instances, rather than holding back the flood, we must use our energy to find a new sense of purpose – to respond to problems when seemingly no solution exists. 

This is the lesson that the main character in A Serious Man must learn.  Although life may be disorienting, cruel, and indifferent, we must still be responsible, self-reliant and resilient.  Life is not necessarily finding answers to our problems. It’s about living with them. In the words of poet Ranier Maria Rilke: Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves … Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way to the answer. 

Moving from theory to practice, the 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl chronicles his experiences as a inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding a reason to live. According to Frankl, We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. 

We can learn a lot about purpose and meaning from Wiesel and Frankl: compassion, sympathy, and care.  We can also learn about purpose and meaning from the film, A Serious Man.  Perhaps, more importantly, however, we can unlearn much of what we think we know.

United Nations Urges Worldwide Shift Away From Animal Products
A new United Nations report entitled Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production is the first of its stature to actually stress the necessity of moving away from meat and dairy. Specifically, the paper says that “impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth [and] increasing consumption of animal products [...] A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.”

View the Executive Summary and the Findings and Conclusions (PDFs).

The report goes into detail about the consequences we can expect if business continues as usual. Increases in population and wealth have historically resulted in increased consumption of meat, dairy, and eggs, which they blame for the bulk of agriculture’s environmental impact. Agriculture is said to be responsible 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use and 19% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

It is now undeniable that we need to substantially reduce our use of animal products in order to prevent global catastrophe. The simplest way to do this is to adopt a vegan diet, which, in addition to avoiding all of animal agriculture’s ecological impacts, also spares the lives of dozens of animals each year- amounting to thousands over one’s lifetime. The American Dietetic Association calls a well planned vegan diet “healthful and nutritionally adequate […] for individuals during all stages of the lifecycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes” and adds that it “may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.”

Israel: Guilty Until Proven Guilty

For the month of June 2010, SWIVL enters the world of YouTube to show the media bias towards Israel even in the face of solid evidence.   SWIVL provides videos for your review that distinguish fact from fiction.  In a world where the media is more interested in theater than the truth, individuals are able to judge for themselves through primary video sources.   The result is that people are becoming more and more skeptical of the media as they are able to see events through their own eyes.

Media Unable to Ignore the Evidence: When confronted with compelling video evidence, many media outlets have been unable to contest the images of Israeli soldiers attacked with clubs, iron poles and knives.  The UK's Channel 4 News invited a British naval analyst and counter-terror expert to analyze IDF footage:

Facts Supporting the Videos: In the aftermath of Israel's raid on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara, during which Israeli naval commandos were attacked and several passengers were killed, the media provided non-stop coverage with both information and misinformation. The following backgrounder sorts out the facts from the falsehoods.  Continue reading.

The primary aim of the Gaza flotilla was not to provide humanitarian relief; it was to cause a provocation with Israel. Its top organizers and some of its participants are radicals with ties to terrorist groups that sought a violent confrontation.  Netanyahu: "Israel Is Guilty Until Proven Guilty"

 

  

Probably the best example of how the international community has and continues to be manipulated by the anti-Israel public relations machine is a parody on We are the World.

June Book of the Month - "The World Turned Upside Down" by Melanie Phillips

 

Is there a world-wide cultural collapse?  Is the United States no longer a culture of success?   Has England become a satellite for Moslem extremists?  Is multiculturalism a Trojan horse for cultural relativism and anything goes?  Have we lost our ideals that promote a strong work ethic, an independent spirit, and the primacy of the family? 

 

If these questions intrigue you or arouse your curiosity, you will want to read the SWIVL recommendation for June 2010, The World Turned Upside Down by Melanie Phillips.

According to Phillips, the West is losing both its rationality and its freedoms. The West is succumbing to a "soft totalitarianism," which not only is creating an ugly mood of intolerance but is undermining its ability to defend itself against Islamic aggression. While the Islamists are intent on returning the free world to the seventh century, the West no longer seems willing or able to defend the modernity and rationalism that it brought into being.

The basic cause of all this unreason is the erosion of the building blocks of western civilization. We tell ourselves that religion and reason are incompatible, but in fact the opposite is the case. It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible that gave us our concepts of reason, progress and an orderly world-the foundations of science and modernity.

The loss of religious belief has meant the West has replaced reason and truth with ideology and prejudice, which it enforces in the manner of a secular inquisition. The result has been a kind of mass derangement, as truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are all turned upside down. In medieval-style witch- hunts, scientists who are skeptical of global warming are hounded from their posts; Israel is ferociously demonized; and the United States is vilified over the war on terror-all on the basis of falsehoods and propaganda that are believed as truth.

Thus the West is losing both its rationality and its freedoms. It is succumbing to a "soft totalitarianism," which not only is creating an ugly mood of intolerance but is undermining its ability to defend itself against Islamic aggression. While the Islamists are intent on returning the free world to the seventh century, the West no longer seems willing or able to defend the modernity and rationalism that it brought into being.

With cold, perceptive, exhaustive and persistent passion, Melanie Phillips dissects the phenomenon among disparate movements, to reach disturbing but compelling conclusions about the erosion of modern progressive society – a society based on personal responsibility, independence, and self-reliance - by ideologies whose surprising interconnections are meticulously identified. One can only hope that her book will penetrate the information cocoon into which many of our intelligentsia have have sealed themselves."  Continue reading.

What Daniel Pearl's decapitation means to Barack Obama

Even given Obama’s ever more terrifying and lethal performance in office, his comments about the jihadi murder of Daniel Pearl, and in front of Daniel’s bereaved family, are simply astounding. This is what Obama said:  ‘Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is.’

Daniel Pearl was not murdered because he was a journalist. He was decapitated because he was an American Jew. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed cut off his head in an act of unimaginable barbarism, which was videoed in order to incite other Muslims to similar acts of barbarism and to destroy the will of the west to defend itself.  Continue reading.

CA Cities Can Now Boycott Each Other

California's penal code section 834b requires, not merely permits, law enforcement to attempt to verify the immigration status of people who are suspected of being in the US illegally.

But there are basic differences.

The California law requires verification of immigration status when a person has been arrested. Under section 834 of the Calif. Penal Code, that means when a person has been taken into custody. Arizona requires verification when there has been "any lawful stop, detention, or arrest." Note that HB2162, the amendments to the original Arizona law, inserted "any lawful stop, detention or arrest" in place of "contact .Arizona requires verification when there is "reasonable suspicion" that the person being stopped, detained, or arrested might be in the US illegally. California does not require "reasonable" suspicion. Verification is required only if it is "suspected" that the person is in the US illegally.

But one difference stands out. Nothing in the California Penal Code Section 834b prohibits police from basing their decision on a person's race or ethnicity the way HB2162 explicitly prohibits Arizona police from considering "race, color, or national origin" when carrying out their duties "except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution." Again, Arizona's SB1070 prohibited police from solely basing their actions on "race, color or national origin." HB2162 deleted the word "solely," which means that the police cannot consider these factors at all unless it is permitted by the US and Arizona Constitutions.