Machine Design Blogs

The Washington Post has an online section devoted to correcting misstatements of President Obama. Two of the more recent entries about the auto industry are interesting and funny:

9:41 p.m.

“As for our auto industry, everyone recognizes that years of bad decision-making and a global recession have pushed our automakers to the brink. We should not, and will not, protect them from their own bad practices.”

This is part of the story. The other part is trade barriers set up by foreign nations to limit the import of U.S. vehicles. South Korea, for instance, has until recently been a market largely closed to Detroit automakers, thanks to high tariffs, while Americans bought Hyundais and Kias by the thousands. –Frank Ahrens

“And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.”

It’s doubtful that President Obama is referring here to Germany, home of Karl Friedrich Benz, inventor of the first true, four-wheel, gasoline-powered, internal-combustion-engine auto, or his contemporary, Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler, who did same. America — Henry Ford — invented mass production of the auto. –Frank Ahrens

Here is the link to the column:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/02/24/live_fact_check.html

A common stereotype holds that engineers are purely logical, detailed-minded, and obsessesed with function. But some technical types also have a “softer” side, engoying artistic endeavors such as reading literature or building one-person airplanes in their garages. Those liking to cook might visit an aptly named site Cooking For Engineers, the tag line of which is “Have an analytical mind? Like to cook? This is the site to read!” Recipes listed included Asian Taco, Grilled Artichokes, and Sauteed Okra with Roasted Peppers. Also included are clever engineered implements, such as a CoolCover, essentially, a lid that covers food and holds an ice pack.

Andrew Lahde, a hedge fund manager whose fund was up something like a factor of 8.7 last year, closed his fund in October due to lack of opportunities. His strategy was to sell short a lot of the financial instruments that have caused banks and other institutions so much trouble. (Selling short is selling something you don’t actually own, with the expectation you will be able to buy it at a much cheaper price later on and deliver it to whom ever you sold short to.)

His comments about closing his fund are precious. You can find the majority of them at the Financial Times site: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2008/10/17/17194/andrew-lahde-bows-out-in-style/

Here is a particularly interesting portion:

“………The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

There are far too many people for me to sincerely thank for my success. However, I do not want to sound like a Hollywood actor accepting an award. The money was reward enough. Furthermore, the endless list those deserving thanks know who they are.

I will no longer manage money for other people or institutions. I have enough of my own wealth to manage. Some people, who think they have arrived at a reasonable estimate of my net worth, might be surprised that I would call it quits with such a small war chest. That is fine; I am content with my rewards. Moreover, I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life………”

Well, good for him. I think a lot of us would be happy to throw away our Blackberrys and enjoy life if we had the resources to do so.

This post has nothing at all to do with engineering or machine design. But the news bothered me enough to want to share it as a pre-cautionary tale.

An unlicensed, non-medical individual recently allegedly injected two women with a combination of saline and industrial silicone oil, telling them it would enhance the shape of their buttocks. Both women are now hospitalized, with critical, potentially irreversible harm. Many doctors have now seen instances of complications from such botched injection procedures skyrocket. An independent study shows the rate and type of such adverse events reported to the FDA.

The moral of the story: Vanity can kill you.

As we contemplate how many billions of dollars it takes to keep GM afloat, here is a lighter look at things. “One test drive will convince you you’d choose it over foreign brands, even if they were still legal.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAqPMJFaEdY

The Competitive Enterprise Institute passes on this helpful bit of information about the roughly $2 trillion the U.S. will be spending between the Secretary Geithner’s new bank bailout plan and President Obama’s stimulus package: $2 trillion is bigger than the entire Gross Domestic Product of our neighbor to the north, Canada. In fact, according to the IMF, only Japan, Germany, China, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy have bigger total economies than the combined bailout/stimulus plan—all other countries on Earth have economies smaller than $2 trillion per year.

And if you’d like to see a visual model of what a trillion dollars would look like all in one place, check this out:

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

I’m at the SolidWorks 2009 conference in Orlando, Florida, looking out my hotel room window, which oversees a lake lined with palm trees, the Swan Resort with giant statures of swans on its rooftop, and blue, sunny skys. I heard it is warmer in Cleveland, but I am in no rush to get back home to snow, ice, and near zero temperatures.

Yesterday, I spoke with Haruyoshi Iida, President and CEO of SolidWorks Japan K.K. He says the CAD system first came to Japan in 1995 when Jon Hershtik made sure to introduce a localized version for the language. Interestingly, SolidWorks has an large presense in Japan, he says, with about 80,000 seats, 40,000 of which are commercial. Mr. Iida says Japan has 300,000 manufacturing companies, mostly heavy industry. Many of these companies still use 2D, but industry is slowly moving to 3D. He says Japanese companies are not “in a big rush.”

According to CEO Jeff Ray, over 4,000 people are attending the SolidWorks World 2009 event being held in Orlando, Florida over the next few days. Although times are tough, that is not evident at this show. Attendees are upbeat and the theme “innovation” predominates. The Great Depression spawned nylon, car radios, and everyone’s favorite — SPAM. Today’s big problems can be addressed by yet more innovative designs. Take for example modern windmills, which came out of a need for sustainable energy. Many people don’t want them in their back yards and the devices are expensive. Still in the concept phase is a 3 to 4-ft tall windmill that would fit on a house rooftop and generate enough energy for the house. Another problem: many people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. A company has invented a device that bombards drinking water with UV light, cleaning the water without the use of chemicals or chlorine. Fifty of the devices are currently being deployed near N.Y.C., enough to fill the Empire State Bldg. eight times a day with water.

Sir Richard Branson spoke on the first day. For a guy worth billions of dollars, he is quite personable, humble, and has a wicked sense of humor. He has started another company — Virgin Galactic Airways — because he thinks commercial space aviation will become a reality. His suggestions for combatting a tough economy:

– Expand out of it instead of contracting. If you can afford to, continue to innovate.

– Before just laying people off explore the alternatives such as job sharing. There might be employees who would really appreciate only having to work a few days a week such as ones with small children.

Branson says America is quite protectionist, which translates to anti-innovative. “We must get rid of all the barriers in the world,” he says. He is a big fan of Obama.

Day Two, Jon Hirshtick, the former CEO of SolidWorks, spoke on what he says will be the technologies most important in affecting CAD in the future:

– Touch and motion UIs. A lot of industrial designers already use Wacon Tablets, like a big computerized drawcuesing pad that imports Photoshop files, and draw directly on them.

– CAD will become a hardware business again in that more and more users will be using hardware specifically designed for CAD such as the 3D mouse.

– Online applications will get even more prevelant. Already have an application on SolidWorks Labs (labs.solidworks.com) to create 2D drawings which can be accessed by many devices including cell phones.

– Video gaming technology will get increasingly prevelant in CAD. Features such as ambient occlusion are already in CAD that have been borrowed from video games. Many graphic gards now have more transistors on them than CPUs.

– 3D printing will become a key part of the design process and be used iteratively.

Other speakers mentioned how industrial design uses “styling cues” from other areas of society to get ideas for designs. Industrial designers choose a “form language” they are interested in for different products.

Check out smoothon.com for material that lets you rapidly mold things using, say, a 3D printed mold.

BoardCAD.com is a free download for making surface models for things like surfboards.

More than just user-centric, design nowadays must be desire-centric. This even applies to machine design which can borrow techniques from consumer design.

The Alliance for American Manufacturing held a conference call today addressing concerns about whether ‘buy American’ provisions in the bloated stimulus bill making its way through Congress could lead to the next Great Depression. The reason for this concern is that trade protectionism is one of the factors that lead to the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to historians. One country erected trade barriers back then because they didn’t want to ‘export jobs,’ and other countries followed suit. Pretty soon, nobody was selling anything to anybody.

The AAM’s call was illuminating on several points. They say there are already ‘buy American’ provisions on the books, and there are similar policies in place in other countries. They also say the provisions in the recently passed House bill “are fully consistent with existing U.S. trade obligations and can help to strengthen the U.S. economy and create jobs.”

One other bit from the Alliance:

The U.S. has been a leading party in reaching broad international procurement agreements, has adhered to all related obligations, and has set a strong example of sourcing materials globally for its domestic governmental projects. By contrast, other countries have held themselves out of the reform movement and have instead opted to promote their own manufacturing base through closed self-procurement programs. A good example is China, which, in addition to a recent $586 billion stimulus program, continues to subsidize its own producers via deliberate (and illegal) currency undervaluation. Until countries like China make the same commitments, and sign-on to internationally accepted procurement agreements, the U.S. will accomplish nothing by making yet more unilateral concessions.

You can view their Web site here:

www.americanmanufacturing.org