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I noticed a few things during my aerospace engineering career:

1: The engineers *tended* to be more “right of center” than the general local population (this was especially true when I lived in California)

2: The engineers *tended* to be less religious than the general population.

Note the repeated use of “tended.” I’ve known outright hippie engineers, tie-dyed and all. I’ve known seriously religious engineers, to the point of taking a year off of work to go to the Maldives and try to convert the local Muslim population to a brand of fundamentalist Christianism (note: I doubt he had much success, but he at least returned alive). Still, at least the places I’ve seen, the general tendency was to be neither very leftist nor very religious.

I’ve mentioned this before. But I’m bored, so I’ll drone on about it again, because this is my blog and I get to do what I want.

The lack of religiosity among aerospace and mechanical engineers makes sense to me. Engineers need stuff to work… and they need to know *how* it works. A description of how some machine is supposed to function is not supposed to include at any part in the flow chart or documentation the phrase “and then a miracle occurs.” Magic and miracles are alien to the engineering experience. There may be joking about “gremlins” and the like, but, trust me, if some machine keeps failing and the team leader in charge of explaining why actually argues that “gremlins” are the root cause… they’re getting another team leader. Similarly, the god hypothesis is not helpful in design or analysis of much of *anything.* And people tend to not believe in or put much faith in things that provide no utility. This may mean that some people become less religious as they become trained as engineers, and it may mean that some people who are less religious gravitate towards engineering.

On the political front, I think one area *might* explain why engineers *tend* to be less left-leaning. The confluence of right and wrong with certainty and uncertainty.

For an engineer, there can be high certainty that something is wrong. Rare to get high certainty that something new and complex is right. Example: you can be quite certain that building the leading edge of your spaceplane out of pot metal is the *wrong* answer. For a skyscraper in a region prone to hurricanes and earthquakes, a structural framework made out of cast iron girders held together with tin rivets is also highly likely to be the wrong answer. The *right* answer for these problems will be the result of a lot of analysis, and even then there will be some level of uncertainty. The more difficult the problem, the more certain you are about “wrong,” the less certain you are about “right.” This leads to a certain form of conservatism.

For a sort of cliched leftist, though, there is often a different approach to right and wrong. We’ve all seen wacky stories about notions about not teaching children that “4+4=9 is wrong” because it’ll hurt their feelings, or not to tell someone that such-and-such behavior is “wrong” even though common sense and 6,000 years of history and a whole lot of YouTube videos inform us that there are very often immediate unfortunate consequences of such actions. In essence, for this world view there is very low certainty about “wrong.”

Now, obviously almost everyone, including even the wackiest leftist, will generally recognize that Behavior X is a bad idea, that they themselves would not engage in it. But then the whole thing about “cultural relativism” kicks in, and they start making excuses. And of course, “diversity” is terribly important. But for the engineer, this reasoning is nonsensical. The principles of engineering apply worldwide. The same laws of physics apply over there as apply here. And diversity? In short… who cares. Whether the other engineers in your team are black or white or Asian or men or women or gay or straight or atheist or Christian or Muslim… F equals MA. Every friggen’ time. If one of your fellow engineers decides that the the rules of statics and dynamics don’t apply to him because he’s not constrained by what some dead straight white males said generations ago… it’s time to consider shaking up the roster of engineers on your team.

Summary: for engineers, magical thinking is not useful. And get used to the phrase, “No, you’re wrong, and here’s the math.” Read it. Learn it. Live it.

The idea of expanding STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) is flawed. Because in art “there are no wrong answers.” STEM fields, on the other hand, are *filled* with wrong answers. There is an infinity of wrong, with just rare islands of right. Try doing Math without that understanding, and you’ll end up profoundly useless.

That said, it’d be a good idea to have STEM and A cross paths from time to time. A whole lot of art *needs* proper engineering. That Statue of Liberty, for example, wouldn’t stand up without structural engineering; skyscrapers designed wholly by engineers would probably be a bit on the dull side. But to assume that Art actually fits into STEM? That there is a Wrong Answer.

Judge dismisses Utah man’s lawsuit against Taylor Swift

The dumb thing isn’t that the lawsuit was dismissed, but that it existed in the first place. In short, Random Guy writes an unsolicited song for Taylor Swift, who is reportedly a singer. Swifts agents never gave her the song. I suspect that celebrities get a *lot* of unsolicited stuff, the bulk of it talentless crap; I’ve no reason to suspect that this was any different. So the songwriter decided to sue for emotional damage or some such nonsense. The judge wisely tossed the suit.

If you remember back to when I first brought up Trigglypuff, I mentioned the minor difficulty I had in that I don’t want to mock people based on their appearance or other physical issues, but in some cases the persons behavior opens them up to all manner of ridicule. Well, guess what. Here we are again. Watch the video in the link and you’ll see what I mean.

This cartoon makes an important point:

As an American, I’m often confronted with people who demand that if I take any pride in American developments such as the space program or defeating Communism I must also take responsibility for things like slavery and the mistreatment of the Indians. On a simplistic level… sure, I suppose. But the distinction I make: I refuse to feel shame or pride for things that NO LONGER EXIST. The space program? Still exists. Slavery? A century and half gone. Nuclear power? Still exists (despite the best efforts of the anti-nuke activists). Jim Crow? Generations gone. First and Second Amendment? Still in force. Trail of Tears? Long over.

There are wrongs that still exist. The War on Some Drugs, for example. The Great Society programs that have contributed to the collapse of the family structure and the permanence of poverty. Idiotic rules and regulations on *everything,* political correctness and speech codes, the lack of forward progress on nuclear power, astrologers, televangelists, dubstep. They still exist, so we should own them. But demanding that people alive *now* take responsibility for things that happened and *ended* long before they were born is just stupid and wrong.

Trump’s election stole my desire to look for a partner

Poe’s Law comes into force here as well. It *could* be that the author is a right-winger cranking out fictional BS, simulating the stereotypical loonie leftie. And it could be that this is just an annoyed leftie, pretending to more crazy than she actually feels.

However it works out, it does point out a bug in the human operating system that I think is one of the more dangerous flaws we have: the desire to be seen as a victim.

We see it in several religions: the idea of the “martyr” as the ultimate in virtue. People getting upset about a mythical “war on Christmas” because some bored barista said “happy holidays” rather than “merry Christmas.” Or believing that there’s a “war on Christians” because they are not granted a special position in government-funded organizations like public schools or city council meetings. Or in one particular Religion Of Peace that thinks that it is in a House of War, that the whole world wants to destroy them because they have a monopoly on The Truth.

And of course we see it in the political realm, where a whole lot of people seem to think that armies of Evil Right Wingers are going to come and lock up Teh Gheys or force women into staying home barefoot and pregnant, or that there is a genocidal war by cops against black men. We see it in the faked “hate crimes,” where a people vandalize their own stuff in order to get… what? Sympathy? Funding in a GoFundMe account? Five minutes of fame, even if much of it is ridicule? And even the ridicule plays into the sense of persecution… which is what far too many people seem to thrive on. “I’m persecuted, therefore I’m Special and Important and my opinions carry special importance, and my failures aren’t really *my* failures, but signs of just how important I am that The Man has to put me down.”

Bah.

All I can say about the author of the piece above is that she seems… a little excitable. She mentions that she was dating someone when the election happened and that she halted the process when her candidate didn’t win.I imagine the feller was a little confuzzled about what just happened. But with any luck, that guy will read this essay and realize “Wow, did I ever dodge a bullet here.” And then he will give a little smile of relief like Billy/William/Man In Black/Gunman/Best Damn Character On TV here did in the season finale of “Westworld.”

Sadly, while Westworld has been picked up for a second season, it apparently won’t air until 2018. Feh. This is an outrage!

Cow attack farmer given suspended sentence over walker death

In short: someone decided to go wandering around on a farmers property, property that had cows on it. You know, those big-ass thousand-pound bundles of muscles, anger and dumb. This someone took his dog with him… you know, those yappy little bundles of energy that cows Just Don’t Like. In the end, the cows stomp the dude to death.

So how does the British legal system respond? Not by admonishing the walkers family for having raised a dumbass, too stupid to recognize that other people property is, you know, not his, and too stupid to avoid animals that *individually* could easily kill him – and which come in herds. Instead they punish the farmer for not having somehow made his farm idjitproof.