A nice read ... still very helpful
Mike Green
Posts: 23,101
I've just started Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I recommend it for its discussion of the role of technology in our lives as well as other thoughts. I hadn't remembered that the author wrote computer manuals for a living. I particularly liked this passage:
The Budda, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Budda ... which is to demean oneself.
The Budda, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Budda ... which is to demean oneself.
Comments
-Phil
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
-Phil
It's hard to discern causes and effects in cases like this, but I know I read that book at about the time I made the switch from aspiring theoretical physicist to mechanical engineer. Soon afterwards or simultaneously I ended up working in a lab where we had to make all of our own equipment, which meant lots of time working in a very old machine shop. The general attitude of the book summed up my approach to working with machines and converting into a hands-on person. Working with objects, designing them in your head and building them with your hands, can induce a certain state of mind, if you allow it to. And I think that particular state of mind - call it zen or intuition or whatever - can feed back into the process of creation, into the problem-solving process, leading to some ah-ha! moments if you let it.
I'm sure the same state of mind can be achieved by any creative process, whether it be grease monkey work or computer programming, but I notice it more when physical things are involved. And I suspect the interaction and participation of mind with the physical world has a lot to do with it. One of the things that bothers me about our present day education system and society in general is how the post 9/11 and drug maker fear culture and legal liability mania has put a stranglehold on kids getting their hands on things like chemistry sets, etc. Nowadays a lot of schools will not do chemistry experiments at the school. Science Fair experiments must be done at home and only the poster is brought to school - no stuff allowed. And yet chemical supply houses refuse to sell anything to people for anything at home, so it's Catch 22. Consequently, the kids don't know how to do anything anymore. In the name of public safety or liability, we're developing a Click-here Culture divorced from physical processes and hands-on understanding. And as more and more of our society is brought up fearing science in that way, the harder it will be to convince the mooing herds that there is something vast and deeply important about doing this sort of thing for real.
Yep, can you imagine that back in the 70s aged 13 or 14 us guys in school were sand casting objects in molten aluminium. Not to mention that the trusted ones of us in school were allowed to use lathes, mills etc in the machine shop without any supervision during lunch breaks
How is anyone supposed to learn anything with out some risk? And responsibility is one of those things one should be learning. Science fair experiments at home only? Are they insane?
As for zen. When that book came out I had a Yamaha motorcycle. The opening pages of the repair manual for that bike contained this priceless advice:
"Repair of Yamaha motorcycle requires great peace of mind"
I've heard rumor of kids who are brilliant DIYers not even bothering to enter Science Fairs because to do so would mean either dumbing themselves down to perform "baby" experiments or revealing what they really do at home. And to reveal what they really do at home might prompt school officials to make a report to Child Protective Services, etc. Contrast that to the fact you can go to the nearby Walmart and buy boxes of bullets. And in parts of Pennsylvania they let kids off school for a week because so many of them won't show up anyway because it's deer huntin season. And in Texas you can't even own a boiling flask without a state permit, and a state permit requires an agent from Texas Department of Homeland Security to inspect the premises.
One of the few reasons I occasionally shop at Walmart, why pay more to exercise your rights than you need too.
C.W.
From my cold dead hands...
I just isn't safe to have people committing unsupervised science...
C.W.
Hello!
I quite agree.
About thirty years ago, during my high school days, I was just beginning to start the series of steps that would be bringing me here. What happens? Someone who, ah, would certainly qualify for a visit from an appropriate department, thought to do something similar. The end result was that we both got our soldering irons confiscated, because he was a klutz. I was taught to be careful.
When I got to my next stop regarding schools, some years earlier, there he was. I found out that the instructors thought he was a heap big pile of..... you all know.
Now I think twice about explaining what I do here, mostly because earlier on someone asked, and I answered something along the lines of making a certain type of device at home.
But yes I experienced that famous book also in the same school, it was reprinted by Scholastic magazines. It was a joy to read. I'm tempted to obtain a copy for the same reason that I have here the book written by a good author about how to build a computer.....
Hello!
Hmmmmm. I wonder if they had me in mind? I was one of them.
Supervised science? Interesting, uh, concept.
I have a 1972 Yamaha RD350 that I'm restoring. I have a shop manual for it, but I knew I was still missing something.
This bike belonged to my dad, It has been sitting in the storage for 15 years. It runs, but it is not very pretty.
Imagine what they could have done with proper supervison...
C.W.
Yep, that about sums it up.
C.W.
What single event (a few hours) can be used to teach university engineering freshmen something "useful"?
Restrictions:
---Cannot cost more than $5 total per person, and must source common parts (preferably non-internet)
---Must use simple (preferably non power) tools
---Should have a definable educational value (for the boss)
---Death/serious injury should be difficult
For example, I recently put on an event to make simple catapults. About 20 students participated, and seemed to have fun.
First thing leaps to mind is building and launching water-bottle rockets, the 2-liter soda bottle kind that you fill partly with water, pump with air using a bicycle pump, then release. If you have a group size over which you can spread the cost, then you can afford a powered air compressor, etc. and still be under your $5/person budget. My own experience shows that you don't even need to put fins on these bottles: they fly pretty well without fins so long as their tops are weighted somewhat so the inertia will carry the rocket after the water is gone. You experiment by varying the ratio of water to air, the amount of inertia you place on the top, etc. Injury is easy if you stick the air hose into your eye socket, but otherwise it's fairly safe, but wearing safety glasses is always a good idea. One kid showed me you don't even need a fancy launcher - just press the bottle (with or without fins) onto the rubber stopper and throw the switch on the air line - you can get 60-80 feet just with that and the rocket can lift a wooden block that weighs maybe half a pound or more.
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/topnav/materials/listbytype/Water_Rocket_Launcher_Directions.html
People have made multi-stage versions of these, too.
http://www.aircommandrockets.com/
I'd be curious to know how many freshmen have even dug a sizable hole in dirt, or used an axe to chop a piece of wood. Buy a block of flint, some sticks, and see if they can make a spear as did their ancestors many moons ago. Chipping flint is a bit counter-intuitive - you can lecture them about how the shock wave works. Or have them try to start a fire by using the drill or "bow drill" method - just give them different materials to chose from, talk about friction, and let them go at it. Then stand back and observe how pathetic we moderns are compared to our "primitive" ancestors.
I remember 'shop class' back in Primary school...
We were barely allowed to use any of the tools,,,
I never had the heart to tell the teacher that back home I was helping my grandfather clinking the copper seams on rowboats... By holding a bl***dy big axe against the head of the nails on the outside, while he was on the inside, putting on copper washers, cutting the nail and flattening it.
Also, I knew how to row a boat before I learned how to ride a bicycle)
Steaming and bending the strips of wood on the inside of the hulls... Guess who was running back and forth between the boat and the homebuilt steamchamber.
Want to teach kids soething REAL?
Get hold of some drawings, plywood and a large garage, and build them a boat!
(Unless you find a lot of kids, that one will blow the budget, though... )
Something like the 'Weekended' on this page:
http://www.stevproj.com/PocketYachts.html
(These boats are designed to be easy to build. )
Bonus is that you can then teach them about sailing...
And if they capsize, about swimming...
(Don't worry, kids today are too fat to sink... )
And navigation... Fishing... How to tie a good knot.
Probably a bit about meteorology, too.
Not necessarily.
It all depends on whether or not they will let go of their iPad after they hit the water.
In many ways it is more about 'live and let live' rather than trying to be something we are not. Flying too close to the sun is indeed dangerous for all.
Regarding the ending, or I should say after the ending... the son was shot in a robbery outside the San Francisco Zen Center by a likely drug addict coming out of the nearby housing projects. Many years later, the head of the Zen Center got involved in chasing yet another robber into the projects and confronted him with a gun that the Zen Master had secretly taken off of suicide victim. I suspect that the second incident was somehow linked to the first. It was quite an embarrassment to the Zen Center.
The real strength of the book is that one can indeed go crazy and find their way back to sanity. God bless all of us who do. Zen and motorcycle maintenance were merely the means of return.
Humanoido,
I wasn't aware that such points had yielded themselves to imaging processes. Don't get me wrong - from what I've witnessed and from what little I've experienced of it, I think acupuncture is a real phenomenon and we have much to learn from it - but I have never heard of anyone getting an image of those Chi points or whatever they're called. I've read about Japanese researchers cooling and tweaking photomultipliers to make them as super-sensitive as possible in efforts to image biophoton emissions, but such emissions are probably a result of "oxidative burst" reactions, strong chemical reactions inside organisms when they fight infection, etc. And other biophoton emissions seem to be extremely rare, measurable above background on the order of maybe one or two photons per minute (?) or something crazy like that, which could be thermodynamic noise of sorts. But I don't know of anyone mapping out any Chi lines or whatever. As with any measurement being performed on the hairy, shaggy carpet edge of the noise floor, there are a lot of crazy claims made concerning biophotons and such, so I'm always a bit skeptical when I hear about somebody electronically mapping an aura or whatever. Do you have a link to this Chi mapping thing?
Do you have any links to supporting evidence for any of that?
There have been some radioisotope studies where a small amount of tracer was injected in (or near) anatomically well defined acupuncture points in the arm and the tracer was found to diffuse preferentially (strikingly so) along the associated acupuncture channel. Other studies have looked at biopsies of specific acupuncture points and these always show a particular structure involving a neurovascular bundle projecting to the surface. These occur elsewhere, but they always appear at the acupuncture points studied. There have been impressive studies using Brain Functional MRIs showing activation of the expected brain areas with needling at specific acupuncture points to reduce perceived pain from experimental stimulation elsewhere. You don't need questionable demonstrations of Chi detection to confirm that this mostly empirically derived system affects the brain in precisely the ways necessary to explain many of the clinical effects known for millennia.
I've heard about some of those, and none of that surprises me, but I guess what raised my eyebrows was Humanoido's suggestion that these channels had somehow been photographed, which to me implied they were emitting some sort of energy that had allowed researchers to map them out electromagnetically, so I was hoping he had a link to that.
This sounds kinda like me! Except I would participate in Science Fairs if we had them around here. I also find it amazing that people my age (15) are as inexperienced in areas such as electronics and basic building skills, as they are. I hear stories from people such as yourselves from when they were in high school, and had access to machine shops. Since we don't have any of these around anymore, I have started to build my own little shop. In the last year I built CNC router from scratch (Most useful thing i have ever built!), and the entire process has been awesome. I now know a lot about mechanics and machining, and I feel like it has opened the doors to other things that i can make, that without building that machine and reading forums, I would never had thought about making. While some could argue that a CNC machine, or any power tool in fact, is dangerous for young people, I think that the more experience you have with things like this, the better off you will be in the future. You have to learn a some point anyway, right?