{"id":1999,"date":"2010-06-12T07:31:15","date_gmt":"2010-06-12T11:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/?p=1999"},"modified":"2010-06-11T09:16:09","modified_gmt":"2010-06-11T13:16:09","slug":"the-a-team-of-engineers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2010\/06\/the-a-team-of-engineers.html","title":{"rendered":"The A-Team of Engineers"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the ongoing tragedy of BP’s Gulf oil disaster.\u00a0 But one of the more subtle ones may be that many of us are more science illiterate than we realized.\u00a0 And I’m not talking just about the average high school graduate here, but about people who are otherwise considered pretty technically savvy, albeit in different fields.<\/p>\n

Almost since the start of the spill, there has been widespread incredulity that no one knows how to cap a well under a mile of ocean.\u00a0 At first, I thought this was just people trying to incorrectly scale up small problems.\u00a0 If a pipe bursts in my basement, it may be messy, but it doesn’t take me six months to fix.\u00a0 Why is this so much harder?<\/p>\n

But now I’m thinking it may be something a little different.\u00a0 The remake of The A-Team<\/a> is hitting theaters this weekend and it brings back fond memories.\u00a0 The TV show was an enjoyable romp.\u00a0 The heroes always won, no one you cared about got hurt, and everything was tied up nicely in just under an hour.\u00a0 This formula has played out numerous times on the small and the big screens.\u00a0 From Rambo to Walker, Texas Ranger, good guys with mad fighting skills succeed against unimaginable odds.\u00a0 Yet despite these fictional phenoms, the average person seems to get that there is no real life Rambo to send into Afghanistan and solve the Taliban problem by Tuesday.\u00a0 In the real world, violent situations are way messier and intractable.\u00a0 The good guys don’t always win, and people you care about do get hurt.<\/p>\n

\"Mad<\/a>Fictional science has many of the same type of over the top heroes as the fictional military.\u00a0 From MacGyver to Dr. Rodney McKay (Stargate Atlantis), from Gil Grissom (CSI) to David Levinson (Independence Day), the plucky scientist was always able to pull a plausible solution out in the nick of time and implement it just before it all goes to hell.\u00a0 But I’m wondering if the average person is as easily able to distinguish the science from the fiction.\u00a0 MacGyver is just as fictional as Rambo, yet the public is increasingly frustrated that we haven’t yet sent MacGyver to the Gulf to plug the pipe.<\/p>\n

In the real world, science and engineering can be every bit as messy and intractable as military problems.\u00a0 Inventions rarely work the first time, and solving a previously unsolved problem almost never happens on a deadline.\u00a0 On the one hand, I suppose it’s kind of cool that people have such faith in technology to be able to instantly solve any problem.\u00a0 But it seems that faith has created an expectation that no flesh and blood techie is going to be able to live up to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the ongoing tragedy of BP’s Gulf oil disaster.\u00a0 But one<\/p>\n

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