Engineers are tools Mar 7, 2017
I'm an engineer, and people sometimes like to point out how engineers created things like the atomic bomb and hydraulic fracking.  You know, the bad things.  I don't need to point out that engineers have created good things too, like jet engines and artificial body parts. 

What I do want to acknowledge is that engineers are simply tools.  They solve problems by creating or fixing or enabling or removing something.  They're like a hammer or a screw driver.  Is a tool inherently capable of amazing or terrible things?  No.  It simply does the job it was asked to do.  That doesn't mean engineers are completely free from blame or responsibility.  But it at least adds some perspective. 

In a similar vein, tools are capable of nearly anything.  Or more accurately, there is a tool for every job.  I have a tendency towards pessimism, so I usually have to tell people their ideas are impossible to achieve in the allotted time and for the budgeted price.  One of my colleagues likes to put it another way:  "With enough money and time, literally anything is possible." #science
Luck in competition Mar 7, 2017
The concept of luck comes up in competition sometimes, like "That was a lucky shot," or "He got knocked out by a lucky punch."  I think the general consensus is that there's no such thing as a lucky shot or a lucky punch.  You could say luck had almost nothing to do with it.  Plus, calling it lucky detracts from the hours and hours of practice and perfection and skill that went into that one event.  It's not just insulting to call it lucky.  It's ignorant. 

But I think there's a deeper level of luck involved in some cases.  Not luck in the sense that a random action was taken at a random time and happened to produce a positive result.  But rather that a series of well-executed actions took place in the exact right order and produced a positive result.  The shot itself wasn't lucky, but it was predicated on the precise timing and exact positioning of the previous event, which itself benefitted from similarly perfect preceding events.  The final result is like a series of probabilities multiplied together:  70% chance of the first event succeeding, 50% chance of the second event succeeding, 20% chance of the third event succeeding = 0.7*0.5*0.2 = 0.07 or 7% overall chance of all events succeeding.  A probability like 7% looks like luck, and it sort of is.  But it's much more than that. #sports
Patchouli and tea tree oil Mar 6, 2017
Two scents that go from 0 to 100 real quick:  Patchouli and tea tree oil.  I didn't realize what patchouli was until someone pointed out to me it's what every live music event, hippie, and health food store smell like.  I don't mind the smell, but there seems to be no reasonable amount of it.  It's either absent, or there's a gallon of it invading your nasal passages. 

Tea tree oil has the same effect on me.  Maybe it's just me, but there's no acceptable amount of tea tree oil scent.  It has the very weird effect of making me feel like I can taste it, even when I'm quite confident I didn't put it in my mouth. #lifestyle