My Manifesto: The Incoherent Ramblings of a Madman

It was a frustrating week. My boss tried to tell me that by using the exact same equation as me, but him calculating the velocity first, and adjusting the height and width to give the calculated velocity is different to calculating the height and width and adjusting the velocity to suit. We're using the same damn equation! We're manipulating different factors in the same damn equation! The optimal solution gives the exact same fucking answers correct to 2 decimal places! AND YET HE insists that, even after 3 different examples giving the exact same answers and 2 days of arguments , which included me finding 2 different sources and worked examples showing my methodology, he still insists my method is a fluke! They base proper scientific conclusions on less sounds results than 3 examples giving the same answer! I was ready to take to him with a brick! A brick I tells ya! I have never felt like hitting another person so much in my entire life before - except for that one time when someone stole some chewing gum from my bag when I was on camp and had the nerve to tell me, that even though I saw them take it, that it wasn't my gum they were eating - I was about to kick that guys arse - but that's another story entirely.

There are some dodgy things engineers rely on in Australia. In masonry design, most of our standards, are based on old wives tales and testing that was undertaken on 3 houses in all of the country. Our road design testing is based on the Californian Bearing Ratio - an INDEX test of all things - as you know, index tests mean bugger all, tell the person bugger all, and count for bugger all - what in the hell are we comparing our soil strengths to those of California for anyway? We're not California. We're no where near California. Laziness is what it is all about. We have rainfall design guidelines that include skew factors, and adjustment factors, and coefficients to adjust American rainfall figures to parts of our country based on one guys assessment of how similar certain parts of America are like certain parts of Australia - we're comparing chalk and cheese! Chalk and fucking cheese! My entire profession is a joke with all of our half baked theories tht get factored up to kazoo to account for the fact we don't want to get sued by some money hungry nutter who watches to much TV.

My physics teacher always refered to Engineering as physics with a hammer. I admired this man for a very long time - but I feel as though I outgrew him purely because of his simple analogy. Conversely, physics can be seen as Engineering in utopia. If you disregard the practical aspect of physics, the experimentation that all of our theories/theorems are based on - you're disregarding the physical part of it, and without the physical part of physics you're left with pure mathematics. Pure mathematics is about as much use to mankind as hydrophobia is to fish. If we take it back one step further, the physical aspect of physics was always researched into as a way of improving our understanding of nature so as to better utilise it when we engineer, whatever it may be, to do our bidding. We've always been selfish in that regard - we rarely simply look into something for the pure reason of knowing how it ticks, it's more so we can gain something from it. Physics/engineering/mathematics whatever we're looking into is for our benefit or we percieve as being for our benefit.

My throat hurts. I will be collecting cans tomorrow to help out APEX. I will be at the gym tomorrow. I keep having a dry cough. I am sick.


R.I.P

Red Cross victims.