Recently read, currently reading, soon to read

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, by Daniel Pink, in which a career advice book a la "What Color is Your Parachute" is interpreted via manga as a 20-minute read.  How long until every other genre is converted into Japanese comics?  Seriously, let me know--this is awesome.

Eco Barons, which is at its best when it's about people who made it big, cashed out, and bought up land for conservation, almost obsessively.  The guy who helped start the super-80s clothing brand Esprit now owns a good chunk of Patagonia and plans to turn it into a Chilean national park.  A good read, if occasionally preachy or wordy.  I probably won't finish it for a while.  Seems like only half of the people profiled are/were businesspeople, the most interesting group.

Green to Gold, which is inspiring in showing how large corporations are seeing conservation, efficiency, and renewable energy as competitive benefits rather than liabilities.  I just hope the remainder focuses on smaller businesses than BP, Sony, Dupont, and Dow.
Fun fact from the book: The proportion of venture funding invested in cleantech (US and Canada) went from <1% in 1999 to 9% in 2005.
Twenty-five cents of every VC dollar invested in 2009 went to cleantech (though this includes other regions, notably Europe and Israel, where cleantech is an even bigger deal).
2009 cleantech venture funding increased $1.5 billion over 2007.  You remember '07.  It was that year before the financial collapse.

Free Agent Nation, by Daniel Pink (again) which will hopefully be as good as this.  This guy was Al Gore's speechwriter?  Only Al Gore could make this guy's writing sound dull.  Zing?


Getting Green Done is a 2009 book by a ski resort sustainability director who used to install home insulation for a living.
Hmm...American dream...hard work...saving the Earth.  It's kinda like Captain Planet wrote a book.  Plus there's skiing.







  















Just a little green hair dye and a bath in blueberry juice and we've got ourselves a live-action remake.
Plus there's blueberries.

What Obama Could Say to Students

Later today, the President will make a "Back to School" speech to America's K-12 students. The White House released the text of his remarks earlier.

The speech mentions several careers to which students might aspire:

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it. [Emphasis mine.]

Generally, a fine message. But it doesn't jive with Obama's desire to reinvigorate the American manufacturing sector. In naming Ron Bloom as his senior counselor on manufacturing policy on Monday, he said Bloom is "going to help us craft the policies that will create the next generation of great manufacturing jobs." [Emphasis mine.]

What about the next generation of great manufacturing workers? Tomorrow's machinists, carpenters, welders?

As it turns out, welders are in short supply in this country. The American Welding Society reports the average age of American welders is in the mid-fifties. AWS anticipates a potential shortage of 200,000 welders by 2010. That figure excludes self-employed welders.

Compare this with the oft-reported nursing shortage, which a recent Johns Hopkins Magazine article reports is gone but will return soon. According to a nursing professor at Vanderbilt, the average American nurse is 43.8 years old. Buerhaus predicts a shortage of 260,000 nurses by 2025.
The average welder is more than 10 years older than the average nurse, and we'll need more welders sooner.

In fact, few of the careers Obama mentions are among those in short supply. In May 2009, Manpower, Inc. released the results of its fourth annual Talent Shortage Survey.

The top 10 jobs American employers are having difficulty filling:
1. Engineers
2. Nurses
3. Skilled Trades*
4. Teachers
5. Sales Representatives
6. Technicians
7. Drivers
8. IT Staff
9. Laborers
10. Machinists/Machine Operators

Worldwide, it's a similar picture:
1. Skilled Trades*
2. Sales Representatives
3. Technicians (primarily production/operations, engineering or maintenance)
4. Engineers
5. Management/Executives
6. Accounting & Finance Staff
7. Laborers
8. Production Operators
9. Secretaries, PAs, Administrative Assistants & Office Support Staff
10. Drivers

* Manpower notes:

In this survey, Skilled Trades refers to a broad range of job titles that require workers to possess specialized skills, traditionally learned over a period of time as an apprentice. Examples of skilled trades jobs are: electricians, bricklayers, carpenters, cabinetmakers, masons, plumbers, welders, etc.

Of course Obama is right to encourage students to follow the careers they're drawn to. And I don't expect him to mention only the jobs that are in high demand amongst employers.

But Obama is missing an opportunity. He could have started to remove the stigmas that help shroud manufacturing careers from today's brightest students: that training in the trades is "just something to fall back on"; that welding is dirty work, unfit for an educated young person; that there's no future in being a plumber or an electrician.

Obama says students will need the "problem-solving skills [they] learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS". He could have also mentioned the problem-solving skills required to, say, plumb a house, or diagnose engine trouble.

There's much work to be done to revive the manufacturing sector, especially small manufacturers. Expanding the MEP would be a great start.

But if this is to be "a country where things are made" in the next twenty years, I hope it's today's kids who'll be doing the making.

Don't Panic.

I arrived in the mountain town of Boone, North Carolina, five days ago, my little red pickup Baby loaded down with everything I'd need to start a new Official Graduate Student life here.

Then the kick-ass housing situation I'd been counting on fell through.

Don't panic. Meet grad students, sleep on their couches, join couchsurfing.org, buy beer for your hospitable hosts. When the couches run out, decide to go camping at the last minute. Keep looking for the right place to live. DON'T PANIC.

--

Yesterday I was in class with a lot of uncertainties. We're writing a proposal for my university to compete in a Big Important Prestigious-As-Hell Competition. The rulebook is an inch thick. We have almost no idea how we're going to get the proposal done in time.

As I am wont to do, I kept raising problems I could foresee. How are we gonna transport this thing a thousand miles without damaging it? How much of the fabrication will we do in-house? Finally one of the profs said something to the effect of, "Don't panic about that. We'll figure that out."

--

I realized that every job is subject to these tensions. Do we make it ourselves or outsource it? What tolerance can we get away with here? Do we build it to last for generations, or just to last long enough?

Some part of me has been hoping that these issues would disappear one day. That eventually budget would cease to be a concern, so I could stop worrying about how much things would cost and just focus on how it's made.

But these things never go away. Everything costs something. The job is to deal with these factors, these tensions, without panicking.

Occupational reconsideration. Or: Shoe shopping

More often than not I find bloggable moments happening in the insomniac quietude of 3am.

--

Here's how it goes.
I get into a thing.
Waiting tables.
Photography.
Building bikes.
I do the thing for a while.
I start to think about what it would be like to do this thing forever.
I try to envision all the good parts, the bad parts, the dull moments in between those parts.
I try it on like I'm trying on a pair of shoes.
I walk around in it for a while.

And then something happens.
The shoes aren't quite right.
The fit isn't there.
The color doesn't work with my wardrobe.
So I take off the shoes, put them back in the box, and look for the next pair.

Right now I'm unlacing a pair that I thought was gonna work.
It's sad.
But I relish the process, as all-consuming and pitfall-fraught as it is.
I get better at it every go-round.

It's harder every time though.
Every time I think: No, I finally got it right this time.
But I'm always wrong about that.

--

I see myself prototyping. It has its own subtle art. It's in demand, it's interdisciplinary, it's challenging, it means using a lot of the stuff I know a little too much about.

Great blurb from Diego Rodriguez about prototyping (more here):

As you make a prototype, assume you are right and everyone else is wrong.
When you share your prototype, assume you are wrong and everyone else is right.

What I've been doing, what I am doing, is prototyping a career for myself. And prototyping is a long, complicated, expensive, failure-ridden process.

Que haces alli en AIDG?

Soy hombre de taller
Soy technico
Soy soldador
Soy disenador
Soy maquinista
Soy metalista
Soy mechanico

--

What do you do at AIDG?

I'm a man of the shop
I'm a technologist
I'm a welder
I'm a designer
I'm a machinist
I'm a metalworker
I'm a mechanic

...but, these days, the Spanish words seem to convey more meaning

To be "an operator"

There is a story about one of my relatives that has been going around my family (in various exaggerated forms) since the 40s.

The protagonist is a great-uncle of mine. The setting, Europe at the end of the second world war.

My great-uncle had been fighting for the Allies. With the war over, he wanted to return to his family's ancestral home, a tiny village in Czechoslovakia (at the time), near Ukraine. He didn't know how much of his family had survived the war, but he wanted to bring as many as he could back to the US with him.

There were some obstacles. My great-uncle was in France. The village lay deep in Soviet territory, and the Soviets weren't keen on American passers-by. Border crossings lay ahead. The cold war was beginning. Europe was in shambles.

Somehow he acquired a jeep and some gasoline. Frankly, he probably stole the jeep. He drove the jeep across Europe. He spoke the languages. He made deals. The Soviet border guards drank well.

He found the village and married the only surviving female relative, then turned the jeep around to bring her to the US. They lived in California the rest of their lives.

--

I've known this story forever. It's part of what I am.
My great-uncle, he's what we call an operator. He speaks every language. He's undaunted by uncertainty. He thrives where others fear to operate. He doesn't follow the rules. He does the impossible. He has a toolbox a mile deep.

Why Bikes are a Great Way to Learn About Technology

It goes like this. Someone finds out that I'm a "bike guy". They learn that I build up bikes for friends, or they see bike tools in my apartment, or they read this blog.

Sometimes they figure that bikes are all I want to work with, all I'm interested in, just bikes.
The reality is almost exactly the opposite. In learning about bikes, I've learned a lot about other things. Because of what I know about bikes, I know a little about a lot of other related things.

Bikes are a great way to learn about technology. They're accessible, but they're challenging enough to be interesting. Getting started is easy, but learning the finer points of bikes means learning about all kinds of technology.

- Industry standards for bicycle parts are a mixed bag, to put it mildly. Pick up a random bike part, and its threads might be based on a metric, an imperial (SAE), or a totally bike-specific standard. Some parts are ISO, some JIS; Raleigh even had its own threading standards. Then there's the Italian, French, and Swiss standards. A few parts are left-hand threaded. People who know bikes are comfortable switching between all these crazy standards. Inch vs. metric? Try Italian vs. Swiss. Pop quiz: What's the difference between ISO and JIS bottom bracket axle tapers? Ask Sheldon

- Many of the essential technologies of modern life are present in every bike. Bearings, chain drive, brakes, control cables, and spoked wheels, to name a few. People who know bikes are familiar with all these subsidiary techs that drive so many other things. They've taken apart bearings, regreased, and reassembled.

- For under $300, you can buy a set of tools that will allow you to maintain damn near any bike. That kit doesn't have everything (notably a truing stand and workstand). But good luck overhauling your motorcycle with $300 in tools.

- Similarly, information about bike repair is easy to find. http://www.sheldonbrown.com/ is 90% of what you need.

- Steel bike frames are pretty unique in the realm of steel fabrication. The tubes are thin-wall--down to .3 mm in some cases. They can be joined in a lot of different ways, each requiring advanced skills. A frame needs to be straight, so low-distortion joining is key. The frame has to interface with all those funky bike part standards mentioned above. And the frame has to fit the rider, so there's a big human-machine-interface problem to be solved. Building bike frames is challenging, but part of the reward is that most other fabrication jobs are straightforward in comparison.

- Weight is always a factor with bikes. As Keith Bontrager said:

Strong. Light. Cheap. Pick two.

This isn't just true for bikes, though. As designers and fabricators, bike people are acutely aware of the trade-offs inherent in working within these constraints.

- There are bike parts made from a wide variety of materials, from brass to carbon fiber. Bike people have experience with the interactions between these materials. They know that aluminum seatposts tend to get stuck in steel frames because of galvanic corrosion.  They know that blue Loctite or beeswax can keep a threaded part from coming loose.

Why else?

On Obscurity

I was at a vintage bike show last year, chatting with a talented framebuilder whose star is rising. I had bought a t-shirt from him earlier, so I mentioned before we parted ways that I was glad to have expanded my collection of obscure frame company t-shirts*.
From the look on his face it was clear he took my comment a little differently than I'd intended it. Perhaps it wasn't the best choice of words. But he was off with his family by the time I realized my fumble.

I wish I could have explained myself as well as Obama did in today's inauguration address:

Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

He described better than I can most framebuilders I've come to know. They are doers, makers of things, uninterested in riches and fame. They are obscure but they are kick-ass. Their obscurity is not a liability.  I meant it as a compliment.

This is the kind of person that I strive to be: someone who goes out and gets stuff done and doesn't make a whole lot of noise about it.

*which includes, among others:
Signal
Rebolledo
Courage
Bilenky
Pereira

Why the Shop

I spend a lot of time in a shop. I consider myself a shop person.  But most of the people in my life are not shop people, with only a few exceptions.

I often think about how to relate to non-shop people about the shop. "Why do you spend so much damn time down there?", they ask. "You always come home filthy." "What's so exciting about screw threading of all things?"  "What's the point of endlessly tinkering?"

It's especially difficult to discuss, perhaps, because the shop is not generally a place I go to accomplish a specific thing. I might go there to work on one problem but end up working on the shop itself. Sometimes the tool I need is broken, so I spend an afternoon making a new one, or fixing the old one. The work is often non-linear; I work on what needs to be worked on.

Not many places are ambiguous in this way. A kitchen is for cooking; a classroom is for learning; a theater is for seeing shows. A shop can be for doing anything, and its purpose can change momentarily.  A shop is for working on things, but that includes the shop itself and everything in it.

Working in a shop can have a wonderfully self-reflexive feeling, of constantly re-examining the tools, the process, the shop--even the people in the shop, including yourself.

A shop is a place where all variables are in flux. A mill, for example, is so versatile that it could be used to produce a copy of itself*. When you're standing in front of a mill, the question is not "What is possible?" but now "What do I want to do?".
In the shop, the only limitation is you. It's up to you to decide what deserves your time and effort. It's a nice metaphor for growing up.

But why machine tools and screw threads and such?  What dispassionate things to study and to have strong opinions about.

There's a feeling I get after I've been using a lathe for a while. I don't mean any lathe, I mean one specific lathe, because each one is a little different. When I first start using it, I take my time flipping every lever, making sure I don't make some catastrophic mistake. But over time the lathe and I come to an understanding. I learn her idiosyncrasies, and she lets me know when I'm pushing her too far. After a few weeks, I'm flipping levers left and right. I know every control without taking an eye off the workpiece. I like to use the words sensual and intimate in describing this feeling. It's a little like raising a dog.

My old machining teacher liked to refer to using a machine tool like driving a car, e.g. "How do I drive this daggone mill?".  For my part I think of it more like flying an airplane.  It's more complicated than driving a car, but the possibilities are greater.  Pilots are an elite, sometimes cocky bunch, much like machinists.  Among those in the know, what they do inspires awe.

Machine tools are anything but cold. It honors me to include myself in a tradition that bears the mark of so many great people, including a few of my ancestors. It brings me closer to a history I don't fully understand yet. It gives me something in common with everyone who's ever made something well.

It's by learning to apply tools well that we have advanced our human condition. Our survival depends on knowing how to manipulate our world with tools, and on continuing to pass on that knowledge.

And by the way:
Besides being essential to everything we do, screw threads are, in one sense, a culmination of all human experiences. Their development is the result of many tiny decisions made by many people over many centuries. The most recent decisions were based on older decisions, which were based on yet older ones. That legacy goes back to the earliest humans. And without exaggerating, it can be said that screw threading standards have made fortunes and lost them.

In fact, every modern tool is a permutation of some simple, primitive tool. It was when we first started using these simple tools that we became technological--that we began a period of ever-increasing improvement upon what came before.

*This is theoretically true, but it's not something that happens often. It would require almost fantastical quantities of metal and time.  Some of the tools used to make machine tools are friggin' huge.

Blogwise Blog on Blogging Bloggily

In response to a recent [Frame] thread on the pros and cons of a website vs. a blog for the framebuilding set...

- You need both, ideally. They can serve two different purposes and two different sets of clients.

- As has been discussed, there's a chasm of difference between writing a blog and writing a blog *for money* (or as part of a larger business plan/marketing strategy).
Doing it without involving money is great. I write this having failed at a meager attempt to turn blogging about framebuilding into a money-making proposition. It's more enjoyable this way, and anyway, about 30 people a week keep coming back for more.

- What one is doing by having an 'internet presence' is building a name for oneself, not selling bike frames. The Flickr, the blog, participation on the [Frame] list--none of it needs to be (directly) about making a buck. It's about building a brand for oneself, which is in turn part of making a buck. See, I'm building my brand right now, just by typing this, and I'm not even trying to sell anybody anything (yet).

In business school terms:
- A strong brand creates a competitive advantage that is wholly inimitable. No one but Jon Q. Builder can produce a "Jon Q. Builder" frame, because the value of the frame is tied to the reputation of the maker.
- Even, say, Wal-Mart* doesn't have such a good competitive advantage, because, with enough money and resources, anyone could copy Wal-Mart's business plan.  In contrast, a "Jon Q." is inherently more valuable than a non-"Jon Q.", even if the latter is cheaper or has a shorter lead time.
- The brand and the presence are assets with real dollar values (although calculating the exact values is a different story). If Jon Q.'s web presence is competitive, then it will be a stable asset.

- The world of professional art is full of people who understand how to gracefully cultivate a brand. Besides that, it's loads of white wine.

- Richard Sachs is the prime example of a 'presence'. Go see how often he posts to his Flickr. Jonny Cycles also comes to mind, ever since he got that fancy digital-camera-direct-Flickr-uploader thingy.

- There is a staggering quantity of framebuilding-related web content being produced. It's impossible to keep up with. There's easily a couple hundred blogs and Flickr streams. I'd bet that number has at least doubled in the 2.5 years I've been on this list. Don't get scared, though. Just figure out what you can offer that nobody else can.

All this is part of why the post about Chris Zanotti has been removed.

On Grinder Safety

Here was the most interesting part of my day (so far):

I work as a 'Student Shop Foreman' in the machine shop of an engineering school.
A guy came in today who's been in pretty regularly in the few weeks I've been working here. He cut up some stainless sheet on the vertical band saw. No big deal.
Then he wanted to use the grinder to remove the burrs.
The only utility grinder we have is monstrous, like 12" wheels.
Sure, I say, just be careful 'cuz that thing can take your hand off.
So I walk away. And before he's even really gotten started, the plate gets snagged and wedges between the grinder support and the grinding wheel. Turned out the gap was set too big. Coulda happened to anybody.
All of us who had been chatting gathered around to watch the grinder spin down, partly out of curiosity, partly out of concern that the situation not get any more interesting.
And then he shows me his hand, which is bleeding from the thumb, cut pretty deep, but thankfully it was the burr that got him, not the grinding wheel.
First aid kit. Alochol wipes, sanitizing spray, gauze, bandages, anitbiotic ointment. Sink. Wash for a few minutes.
He's telling me about how he hates blood and needles and going to the doctor. He's pale in the face. Got him sitting down. He wants the trash can next to him. Turns down water but I send for some anyways.
At this point I'm running worst-case scenarios through my head while I keep pressure on his thumb. It's not a life-threatening cut, but if he passes out, things get more complicated. He could go into shock, and I don't remember exactly how to deal with shock (a blanket over them and call for an ambo maybe).
He ralphs into the trash for a couple minutes, while I change the gauze and maintain pressure. Then he picks his head up, color in his face now, he's back amongst the living, 100% fine.
That's one way to learn how to use a grinder.

Be careful, folks. Mind the grinder gap.

Consumers Are Consuming Raw Materials

Then in the middle of a "Manufacturing Processes" lecture, the prof said something about how, as opposed to manufacturers, consumers don't consume raw materials.

I perked right up. I'm a consumer, I thought to myself, and I consume raw materials all the time.

Moreover, the resurgence of craft in the US* has redefined what it means to be a consumer.

* cf. MAKE magazine, steampunk, TechShop & The Crucible, hobbyist/amateur frame builders, this WIRED article mentioned previously, and even The Whole Earth Catalog

These "crafters 2.0" are consuming raw and semi-raw materials (as well as scrap materials, even better). They're a different kind of consumer.

It's a niche, but thanks to The Long Tail, it's a valuable niche.

--

This way of consuming smacks of a bygone age, when a family used what nature provided to produce what they needed to survive.

The settlers who populated the American frontier didn't head to Wal-Mart to stock the wagon on their way out of town. There was no all-inclusive, Chinese-made, Frontier-Settling Kit.

They processed the raw resources around them, and they used those resources completely, wasting little.

They manufactured on-site a lot of what they needed: a house, a plow, leather goods, clothing, food. Manufactured goods were expensive before mass production, so it was cheaper to make rather than buy.

Perhaps I'm being sentimental.

But I wonder what can be learned from these frontier ancestors. The best of them were tough, innovative, self-sufficient, and hard-working.

More on Green Industry

I have expanded upon the earlier paper on green manufacturing, which was itself an introduction to a larger group project on that subject.

The topic now includes many other industrial sectors, so I renamed it accordingly.

The assignment was to write a well-researched paper on a subject of my choosing. I wrote it as a broad overview of the subject, like a white paper or a report for someone who wanted the "view from 10,000 ft."

Let's try this in Google Docs format, since there's a lot of footnotes and such:

Green Industry: A Contradiction
by Ethan Labowitz

On Making Pasta

I cook pasta rarely, because I try to limit the amount of starch I eat.

I cook pasta like I braze (or rather like I try to braze). Get it hot, get it done, and get out. Don't cook it any longer than necessary.

Salt the water before you even start it boiling. Use plenty of coarse salt. Helps it boil faster. [Maybe. See below.]

Taste the pasta while it's cooking. I do this about three times. Ignore the clock and timer. Take into account that you want it have a little bite when you eat it, and that it will keep cooking a little after you drain it. You want pasta to be about medium-rare when you eat it, so cook it to rare.

Drain the pasta well when you're done, and do it quickly. You want all that hot water out of there so it cools down and stops cooking ASAP. Shaking the colander can help.

Coat the pasta with a little olive oil when it's still in the colander. Keeps it from sticking. Use a light olive oil of the finest quality you can get. Imported from Spain or Italy and Extra virgin for sure. First cold press if possible.

Use the right materials. Good, fresh pasta is great, though usually too rich for my budget. Good olive oil is relatively cheap, and necessary for so many other things. Salt in the water is essential. Likewise a good pot of the right size, depending on how much is being cooked. And plenty of water.

Bad pasta was cooked in too small a pan, with too little water, for too long, then sat in the waer for a few minutes before it was drained, and not coated in oil afterward. It tastes so bad. It tastes like the worst airline food on the worst airline.

Rethinking Occupational Taxonomies

Back when I wanted to be an aerospace engineer, I did some research and came away with the following understanding of how things worked:

1. Scientists do the theoretical stuff.
2. Engineers design stuff, solve problems, and apply the scientists' theory.
3. Technicians install/build/make what the engineers designed.

A semester of engineering school made it abundantly clear I was not destined to be an engineer. So I've been trying to decide ever since...Where do I fit in this hierarchy?

Now I have realized some key truths:

1. Engineers, bless their hearts, often lack on-the-shop-floor experience, which can cause problems in the design process.
2. There are actually more than three positions in that 1-2-3 hierarchy.
3. Especially under sub-optimal conditions, the lines between Engineer and Technician are often blurred.
4. People who are good at their thing often have a lot of knowledge that overlaps with the areas around them--e.g. good engineers know a lot about technicians' jobs.

Green Manufacturing

***What follows is the introduction I wrote to a group paper for Production/Operations Management class.***

There is a fundamental contradiction in the phrase “green manufacturing”. The process of making nearly anything will, by necessity, consume resources and produce waste:

(1)

Buying the results of these processes, Americans have been consuming resources at an unsustainable rate in a breathless quest for increased quality of life.(2) The US population increased threefold from 1900 and 1995, while total materials use increased tenfold.(3)

(4)

Thus our industrial future will conform to one of three basic scenarios. Commerce and industry could continue operating as they have, driven largely by economic growth and consumer demand. Or we could transition to a “green world”, where sustainability and environmental impact become major factors in design, manufacture, and use of products. Or we could enter a “brown world”, where concerns like sustainability are grossly superseded by interests such as short-term economic gain and consumer convenience. Which of these scenarios becomes our reality is largely a function of choosing how we use technology, not the rate of technological change or economic growth.(5)

The process of making manufacturing “greener” is often perceived to happen only at significant economic cost. This may be the case when an “end-of-pipe” solution is used, like a treatment device added to the end of a smokestack or sewer pipe.(6) But when process and product are examined with an eye toward reducing waste, the results often include increased productivity.

Reasonably successful businesses may be understandably reluctant to implement such changes, since potential risks of failure may seem to outweigh immediate profit gains. In this way, “green” manufacturing is a lot like Lean manufacturing, or most any other system of process improvement. There are up-front costs, but these can pay dividends for years to come.(7) In green manufacturing, there is an added benefit in making the whole economy more sustainable, thereby further ensuring future profits.

1 Thomas Graedel and Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Greening the Industrial Facility: Perspectives, Approaches, and Tools (New York: Springer, 2005) 6
2 Ibid 13, 15
3 Ibid 15
4 Ibid 16
5 Ibid 10
6 Curtis Moore and Alan Miller, Green Gold: Japan, Germany, the United States, and the Race for Environmental Technology (Boston: Beacon, 1994) 2
7 Ibid 4

Hampshire College and a Maasai Rap Video

Earlier this spring I spent a day visiting Hampshire College (wiki), a small liberal arts college in Amherst, MA.

Hampshire is an interesting place, because every student designs their own degree program. There are foundation courses in the first year, then two years of study in an area of the student's choosing. Finally, in the third year, the student completes a big self-directed project, somewhat like a graduate thesis. Also, there's no grades, just student evaluations.

Yes, they do play a lot of frisbee.

But the most interesting thing there is the Lemelson Center for Design, part of their School for Interdisciplinary Arts. The Center is funded mostly by grants from the Lemelson Foundation, named for prolific inventor Jerome Lemelson.

The Center has great facilities, especially for metalworking, and especially for framebuilding and other bike-related work. The shop is unusually clean and well-organized, with lots of funky, shop-made tools. They have an Anvil Journeyman frame jig as well as a full set of reaming/tapping/facing tools. A course on bike frame construction is taught every fall. They are especially geared toward technological solutions for disabled people. Here's some student projects:




--

While observing the "Appropriate Technology in the Developing World" class, I saw some students brass brazing a bike cart based on the Community Bike Cart Design plans (by Aaron Wieler, a Hampshire grad). They were using Harris black flux, which actually seemed to work OK despite the high temperature, although I would've preferred Gasflux Type B blue flux.

So after returning to Richmond, I sent a few sticks of Gasflux C-04 and a little bottle of blue flux up to Hampshire. Today I got this email from the Appropriate Tech professor:

This morning I was searching online for a blue colored flux that I used several years ago and really liked. I couldn't find it. So it was really strange when I found your package outside my door several moments later, with a sample of blue flux, and instructions on where it was from. Are you a metal shop elf dressed up as a regular seeming guy?

The big story here is that I managed to seem like a regular guy.
But it also made my day to have helped the folks at the Lemelson Center.

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The Lemelson Foundation also recently awarded a grant to KickStart, a non-profit that developed the MoneyMaker--a simple, affordable, effective pump for small-scale crop irrigation.

The MoneyMaker pumps were the focus of a fantastic 2002 Wired article, back when KickStart was called ApproTEC. That article made a big impact on your then-17-year-old narrator, because it was about practical ingenuity applied to problems in the developing world, and that kind of thing gets me all giddy.

But wait. It gets so much better. There now exists a rap video about the MoneyMaker (the pump, not a butt) by a Maasai rap artist named Mr. Ebbo, seen here very excited about something...possibly an irrigation pump:



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The importance of a place like the Lemelson Center cannot be overemphasized.

It offers an entirely unique form of education. It breaks down traditional barriers between education in the arts, the business world, and the fab shop. Traditional educational structures tend to stifle this interdisciplinary learning, especially at the large universities that award most degrees (like mine).

It cultivates inventiveness. Moreover, it focuses inventive energy on the problems of groups that traditionally go overlooked: the disabled and the developing world.

From a business perspective, these markets may go untapped because at first the numbers look all wrong: the R&D and manufacturing costs appear too high relative to the size of the market. But the Lemelson Center can provide a vibrant think tank where good ideas can develop into marketable designs, and the Foundation can provide seed capital to get these designs distributed to the folks who need them, via a non-profit like KickStart. There are hundreds of similar problems waiting to be solved with a solution like the MoneyMaker.

This is one blogger who would hate to see a place as valuable as Lemelson disappear, even if I never study or work there.

Shop Class Journalism

In last month's WIRED magazine, Clive Thompson reminds us why shop class is important, especially for "my" generation.

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Shop Class as Soulcraft is the tentative title of a forthcoming book by Matthew B. Crawford.
In the article upon which it is based, published in The New Atlantis two years ago, Crawford brings together a lot of the themes I've been blogging about here for the past year.

[A]n engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering the artifacts we use unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the cavemen in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood. This creeping concealedness takes various forms. The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry from interrogating the innards. By way of contrast, older readers will recall that until recent decades, Sears catalogues included blown-up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances and many other mechanical goods. It was simply taken for granted that such information would be demanded by the consumer.

This guy gets it!

Bonus points awarded because Crawford used to run a motorcycle shop here in Richmond, VA--and because he turned me on to local machine tool dealer Dempsey and Co.

Sheldon Brown

I need to take a minute here.
Sheldon Brown died yesterday evening.

I found his website when I got my first real adult bike, in the summer of '06. His info got me started on bikes, and so much has been an extension of those hours spent in the basement of my sister's townhouse--studying that beat-up old Peugeot, then Sheldon's site, then the Peugeot again.

Sheldon's blog, updated yesterday. And his inspiringly upbeat take on MS.

It was always a little odd to communicate with him by email. He had his own way of getting a point across, which was always direct.
Now I can see that I was a little nervous whenever I wrote him--I was simply starstruck.

Sheldon was an example of the kind of man I hope to be one day. He loved his family dearly, as his website shows. He was a thinker, an intellectual even, but he also had a knack for practical and the mechanical. That combination has become rare these days, and there is a generation of folks like me that are lucky to have had Sheldon around to share with us.

To my mind, no one individual could claim more responsibility for the popularity of fixed gear bikes. Sheldon preached the fixie sermon. Enough bike geeks tried it, and liked it, that a couple of the cool kids caught on. Now young folks in skinny jeans crisscross this town and every other. Some of us are going to grow up and become the next generation of bike consumers, and it will be interesting to see how Sheldon continues to influence us in 20 or 30 years.