Realize Engineering

An engineering commentary for non-engineers every Wednesday

[eannpatterson]

Worldly goods and routes to happiness

In her novel, ‘The Gap of Time’, Jeanette Winterson writes that Buddha and Jesus knew that when you had so much money that you could buy anything, everything, then worldly goods were worthless.  Modern capitalism has generated a small number of owners of capital who have this much money.  For the rest of us worldly goods are not valueless or worthless.  Omnipresent advertising tends to create a…

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Real-time label-free tracking of bacteriophages interacting with bacteria

(a) Two-dimensional random dynamics (blue line) of a pelp20 bacteriophage monitored for a period of 5 s. Scale bar, 2 µm. (b) A plot of the same dynamics and (c) the mean square displacement (MSD) of the random walk. The MSD of the random walk is represented by square data points, and a linear fit (black line) has been applied to the data (Figure 4 from…

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Beyond language with stochastic parrots

Some months ago, I wrote in unflattering terms about artificial intelligence applications (AI apps) and large language models (LLMs), (see ‘Ancient models and stochastic parrots‘ on October 1st, 2025).  My view is changing, probably as AI apps develop and my user skills improve.  I have started using a couple of different free AI apps as research assistants in three ways.  First, when I am…

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Extra! Extra!

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!  As newspaper vendors used to shout.  The Pint of Science Festival is happening across the UK in the week beginning Monday 18th May for three evenings in venues in 43 locations.  I am talking on the first evening, May 18th, in Lime Street Social (51 Lime Street, L1 1JQ) on ‘I Sell Here, Sir, What all World Desires to have – POWER’.  My title is a quote from…

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Face-to-face with a polar bear

What would you do if you found yourself face-to-face with a polar bear?  Run?  Probably not a good idea because polar bears regard anything that runs away as a potential meal and they can reach speeds of 40 kph or 25 mph, so they can easily outrun you.  This question is probably theoretical one for most people, even though climate change is reducing the area of sea ice and forcing polar bears to…

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Experiencing success vicariously

The final PhD student for whom I will act as lead supervisor is scheduled to finish this month.  I have graduated forty PhD students since I was appointed a lecturer in 1985.  I am still in touch with many of them – they are divided between industry and universities with a bias towards industry (about 60%).  For the first twenty years, I was a sole academic supervisor often with an industrial…

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Perched blocks and muskoxen

Greenland has been in the news recently and as a consequence more people know about it than when I visited there about 45 years ago (see ‘Ice bores and what they can tell us‘ on January 12th, 2022).  I was part of a small expedition that spent a short Arctic summer on the Bersaekerbrae glacier in North East Greenland.  We air-freighted our equipment from Glasgow to Reykjavík in Iceland where we…

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Webs of expertise and knowledge

I am writing this post while I am in the middle of leading a breakout activity for more than a hundred PhD students from our Centres for Doctoral Training in nuclear science and engineering, GREEN and SATURN.  We have asked them to construct a knowledge network for a start-up company commissioned to build either a fusion energy power station or a power station based on small modular reactors…

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Going around in circles

I spent a day last month marking essays that were part of the assessment for a postgraduate module I have been teaching about engineering leadership. I use Boyatzis’s theory of self-directed learning to talk about how students can develop their leadership competences. Then, we ask the students to reflect on the leadership and ethical issues associated with one or two incidents they had…

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More than human

In his recent book, ‘The Place of Tides’, James Rebanks writes ‘the age of humans will pass.  Perhaps the end has already begun though it may take a long time to play out’.  I grew up when nuclear armageddon appeared to be the major threat to the future of life on Earth and it remains a major threat, especially given current tensions between nations.  However, other threats have gained prominence…

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Ancient models and stochastic parrots

In 2021 Emily Bender and her colleagues published a paper suggesting that the Large Language Models (LLMs) underpinning many Artificial Intelligence applications (AI apps) were little more than stochastic parrots.  They described LLMs as ‘a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information…

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Staying connected to reality via literature

For most of this year, I have not been a frequent visitor to bookshops so I am not suffering from tsundoku [see ‘Tsundoku’ on May 24th, 2017].  Instead, I have been unable to resist borrowing books from people when visiting them for weekends [see ‘Fictional planetary emergencies’ on June 4th, 2025].  This has allowed me to enjoy Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by…

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Passive nanorheology measurements

What do marshmallows, jelly (or Jell-O), cream cheese and Chinese soup dumplings have in common?  They are often made with gelatin.  Gelatin is derived from the skin and bones of cattle and pigs through the partial hydrolysis of collagen.  Gelatin is a physical hydrogel meaning that it consists of a three-dimensional network of polymer molecules in which a large amount of water is absorbed, as…

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Star sequence minimises distortion

It is some months since I have written about engineering so this post is focussed on some mechanical engineering.  The advent of pneumatic and electric torque wrenches has made it impossible for the ordinary motorist to change a wheel because it is very difficult to loosen wheel nuts by hand when they have been tightened by a powered wrench which most of us do not have available.  This has…

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Fictional Planetary Emergencies

A little while ago, when looking for something to read when visiting someone’s house, I picked up ‘The Complete Short Stories: volume 2’ of JG Ballard and started reading from the last story in the collection, ‘Report from an Obscure Planet’.  I was surprised to discover its similarity to a fictional piece I posted on this blog last year, see ‘Where has the blue planet gone?’ on July 3rd 2024. …

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Subconscious awareness of the erosion of individuality

One impact of publishing a monthly post instead of the weekly one I used to produce [see ‘600th post and time for a change‘, on January 3rd 2024], is that I often starting writing without any memory of the recent posts.  So, I have only just noticed that, ignoring the posts on technical topics, all my posts this year have been on the theme of what it means to be an individual [see ‘Is the…

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Are we individuals?

It has been estimated that there are 150 species of bacteria in our gut with a megagenome correspondingly larger than the human genome; and that 90% of the cells in our bodies are bacterial [1].  This challenges a simple understanding of individual identity because on one level we are a collection of organisms, mainly bacteria, rather than a single entity.  The complexity is almost…

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