Cool Things

Last weekend one of the brothers-in-law that I hiked with asked me what technological marvel I found most amazing. It's a good question. There are things around us daily which are truly amazing. My answers were the first two below. I've listed some more.

1. Ink Jet Printing (heck, even dot matrix printing is amazing!) - The head flies by and shoots micro-droplets of ink onto a page in perfect placement to form an image. The fact that this can be done accurately and quickly enough to form text - let alone a photo quality image - is astounding.
2. Machine Vision Systems - In my former job (I could name a lot of cool things from that job) I was exposed to machines that would literally 'look' at a stream of parts passing by their camera eyes and decide whether each part was good or bad. In some food processing factories the stream of product is passed over a ramp, flies through the air past a camera, and if a bad item is seen it is removed from the airborne stream with a puff of air.
3. Digital Light Processing (TM) - I held one of these in my hand today. It looks like a computer chip with a small mirror in it. That little mirror is actually 2 million tiny mirrors, each of which can tilt one way or another extremely quickly, such that the reflected light creates a high quality moving image. These little mirrors aren't just making 'bright' and 'dark' they make the shades in between by tilting back and forth quickly, staying on more than off for brighter and off more than on for darker. I can't believe this actually exists.
4. Magnets - That's it. Magnets are cool.
5. Electricity, Water, Sewage, Gas, Telephone, Cable - They're not trendy, but these guys are really, really important. If the first four were cut off even for a few days it would be a disaster.

You know, working in the engineering field it seems like everybody else thinks we know how all this stuff works and that means we're not impressed by it. We're just as amazed as everyone else. I worked for nearly five years in factory automation and I still don't understand how those machines get built. I guess it's the whole "no 'I' in team" thing. OK, bedtime.