How Do You Engineer?

Prosthesis are designed to replace lost or missing body parts, but what if they could do more? Inspired by The Third Thumb prosthetic, this week we discuss the possibility of enhancing human ability with various prostheses. Pete wants a prehensile tail, while Abbey just wants to flip through a book without using her arms. We describe (possibly dangerous) experiments with pure oxygen, and Simon discusses why gills are his top choice.

Welcome back to the past. Now that we have secured a good standard of living with light, heat, shelter and books, we have to spread the word. That requires a way to communicate information over long distances. We didn't want to rely on the actual historical method of guys on horses, so instead we tried to make semaphore, telegraph, and even a tiny underground message service.

What is your favorite programming language, and what would you change to make it better? Those are the questions that we ask this week. Abbey talks a bit about creating graphical UI designs using XML, and Pete and Simon share their experiences with graphical programming. We compile our experiences, and parse their meaning before we assemble it all together.

This episode we got together to talk about nothing... but we ended up talking about too much. Too much work, that is. When opportunity comes knocking, how do you say no?

This week we discuss managing our time, and every one else's expectations. Pete explains how to be a manager using a (perfectly accurate) sports analogy, and we talk about when to burn a project to the ground and rebuild. Remember engineers: in the end it's about saying no to yourself.

We've been talking about doing this episode for a while, but wanted to prepare our thoughts a little beforehand. Engineering has been understood for years to have a serious problem with diversity. We don't necessarily have the same ideas, and we almost certainly don't share all of your ideas, but we thought that it is important to discuss the issues and possible solutions to try to see where we come to.

Our trips to the year zero are back. This week we return to the past and create the worlds first 'zine. We start by trying to encode data for longevity. In an attempt to keep to a reasonable episode length we decided to limit the problem to reproducing text data for distribution. Soon we have a solution for spreading our propaganda across the ancient world. As usual we run around in circles and come up with a half-reasonable solution.

This week we travelled to big, scary Manhattan to talk to long-time guest and friend of the show, Safwan. Safwan joined us from his fancy office to discuss deep learning, AI, and the steamballing effects of big data. But before we can get there, we have to find the best way to navigate through the building.

How much private information are you willing to give away in exchange for services or discounts? We start off this week discussing how insurance companies trade information on you and your habits in exchange for discounts, but soon branch off in all directions related to privacy and security.

This week, we follow our love of words and look at one of Simon's favourite words: "Skeuomorphism." It's a five dollar word for a concept that you might know more about than you think. We jump off of the idea of skeuomorphs into a conversation on the general future of software interfaces (as we often do) so if you're into that, we have a podcast for you.

We're changing things up for a couple months