About "Open Engineering"
This web site has three main themes:
1) Energy without the Mess
This part of the site is aimed at providing a summary of energy issues that I can share with friends in the Spanish speaking world (there are English & Spanish versions of each page). It also includes some possible practical activities aimed at energy analysis and energy saving that can be carried out by students with very little equipment.
2) Open Engineering
The title of the site is inspired by the open source software movement which has succeeded in producing complex software by the voluntary effort of many collaborators. I have seen that in third world countries, engineers in universities and elsewhere sometimes have no budget to pay for travel to conferences, subscribe to journals or even make international phone calls. However they often have access to the Internet. Perhaps it will be possible to collaborate using the Internet to produce and share solutions to some of the problems that face us.
3) Nuclear Power
I am old enough to remember the fear when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in 1986, radioactive clouds were passing over western Europe and no-one knew whether the brave Soviet citizens who were sacrificing their lives to put out the fire would succeed or whether an even worse disaster would occur. In 2007 I participated in the UK government's consultation on nuclear power: this involved wading through hundreds of pages putting a biased pro-nuclear case. Examples of this bias are:
- That the word 'Chernobyl' appears only once with no mention of any deaths.
- No mention either of the farms in the UK where government controls restrict consumption of sheep to this day because they are too radioactive.
- That the word 'solar' doesn't appear at all despite solar power from the Mediterranean area being the largest viable energy source available to Europe and already under development.
Personal
I worked for over 40 years as an engineer or engineering manager, mostly in private industry in the UK but also for 5 years in the National Engineering University of Nicaragua (Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria - UNI) where I was awarded an honorary lectureship (Profesor Honorario). I originally qualified with a BSc in Engineering Science (mostly mechanical engineering plus some electrical and electronics) and worked for a while as a mechanical engineer before migrating into digital electronics and software. In mid career I gained an MSc in Digital Systems. I haven't earned my living in the energy field and aim to justify the arguments made on this website with publicly available figures, statistics and references, that anyone can check.
Blog
There is a blog - very occasionally updated - here: Blog.
To contact me, email the address below:
Economics Writing
My economics textbook "An Economy of Want" is now available on Amazon (ISBN: 978-1-3999-8588-8). The book is first of all a 'how the economy works' text, written by an engineer. It addresses how the operation of the economy underlies the problems of devastating environmental damage, deindustrialisation, lack of adequate livelihoods, and other health & social ills. A second part to the book contemplates what, based on the analysis, we might do to improve things. It's the work of 30 years of occasional notes and study whenever I could fit it in, plus a more intense effort over the last few years in retirement. It's based on my training and career as an engineer, on experience of the labour and environmental movements, and on the 5 years I spent working in Nicaragua - then and probably still one of the poorest countries in Latin America. I fear that my generation has largely failed the next. This is my best shot at trying to do something about it.- See the book here on Amazon UK: An Economy of Want
- Amazon have a 'Look Inside' feature if you'd like to see the contents and a sample.
- NOTE: If you are based outside the UK, find it on your local Amazon site, not the UK one!
- There's more about the book (in English and Spanish), where to buy it and where to leave a review, on its dedicated website.
Why The Economy is Failing: There are some earlier notes on the workings of the economy, made during the course of developing the book, here Why The Economy is Failing. There is of course far more in the full book which is over 500 pages with an extensive bibliography, and numerous diagrams and illustrations.