Let's say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called 'paper.' It's cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries. You can't write over it once it's been written on, but you buy more very cheaply. Wouldn't that technology come to dominate the market?
I had posted this on the amd blog...I am posting it here as well:
Guided by a thread that proposed the Journal Club, we evolve these operating notes. These notes are a work in progress, and will evolve as the iMechanica community and the Web technology evolve. Every moderator and architect can edit these notes. Every user can see the editing history. As always, every registered user can make suggestions by leaving comments.
It is commonly assumed that grain boundary sliding can control plastic deformation in fine grained crystalline solids. Superplasticity is often considered to be controlled by grain boundary sliding, for example. I have never accepted that view, though my own opinion is very much at odds with the commonly accepted picture. When I was asked to write a paper in honor of Professor F.R.N. Nabarro's 90th birthday (Prof.
So, What is Mechanics? It seems that useful answers ought to depend on who you are talking to. If you are persuading your dean to hire a new faculty member in Mechanics, perhaps you’d like to point out promising research in one area or another, and how foundational mechanics is to the education of future scientists and technologists in (almost) all fields.
I am actually an Internet Marketer (and only have the pleasure of being involved with your forum through my affiliation with one of this forum's founders.) I find that many of my customers are in engineering, and I look far and wide for forums and blogs on their specific topics. Robotics, extrusion, and atomization are three of the areas where I look for forums/blogs but I almost never find any. Any suggestions?
In early days of Applied Mechanics News, I encountered a practical problem. How do we call ourselves? I began with a phrase "people in the international community of applied mechanics". The phrase is inclusive and descriptive, but is too long, too timid and too clumsy. It is like calling entropy "the logarithm of the number of quantum states". I have also heard the phrase "mechanics people", which I don't like either. It sounds too folksy, like calling a gynecologist a women's doctor.
Here is one answer from Nokia.
Nokia 888 communicator, a concept design which recently won the Nokia's Benelux Design Award. It uses liquid battery, flexible touch display, speech recognition, touch sensitive body cover which lets it understand and adjust to the environment. It has a simple programmable body mechanism so that it changes forms in different situations. Don't forget to enjoy a video demo of this cell phone of future.
Yet one more future application of flexible electronics, it's clear there're great mechanics and materials challenges in making electronic devices flexible. It will be great mechanicians can help accelerate the advance of this emerging technology.
I registered for iMechanica a few days ago, and found many postings instructive. Here is my first blog entry.
The topics being studied today by mechanicians are very difficult (what I often call "dirty problems"). In fact, often the mechanical theories (actually coupled mechanics, biology, chemistry) required to gain improved understanding are still in their infancy. Mechanicians that have entered fields such as mechanics of biological structures have gotten up to speed by paying the price (hopefully an enjoyable time on a learning curve) of reading large numbers of papers and discipline-based books. Many of these papers are cryptic and, while they may be of high scientific quality, they do not have significant pedagogical value to those entering the field (graduate students for example).
