Ninjaneering and beyond

Engineering and Beyond.

That is the sales pitch for the School of Engineering.

I’d like to know how much they paid some marketing firm tocome up with that one. Any simpleton could have come up withthat.

In fact, I could have come up with that, and they could havepaid me, the starving college student, instead.

I think they should change their marketing slogan to”Ninjaneering. Engineering so fly you can’t even seeit.”

That has a bit more appeal, don’t you think?

That would mean that the students are ninjaneers —ninjaneers that sneak around in the shadows at night fixingthings.

To give the school even more appeal, I think professors shouldtake on cool rapper names. Shout outs to my engineering profs:Scotty D., Jerry B., Ali K. and Eddy Z.

This is how badly my mind wanders during class. I start thinkingabout real world applications of this stuff.

Sure, all of it makes sense in a mathematical and engineeringcontext, but some things just make more sense when you look at themin a completely different light.

In my Advanced Math class, the professor discussed a surfacethat was orientable. If something is orientable, does that meanthat it is capable of being Asian?

In my OMAP Systems class, we study the ARM core extensively,which is a 32-bit instruction set for the processor. Some engineercame along and thought it would be funny to call the 16-bit modethe Thumb.

Engineering humor — it makes up for lack of a life.

The ARM assembler is denoted by armasm when writing the assemblycode. You read it as arm a-s-m. However, if you run it all togetherand read it as a word, it’s armasm. Is that what happens whenthe processor gets excited?

Also, in my OMAP Systems class, we went over memory coherency. Istarted cracking up in the middle of class.

No one else was laughing, though. Memory coherency —something you lack when you’re severely intoxicated.

In Electronic Circuits, we talked about an insensitivity factor.The insensitivity factor is directly proportional to the degree bywhich a person is deemed a jerk. That is to say, the bigger thejerk, the greater the insensitivity factor.

In my Signal Processing class, we discussed causality. A systemis causal if it is non-anticipatory. It seemed to make more sensein a philosophical perspective.

Life — something that is non-anticipatory and therefore iscausal.

Three years of engineering and math classes and this is whatI’ve learned. Oh boy. I’d make one lousy engineer. Iwould spend all my time making fun of all the other engineers andwriting about everything instead of building and creatingstuff.

I think my recent career move was a good choice.

I’m convinced that I should be the one to write DavidLetterman’s nightly top 10. What do you think?

Ann Truong is a columnist for The Daily Campus. She may bereached at [email protected].