Lecture by Ben Craven

Today's lectures main point was show the value of rough calculations and estimates. We were given several exercises which were impossible to estimate without logical thinking and some basic understanding of Physics. These calculations give an idea of feasibility of projects and give an idea of in what scale the answers will be. I had a memory that quiet big engineering projects have had fails due to the lack of the estimates and a simple Google research gave a few examples:

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/11/1110mars-climate-observer-report/

http://www.globalprojectstrategy.com/lessons/case.php?id=23

The exercises what we were given seemed hard at the start, for example a practice question was "How many times do you roughly breathe in a year?". When you start to think about this question more in depth it is quiet simple to get an estimate, you only need to test how many times you breathe in a minute and know how many seconds are in minute, how many minutes in hour, how many hours is there in a day etc. The rest is simple maths. Even harder questions like what is the average power density of a human body in certain units is very doable with engineering logic.

I think this sort of exercises should be done in all the engineer/science schools. I believe that you can get a degree in many things with just a good memory and ability to learn by heart which obviously isn't great in a job where your main task is problem solving.

 I felt like I understood how my knowledge and thinking are very applicable even though I often (especially in lectures) feel that I don't know much. The phrase below sums up what is wrong about going to lectures and listening things about maths/engineering.