{"id":1581,"date":"2012-03-22T14:46:28","date_gmt":"2012-03-22T06:46:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tzlee.com\/blog\/?p=1581"},"modified":"2014-08-02T00:08:10","modified_gmt":"2014-08-01T16:08:10","slug":"real-world-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/real-world-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Real World Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m leaving for Sydney later tonight and will be flying on the Airbus A380. I know we’ve heard about wing cracks<\/a> on the A380 and wifey was just getting a little paranoid that we’re going to fly in a potentially cracking aircraft tonight.<\/p>\n

So wife’s paranoia* got me reading up on the cracks.<\/p>\n

* I’ll have to convince her it’s safe to fly or she’ll squeeze my arms so hard on take-off that blood just stops flowing.<\/small><\/p>\n

Anyway just to quickly summarize, the cracks were small hair-line cracks in the feet of ribs in the wings. This was a result of using newer, lightweight materials to save weight and improve fuel economy.<\/p>\n

If you make an aircraft bigger, it gets heavier so you’ll need to make the wings bigger and the engine more powerful. It’s only natural that fuel economy takes a hit.<\/p>\n

The automotive industry works similarly – the easier way was to make things more aerodynamic<\/a> and lighter so that fuel economy improves, but with newer safety standards this is starting to become a challenge. Making an engine do more work with less fuel was the difficult part.<\/p>\n

The aircraft turbofan<\/a> is already very efficient (at cruising speeds) but automotive fuel-saving technologies<\/a> still has some ways to go. Nevertheless, the automotive industry has seen some pretty awesome new technologies in the past decade, which explains why I am such a fan of them.<\/p>\n

But I’m not going to talk about cars today. This brings me to another point: What drives technology?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Technology<\/a> is an integral part of our evolution and my belief is that real world needs are the main drivers of good<\/strong> technology. Unfortunately for the folks who would like to believe everything new is good, I do not believe its true. Good technology is not just any new technology, but technology that works to solve a real world problem – hence my love for automotive technology. In fact, old technology can sometimes be better than new technology.<\/p>\n

I think that aviation and automotive industries are two of the major drivers of technology; if not for space flight and aviation, we wouldn’t have GPS, accelerometers and gyroscopes in the iPhone today.<\/p>\n

In the recent years the automotive industry has gained a lot of traction. We’ve seen new engine technologies that improve both power and fuel efficiency, reduced emissions and new gadgets that improve safety. These are technologies put to real-world tests in everyday use, and these technologies are what I believe where the real money should be.<\/p>\n

Not social networking. Not group buying. Not building some iPhone app.<\/p>\n

Of course, these are just my personal opinions.<\/p>\n

In today’s fast-paced environment we are distracted by the Internet. Our thoughts are becoming more and more shallow and short-sighted. Most new technologies are built around dreams and desires rather than real needs.<\/p>\n

I’m not downplaying the importance of dreams but I my worry is that many are headed towards building dream\/desire and we’ll soon be starved of real talents to serve our needs – and I think it’s already happening right now in our society.<\/p>\n

If you’re thinking of building the next big thing, give a few minutes to think about what I just wrote here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m leaving for Sydney later tonight and will be flying on the Airbus A380. I know we’ve heard about wing cracks on the A380 and wifey was just getting a little paranoid that we’re going to fly in a potentially… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-automobile","category-tech"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1581"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1727,"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1581\/revisions\/1727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}