Commentaries • insights • Technical thinking

By Mark Jones Each month, I email this column to the editor of Design World. It is the way we communicate and the way I communicate with many others. So, an article quantifying the human mortality cost of email signatures caught my attention. I dug in, curious to find how email leads to death. The…

The phrase, “E pur si muove,” (or in English “and yet it moves”) is attributed to the Italian natural scientist Galileo Galilei, who allegedly uttered it sometime after being brought before the Inquisition and forced to recant his claim that the earth moved around the sun and not the other way around, as was the…

By Mark Jones I got skunked. Two groups published an idea I had before I could complete the research. But let’s go back to the beginning. Ever the supportive spouse, I accompanied my wife for her colonoscopy in early May. But I had an ulterior motive; I wanted a sample from the IV bag. A…

By Mark Jones I was in Florida when the alert came telling me my house was in danger of catching fire due to an electrical problem. Not news I wanted to receive while 1,400 miles away from home. An internet-connected device plugged into an outlet detected a problem. Whisker Labs was reaching out to warn…

Whether you’ve had a subscription to The Economist since college or know nothing about the taxing of imported goods, you’ve probably been thinking a lot more about tariffs than usual. The subject has overtaken the airwaves and the watercooler alike since mid-January, and when it will subside is anybody’s guess. The Trump Administration’s “on-again, off-again”…

By Mark Jones The experiment is brilliant. Researchers came up with a way to compare the intelligence of ants to humans. It didn’t go so well for us. Some of us perform worse at a cognitive test than an ant. Disturbing as that is, the study also shows that when we cooperate in a group,…

By Mark Jones 2024 was the year of spatulageddon. Plastic spatulas were trashed due to reports of dangers lurking within. The journal article that raised concern contained an error, an obvious error. A correction was made, but there’s more to the story. The study causing spatulageddon was published in the journal Chemosphere. The corresponding author…

By Mark Jones I was bored as I waited for my “torch” — something that this food truck called its sandwiches — and so random thoughts came and went. This torch name seemed to be an unnecessary gimmick. Fumes directed my next thoughts: fumes from portable generators. Each food truck in the line of food…

If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately (and even if you don’t pay that much attention at all), you’ve probably noticed that there sure seem to be a lot of stories about food recalls and alerts in the United States. I’ve certainly noticed. Every day that I visit a major news website, there…

By Mark Jones As I passed the horse and buggy, I noticed a buggy whip in the driver’s hand. While buggy whips are the standard analogy for obsolete technology, here I was confronted with one currently in use. Any technology doomed to be replaced will, at some point, be compared with buggy whips. Yet, buggy…

By Mark Jones I’m sure detailed questions about fuel consumption from a passenger aren’t common, but the pilots on flights 2030 and 1114 humored me. My ticket showed the emissions allotted to my seat, something I noticed for the first time. The numbers were lower than I anticipated, so I wanted to check the math.…

I’ve lived in my home for 20 years now, and a lot accumulated and cluttered the living space over that time. So much so that it periodically requires a full purge of possessions. When that happens, the industrial-strength dumpster rolls onto the driveway, and I start cleaning house. Once done, it’s like a weight has…

By Mark Jones Mistakes happen. But small mistakes create big impacts when perpetrated by enormous companies. The largest IT meltdown ever occurred because a small mistake took down 8.5 million computers. Scale made it a big problem, just like a recent ice cream issue. The pictures of airport concourses with bright blue screens on kiosks…

It’s the holidays again, and with all the commotion and stressors of the season, few things go out the window faster for me than moderation: the food, the presents, the social engagements — it’s festivities: full-throttle. Admittedly, I can be a bit much. So, it should be no surprise that it is with that same…

Back in the early days of the Internet, as the world wide web was beginning to take shape and before it was as ubiquitous as it is today, there was an optimism that pervaded tech circles. The general mood was that this rising tech wave would make us all freer, smarter, and happier. There were…

Startups have it made. With a single match, they can ignite engineers’ creativity and fuel collaboration and quality naturally within their emerging cultures. Light the same match in a long-standing company, and many people flee and protest, clinging to the way things have always been. In chapter one of “Quality Management for Dummies” by Anthony…

DigiKey, a global commerce distributor offering the largest selection of technical components and automation products in stock for immediate shipment, announced the debut of Season 4 of the Factory Tomorrow video series sponsored by Siemens and Banner Engineering. The newest season explores the next wave of innovation in industrial automation solutions for global manufacturing. The modern factory is defined by…

By Mark Jones My wife, Erin, is now the proud owner of a plug-in hybrid vehicle. It is a purchase intended to make us more sustainable. Like previous purchases intended to reduce our environmental impact, it does not make economic sense. It is not our first hybrid. It is our first lithium-ion battery vehicle, fitting…

It’s been six months since the DW team met with igus for the launch and open house of the company’s Michigan-based “Enjoyneering” Center last winter. For a company that has historically moved on new initiatives as quickly as Igus, six months is actually a fair amount of time. So I was excited to sit down…

By Mark Jones The norm is technology just gets better. Cars are better. The feeler gauges I used to adjust the valves in my first car still reside in the upper right drawer of my toolbox. I haven’t adjusted valves in decades. Same for my grease gun. There isn’t a grease zerk on my current…

By Mark Jones “Save water. Shower tomorrow” is the message on a billboard I just passed. It stood out from the others along I-75 near Flint, Mich., a mix of personal injury lawyers, fast food, and cannabis shops. As it happened, I was listening to a podcast on water. Seemed fitting. Flint is synonymous with…

Before each dinner, I ask my son to consider everything that went into preparing his meal. We start with Mom or Dad cooking, which leads to working hard to provide healthy food, and so we give thanks for everyone and everything that makes working and living well possible. Then we acknowledge the grocery stores, farmers,…

By Mark Jones The cause of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse seems clear. The Dali, the cause of the bridge’s demise, sits grounded with parts of the bridge strewn across its bow. Drifting after losing power, the ship hit one of the bridge’s supports, bringing it down in an instant. Removal of the support…

By now, Boeing’s recent engineering issues are familiar to most people. There were the two deadly crashes of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in 2018 and 2019 that killed more than 350 people. Plus, we’ve seen the recent incident of an aircraft door plug falling off in midair and allegations of structural defects in the 787…

By Mark Jones I was relieved at Acadia National Park when I didn’t see the plastic trash I was expecting. It was the same in Anguilla. I expected fouled beaches I never found. It was the same in Florida. Sadly, I found the plastic trash where I wasn’t expecting it: Kentucky. Cave Run Lake, in…