Does a janitor really need to know Pythagoras's theorem?

There is a debate which comes up very often, of whether it is worth teaching people any more than is strictly necessary, or whether there is any benefit to learning a wide range of subjects at school and university.

"Do you really need to learn about glaciers or the quadratic equation at school?" I will answer this question with another: "Does a soldier really need to do push-ups?" The motion of a push-up itself is near useless just about anywhere in life, military or otherwise, but it is a valuable physical exercise. In the same way, rigorous academic study is central to exercising the brain. Mathematics in particular is as important to develop logic and critical thinking as push-ups are to strong muscles.

In the modern world, no job is "brainless" (except, perhaps, for reality TV). There is so much automation and connectivity that it's impossible to be illiterate or innumerate in the workforce. Car mechanics increasingly need to be proficient with an oscilloscope; farmers increasingly internet connected. Even besides economics, our democracy and society requires informed individuals.

I think that this point reaches even further. There is often a question of whether university degrees are "worth it" when there are already so many graduates in the job market. Should our society invest in pumping out so many graduates? When every one of its members is responsible for taking part in its politics, looking after the environment, representing it internationally, I don't think it can afford not to.

Must a Civilization harness fusion power?

Chances are, if you're reading this, that you are aware of the (Sid Meier's) Civilization series of video games; the most recent of them has sold something like 20 million copies. It could be argued that they are a cultural icon. Many young people like me grew up on them.

In a game whose premise involves commanding a titular civilization from the age of triremes to jet fighters, there is a comforting commonality in the depiction of how technology progresses. Or, more specifically, its apex. Because, while you will inevitably encounter writing and gunpowder as time passes, nearly every game in the series finishes the story off with Nuclear Fusion.

What is most remarkable about it is that it is one of the very few speculative technologies to feature in the games. Sure, you can launch a space mission to colonize another star system, but almost everything else in the games mirrors the world up to the present day.

I think that the creators continue to include fusion in the story of civilization, because like me (and I hope, most of the players too) they are optimistic that humanity will inevitably generate vast amounts of energy from controlled fusion. Could a civilization afford not to?

Go Banana!

I recently obtained my PhD in Plasma Science and Fusion Energy and fittingly started working at the most successful fusion experiment to date. Suffice it to say, not all of it is as high-tech as one may imagine.

I am working with a team of engineers on a set of diagnostic antennas to probe the fusion plasmas with radio waves. To generate these radio waves and stop them from burning anything out, we have a complicated set of electronics, which must be commissioned before they are used in anger.

We discovered that one of our control units was behaving strangely. A loose connection, perhaps? As we probed around around the unit's motherboard, the requisite lights seemed to flash back to light and flicker out. A closer search revealed that the system could be made to work by touching a particular area of the circuit board.

I quickly hunted down and marked with a sharpie the area where reaching in to our electronics rack with a carefully placed middle finger would bring the system to life. Surely one of us couldn't stand there poking the device into life for hours on end, grumbled my colleagues.

Faced with this challenge, I looked around the room for something to apply sufficient pressure to the marked area. After trying various plastic tools, I thought about approximating a human finger more closely. An orange taken from a lunchbox didn't quite do the trick, but a banana seemed to apply exactly the required pressure and capacitance to fix our circuitry.

Here is how I wedged it in place to allow us to continue testing:

In the end, we were able to successfully finish our tests and subsequently to fix the "floating" grounds causing the problem so that we needn't use any more bananas.