Re: Stress Analysis Spreadsheet Software - Opinions

On Feb 19, 2006, at 4:53 PM, Geoff Stone DD&D Australia wrote:

> How are things going to change if we dont participate?
I'm sure there were French unit commanders who said this very same thing in 1940 when support for the French government collapsed. When it's too late and you're on your own, it's no time for meaningless gestures. The only sensible thing is to keep your head down and hope to be around someday when you can accomplish something meaningful.

I've preached this little jeremiad so many times... I joined ASME in 1962, a few months out of school, and in 1963 I presented my first paper to the Joint Automatic Control Conference. Between 1963 and 1969 I wrote a few more papers and ended up on the ASME Code sub-committee for pressure vessels for human occupancy (PVHO). Code work is a huge rush, BTW, and I got to work with some of the real greats in putting out the first standard for PVHO. I the late 70's i started working with the local ASME section and served as secretary and vice-chairman. Later on I got involved with the old ASME BBS, helping out with the software archive at a time when the Internet was an obscure 'computer thing' that no one but a few academics knew anything about. The BBS became a mailing list some time around 1995 and I was co-sysop for the FEA user group FEA-L. Among the projects I helped with were ASMENet and a small effort to show some of the capabilities of something called the World Wide Web for the ASME. My very last national meeting--absolutely--was the Computers in Mechanical Engineering in Minneapolis. I'd been to dozens since the JACC in 1963, and this one was ghastly--a mockery.

I'd say I've paid my dues--in the literal sense and figuratively--for as long as anyone on this list and a longer than most on any list. I know you mean well, Geoff, but I know what I'm talking about.

The single constant in all that time was the ASME's inability to listen to any voice but its own. In the beginning, when society governance was predominantly industrial, this voice reflected working engineers and years of engineering practice. Since that time as industrial support faded away, the society began to become more of an old boys club, and began losing focus. ASMENet was a very expensive disaster---an on-line presence that provided no content and was so horribly backward even by on-line service standards of the time. It was quietly killed a year or so later in favor of a web page, which likewise had no content and no real reason for being. ASME Code has become an editorial nightmare--the basic technical basis has been in place for years but still the addenda and errata are larger than the Code itself, even as the price has quadrupled. Without heavy industrial involvement in maintaining the code, hairsplitting has replaced clarification and the backlog for addressing Code cases has increased mightily.

Believe me I could go on with the state of Mechanical Engineering magazine, the decrease in member services and the rush to veer off onto tangents. The reason I've pretty much given up on the society is that the governance won't admit to problems and cannot admit that they're in a headlong dash to irrelevance.
Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at chrisw@skypoint.com | this distance" (last words of Gen.

.......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania