Rob Cook - Mechanical Engineer

As my long-suffering colleagues, family, and friends will attest, I like climbing, and I like talking about climbing. 1   Some lovely rocks for climbing on - Sennen, Cornwall. I'm definitely not alone in being an engineer who climbs - perhaps it's the attraction of the shiny metalwork, the fact that it has standards against which success can be measured, or the chance to get outdoors after a long week at work. I'd wager that the feeling of competence has something to do with it as well - climbing has skills that can be learned. Once you've learned those skills and become competent, you can use them to wow non-climbers, demonstrating skill in a way that impresses people. That immediate competence feedback isn't always available in work projects that can last months or years, and sometimes the most difficult element of engineering in a project goes unnoticed by the client, while they're wowed by the box you put it in. This might g...

This is a slightly odder one, but again (like the Pope and pizza question ) it stems from a conversation with my friends. This one started from me providing tips to warm up cold hands, an ever-present problem in poorly-insulated student houses. As someone who's quite keen on mountaineering, especially in winter, cold hands are something I think I know about and the engineer in me can't help but try to solve a problem when one is presented. Winter, in case you didn't know what it looked like. (Any excuse to show off some photography...) A classic mountaineer's trick to get some blood flowing in the fingers is to windmill your arm vigourously, both generating some heat through movement and creating some extra artificial blood pressure. This bonus pressure forces some blood into the digits, which can be enough to give you a little more dexterity for a few minutes, handy for undoing zips, putting on crampons etc. While I was keen on the idea, one of my friends put for...