[jerf]

I'm not talking about a bridge meant to stand for the ages. I did say "creek" after all.

We do all understand that there's everything from bridges across creeks that we can literally step over to bridges across multi-mile spans of lake or ocean, right? 100 hours of civil engineering is only enough to get a sense of how big a problem the latter is, but is probably plenty to learn how to build something down in the single or low-double digit of feet range that will be safe to cross.

I ask this quite seriously because it seems to me a lot of people get rather black-or-white on these sorts of issues, where either we must insist that we know nothing, absolutely nothing, and how dare you claim otherwise in your arrogance, OR we went to school for at least four years and got certified and have a job in the field and their opinions are unimpeachable and perfect on this matter. Probably an artifact of too much "school" and not enough experience in much of anything. In reality there are very few fields where there is no way to gain a modest amount of skill with modest effort; all the ones that leap to mind block you not because of the fundamental impossibility of learning a bit of something, but because of high capital entrance fees.

[oddsignals]

I actually agree with you, but I can see that it's not very obvious from my snarky comment. I've always been a generalist, and if there's one thing I hope I can teach my children it's that it's possible to learn how to do, make and fix just about anything - probably with less effort invested than they'd expect.

I just think it's interesting how much more concerted effort, even over centuries, it takes us to figure out how to do these things on larger scales.