I realize I said I wouldn't discuss work here. What I meant was no work gossip and no opinions on research or technologies in my field. However, opinions on widely agreed facts are fair game.

In other words, it is OK to discuss how few women there are in engineering and what can possibly be done about it. This particularly hits home, since I work with very few women, and even fewer technical women.

Yesterday, I volunteered for an event held for local Girl Scouts. It was a day-long series of workshops designed to introduce the girls to various engineering disciplines and give them a taste of what can be done with the knowledge acquired. For example, the aeronautical engineering unit inflated and released balloons of different shapes to compare their aerodynamics. For the electrical engineering unit, we acquired a number of toy circuit kits and built simple circuits, explaining the concepts of Ohm's law along the way.

As part of the workshop, we also discussed career opportunities one can pursue with an EE degree. One of the points we made was that pursuing an EE degree doesn't mean you have to stay technical all your life; you can become an attorney, a doctor, a marketer, etc.

While it's true, this bothered me a bit. Engineering rarely makes its way into TV dramas or the movies, possibly because we don't get to save lives or put bad guys in jail, at least not directly. Engineering is the stuff of documentaries and little more.

The only examples I can come up with are Dilbert, Office Space, and Apollo 13. Dilbert and Office Space require a cynical sense of humor to appreciate. I love Dilbert and Office Space and am cynical myself, but it's hardly a glamorous depiction. After watching Apollo 13, one would want to be an astronaut, not the hapless engineers arguing with mission control or trying to figure out how to get various systems to work using the contents of a certain cardboard box. (I forget what they were trying to build, other than the contents of the box were clearly less than promising).

As a general rule, I guess it is difficult to write a drama that focuses on the profession. Take law, for example. Ally McBeal was essentially a sex show overlayed on a courtroom. It could just as easily have been, oh, I don't know, a record company. Law & Order, I think, does a much better job, since we know hardly anything about the prosecutors' personal lives.

Depending on the product, it could take just as long to design and implement a product as it does to investigate and try a case. That could get boring after a while. So how to make engineering design palatable for TV?

Hm, I'll have to mull this one over...