h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was listening to a radio program the other day where they discussed the Clifton Gorge suspension bridge, designed by Brunel and built by some very brave men. A new contest has been launched on Brunel's bicentenary to design a new bridge. Not that the old one has problems, but it would be good to encourage new thinking and encourage interest in engineering, even if remained a paper exercise only.

When I was a kid, we didn't have much money at all. We weren't poor but there was little left over for luxuries. The best present somebody ever bought me was a construction set of fischertechnik. I'd had loads of Lego up to that point but you get a bit bored building skyscrapers all the time. This stuff, on the other had, was amazing. You could build anything you wanted from it.

I was never a very fanciful child but I was very imaginative in my own way. I loved engineering. I loved exploring possibilities. So when i was bought this as a present it was not long before I wanted more and more of the stuff. Very little more of it came, because it was German, could only be bought from Hamleys and was very very expensive. Back in 1970, the basic set cost £3 10s, which was close to a king's ransome. I got two more small sets but that was it.

I brought all this up because I asked my daughter what she'd like to be when she grew up. She said she wanted to be an engineer on the space shuttle. She loves mechanical things, so I decided to buy her some of this. It's still expensive, but when you compare it to the cost of a GameBoy cartridge it really isn't. If we want more engineers in Britain we have to start young. We have to encourage their imaginations and passions from an early age. We have to get them away from the games consoles and DVD players. And we have to allow them to discover for themselves that it's only slightly more difficult to create than to consume, but immeasurably more satisfying.

I had some of this when I was a kid.

My dad used to pay regular visits to his mother in Frankfurt and brought some back with him on various occasions.

I'm not sure whether I still have it, or whether it has been passed down to nephews, but I found it far more interesting than Meccano - probably because of the colours and the twist-lock fittings.

JT

I've just spent some of my bonus on this for her. To buy the kit I want directly from Germany costs me £81 on eBay (new). Buy through a Uk distributor and you can add an extra 20% on top of that .

So how long before you buy the computer interfaces and start programming your own robots FM

That is an interesting question. I work at a pharmaceutical research site where we rely very heavily upon robots, especially in high-throughput screening. The *huge* compound management facility we have is a wonder to behold. It would be fun to try to make one of these in the back bedroom.

J wants to be a 'building planner', so I guess architect or engineer would fit that bill. You're right, we need to start them early.

It would probably help his ADHD by getting him to concentrate for longer.

When I was a kid I used to do origami...loads of it. I think that not only did it help me to concentrate, it also taught me a very great deal about visio-spatial relationships. As a chemist, you need a brain that can think in 3d.

My eldest son used to do endless Lego; I'll never forget that scrape-scrape sound in the early morning as he trawled through his drawer full of it. He's now a very versatile and busy bass player; just did a tour of the UK with a wonderful singer called Camille (she was in "Mrs Henderson Presents") http://www.camilleosullivan.com/home.html

My nephew played endless video games as a boy, and is now also a musician: lute and theorbo (based in London) http://www.oxfordlieder.co.uk/performers/sweeney.htm

I'm convinced the speedy reactions and unforgiving standards it taught him made him the excellent sight-reader he is.

But you're all musicians in your family. There must have been a huge pool of raw talent there that just needed some training. Like the Menuhins: they were all outstanding musicians.

Hmmm . . . does that make you a racist?

Don't see how . I'm prepared to believe that some intellectual abilities are inherited, just not prepared to say that certain races are better at certain kinds of things than others.

It's been convincingly shown that many human behaviors have a genetic component. It may not be very large for some behaviors, and overwhelming for others, but almost never nonexistent.

Yes, that's what I was on about . . . opening the Steven Pinker argument against the "Social Science model" of behaviour, which states that it is all learned. Not serious, just gadding about.

Though JS Bach, who came from the most famous dynasty of musicians in European history, once said that anyone could do what he had done, if they worked as long and hard as he had . . .

Did you know you only get two kinds of true child prodigy: musical and matehmatical You get lots of expectionally bright children, of course, but then you also get very bright adults. But *true* prodigies only come in one of the two flavours. *Nothing* can convice me that this kind of ability is learned, especially when children show it from such an early age. I don't know if JSB was a child prodigy but he was certainly a musical genius (who urinates on Mozart, IMHO).

Well I didn't know that; thank you.

Mozart would have stood in Bach's hot stream willingly; he was shown some Bach late in his short life and was enormously inspired by it.

Moazrt's misfortune was to be a composer in an age when "good taste" meant dumbing down; what the patrons wanted was the equivalent of those paintings showing fatarsed putti on fluffy clouds. The overture to "The Magic Flute" is a howl: Mozart writes a fugue that is cunningly disguised (by using an idiotic subject) so that the general public won't recognise it as a fugue at all. The Emperor's comment was "Too many notes".