Last week was a busy one for the Senior Design Project program at Pitt’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, dominated by final presentations by all the graduating seniors. Senior Design is the capstone event for our students, an opportunity for them to synthesize the course work they have taken for the past four years into one integrated project. This semester we had sixty-two students, subdivided into twelve teams implementing a wide variety of design projects. Each project was based on a real-world example; each team was supported by a faculty mentor for technical guidance and an industry mentor for…

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It was my privilege last Saturday to be invited to the Opening Reception of the Fifth Annual Sculpture Exhibition at the Bridgeville Public Library (Bill and Grace McDivitt Center). The Pittsburgh Society of Sculptors is a nationally known organization of Western Pennsylvania sculptors working in a broad variety of media. Their partnership with Public Art Bridgeville has contributed heavily to the cultural environment of the community. This year twenty artists contributed forty-two pieces to the exhibition. It is traditional for outstanding exhibits to be given special awards each year at this exhibition. Three of the winners of the awards were…

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Last week Kevin Abt, an ex-student and dear friend of mine, was in town for a visit and offered me the opportunity to spend a day exploring industrial archaeology in Mercer County, an opportunity I was eager to accept. Kevin has had a distinguished career working as an engineer/project manager in the Virginia Beach area for the past two and a half decades and has a keen interest in everything technical and historical. He currently is finishing an engagement as Project Manager for a new tunnel under the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel Commission….

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I have just returned from an enjoyable visit with my daughter Sara and her family in Fort Collins, Colorado. It is always great to see them and interesting to spend time in an environment that is quite different from ours. Fort Collins is a pleasant city, about half the size of Pittsburgh, located at the edge of the foothills, the boundary between the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. Jim and Sara moved there in 1993 when she enrolled at Colorado State University to pursue her Doctorate in Wildlife Ecology. After graduating in 1999 she joined the United States Geological…

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When we studied world history in high school, we learned that the evolution of civilization had a major setback in the fifth century AD when the Barbarians overthrew the Roman Empire and Europe entered the Dark Ages. All attempts at learning and science were suspended and massive amounts of knowledge were lost forever. It took a millennium and the arrival of the Renaissance for it to get back on track. Recently I have learned that this perception may have been grossly exaggerated. This realization began with watching “The Dig”, an excellent recent British movie. It documents an important archaeological excavation…

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Long time readers of these pages are aware of my fascination with the Iditarod and my insistence on dedicating a column to it each year. This year’s running finished last week, and I am in my annual slough of despond and withdrawal, realizing I must wait eleven months for next year’s race. After several years of warmer temperatures and a disappointing snow pack, Mother Nature provided us with old-fashioned conditions this year. The temperature seldom got much above zero during the day and several times was as cold as minus fifty in the mornings. Last year’s race had a makeshift…

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Last Saturday (March 14, aka National π Day), when I randomly pulled a pair of socks out of my sock drawer, I was astonished at the coincidence that it was my “π Day” pair. I suspect that not all of our readers are sufficiently esoteric to celebrate this popular holiday, so I will briefly bring you up to date. In 1988 an eccentric physicist (Larry Shaw) at the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco, initiated a celebration honoring π, the Greek letter representing the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter. We amateur mathematicians know that…

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It is easy to accuse me of having mixed up priorities. While the rest of the world was grappling with major issues – war with Iran, climate change, the effectiveness of vaccines, etc. – last week I found myself in a knock-down, drag-out argument with a group of serious glass collectors debating the significance of the “bumblebee” trademark for verifying the authenticity of JB Higbee glasswork. A year or so ago I realized that the Facebook page for the Early American Pattern Glass Society was a possible source of information regarding collecting Higbee pieces manufactured in Bridgeville between 1906 and…

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The Bridgeville Area Historical Society presented the final program in its Winter schedule on the last Sunday of February. This month the program series will return to its traditional “last Tuesday evening of the month” schedule. The speaker for February was Tim Ragaller, representing the Woodville House Associates where he is a member of the Board of Directors and an extremely active volunteer. We know Tim as the son of Dolores DeBlander (Ragaller), Bridgeville High School (BHS) May Queen in 1947, and Dick Ragaller, BHS class of 1945. I had the privilege of working as a soda jerk at McMillen’s…

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Last week’s column lamenting the demise of the Post-Gazette generated more feedback than usual, mostly from old fogies with fond memories of being paperboys. The more I read about the subject, the more depressing it becomes. It appears that the only cities still served by print papers seven days a week are New York, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and even those holdouts are experiencing dramatically reduced circulations. My initial intention was to produce a follow-up column discussing the apparently still successful newspapers in near-by county seats, with the Washington Observer-Reporter as a principal case study. It is an excellent candidate for me, being…

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