Today’s the official first day of Engineers Week, so I hope everyone is planning to celebrate (how is up to you)! I started a day early by helping to staff the IEEE table at Engineers Week Mall Day at the Foothills Mall. We were one of a dozen groups trying to bring the beauty, fun, and importance of engineering to the people walking between Famous Footwear and KB Toys.

In addition to standard IEEE brochures and such, we had a Jacob’s Ladder set up. Not the biblical ladder, or the nautical rope ladder, or the logs on a ropes course (Wikipedia includes a dozen possible definitions for the term) but the Jacob’s Ladder that you see in SciFi movies all the time that is actually a high-voltage arc that travels up between two not-quite-parallel wires.

It actually went really well – people seemed interested in the visual nature of the thing, and stopped to ask lots of questions. Plus I got to meet a few more of the IEEE membership – though we have a lot of members here in Tucson, we don’t have very many opportunities to get together. This is something I hope we work on this coming year!