Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares
&gt; Light and flexible pieces of wheat straw in San Francisco had easily been conveyed pneumatically from the tub grinder into the hammer mill.<p>Okay, that is a very basic failure of engineering&#x2F;imagination. I’m not saying shame is in order here, but several someone’s should be made to feel uncomfortable over this cock-up. Including the hiring manager because they went for kids instead of people with experience.<p>Why on earth would you assume you could move corn residues with air? Have you seen a corn field before? Have you touched corn?  This is the other problem of moving engineering far away from the problem. SF only sees so many refugees from Iowa and Illinois. Most of those go to Chicago or Seattle.<p>&gt; But with some deeper searching, we found a great, off-the-shelf belt that would arrive quickly.<p>Arrive quickly because the locals have been solving this exact problem for a hundred years. When you find an off the shelf solution for your problem, that’s when a good engineer or software developer takes umbrage and considers whether they have a bad, bad case of NIH.