Modern Vespa

What's a topic that YOU could present on -- let's say a 20 minute talk -- with no preparation?

I realize that talks don't really lend themselves to the textual format we have here at MV, but if you like, you can give us a paragraph or so on how you came to be an expert on your topic.

Difficulty level: scooters are off limits. Most of the people here could talk about scooters at the drop of a hat -- any hat -- for way more than 20 minutes.

Hey, at 70 I can blather on about most anything.

The easiest is anything related to spinal and other musculoskeletal issues as I spent 40 plus years dealing with that stuff. So kind of expected.

How about German immigration to Wisconsin and mid-19th century construction of Fachwerk ( half-timbered) buildings.

Pig castrating??

I think I could talk about Ales and Ciders for 20 minutes, oh and Golf.

Tell us a bit more about how you came to be an expert on these topics.

Introduction to Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing

or

Programming Coordinate Measuring Machines in either GeoMeasure 6000, CMM Manager or Polyworks


I've been doing it professionally since 1991 and have had my CQT Certification since 1994

Several different Bible topics ... I do that on a regular basis anyway.

Extensive study over the last 20+ years, and I give regular public discourses

Music Theory

I've been studying and playing music since I was 10, albeit not professionally.

The Advantages of Synthetic Oils

General study and personal experience

Managing the complexities and what to expect raising a special needs child

29 year's worth of life experience raising my son with Down Syndrome

Air Cooled Volkswagen Maintenance

Years of bloody knuckles and two copies of "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot" by John Muir. One working copy where the general maintenance section was so covered in dirt and oil it was barely legible, and the other for light reading.

Kitchen Disasters You Can Avoid

Because I failed to avoid many of them until I learned.

How We Survived the 1980s on Hose Water and Neglect

Life experience

So, that's a bunch. I know you only asked for one, so I didn't include "counting to one".

10 things almost all SME's get wrong with their website. In truth, 20mins would've long enough!

Why do u know this stuff? It's what I've done (amongst other stuff) for nearly 25 years now.

Group psychotherapy.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy.

West-Berlin, British sector of.

To me it sort of depends on what you mean by "no preparation".
My company was giving a seminar a few years ago, and I was a presenter about cutting tool failure modes, toward the end of the day. Turned out the presenters before me had gone short, by a lot, and I was called in about an hour and a half earlier than I had expected (mine was to be something like 45 minutes). So I was basically tasked with filling a bit over two hours. Which I did. But I was sort of prepared for that, in the sense that I had added topics to my presentation at the end, not intending to actually need to deliver.

On a more "without preparation" sort of level, I could do presentations or training an a variety of topics. Auto maintenance and repair for beginners (sort of like 'what is the point, and what happens if I don't do it'). Same for scooters, but that's not allowed here... Drywalling, plumbing, electrical work. Painting, tiling, gardening.

Oh, and it's not so much that I would present myself as an expert on these topics (other than paragraph one). I'm just familiar enough to be able to get a novice through their first level learning, with tips and tricks I've learned mostly through painful experience, as well as safety considerations. I tend to study the things I am considering attempting, rather thoroughly.

I'm intrigued. Can you say more about this topic?

Sea Kayaking
I could do 20 minutes on Kayak Safety or proper paddling technique, or trip planning and kayak camping. Once upon a time I used to do classes on all the above on the regular.

(I was ACA paddle instructor for 10 + years in a former life.)

I miss sea kayaking… but my back doesn't.

Pain, health issues (arthritis, ulcerative colitis, COPD, asthma etc), and growing old..

20 minutes..? I never shut up about it

Have you got AI to automatically respond to the replies on this topic or are you in training to be a therapist?

Your question reminds me of my teacher in high school, I was 14 - 15 something, long time ago.

One day he asked me if I could make a presentation on whatever scientific subject and present it to a jury in a regional competition.
First stage was city, then province, then region.
I do not know if that competation still exists. It was intended to stimulate young people's interest in science.

Back then I was much into cars and their technic and I decided: OK, I will do it. I will explain how a carburettor works and what the physical principles behind are, and I will explain different types of carburettors.

That was with preparation, but all on slides, all manual, back then no computers or anything.

For me, the question is really about finding out what topics people are experts on, with the caveat that their professional expertise is not really what I'm after (though that can be interesting too, depending on the profession).

For instance, I could blather on about C and Objective-C for hours, because I lived and breathed C and Objective-C for years, professionally. But that's really dry unless I'm talking to another programmer.

I find that the more interesting things are related to topics that people are accidentally experts in -- knowledge that they didn't learn in school or professionally.

I had to learn how to sweat copper twice, because I forgot the bit about waiting for the flame to turn green. So yeah, accidentally not going to forget that again....

Aerial Navigation(including Celestial navigation with a sextant)--I was a rated USAF Aerial Navigator in my first career, back just before electronic navigation aids became so reliable.

Aerodynamics and Fundamentals of Flight (Fixed and Rotary Wing)--USAF training.

Deployment and Operation of UAVs--Another facet of my USAF career.

Astrophotography--Another hobby.

Space Operas--I discovered Isaac Asimov's Robot novels when I was about 12 and have been a dedicated reader of Space Opera ever since. Asimov, Niven, Asher, Pournelle, Chalker, Banks, Corey, Reynolds, et.al.-I can glaze most people's eyes over talking about them.

Repair Techniques for Very Old Fiberglass Boats: a three-part series (Deck, Hull, and Interior)

Epoxy, the Eighth Wonder of the World

Crooked Sewing for Straight Men

How To End Up All Alone At Parties By Talking About Old Boats, Epoxy, or Sewing

-> I have owned a 56-year-old boat for 35 years

Was it 56 years old the whole time?

No, but time, space, and sweat have made me a bit philosophical about the boat's true age…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Pig castrating? We had a mostly dairy farm, but raising hogs brought in money and helped with cash flow...depending on markets, as always. It's one of the many unglamorous farm tasks. My dad had such a good "sell"...."Hey, Dave, I've got a job for you today!" I was his assistant, so really just trying to hold down a feisty piglet and a front row seat to the procedure. I didn't complain that much, but my grandfather once sent me a letter in college telling me if I tired of studies I could become a professional pig castrator.....now THAT was motivational!

We had an old Fachwerk (half-timbered) housebarn on our farm. Land was purchased in 1846 IIRC, land was cleared and building was built by a family from Saxony (before Germany existed). Two years later it was sold to a family that we were shirttail relatives of. It stayed in that family until it was sold to my grandparents during the Depression. There were a ton of that type of building in the area, but they gradually fell into disrepair, although some disappeared under siding. Our building was relatively unique, as most buidlings were houses or barns, not both. Back around 1960 historians were cataloguing remaining buildings, as well as scouting for a living museum nearby. An architect from Florida was tasked with doing detailed drawings of the building, visiting often enough to become a friend of the family, as well as many others who've come around over the years. The house part was mostly abandoned, so my sister and I took over part of it for a rather unique playhouse. Lots of things were never really disposed of, so we had a variety of furnishings, butter churns, washing machines, logging tools, etc and etc around us. It could have become part of the museum, but when they asked, my dad needed it as a farm building, and couldn't afford to donate it.

I spent part of a summer when I was in high school cutting up an old 1020 steel wheeled tractor. My standard summer outfit was cutoff shorts and bare feet. I can not only lecture about use of a cutting torch as well as artful dancing to avoid slag hitting the tops of my feet.

I was a private pilot long enough to have enough interesting stories to fill the time slot....

Fundamentals of Tabla?

Not much, I'd have to submit just about anything to pre-publication review for approval.

I don't know if you get Clarkson's Farm over there, but if you do, there's a segment on pig castrating (S04 Ep4 I think) that had me in stitches and cringing simultaneously. If you ever watch it, please come back and confirm if that is a prescribed method of extraction?

I might need a touchup, but Windows shell scripting. Besides desktop, printing and every other problem that came up, I spent considerable time writing 'batch' files.

Or perhaps, using Windows without any installed programs.

Old movies.

1910-1970.

I could easily go past 1970 but 1935-1960 are the golden age.

The best way to pack a dishwasher.

Vintage 2 stroke moped resurrection and restoration. I could go on for hours on these topics. I've been riding and wrenching on vintage mopeds since 1977.

The creative and legal minefield of designing a new guitar headstock that will not be seriously challenged for copyright infringement by others, and is also, hopefully, reasonably attractive.

I'll see if I can find it. IIRC, my sister was telling me she's a fan.

I was going to say that watching it might retraumatize me. then went off reminiscing: I got to be on the safe side of the fence, dad would nab the babies while the sows would protest with grunts/barks. Dad was oblivious, even with a how's mouth against his leg threatening to bite. When asked, he'd say the bite didn't hurt much. I remember a more protective mom kept another partition away hurdled the 3-foot partition to protect her offspring. Can't recall if that got his attention or not.

As an aside, my dad was a pretty quiet unassuming man, but he was fearless. Looked at an old photo recently of him painting our barn. 40 feet to the peak, he's painting the trim, I'm holding a sign holding the date 1963? My mom's taking the photo, so not only can I not see a safety rope, there'd be no one to hold it. My wife has nicknamed me "Juan sin miedo" or fearless Juan. I generally don't feel brave, but perhaps the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree...

As unobtainable as the end of pi.

How to build a controller for a high power EV brushless motor. Both hardware and software. Including advanced topics as regeneration, Field oriented control, field weakening and high torque sensorless start from standstill. Also for non-magnet salient motors.

Learned and developed all this from 0 when I started a project to build my own ebike. Built my own motor, built and programmed my own controller. Since I am a research scientist / electrical engineer with knowledge of algorithms and control and with experience in assembly language programming, stuff just got more and more advanced to the point of over the top ridiculous. I stopped cause there was nothing more to add.

You should look into turbo encabulators.

Maybe not present the topic as such. It usually starts when I'm in an area that has fundamentally changed from my childhood in ways that no other city could have changed and people take an interest in that place. Like two months ago when I had friends visiting from the US and I was showing them around.

For example, there is a large, central park area with a very broad straight street running all the way through it from east to west. The road is centuries old and eventually became as big and busy as it is today almost a hundred years ago.

Naturally, there is a lot of traffic there today; it's one of the arteries of the inner city. Only, there wasn't in the Eighties. When I was a teenager, the main access was from a big traffic circle in the west. A university campus lies to the left and right. Once you were past it, there was a canal running perpendicular to the street and a "gate" which was two colonnade-like stone erections on both sides of the street. One of them had been moved to the side to make way for the broad street.

Beyond that gate, things got very, very quiet. There was a flea market on weekends, but not much traffic. To the south, on your right the park area already started and to the north was just one large government-style building, set back a bit and you never saw anyone going in or out or open up a window.

Not far beyond the gate and large building, a train viaduct runs perpendicular to the street, but there were never any trains. Most cars coming from the west would turn north at the viaduct, so once you pressed on east under the tracks you were inside the park with that very broad street but basically no traffic at all.

To me, riding there with my bicycle it felt like entering a stage area. At the end of the stage, there was a gazebo and a backdrop, but as you got closer to it, you reached the end of the stage area. The gazebo looked less and less impressive, the closer you got. The backdrop was still only a backdrop, not a part of the city even though it looked like buildings from afar. And it literally was the end of the city. You could go north or south or go back the way you came, but the street, the very broad street had come to an end. Like swimming up to the rear glass pane in an aquarium.

Some cities are surrounded by mountains or they end at a cliff, but this one is flat. Still, it had a defined edge, an end to the stage. Most of you will have guessed that the gazebo is the famous Brandenburg Gate.

I've managed to sneak a few through without any unforeseen problems, but it's often a 'hit and miss' proposition.

One can only imagine how many different (and only slightly different) guitar headstock designs have been created, and there are no guides or catalogues of them to research so as to avoid inadvertent duplicity.

You're dealing with a starting point of a generally rectangular piece of (usually) wood that measures maybe five by eight inches, and must also facilitate the proper placement of four to twelve tuners, depending on the type of guitar it is.

Within those small dimensions, you have to create something unique and serviceable.

Don't get me started, dammit!

Oops, too late.

Made me think of the "Costanzacaster" for some reason.

As I read this, I was watching Seinfeld reruns in a hotel room in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

George was being physically thrown out of a movie theater by two big ushers.

For things that have no professional relevance, I could wing an impromptu talk on formal Japanese tea ceremony.

Towards the end of college, I started studying Japanese as a palate cleanser; which lead to tea on the side, both of which lead to living in Japan for a while, while I continued to study tea. I eventually got a teaching license (now lapsed).

I have opinions on the matcha boom here and abroad.

Jess must have read the same article I did about asking "magic questions" -- questions that people want to answer and people want to hear the answer to and thereby stimulate personal connection. Good article!

I could talk about:

Live theater operations, technology, design, programming - my primary career for 35 years.

Basic Chinese cooking - godmother sauces, ingredients, preparation, wok cooking - I've traveled in China a couple of times, and I love learning about culture through food (and eating it too).

Primatology, human evolution and behavior - What I studied in college a long time ago, but I could probably make 20 minutes.

Antique electric fans from about 1890 - 1950 -- I've owned hundreds, restored many dozens, specialized in pre-WWI models