The current issue of IEEE Spectrum includes their excellent Dream Jobs 2006 Special Report. Included in their list of ten technologists with "dream jobs" are Martin Cooper, who restores works of art using lasers, Mythbuster Grant Imahara, Disney Imagineer Manni Wong, and fountain designer Anthony Eckersall. From the profile of Eckersall:
When Eckersall started at Wet Design, he was asked to double the height of the Bellagio's water spray to its current 160 meters–"high enough," he says, "that the Federal Aviation Administration has complained that it shows up on radar." The shooters he helped design can propel water so powerfully that it disappears into a vapor. The new design also greatly improves control of the sprays. Today, the oarsmen can direct water to nearly one-thousandth of a degree. That lets the show designers pick the precise point at which two streams touch during the show.
Surprisingly, Eckersall says, one of the biggest challenges with the Bellagio fountain is maintaining the seemingly mundane housekeeping computer. It controls, among other things, the pond's filters, which catch everything, "from coins to nappies," he says.
