The art of quipping

At least one piece of Danish literature suggests that you should find out what you are good at and then stick to that. Having compared myself to others for decades, I believe that I possess certain skills for quipping. As with any other skill, it makes sense to learn the craft from the best in town. For that reason, I have decorated this page with pictures of my main sources of inspiration.

You may notice that I have left out Albert Einstein. Besides from such references being a much worn-out trope, I believe that he has through the years become victim of large-scale misattribution and misquoting. I do not want to contribute to that.

This page, however, is dedicated to my own contributions. On LinkedIn, I have given it a shot so many times that I can no longer find my old contributions. For that reason, you will below only find some more recent ones. Too bad, for one of my most memorable quips (memorable to me, that is) belongs to a favorite category of mine: "If false authorities ask for trouble, it would be impolite not to provide it." Anyway, Boeing once in a LinkedIn post proudly announced that one of their latest prototypes had succesfully flown its maiden voyage. I then commented that we should of course all rejoice with Boeing each time one of their planes got down in one piece. For reasons unknown to me, this particular advertisement disappeared soon afterwards...

One of my specialties, however, is quipping based on science and engineering. I tend to recycle these elements incessantly:

Statically determinate designs versus overconstrained ones
A conscious attitude to phenomena like observation, data processing and causality (recently inspired by this book)
A belief in Occam's razor: Any explanation should me made as simple as possible but no simpler
A belief in the separation of concerns as a general design principle
A keen eye on the possibility of multi-purpose design elements (contradicting item 4 above), which you may encounter on one of your lucky days
Other ways of combining sources and ideas that would otherwise be very far from each other

Science and engineering

First of all: Hats off for this contribution and this one from Mr. Elon Musk.

If you descend from a mountain in your car and attempt to control the speed with the brakes only, they will fail. If you drive your car for hours in first gear only (assuming manual transmission), the gearbox will fail. Every mechanical device has its limits. What IMHO makes the wind turbine on the video fail is that the control system did not turn the rotor axis perpendicular to the wind – for some unknown reason.

Christoph Müller: Yes and no. You can get a long way by estimating forces and divide them by a cross section area.

In an almost linear setup with many system modes clustering around the same eigenfrequency, the energy of the non-fundamental modes will dissipate faster than the energy of the fundamental mode.
That's all, folks!
(In particular, we should all avoid any interpretation in non-technical terms)

Kudos for an insightful presentation! Let me repeat that CAE analyses tend to be fish-shaped with respect to information content:
1) No human can phrase a question with an information content exceeding a few megabytes.
2) The results of just one CAE job may exceed the terabyte range.
3) No human can interpret an answer whose information content exceeds a few kilobytes.
So, the task of boiling down CAE results to a useful level is utterly important. Each attempt is highly welcomed.

It must depend on the context. If the goal of your simulation is to reproduce an NCAP test, accuracy must be the key issue, because the test conditions themselves are accurate.
Otherwise, "everything else equal"-simulations must be as valid today as they were in days of less abundant resources. Good product development will always bounce between the real world and the unreal one.

Gustavo Spaziano: I hope that your description is not to be interpreted as a double entendre. I know of a story where a customer representative did routine checks of brake pad deliveries as part of his job. In order for things to run smoothly, he and the supplier had a tacit agreement concerning in which box he would find the good ones…
As for Tiina’s question: After decades of working with myself, I have reached an important objective: There is only one me.

Graeme Keith: I am convinced that even math gifts come in flavors. Speaking of dichotomies, the teachers at my university tended to split between “analysis” and “geometry” – but there are more dichotomies than these. And then there is the concept of “hunches” which I think is one of my skills: “There must be some interesting stuff in that area so I guess it will be worth while to study it.”

Kompleksitet? Enhver god simuleringsberegning er fiskeformet: Først fodres analysen med menneskeskabte data, som i sagens natur ikke kan fylde mange megabytes - der findes simpelt hen ikke større problemer end det, som har meningsfulde løsninger.
Derefter skal der knuses tal til den store guldmedalje. Her når datamængderne op i terabyte-området.
Til sidst skal hele molevitten menneskeliggøres igen. Ofte ned til direktørniveau: 1 bit (dimsen er enten god nok eller ikke god nok).

I have for many years struggled with a sub-par OpenFOAM version which did not handle interface boundaries particularly well.
I know that Johan Rønby has contributed in that area, too. What are the similarities and what are the differences between your approaches?

I have always enjoyed your test example with a stationary droplet in an oscillating coordinate frame – a very intuitive way of illustrating a rather complex scenario.

The open-source community has the potential of being more honest, more open and more reproducible than any alternative – let’s keep it that way!
Documentation is fiction, source is fact.

I am always in favor of reduced order models. They counteract a business world which is drowning in mindless data.

Extraction of key values like the kLa value is often an underestimated part of a simulation job.
Massive amounts of data and tasty postprocessing may impress and deceive, but important decisions are typically made from extremely small amounts of - properly distilled - data.

Axially loaded, unstiffened cylinders are extremely sensitive to geometric imperfections, which are a random phenomenon. To "prove" anything at all, the experiment should have been performed with hundreds of cans of each kind (and perhaps it was).

Test some limits. Until you have done so, you will not know where the limits are. If something interesting shows up near the limits, you will not know that, either.

I have always liked the idea of hex-meshing what can be hex-meshed and applying transitional elements (ANSYS have them) to areas which cannot be hex-meshed. If the mesh is to be used for iterations, any cost savings will be beneficial. Any arguments against that approach?

Dr. Nils Jeners: And never ever forget the importance of heuristics. Without heuristics, you cannot be fast. If you are not fast, options will get stuck in the funnel or in the jet engine - and your competitor will arrive at the target before you.

Information technology

In most dynamic systems, wavelike behavior should be expected. The evolution – both in performance and in deployment – of AI has more than once suffered an “AI winter” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter ).
For poorly funded companies or for companies with other reasons to have nothing left to lose, overselling AI has been a no-brainer. Now – as always – the serious part of the business must suffer the blows that other stakeholders would have deserved if they were still there.
History actually repeats itself – to a great extent because unfounded optimism is both hard to counter and utterly charming…

As I see things, cryptocurrencies solve problems related to trust. For that reason, they may have genuine niche applications (some of them may even be legal), but the big picture is that payment always requires a certain amount of mutual trust, and anyone expecting more than “a certain amount” is in dire straits anyway.
So, any cryptocurrency is less of a problem solver and much more of a pyramid scheme and a “pass-the-buck-machine”, sending the energy consumption bill to some place where it will never be found.
For those reasons, I find myself in the strange position that I favor a kind of government which is able to ban cryptocurrencies. But I favor this kind of government only in that respect.

Documentation is fiction, source is fact.
(And tutorials which guide the user through pre-cooked examples are an underrated learning method. The OpenFOAM community offers many tutorials.)

In my understanding, software produced as part of a research project belongs to the institution sponsoring the project. If that institution is publicly owned, the software should carry an open-source license of some kind.
I suspect that many commercial software packages incessantly run code snippets which originate from publicly sponsored research work. This is, however, unprovable and should be a thing of the past. I am not the only one who thinks that open-source R&D software has a brilliant future.

Inkscape is a formidable tool for vector graphics, and vector graphics is a formidable tool for discarding the otherwise pervasive concept of dots-per-inch (dpi).
I recently communicated with people who – otherwise competently – use JPG files when scanning texts. If you think a little about what you are doing, you may substantially improve your quality-to-bandwidth ratio.

Management

A toxic manager typically manages what he should not manage, and refrains from managing what he should manage.

Management consists of information gathering, information processing and subsequent decision making - to be repeated ad nauseam. Only with respect to decision making, the boss has a true and undisputed monopoly. But during my 40 years of engineering, I have encountered many bosses who attempted to monopolize information gathering and information processing, too - and many subordinates who ducked and allowed the boss to have this additional monopoly. Ducking like this, at least the shareholder value suffers in a very opaque way.

Rachel Botsman: I definitely see the problem that "strong" and "empathetic" are misperceived as being mutually exclusive human properties. But why do you see it as a gender issue? Can you produce a list of male leaders who in the public eye pulled off being both strong and empathetic?

So true. But just the task of communicating item 1 to a manager is hard work. Concerning item 6: I have never understood the general trend that decision-makers strive to avoid making decisions.

I believe that ”bang for the buck” is the key issue. If you go nitty-gritty into details that you know of and unknowingly ignore important threats outside your comfort zone, you have made a poor risk estimate. Imagination, deliberate efforts to avoid bias, listening to people and keeping your organization healthy should be considered key elements of good management. My late father put it like this: “During a parking maneuver, the corner of the car that bumps into something will be the corner which you did not keep an eye on.”

The most toxic kind of management I know of - because the management layers above may think that all is well.

Bo Bodekær Hansen: Selv om ordet "samtale" lyder forjættende, kan afstanden fra samtale til uforpligtende snak være ubehageligt kort.
Ordet "samskabelse" peger derimod i retning af, at der træffes beslutninger. Når to parter skal skabe noget sammen, er det ofte nødvendigt, at parterne gør det, journalister kalder "kill your darlings" (eventyrkyndige vil kalde det at hugge hæle og klippe tæer). Det gør ondt, men somme tider skal det gøre ondt, før det gør godt.

Et klassisk beslutningshierarki har - også efter min mening - de ulemper, som oplægget så udmærket beskriver.
Men et par fordele bør fremhæves:
1) Alle forstår intuitivt, hvad det drejer sig om: Chefen bestemmer og har ansvaret, også når chefen befinder sig et sted mellem ukyndig og fuldkommen idiot.
2) "Alle" indebærer endvidere de myndigheder, der skal holde øje med, at landets arbejdspladser agerer nogenlunde gennemskueligt og ensartet.
Det er faktisk på ingen måde trivielt for en virksomhed at skrive sig ud af den klassiske, hierarkiske ledelsesret og ind i noget, hvor ledelsesretten er uddelegeret på en så veldefineret måde, at der ikke opstår nye problemer omkring beslutningskompetence.
For enden af hele denne problematik findes en forholdsvis ny bekendtgørelse: https://www.retsinformation.dk/eli/lta/2020/1406 . Jeg må kraftigt anbefale/indskærpe nye spillere på banen for virksomhedsrådgivning at sætte sig ind i alle konsekvenser af, hvad de anbefaler.
(Spørg eventuelt mig - jeg ved meget mere end, hvad jeg giver udtryk for her.)

Hvad med "tværgående perspektiver"?
Jeg har tænkt, at en arbejdsplads kan betragtes på to måder: Som et kludetæppe af opgaver, der holdes sammen af mennesker - eller som et kludetæppe af mennesker, der holdes sammen af opgaver. Der er virkelig ingen grund til at grave grøfter ved at foreslå kategoriinddelingen ovenfor. Det kreative, lønsomme og interessante sker typisk et sted imellem de to betragtningsmåder.

Philosophy (on my own level of enlightenment)

I think that data is knowledge with a lot of noise on top of it. Knowledge emerges when you extract the signal from the noise. Unfortunately, this process will always be ambiguous. Thus, knowledge is at best a volatile thing. Wisdom may be the outcome of realizing exactly that.

I am a simple-minded engineer and tend to think: "Fine stuff, indeed, nicely phrased and interesting. What will it make you do?" (Thus, I am a proponent of the Homo Faber approach to mankind. Trilobites or dinosaurs may do as they please.)

I have seen "intelligence" defined as "the quantity which correlates positively with IQ tests". Even classical IQ tests measure a broad spectrum of skills, and only prejudices should prevent anyone from including emotional ones, at least conceptually. The notion of a person (a "nerd") with a high IQ and a low EQ is a classic trope encountered everywhere. But it does not comply with my experiences. I have never met a person with a low EQ whom I could not outmaneuver intellectually. So when Mr. Zuckerberg finds the combination exceptionally rare, I attribute his findings to his perception skills.

Concerning the list ”9/11, 2008 financial crisis, 2020 Texas freeze”, the first two items were entirely man-made and could have been predicted, the last one less so. But counteracting them all would have followed similar guidelines: “Where am I vulnerable? Am I watching a sure path to success or simply a bubble?” Good heuristics are frequently much better than nothing.

Graeme Keith: I embrace several of your formulations but on the other hand, I think that you may have overcomplicated things a bit. As an amateur journalist, I am very much in favor of simple observations. I simply observe that some people refer to a “black swan incidence” differently from what I do. My understanding is that if you did not expect the Spanish Inquisition but observe its appearance anyway, there must have been something wrong with your expectations. In order not to be caught by surprise another time, you should revise your expectations. As the first Westerners in Australia did, and what the developers of special relativity and quantum mechanics did. Put in another way: By observing fish, you cannot predict the emergence of toads. From observing toads, you cannot predict the emergence of reptiles – and so on ad hominem and the Spanish Inquisition.

Erik Eklund: Depends on the context. If you are a doctor removing appendices or a Japanese chef preparing fugu ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugu ), most people will expect a higher success rate from you.

Concerning the subjects of JFK, purpose and direction: http://www.crimemagazine.com/president-and-prostitute-jack-kennedy-and-ellen-rometsch

Rob O’Donohue, ACC, PMP: At the age of 63, I take your statement "Stay forever young!" as a kind of curse.
However, I have a long time ago decided never to feel cursed - because the origin of a curse will always be outside me.
What I can control is my self-esteem: I am proud not to be young. Due to a combination of privileges, determination and hard work, I have survived both the follies of adolescence and the subsequent demands for never-ending performance while bringing up my children.
It seems that I still have a role to play. As brilliantly stated by Dave Aron, calmness is expected of me rather than brain-dead rebelliousness. I don this cloak of calmness with pride and intend to offer the output of still-functioning synapses to anyone who cares to listen. This will be my way of not going gentle into that good night...

Ginny Radmall’s point would be valid if homo sapiens adhered to its name. But our species obviously does not.
Just look at global politics in which each player strives to position himself as an underdog for the simple reason that people subliminally love underdogs and hate overdogs (they remind them of their most annoying adversaries).
Or watch American politics in which voters only occasionally elect the person who uses the right facts right. False humility has an important place among the strategies you can choose from.
This was just etc. etc. …

Constantin Diez: To me, the concept of winning is identical to "success for more than one person" - in accordance with my motto: "My life is too short for zero-sum games".
Within this paradigm, the opposite to winning is something which did not work. If it didn't work, I should make a note of it so that I do not repeat whatever led me into that situation.
To sum up: I am convinced that I need to care about winning in order not be a serial flopper.

Some of us belong to the Aspergers/autism spectrum...

It’s exactly here that we all need “Occam’s razor”. All successful analyses lead to decisions (no decision, no success), so all analyses should aim at highlighting the incongruences involved in reaching any decision at all. Complexity for complexity’s own sake makes no point whatsoever.
Let me attempt to illustrate with a musical example, quoting one of the classical world’s most demanding works with about 130 musicians involved at the peaks. Never the less, the whole thing begins with a simple “plink-plink-plonk”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPXuHs3Ksow

Blaise Papon: I read the article differently. As I understand the intent of the article, it is to make a distinction between mathematics and other kinds of science. Here I tend to disagree. Isn't it so that the derivations from axioms are more water-proof than the axioms themselves? Is the Axiom of Choice carved in stone? How about the Parallel Line Axiom? Aren’t the derivations causal effects of the axioms?
Concerning the dichotomy between natural science and humanities, I unabashedly think that the former seeks exact answers while the latter tend to avoid them. When disagreeing parties end up with an agreement, each party will want some leeway for interpretation so they can tell their hinterland that they got more out the agreement than the other party.

The future of mobility

Mobility is the issue - not cars...
120 years ago, people dreamt about carriages without horses, and products offered for sale looked like this:

Matthew Gardner: You nailed it. Any assumption that L5 is near is at best naïve, at worst reckless. I expect L5 to arrive in a decade or two but no sooner than that.

Giovanni Barbuti: The AV industry is no different from any other industry. The crucial point is to make a sharp distinction between what must be public and what can be confidential. Of course, today's vendors try to pull everything towards the confidential side. The more ground they gain today, the less they will have to give up later on as the technology matures. Shareholder value depends on that, but not customer satisfaction. If your AV is a Waymo and it is soon to collide with another AV, you as a customer want the outcome of the accident to be independent of the make of the other car.

The big advantage is the small footprint occupied by each traveler. At least in Copenhagen, however, bikers may behave really badly, turning life into hell for pedestrians.

Hot air at best, death traps at worst. Only SAE Level 5 will do.

In this video, I see an archefact from an AV euphoria just a few years ago. AVs will come, but not in the immediate future, and not like this.

I believe that both journalists and consumers can be trained to paradigms like SAE J3016, it is just a matter of time and hard work. Today, Dacia is just about the only car vendor in Denmark who can get away with selling cars without a maximum NCAP score. IMHO, the story about getting there proves that the average consumer may be less stupid than the average media professional.

Collaboration seems to be a splendid idea – preferably led by government agencies but with the AV vendors as partners and not adversaries.
There should be no doubt what the customers and people in general want: Interaction between a Tesla and a Ford should have the same effect as interaction between two Teslas – and as a pedestrian you should not need to take notice of the brand of the car that will collide with you in a split-second.

Jack Creasey: I expect the release notes to assign responsibility to the human at the controls. If the release notes are not understood, responsibility vanishes into thin air...

Tram-like public transport probably reached an all-time low three or four decades ago. Since then, many cities have invested heavily in such systems. With long, articulated units and smart payment systems, tramways are attractively positioned between buses and subways.
But apart from cold economics, there is an intriguing cultural aspect as pointed out by David Pickeral. Right-wing city councils may invest heavily in trams and other means of public transport, and left-wing city councils (like in Copenhagen) may entirely abandon the concept – all due to local public sentiments having developed themselves through the years.
As for future trams, the easy access to online electric power will probably keep batteries away – they are better used for other purposes. And SAE Level 4 AV operation should be within reach if the business case is there at all (there are lots of other reasons to have some kind of steward in each vehicle).

I think that the concept of flying cars suffers from scalability issues (as does the concept of travelling to Mars). I can imagine a few flying cars for special purposes, but I believe that a scenario of many flying cars is a scenario with a high risk of collisions - just to mention one scalability issue.

Sam Price: I agree – just compare the user scenario with that of designing a control room. People doing the latter professionally know that keeping the operator alert at all times is an independent and extremely important task.

Cars have never been more than one means among others to reach the objective of mobility. Mobility is and has always been the main issue.

Sustainability politics

I am not sure that the concept of a "power elite" applies everywhere. In Denmark, our democracy works so well that, in theory, we could make more pervasive decisions with respect to climate change than we actually do. But politicians advocating for such decisions will not be reelected. Thus, any decisions turning the blind eye towards climate change are actually made by the voters.

False authorities asking for trouble

Survival of the fittest - the unfit get run over by trains...

Eddie Plater: Definitely (nice one, thank you). Let's beat those Krauts with what they come with - weapons, humor, whatever...

Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

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