Chris Sideroff

Computational fluid dynamics development and consulting with @caelus_cml and other things. Owner of Applied CCM Inc @CanadaCFD

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@HiroNishikawa Agreed. It’s often a trivial operation we tend to overlook- that’s turns out to have some unexpected input or unexpected behavior on certain types input. Or a null pointer ;-)

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@garcfd Like this? https://t.co/TSkGdSVj5L

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@JohnDCook The sunk cost fallacy comes to mind. A very difficult individual and organizational behavior to overcome.

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@JhanHky Interesting thought. I’ve wondered if this why elite NHL scorers in the regular season can struggle to score in the playoffs.

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@travisyost If there was only one missing piece, this would be it. Bobrovsky was outstanding. Skinner and Pickard were Ok.

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

Someone asked me the other day who my hero was. I was never one to be starstruck by or idolize others but if I were forced to choose Freeman Dyson would be a good candidate.

[Hiroaki Nishikawa @HiroNishikawa]

My goal is to improve CFD algorithms, and prove that there is no such thing as bad grid, only bad discretizations.

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@HiroNishikawa “doesn’t” not “does”

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@HiroNishikawa I’m not sure how to reconcile in this context but I’ve often found one does actually “know” a subject well until they have to teach it. It seems to act of preparing and delivering material for teaching purposes is an excellent mechanism for learning.

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@Rolando_tillit @HiroNishikawa Is this a solver issue or more of RANS deficiency for separated flows? The HLPW seems to indicate the latter.

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

Humans are good at many things but communication is not one of them. All of our inefficiencies are rooted in poor communication and not lack of knowledge or know how.

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@HiroNishikawa It similar to the sentiment about starting your day by making your bed. No matter what else you do that day, you’ll always end the day with some feeling of accomplishment.

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@scottcwheeler In general I agree with this sentiment. Maybe there are other examples but what this does demonstrate is a lack of consistency from DPS. The cross-check he took to the face last year was worse and only resulted in a one game suspension.

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@jchawner I would argue beyond SMB this never happens. I could point out an obvious anecdote but won’t.

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@JohnDCook Agreed but in practice we struggle to separate people and ideas.

[Travis Yost @travisyost]

Oh great Alex Mogilny missed the Hall again. At this point I can only conclude he is guilty of innumerable homicides not privy to the public.

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@JohnDCook That was very well written and precisely how I feel about “charity” how it is currently carried out.

[John D. Cook @JohnDCook]

Is your charity going to waste?

The "fire and forget" model of giving is broken

https://t.co/qDyNJs4EKd

[Chris Sideroff @cnsidero]

@jchawner I had to look up that word #wordoftheday

[Jordan Taylor @Jordan_W_Taylor]

An elegy to iteration.

I work with someone who is about to earn a PhD by firing carbon dioxide snow out of a 6 axis robot at injection moulding tools. This is, of course, amazing.

Why is this amazing?

Well aside from the obvious robot-cleaning-with-CO2-snow aspect, it's also amazing because the opportunity to do this existed at all. We live in a society of impenetrable but cleverly disguised complexity and there are weird niches for innovation you would never think about. After all, *somebody* has to investigate soil chemistry, or kerosene vapour combustion, or how to ingest drugs through your eyeballs with doped contact lenses.

Or whatever.

But it's not the world changing deep specialists I'm most impressed by. Sure, it makes for a good LinkedIn post to say that you're working on renewable this, or fusion that, or melanoma therapy something else, and it might even be properly world changing, but I like to appreciate the smaller things.

I once sat in judgement of a group of engineering interns in a medical device facility, who were showcasing their work to directors. Obviously I had a lot of time for my own intern who had worked on qualifying a deep learning AI to do visual assessments, and had devised high efficiency tooling and workstations into the bargain, but I also had eyes for one other with far more modest achievements…

Where every other intern had showcased a single grandiose project, this unassuming  guy unfurled a list of two dozen teeny, tiny production tweaks. A process change here, a stock change there, each yielding pennies on the dollar. Tiny, modest, unimpressive…

…I practically sprung to my feet in applause.

Sure, each one of these tweaks were pretty pathetic in themselves, but there were a lot of them and, -here's the magic- they were the type of thing you could just *keep on doing!*

And small changes have a habit of releasing big ones: A few years ago I started a job where I wanted to make a good impression in the first hundred days and the only thing I could grasp at was… label alignment. Literally the most dull “who cares?” thing you can think of. But realignments were absorbing 10% of 30 peoples’ time in a busy shop floor unit, so I plugged away at the problem, and eventually beat it.

And a funny thing happened…

…That small change was just enough for production supervisors to start getting control of the area, and that released a few spare people, and *that* allowed me to run a new, bigger project to shorten lead times and remove millions in inventory… and removing that inventory eventually gave my team enough swing space to install a 2 million automated line, and so on.

And therein lies the magic that drives our crazy, complex world. It's not the visionaries or the mavericks, but the attentive quiet plodders who change the world, if only because there's so many of them: We can't all be Elon Musk, but maybe we can all be Joe-Bloggs-in-stores-who-has-a-bright-idea, and there are millions of Joe Bloggses in the world. They add up.

Now granted, there aren't many of us who could be my colleague, the soon-to-be PhD with the CO2 snow, as she's very clever indeed. Nonetheless, her automation project has the same flavour of modesty, technical savvy and attention to detail that makes up most innovation the world over.

We live in a world made by such people, who patiently implement Bright Ideas. Why not add to their number?

And then do it again, and again…