Er, right. I should have remembered that.... (a revel in jargon)

So this computer program I was writing this week (simulating flow around a cylinder) isn't working right.

( Yeah, this probably is long enough to need a cut-tag. )

And I post the above, on the grounds that it was pretty much exactly my thought process as I was walking home tonight, and I figure that enough of my friends-of list presumed-readers write sf and can use it with words substituted as a template for technobabble as she is spoke by a Real Engineer^(tm), with all the caveats and entertainments thereby implied. And there's always the amusing possibility that someone might understand.

It's also a good argument for the existence of jargon; there are at least a half-dozen words in there that would take a couple of paragraphs to explain in non-jargon terms, and there's no way to have a thought-pattern like that if you've got to stop every half-sentence and explain all that.

On the other hand, I could probably outline a fairly complete computational fluid mechanics course that did little more than explain the above post. *grin*

- Brooks

Er, right. I should have remembered that.... (a revel in jargon)

So this computer program I was writing this week (simulating flow around a cylinder) isn't working right.

( Yeah, this probably is long enough to need a cut-tag. )

And I post the above, on the grounds that it was pretty much exactly my thought process as I was walking home tonight, and I figure that enough of my friends-of list presumed-readers write sf and can use it with words substituted as a template for technobabble as she is spoke by a Real Engineer^(tm), with all the caveats and entertainments thereby implied. And there's always the amusing possibility that someone might understand.

It's also a good argument for the existence of jargon; there are at least a half-dozen words in there that would take a couple of paragraphs to explain in non-jargon terms, and there's no way to have a thought-pattern like that if you've got to stop every half-sentence and explain all that.

On the other hand, I could probably outline a fairly complete computational fluid mechanics course that did little more than explain the above post. *grin*

- Brooks