Issue #1,116 | Merry Christmas! | 6 December 2021
From the Editor
With this issue, upFront.eZine takes its annual break to celebrate Christmas, and then returns in the new year. For January, I have the following topics planned:
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2 CAD Guys Talk
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Solid Edge 2022
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Plug-ins or Apps?
See you again on January 10, 2022!
In the meantime, enjoy the best-ever! version of Little Drummer Boy, by For King and Country:
The Complexity of Simplicity
Another in the upFront.eZine series examining complexity
There are a half-dozen or so books that have greatly impacted my thinking. One of the very first was Alan Bloom’s classic The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which launched my decades’-long longing for a better understanding of understanding, and a clearer knowing how we know (epistemology). In brief, Mr Bloom allows us to see that is not necessary to view life through the prism of our culture; it is possible to step outside of it.
Also, he predicted today’s woke bullies by some thirty years.
The book that a year ago really began this upFront.eZine series on complexity in is “Evolution of Scientific Knowledge: From Certainty to Uncertainty” (Edward Dougherty). I didn’t dare review it at the time, as I found it overwhelming. Not to read, but in its breadth. And so a year later, I take a stab at telling you what it’s about.
For a few thousand years now we’ve been trying to understand how we understand. The movie The Matrix popularized the problem: How do we know what we experience (and what we think we know) is truly what is. Or, as Rene Descartes wondered, suppose there is there an evil being fooling us into thinking we exist, when we don’t.
(In Mr Descartes’ case, he figured that if an evil being were fooling us, then we must exist, otherwise why would the evil being bother fooling us? From this, he came up with his famous cogito, ergo sum conclusion that he must exist, if only because he is thinking about these matters.)
While Mr Descartes’ conclusion has since been countered by other thinkers, he nevertheless launched a many centuries effort to explain everything through the portal of rationality. This approach, however, takes us Westerners only so far, and then we hit barriers: not everything can be understood through rational thinking; not all that there is can be known by humans.
And that’s what Mr Dougherty’s book is trying to teach us: we can’t know everything through logic alone. His book as a pretty good introduction to epistemology. He starts with Aristotle with his theories on certainty, and then arrives four chapters later at Bohr, who ruined certainty.
Mr Dougherty’s conclusion is this: although we desire the certainty of deterministic solutions, we’ll have to be satisfied with the vagueness of stochastic models. There is just too much we can’t ever know for sure.
Publisher SPIE considers this book important enough to distribute as a PDF for free, and I recommend it as a start in understanding epistemology.
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The Essence of Software
There’s a reason all cars, toasters, and televisions interface with humans the way that they do. They have, over time, proven to have pretty good interfaces, ones that through practice have made sense to us humans. All toasters have the same interface; as do cars, and so do tvs. To put it more accurately, these interfaces are what humans have come to expect.
Not to belabor the obvious, but when we push down a toaster’s ejector lever, we do so in expectation that the bread will descend into the toaster. Before doing so, we form a mental image of what will happen.
The good thing about cars, toasters, and televisions is that their configuration is relatively inflexible. There isn’t much designers can do to make their operation puzzling to consumers. Not so for software programs and the computers on which they run. They suffer from being just about infinitely flexible.
For computers with large screens, we are blessed to have a standard based on the original prototype developed by Xerox’s famous PARC research facility. For ones with small screens or even no screens, standards also have been developed. For vague concepts like the cloud, standards are still being worked on.
Here’s the problem: a complex standard cannot stand up to customer expectations. A standard makes things uniform, whereas people are not uniform. We each have our own ways of interacting with hardware and software that suits us, but not our neighbor.
One person I know, who has worked with computers for two decades, still has difficulty grasping the Clipboard concept: once he selects an item and press Ctrl+C, it is not obvious to him that pressing Ctrl-V returns the copied item, for the copied item is invisible to him. Interestingly enough, Windows 3.x offered a Clipboard viewer in 1990, while Windows 3 for Networking had a version that allowed copying and pasting between computers. Later, they were removed; not everything advances. It took nearly three decades for Windows 10 to bring back a visual Clipboard history (press Windows+V).
The Great Disconnect
Between the near-infinite variety in the ways by which software programmers can develop their software, and the near-infinite variety in which humans form a mind-image of how software ought to work, there is a great disconnect.
In areas as simple and as frustrating as UX [user experience], should there be more options, or fewer; longer explanations, or shorter ones? Software being unlimited in scope, programmers include more options, and then hide a bunch of them to make it look like there are fewer; provide both longer and shorter explanations.
In “The Essence of Software,” Daniel Jackson explains that the problem isn’t the number of functions; it’s the mental model users adopt, and so users...
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Cannot effectively use functions that exist
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Assume the functions they need don’t exist, and so do not actively seek them out
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Be nervous of making serious mistakes, and so use a tiny subset of functions
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And, in the most severe case, suffer loss of data
In short, the users’ mental model is incompatible with the programmer’s mental model.
The cloud makes the disconnect worse. Files that at one time were securely located on one’s computer might or might not still be there. Mr Jackson describes how design flaws in Google Docs and Dropbox cause people to lose files.
The immediate solution that springs to mind — education — is a partial solution for the same reason: Everyone learns differently. “If only there was a book I could buy,” my mother-in-law sighs.
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Evolution of Scientific Knowledge: From Certainty to Uncertainty
by Edward Dougherty
155 pages
PDF; free
ISBN 9781510607354
spie.org/samples/9781510607361.pdf
The Essence of Software: Why Concepts Matter for Great Design
by Daniel Jackson
336 pages, of which nearly half are notes
Hardcover; US$29.95
ISBN 9780691225388
essenceofsoftware.com
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And in Other News
A problem in 3D printing is distortion. Parts sag as gravity pulls down on not-yet hardened material; as heated material cools down, it can warp. The solution is to print the part, measure the distortion, and then edit the model. In this regard, Riven has a new Warp-Adapted-Model function that uses full-part 3D data to identify errors in printing, and then produces a new corrected model in minutes that eliminates warp. riven.ai
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IntelliCAD Technology Consortium releases IntelliCAD 10.1a to its member companies, featuring the following improvements:
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Excel file import
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Data links, formulas, and cell formats for tables
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Synchronize block attributes
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Nudge entities using keyboard shortcuts
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And more.
More information at intellicad.org/intellicad-10.1-release.
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Siemens lands a replacement contract with Hyundai-Kia, as the car makers switch to NX and Teamcenter for engineering design and product data management. The press release does not name the incumbent; in 2011, Hyundai-Kia implemented Windchill PLM from PTC.
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ARAS ups the update schedule of its namesake PLM software to every five weeks, starting with release 14 of ARAS Innovator. Customers can decide whether (or not) they want to install the update. Details at aras.com/en/news/press-releases/2021/11/aras-extends-leadership-with-most-agile-release-cadence-in-the-industry
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Here is a post that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:
You can subscribe to the WorldCAD Access blog’s RSS feed through Feed Burner at feeds.feedburner.com/WorldcadAccess.
Letters to the Editor
Re: TNG Rigs
Currently, and so far, Tangerine has no funding for developing TGN as I’ve specified and proposed it as an API, to be made openly available and encouraged for implementation in all 3D digital modeling environments/apps/platforms.
But hope springs eternal. Perhaps willing partners will make themselves known and TGN can move from idea to reality.
- Rob Snyder, developer of TNG rigs (via Linkedin)
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My issue with “BIM” is that it tries to be way too many things all at once. Trying to add render-quality components to a model, which already is overblown because of all the data contained, can really explode productivity and file sizes.
I prefer using a much more “hub and spoke” approach. Data is linked to objects in the model, rather than being fully contained in the model. Render-quality components are substituted when renderings are done. In that same manner, construction documents are extracted from the model, and then embellished externally.
What’s often missing is the advantages the model has for external generation of these of parts of the project. Why aren’t details requested or pulled from a library when the model has two different types of wall meet? Or two different types of floor material? There’s much which could be developed for the overall workflow if there wasn’t the need for everything being contained within a model and within a single application.
- Dave Edwards, editor
PragArchDesignTech newsletter
The editor replies: The dream of BIM was that it indeed would contain all information necessary to design and construct a building. But, as we are seeing, the complexity of the dream is overwhelming us and our hardware/software systems.
I think that one fear BIM vendors have is that, by allowing links to external data sources and apps, they lose monopolistic control of their customers.
Mr Edwards responds: If vendors would just open up their applications so that databases could be linked to unique Component Object Indexes, there’s a ton of things which could be done externally long before they are implemented in the software.
Notable Quotable
“For an app to be secure, you need to trust the hardware, the operating system, the software, the update mechanism, the login mechanism, and on and on and on. If one of those is untrustworthy, the whole system is insecure.
- Bruce Schneier
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