Skip to main content

Why Thinking is important

This week I went to the dentist for a routine check-up. By inspecting his waiting room I should have guessed that my dentist was a Jeovah witness. The book questioning the existence of pardise should have warned me.

After a while the dentist came in and I sat in the scary chair with pipes and syringes all over. I looked at my wisdom teeth that I should remove because there is no place left for them in my mouth. I mean really no place, one is pushing against my jaw and it make a terrible infection. The dentist began to explain me that I should open my mind, that I should make some work upon myself and give a place to those teeth, that they were here for a REASON. It was not a matter of surgery, just a matter of faith and self opening to the world. Seeing that I was more and more sceptical, he mistakingly took the example of homepathy to explain me that OTHER WAYS exist. "Yeah, I replied, I know that. It's the placebo effect. But it work only if you believe it". At that point he finally understsood that I would not be convinced by his weak arguments, and he said that I should pay him. Which I did.

Wow, I am happy that dentist is not a oncologist !


I am not against faith for itself, eventhough I'm not a believer. At all. But at some point, believing should not prevent people to think!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

5 Tips to work with legacy code

As engineers, we like to move things forward and, for those who have a little bit of experience (like me), having to work with legacy code can be a huge set back because we know it can be long, painful and slow-paced. But you don't have to make it harder that it needs to be for you and your team! Below are some common mistakes that occur when working with legacy code and possible ways to overcome them. 1. Should you really use it? That's probably the first and foremost question. Is it really necessary for your application to tap into this legacy code? Have you done extensive researches to see if there isn't a more modern library out there, with better licensing, design, architecture, library initialization, newest code features, documentation, unit tests, whatever than this old piece of code which is on your shelves? In case there is, ponder with caution the possible consequences of any choice, using as many criteria that you care for! Remember that this is an important cha

Shear waves, medecine and brain

Yesterday evening, too bored by what TV was proposing to me, I decided to watch a conference of Mathias Fink , a french researcher working on multidisciplinary application of waves. Specially shear waves.  Here is a brief summary of his talk. In solids, waves have two principal components:  compression waves (P-waves for primary) moving in the direction of propagation, and shear waves (S-waves, for secondary) that make ripples in the plane orthogonal to that direction. Since compression waves propagate in the direction of propagation, they move faster than shear waves. Usually ultrasound equipment in medicine only use compressional waves. But since human tissues have a high bulk modulus, the P-wave speed is relatively constant (around 1580 m/s). Human tissues are very stiff if you apply isotropic constraints on them (like pressure of water). However M. Fink and his colleagues proposed a new way to investigate human tissues by first sending a strong compressional wave in the tissu

Robust Stable Objects Deformation

In this entry, I'll briefly speak about computing robustly the deformation on a given object represented by a Finite Element mesh. There are a handful of methods to do that more or less robustly, and I'll just discuss them, with a speaking a little bit about their distinctive aspects. Classic lagrangian formulation The most used one in industrial commercial packages (like abaqus, ansys, etc). This is simply a linearization of Green-Lagrange strain tensor and deriving it to get the proper residual and stiffness matrix from one single Newton step. This method is absolutely rigourous, meaning that as long your mechanical behavior is well captured by the strain model  you'll get reliable results. However it has two main drawbacks: first you have to be careful when applying new forces or constraints and do it incrementally otherwise you may really blow up your model. For instance applying too much force will cause some elements to invert which won't be re-inverted thanks