I have little understanding of the complexities being discussed on this forum but have learned a lot from the lively discussion. But there comes a time to acknowledge excellence in an entirely other realm. As General George Patton said, "Sometimes I get carried away by my own elegance" and he was referring to his speech. Terms like "purple pissing Japs" come to mind. BTW General Patton "troubled" the German military stategists who feared his out of the box creativity, but I digress.
I am here to award the General George S. Patton speech elegance medal to deSitter who has risen to commendable heights is his literary elegance rare among the individuals in the digital age.
Following are excerpts of the text considered in this prestigious award.
"…people are starting to take models as reality, and to actually believe that the model is giving them direct information about the world….cause people to imagine that they've got reality licked down to the first nanoseconds of existence… and that up to 95 percent of the universe is unobservable… In this toxic and neurotic environment…the digital universe has acquired a life of its own, and a strange religious fervor has settled over… One fantastic whopper after another emerges from the dark vortex of neurosis that has ingested academic physics…There is no earthly reason to have an airplane whose crew are mere stewards to some cheap pile of circuits somewhere in its chin… irreal universe of modern physics. The same deadly neurosis is sweeping over aviation under the pretense of cost savings. There is something utterly disturbing about the idea of a perfectly good, flyable airplane falling from the sky because its crew are sitting there staring at screens and processing idiotically coded error reports generated by some pimply digeratus with a belly full of fast food and soda in some tacky office… it's ugly, and whether it's a pile of milspec engineers or a crowd of H1B slaves makes no difference…
For anyone violently opposed to this honor, we have just for you the Field Marshal, the Right Honourable Bernard Law Montgomery Operation Market Garden medal which is made of re-cycled aluminium in the shape of a wilted cabbage head. A monetary award of 25 expired stock options in Citibank are included with the prize. (Some have demeaned this award by calling it the ******** Medal in honour of Field Marshall Montgomery, and while it is discriptively accurate of the Field Marshall we at the Military Academy would have preferred the term "Cabbagehead").
The phrase "dark vortex of neurosis that has ingested academic physics" is just so Pattonesque.