Originally Posted by
Jay Sata
I suspect your personal wiki page would be a lot more interesting than TCT's fiction Genghis.
As an aside I have enjoyed your posts for a long time on pprune especially the very heated one a couple of years ago.
I have always wanted to ask why the Genghis name? I assume it must be a play on your surname.
No need to answer but just curious.
best regards
About a quarter of a century ago, I was working part time in a research group looking into metal fatigue. I was the only real engineer there - pretty much everybody else were materials scientists.
I got rather frustrated one day after yet another day of them trying to get to the bottom of the very fine detail of a problem, whilst I was at the same time trying to identify what really mattered to the engineers I felt that we were there to serve.
So, on the spur of the moment I made up a small sign and pinned it to the office wall...
Dear Scientists, please remember - Best is the enemy of good enough. Signed, Genghis the Engineer.
In retrospect, I don't think that anybody there gave a damn what I thought - but it stuck in my mind as a good label for myself, and I've used it a few times since - including on PPrune.
"Best is the enemy of good enough", I stole from a sign on the desk of the Chief Maintenance Engineer at RAE Farnborough, who I'd reported to in a previous job. It's a useful concept, because it forces you to think about both what "best" and "good enough" mean and why each matters and where.
I have since read a few biographies of Temujin, who became Genghis Khan, and discovered what a hellishly interesting chap he was (if one rather lacking in social niceties) which didn't cause me to change my liking for the name at-all.
No, not particularly to do with my real name.
I have been contacted once on PPrune by an aspiring pilot from Mongolia, who was dissapointed to discover that there wasn't really a second Mongol here, as he hoped I was. Boringly British I'm afraid.
G
(Yes I am mentioned a few places on Wikipedia, in my real name, by other people. I once added a couple of words to a sentence saying what my profession is (for the record "an aeronautical engineer"), otherwise I've left it to other people's perception and views.)