*Brennschluss*
*That's what I remember,*
*K*
On Sat, Mar 6, 2021 at 10:53 AM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Sat, 6 Mar 2021, Uwe Klein wrote:
in German ... in another domain we used to have
Baumeister ( aesthetics, functional design, supervision...
Bauingenieur ( structure )
Architekt. ( aesthetics, useability )
ranges of activity that seem to have a more academic background
than in the anglo-saxon world?
more weight on analytics vs try out
Possibly also more of a cultural bias toward structure and hierarchy,
rather than ad-hoc setup for every project. I have a dim memory of an
old German assessment of the US Army, which said roughly: "they are
amazingly good at improvising; what's less impressive is that they *must*
improvise so much, because they do so little planning and organizing ahead
of time..."
(The downside of this is rigidity. My old boss of many years ago came
over from Germany after the war, looking for a chance to run his own shop,
escaping the expectation that he would naturally have to spend many years
as an underling first...)
That said, yes, also more weight on analytics vs try out. Charles
Steinmetz, the grand high wizard of heavy electrical machinery in the
early 20th century, was a German immigrant to the US. He was the first to
apply serious mathematical analysis to electric motors and such -- he
coined the word "hysteresis" among other things -- at a time when nobody
took that idea seriously, and it revolutionized electrical machinery.
(The little motor company he worked for got such conspicuously superior
results that GE tried hard to hire him away. When this failed -- he was
loyal to the man who'd given him a job when he was a penniless immigrant
and needed one badly -- GE gritted its teeth and bought the whole company
to acquire him.)
Henry