The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

― John Kenneth Galbraith

I chose the name the “Regularized Singularity” because it’s so important to the conduct of computational simulations of significance. For real world computations, the nonlinearity of the models dictates that the formation of a singularity is almost a foregone conclusion. To remain well behaved and physical, the singularity must be regularized, which means the singular behavior is moderated into something computable. This almost always accomplished with the application of a dissipative mechanism and effectively imposes the second law of thermodynamics on the solution.

A useful, if not vital, tool is something called “hyperviscosity”. Taken broadly hyperviscosity is a broad spectrum of mathematical forms arising in numerical calculations. I’ll elaborate a number of the useful forms and options. Basically a hyperviscosity is viscous operator that has a higher differential order than regular viscosity. As most people know, but I’ll remind them the regular viscosity is a second-order differential operator, and it is directly proportional to a physical value of viscosity. Such viscosities are usually a weakly nonlinear function of the solution, and functions of the intensive variables (like temperature, pressure) rather than the structure of the solution. The hyperviscosity falls into a couple of broad categories, the linear form and the nonlinear form.

Unlike most people I view numerical dissipation as a good thing and an absolute necessity. This doesn’t mean that it should be wielded cavalierly or brutally because it can and gives computations a bad name. Generally conventional wisdom dictates that dissipation should always be minimized, but this is wrong-headed. One of the key aspects of important physical systems is the finite amount of dissipation produced dynamically. The correct asymptotically correct solution with a small viscosity is not zero dissipation; it is a non-zero amount of dissipation arising from the proper large-scale dynamics. This knowledge is useful in guiding the construction of good numerical viscosities that enable us to efficiently compute solutions to important physical systems.

One of the really big ideas to grapple with is the utter futility of using computers to simply crush problems into submission. For most problems of any practical significance this will not be happening, ever. In terms of the physics of the problems, this is often the coward’s way out of the issue. In my view, if nature were going to be submitting to our mastery via computational power, it would have already happened. The next generation of computing won’t be doing the trick either. Progress depends on actually thinking about modeling. A more likely outcome will be the diversion of resources away from the sort of thinking that will allow progress to be made. Most systems do not depend on the intricate details of the problem anyway. The small-scale dynamics are universal and driven by large scales. The trick to modeling these systems is to unveil the essence and core of the large-scale dynamics leading to what we observe.

Given that we aren’t going to be crushing our problems out of existence with raw computing power, hyperviscosity ends up being a handy tool to get more out of the computing we have. Viscosity depends upon having enough computational resolution to effectively allow it to dissipate energy from the computed system. If the computational mesh isn’t fine enough, the viscosity can’t stably remove the energy and the calculation blows up. This provides a very stringent limit on the resolution that can be computationally achieved.

The first form of viscosity to consider is the standard linear form in its simplest form which is a second order differential operator, . If we apply a Fourier transform to the operator we can see how simple viscosity works, (just substitute the Fourier description for the function into the operator). The viscosity grows in magnitude with the square of the wave number . Only when the product of the viscosity and wavenumber squared becomes large will the operator remove energy from the system effectively.

Linear dissipative operators only come from even orders of the differential. Moving to a fourth-order bi-Laplacian operator it is easy to see how the hyperviscosity will works, . The dissipation now kicks in faster () with the wavenumber allowing the simulation to be stabilized at comparatively coarser resolution than the corresponding simulation only stabilized by a second-order viscous operator. As a result the simulation can attack more dynamic and energetic flows with the hyperviscosity. One detail is that the sign of the operator changes with each step up the ladder, a sixth order operator will have a negative sign, and attack the spectrum of the solution even faster, , and so on.

Taking the linear approach to hyperviscosity is simple, but has a number of drawbacks from a practical point-of-view. First the linear hyperviscosity operator becomes quite broad in its extent as the order of the method increases. The method is also still predicated on a relatively well-resolved numerical solution and does not react well to discontinuous solutions. As such the linear hyperviscosity is not entirely robust for general flows. It is better as an additional dissipation mechanism with more industrial strength methods and for studies of a distinctly research flavor. Fortunately there is a class of methods that remove most of these difficulties, nonlinear hyperviscosity. Nonlinear is almost always better, or so it seems, not easier, but better.

Linearity breeds contempt

– Peter Lax

The first nonlinear viscosity came about from Prantl’s mixing length theory and still forms the foundation of most practical turbulence modeling today. For numerical work the original shock viscosity derived by Richtmyer is the simplest hyperviscosity possible, . Here is a relevant length scale for the viscosity. In purely numerical work, . It provides what linear hyperviscosity cannot, stability and robustness, making flows that would be computed with pervasive instability and making them stable and practically useful. It provides the fundamental foundation for shock capturing and the ability to compute discontinuous flows on grids. In many respects the entire CFD field is grounded upon this method. The notable aspect of the method is the dependence of the dissipation on the product of the coefficient and the absolute value of the gradient of the solution.

Looking at the functional form of the artificial viscosity, one sees that it is very much like the Prantl mixing length model of turbulence. The simplest model used for large eddy simulation (LES) is the Smagorinsky model developed first by Joseph Smagorinsky and used in the first three dimensional model for global circulation. This model is significant as the first LES and the model that is a precursor of the modern codes used to predict climate change. The LES subgrid model is really nothing more than Richtmyer (and Von Neumann’s) artificial viscosity and is used to stabilize the calculation against instability that invariably creeps in with enough simulation time. The suggestion to do this was made by Jules Charney upon seeing early weather simulations. The significance of having the first useful numerical method for capturing shock waves, and computing turbulence being one and the same is rarely commented upon. I believe this connection is important and profound. Equally valid arguments can be made that state that the form of nonlinear dissipation is fated by the dimensional form of the governing equations and the resulting dimensional analysis.

Before I derive a general form for the nonlinear hyperviscosity, I should discuss a little bit about another shortcoming of the linear hyperviscosity. In its simplest form the linear operator for classical linear viscosity produces a positive-definite operator. Its application as a numerical solution will keep positive quantities positive. This is actually a form of strong nonlinear stability. The solutions will satisfy discrete forms for the second law of thermodynamics, and provide so-called “entropy solutions”. In other words the solutions are guaranteed to be physically relevant.

This isn’t generally considered important for viscosity, but in the content of more complex systems of equations may have importance. One of the keys to bringing this up is that generally speaking linear hyperviscosity will not have this property, but we can build nonlinear hyperviscosity that will preserve this property. At some level this probably explains the utility of nonlinear hyperviscosity for shock capturing. In nonlinear hyperviscosity we have immense freedom in designing the viscosity as long as we keep it positive. We then have a positive viscosity multiplying a positive definite operator, and this provides a deep form of stability we want along with a connection that guarantees of physically relevant solutions.

With the basic principles in hand we can go wild and derive forms for the hyperviscosity that are well-suited to whatever we are doing. If we have a method with high-order accuracy, we can derive a hyperviscosity to stabilize the method that will not intrude on the accuracy of the method. For example, let’s just say we have a fourth-order accurate method, so we want a viscosity with at least a fifth order operator, . If one wanted better high-frequency damping a different form would work like . To finish the generalization of the idea consider that you have eighth-order method, now a ninth- or tenth-order viscosity would work, for example, . The point is that one can exercise immense flexibility in deriving a useful method.

I’ll finish with making brief observation about how to apply these ideas to systems of conservations laws, . This system of equations will have characteristic speeds, determined by the eigen-analysis of the flux Jacobian, . A reasonable way to think about hyperviscosity would be to write the nonlinear version as , where is the number of derivatives to take. A second approach that would work with Godunov-type methods would compute the absolute value jump at cell interfaces in the characteristic speeds where the Riemann problem is solved to set the magnitude of the viscous coefficient. This jump is the order of the approximation, and would multiply the cell-centered jump in the variables, . This would guarantee proper entropy production through the hyperviscous flux that would augment the flux computed via the Riemann solver. The hyperviscosity would not impact the formal accuracy of the method.

We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them

― Albert Einstein

I spent the last two posts railing against the way science works today and its rather dismal reflection in my professional life. I’m taking a week off. It wasn’t that last week was any better, it was actually worse. The rot in the world of science is deep, but the rot is simply part of larger World to which science is a part. Events last week were even more appalling and pregnant with concerns. Maybe if I can turn away and focus on something positive, it might be better, or simply more tolerable. Soon I have a trip to Washington and into the proverbial belly of the beast, it should be entertaining at the very least.

Till next Friday, keep all your singularities regularized.

Think before you speak. Read before you think.

― Fran Lebowitz

VonNeumann, John, and Robert D. Richtmyer. “A method for the numerical calculation of hydrodynamic shocks.” Journal of applied physics 21.3 (1950): 232-237.

Borue, Vadim, and Steven A. Orszag. “Local energy flux and subgrid-scale statistics in three-dimensional turbulence.” Journal of Fluid Mechanics 366 (1998): 1-31.

Cook, Andrew W., and William H. Cabot. “Hyperviscosity for shock-turbulence interactions.” Journal of Computational Physics 203.2 (2005): 379-385.

Smagorinsky, Joseph. “General circulation experiments with the primitive equations: I. the basic experiment*.” Monthly weather review 91.3 (1963): 99-164.

The greatest danger of a terrorist’s bomb is in the explosion of stupidity that it provokes.

― Octave Mirbeau

Sometimes the blog is just an open version of a personal journal. I feel myself torn between wanting to write about some thoroughly nerdy topic that holds my intellectual interest (like hyperviscosity for example), but end up ranting about some aspect of my professional life (like last week). I genuinely felt like the rant from last week would be followed this week by a technical post because things would be better. Was I ever wrong! This week is even more appalling! I’m getting to see the rollout of the new national program reaching for Exascale computers. As deeply problematic as the current NNSA program might be, it is a paragon of technical virtue compared with the broader DOE program. Its as if we already had a President Trump in the White House to lead our Nation over the brink toward chaos, stupidity and making everything an episode in the World’s scariest reality show. Electing Trump would just make the stupidity obvious, make no mistake, we are already stupid.

The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.

― Earl Warren

A while back I talked about the impending conflict brewing in society and the threat of its explosion in the coming year. I fear this is coming to pass. The multiple events of the American presidential election, the refugee crisis, terrorism all playing out in a maelstrom of societal upheaval is stoking flames into a conflagration. It is really clear theme is a general lack of trust and faith in the establishment. Science is suffering greatly from this problem. Expertise is viewed with suspicion and generally associated with elitism. This in manifested in the actions of our government, legislatures, but authorized by the public. Instead of viewing expert judgment as something to be respected and trusted, it is viewed as being biased and self-serving. The governance of science is being crippled by these attitudes, and the quality of our science programs and labs is being destroyed in the process.

I ponder the imprint of all of this in the events that unfold at work. Why is work so completely unremarkable and dull? Why are the things we are supposed to work on so utterly lacking in inspiration, thought and rational basis? Why are workplaces becoming so completely antithetical to progress, empowerment and satisfaction? How does the combination of the pervasive Internet and our reality show politics reflect all of these trends?

Then I think about the public face of the World today. Why are hatred, fear and racism so openly present in public life? Is violence becoming more commonplace? Has the Internet been a positive or a negative force? Are we freer than in the past, or placed in less visible shackles? Why is more information available than ever before, yet society has never seemed more at the mercy of the uninformed?

How are these two worlds connected? Is there a common thread to be explored and understood?

I think there are parallels that are worth discussing in depth. Something big is happening and right now it looks like a great unraveling. People are choosing sides and the outcome will determine the future course of our World. On one side we have the forces of conservatism, which want to preserve the status quo through the application of fear to control the populace. This allows control, lack of initiative, deprivation and a herd mentality. The prime directive for the forces on the right is the maintenance of the existing structures of power in society. The forces of liberalization and progress are arrayed on the other side wanting freedom, personal meaning, individuality, diversity, and new societal structure. These forces are colliding on many fronts and the outcome is starting to be violent. The outcome still hangs in the balance.

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.

― Eric Schmidt

Society is greatly out of balance and eventually balance must be restored. This lack of balance is extreme enough to assure it will result in conflict and probably violence. We can see how close to violence parts of the political climate is today. It will get worse before it gets better. How it plays out and who wins is still not determined. I favor the left, but the right probably has the advantage for now. The right controls the levers of power and dominates resources be they weaponry, money or influence. The left lacks an element that unifies progress aside from the vast degree of inequality that has arisen, and the connective power of the “Internet”. Insofar as the Internet and connectivity is concerned the impact plays both ways and may favor the right’s establishment cause of preserving the status quo. The right has the resources to harness the Internet to further their cause. The elements at play are worth lying out because of how they affect everyone’s life.

The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now…cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.

― Ben Elton

The Internet is a great liberalizing force, but it also provides a huge amplifier for ignorance, propaganda and the instigation of violence. It is simply a technology and it is not intrinsically good or bad. On the one hand the Internet allows people to connect in ways that were unimaginable mere years ago. It allows access to incredible levels of information. The same thing creates immense fear in society because new social structures are emerging. Some of these structures are criminal or terrorists, some of these are dissidents against the establishment, and some of these are viewed as immoral. The information availability for the general public becomes an overload. This works in favor of the establishment, which benefits from propaganda and ignorance. The result is a distinct tension between knowledge and ignorance, freedom and tyranny hinging upon fear and security. I can’t see who is winning, but signs are not good.

Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.

― Bruce Coville

The topic of encryption is another pregnant topic. On the one hand it allows elements that the establishment does not like to communicate and exist in privacy. Some of these elements are criminal, or terrorists, and some are political dissidents or other social deviants. Encryption has some degree of equivalence to freedom in a digital World. I feel that the establishment is not trustworthy enough to have the keys to it. Can we really truly be completely safe and free? The issue is that we can never be either, and the attempt to be completely safe will enslave us. Any attempt to be completely free will endangers us as well. The trick is the balance of the two extremes. I choose freedom as the greater good, but clearly many, if not most, choose safety as the priority. The line between safety and tyranny is thin and guarding our freedom may be sacrificed in favor of safety and security.

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

― Salman Rushdie

Terrorism is another huge problem that crystalizes the issues of freedom, safety and security. It is used to frighten and enslave populations. Terrorism has successfully harnessed the will of the American population to support further profit taking by the wealthy. In fact, the key to curing terrorism is brutally simple. It is so simple and yet hard; the cure is to not be terrorized. Our fear of terrorists is their greatest force, and amplifies the damage done by actual terrorist acts by orders of magnitude. If we refuse to be terrorized, terrorists lose all their power. The problem is that terrorists are used by the establishment to frighten, control and corral the population to do the establishment’s bidding. It is an incredibly powerful political tool to mobilize the population to support tyranny. It drives the desire to have strong, protective and violent governance. It encourages a populace to consume itself with fear and hatred. It has led us to consider Trump as a viable candidate for President.

Our media including the Internet does immense amount of exaggeration of the risks in the World, and amplifies the impact of those risks on society. As one of my Facebook friends likes to say, “we are terrorism’s greatest force multiplier”. The risk from terrorism is vastly less than our actions would indicate. The deluge of information is making terrorism seem commonplace while the reality is how utterly uncommon and rare it is. For the media terrorism is great source of customer attention and a source of money. For politicians on the right terrorism is a way of channeling the ignorance and hatred in society to their side. For the interests of the wealthy terrorism is a great source of money for defense and intelligence industries to line their pockets with taxpayer money. All of these actions work to help society’s unraveling through opposing the forces of progress and liberalization by strengthening the power of the establishment whether it is industry, police or military.

Abandoning open society for fear of terrorism is the only way to be defeated by it.

— Edward Snowden

We need to strike a balance that allows freedom and progress to continue. Too many in the public do not realize that fear and security concerns are being used to enslave them. The politics of fear and hatred are the tool of the rich and powerful. They are driving maintenance of the status quo that hurts the general population and only benefits those already in power. It is continuing to drive an imbalance that can only end up with societal conflict. The larger the imbalance grows and the longer it goes unchecked, the greater the resulting conflict. If things don’t blow up this year, the blowup will only grow in severity.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

― Abraham Lincoln

Action expresses priorities.

― Mahatma Gandhi

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

― Peter F. Drucker

I know that I’ve written on this general topic before, but it keeps coming up as one of the biggest issues in my work life. We are getting more and more management while less and less leadership is evident. I know the two things shouldn’t be mutually exclusive, but seemingly in practice they are. With each passing year we get more and more management assurance, more measurement of compliance all the while our true performance slips. We are “managed” in the modern sense of the word better than ever, yet our science and research is a mere shadow of its former glory. Perhaps this is the desired outcome even if only implicitly by society where lack of problems and readily identifiable fuck ups is valued far more than accomplishments. A complete lack of leadership nationally that values accomplishment certainly shares part of the collective blame.

The core of the issue is an unhealthy relationship to risk, fear and failure. Our management is focused upon controlling risk, fear of bad things, and outright avoidance of failure. The result is an implemented culture of caution and compliance manifesting itself as a gulf of leadership. The management becomes about budgets and money while losing complete sight of purpose and direction. The focus on leading ourselves in new directions gets lost completely. The ability take risks get destroyed because of fears and outright fear of failure. People are so completely wrapped up in trying to avoid ever fucking up that all the energy behind doing progressive things moving forward are completely sapped. We are so tied to compliance that plans must be followed even when they make no sense at all.

Any imperative revolving around progress and overall technical quality has absolutely no gravity in this environment. The drive to be managed well simply overwhelms us. Of course managed well means that nothing identifiable as a fuck up happens; it almost never means doing something great, wonderful or revolutionary. Accomplishment is limited to safe, incremental things that couldn’t possibly go wrong. Part of the issue is our adoption of modern management principles, which put a massive emphasis on the short term. To be clear, modern business management is obsessively short term focused. This short-term focus is completely contrary to progress, quality and imagination. These impacts are felt deeply in the private sector and manifesting themselves profoundly in the public sector where I work. One of the key aspects are the structural aspects of modern management practice. We are too obsessed with following our management plans to completion as opposed to being flexible and adaptive.

We put management practices that are intrusively damaging on a virtual pedestal. A prime example is the quarterly progress obsession. Business is massively damaged by the short-term focus embodied by demands for unwavering quarterly profits. The same idea manifests itself more broadly in public sector management to a deeply distressing degree. The entire mentality is undermining the long-term quality of our scientific base nationally and internationally. We are unwilling to change directions even when it makes the best sense and the change is based on a rational analysis of lessons learned and produces the best outcomes.

All of it produces a lack of energy and focus necessary for leadership. We do not exercise the art of saying NO. We are managed to a very high degree, we a led to a very small degree. Our managers are human and limited in capacity for complexity and time available to provide focus. If all of the focus is applied to management nothing is left for leadership. The impact is clear, the system is full of management assurance, compliance and surety, yet virtually absent of vision and inspiration. We are bereft of aspirational perspectives with clear goals looking forward. The management focus breeds an incremental approach that too concretely grounds future vision completely on what is possible today. All of this is brewing in a sea of risk aversion and intolerance for failure.

Start with the end in mind.

― Stephen R. Covey

The focus of our management is not performance of our jobs in the accomplishment of our missions, science or engineering. The focus of our management is to keep fuck ups to a minimum. If some one fucks up, they are generally thrown to the wolves, or the fuck up is rebranded as a glorious success. This increasingly means that our management insofar as the actual work is concerned contributes to the systematic generation and encouragement of bullshit. The best managers can bullshit their way out of a fuckup and spin it into a glorious success.

This is incredibly corrosive to the overall quality of the institutions that I work for. It has resulted in the wholesale divestiture of quality because quality no longer matters to success. It is creating a thoroughly awful and untenable situation where truth and reality are completely detached from how we operate. Every time that something of low quality is allowed to be characterized as being high quality, we undermine our culture. Capability to make real progress is completely undermined because progress is extremely difficult and prone to failure and setbacks. It is much easier to simply incrementally move along doing what we are already doing. We know that will work and frankly those managing us don’t know the difference anyway. Doing what we are already doing is simply the status quo and orthogonal to progress.

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Managing and leading are different, but strongly related. We need both in the right measure and they shouldn’t be exclusive, but time and energy is limited. Today have too much management and virtually no leadership because the emphasis is on managing a whole bunch of risks and fears. We are creating systems that try to push away the possibility of any number of identified bad things. We soak up every minute of time and amount of available effort in this endeavor leaving nothing left. Leadership and the actual practice of good personnel management is left without any time or energy to be practiced. The result is a gulf in both areas that becomes increasingly evident with each passing day.

Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.

― Stephen R. Covey

Leadership or the positive qualities of management do not stop or control all the bad things directly. Leadership and management impact these things in a soft and indirect way. Rather than step away from the overly prescriptive and failed approach to control every little thing that might go wrong, we continue down the path of micromanagement. Each step in micromanagement produces another tax on the time and energy of every one impacted by the system and diminishes the good that can be done. In essence we are draining our system of energy for creating positive outcomes. The management system is unremittingly negative in its focus, trying to stop stuff from happening rather than enable stuff. It is ultimately a losing battle, which is gutting our ability to produce great things.

Producing great things is in the service of the National interest in the best way. By not producing great things and calling not great things, great, acts to undermine the National interest. Today we are doing exactly this and letting ourselves off the hook. We have made management of risks and failure the focus of our energy. We had sidelined leadership by fiat and allowed mediocrity to creep into our psyche and let progress and quality drift. Embracing quality, progress, risk and allowing failure in service of greater achievement can make change happen in ways that matter.

What’s measured improves

― Peter F. Drucker

The issue isn’t that most of the management work shouldn’t be done in the abstract. Almost all of the management stuff are a good ideas and “good”. They are bad in the sense of what they displace from the sorts of efforts we have the time and energy to engage in. We all have limits in terms of what we can reasonably achieve. If we spend our energy on good, but low value activities, we do not have the energy to focus on difficult high value activities. A lot of these management activities are good, easy, and time consuming and directly displace lots of hard high value work. The core of our problems is the inability to focus sufficient energy on hard things. Without focus the hard things simply don’t get done. This is where we are today, consumed by easy low value things, and lacking the energy and focus to do anything truly great.

I think there needs to be a meeting to set an agenda for more meetings about meetings.

― Jonah Goldberg

Examples of this abound in the day to day life of Lab employees. If you are a manager at one of the Labs, your days are choked with low value work. A very large amount of this low value work seems like the application of due diligence and responsibility. I think a more rational view of the activities is to view it through the lens of micromanagement. Our practices lead to our micromanaging people’s time, work and budgets as to absorb all the available time. This effectively leaves no time or effort to be available for people’s judgment. These steps also act to effectively remove the staff’s ability to act as independent professionals. We are transitioning our staff from an active independent community of world-class scientists to a disconnected collection of hourly employees.

Your behavior reflects your actual purposes.

― Ronald A. Heifetz

Perhaps the core issue is a general ambiguity regarding the purpose of our Labs, the goals of our science and the importance of the work. None of this is clear. It is the generic implication of the lack of leadership within the specific context of our Labs, or federally supported science. It is probably a direct result of a broader and deeper vacuum of leadership nationally infecting all areas of endeavor. We have no visionary or aspirational goals as a society either.

The quest for absolute certainty is an immature, if not infantile, trait of thinking.

― Herbert Feigl

You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.

― Brian Greene

For those of you who know me, it’s neither a secret, nor a widely known fact that I’ve gotten some tattoos recently. They aren’t the usual dreck most dudes get (like those tribal ones), but meaningful things to me. Now I have five in total, four of them are science related. One of the things that I wanted was an equation (yeah, I’m a total nerd). The question is what equation do I believe in enough to get permanently inscribed on my skin? A “common” choice for a science tattoo is Maxwell’s equations, and a friend of mine has the Euler equations on this arm from his PhD thesis. This post is about the equation I chose to care enough about to go through with it.

I’ll write the equation in TeX and show all of you a picture, you can make out a little of my other ink too, a lithium-7 atom and a Rayleigh-Taylor instability (I also have my favorite dog’s paw on my right shoulder and the famous Von Karmen vortex street on my forearm). The equation is how I think about the second law of thermodynamics in operation through the application of a vanishing viscosity principle tying the solution of equations to a concept of physical admissibility. In other words I believe in entropy and its power to guide us to solutions that matter in the physical world.

The all-knowing yesterday is obsolete today.

― Jarod Kintz

This is in contrast to much of the mathematical world that often cares about equations that are beautiful, but mean nothing in reality. A lot of the tension is related to following the beauty of Newtonian determinism and its centrality to continuum mathematical physics, and the need to embrace to stochastic nature of the real world. The real world is random and flows along time’s arrow and needs to embrace entropy and uncertainty. Our education and foundational knowledge of the physical world is based on Newton’s simplified view of things (a simplified view that revolutionalized science if not mankind’s understanding and mastery over nature). Newton’s principles can only take us so far, and we are probably reaching to end of its grasp. It is past time to push forward toward incorporating new principles into our model of reality.

Here is the equation in all its glorious mathematical statement, taking the limit as . The equation is the time rate of change of a variable determined by a flux balance and a diffusive term where the limit of diffusion is taken to zero, which implies the satisfaction of the second law of thermodynamics implying that entropy increases. OK, but WTF is it all about? So in words the equation is a hyperbolic conservation law with a diffusive right hand side where the coefficient of viscosity goes to a limit of zero. In this limit we find solutions that are physically admissible, that is ones that could exist in the real World. These solutions lead to satisfaction of the second law of thermodynamics, which implies that entropy or disorder monotonically increases in time. The second law can be viewed as the thing that gives time a direction (time’s arrow!), and without the increase of entropy, time can flow equally well forward or backward, that is being symmetric. We know time flows forward in the real world we all live in, so we want that (or at least I want that, and believe you should too).

lot of effort is spent studying the equations of inviscid flow, flow without dissipative forces most commonly the Euler equations. This form of equation is studied a lot because it is so pure. One can really get some awesomely beautiful mathematics out of it. Commonly the math leads to some great structure by studying these systems through their Hamiltonian and its evolution. Unfortunately, this endeavor while beautiful and hard has no physical merit whatsoever. No physical system really adheres to this Hamiltonian structure (except perhaps isolated systems of very small scale, and I really don’t give a much of a shit about these). They are seductive, pretty and almost without any physical utility. I care about stuff that appears in nature.

The important thing for equations to represent is physical reality (unless you’re doing math for math’s sake). As Wigner pointed out, mathematics has an incredible, almost mystic capacity to model our reality as he says is unreasonably effective. Exploiting this power should be a privilege we exercise whenever possible. In that vein the equations that connect to reality should be favored. In many cases inviscid equations are incredibly useful for modeling, but an important caveat should be exercised, the solutions to the inviscid equations that are favored are those associated with the presence of viscosity. These solutions are found through the application of an asymptotic principle, vanishing viscosity. The application of vanishing viscosity provides a route for these equations to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics, and its demands for increasing disorder.

These principles actually don’t go far enough in distinguishing themselves from inviscid dynamics associated with Hamiltonian systems. Let me explain how they need to go even further. A couple of the most profound observations associated with fluid dynamics are associated with shock waves and turbulence, and share a remarkable similarity (it might be argued that both are inevitable through dimensional similarity arguments!). For shock waves the amount of dissipation occurring via the passage of a shock is proportional to the size of the jump in the variables across the shock cubed (Bethe came up with this in 1942). For turbulence the amount of dissipation is a high Reynolds number flow is proportional to the size of the velocity variation cubed (Kolmogorov came up with this in 1941). Both relations are independent of the specific value of the molecular viscosity.

What people resist is not change per se, but loss.

― Ronald A. Heifetz

These relations are profound in their implications, which are not intuitively obvious upon first seeing it. The dissipation rate being independent of the value of viscosity means that the flow contains something that approaches a singularity. These singularities are called shock waves and have no name at all in turbulence because we don’t know what they are. These singularities are the mystery of turbulence and they are surely ephemeral as they are important. In other words we don’t see the turbulent singularities like we see shocks, but they must be there. Moreover the supposed equations of turbulence, the incompressible Euler equations don’t appear to contain obviously singularity producing features. This whole issue has produced an utterly stagnant scientific endeavor of immense practical importance.

Of course what is usually not covered is the horribly degenerate and unphysical nature of the incompressible Euler or Navier-Stokes equations. The key term is incompressible, which is intrinsically unphysical and removes sound waves from the system making their propagation speed infinite. What if these sound waves, which are always present, contain the essence of what drives dissipation in turbulent system. Incompressibility also removes thermodynamics from the equations and can only be derived from the compressible Navier-Stokes by considering the flow to be adiabatic. Turbulence in its essential character is non-adiabatic and intrinsically dissipative. Anyone see the problem(s)? Perhaps its time to start considering that the lack of progress in turbulence is exposing fundamental flaws in our modeling paradigm.

I would posit that we are trying to solve this monumentally important problem with a set of equations that we have systematically crippled. These equations were posed during an era where the fundamental issues discussed above were not well known. There really isn’t an excuse today. Could our lack of progress with turbulence be completely related to focusing on the wrong set of equations (yes!)?

Let’s dig just a bit deeper on the philosophical implications of the Bethe’s and Kolmogorov’s relations for dissipation of energy. Both of these relations also imply a satisfaction of the second law of thermodynamics by these systems. The limiting value for the satisfaction of the second law is not simply the inequality at zero, but rather an inequality for a finite value of dissipation. This finite value of dissipation is directly related to the large-scale flows structure and quantitatively proportional to the cube of the variations in the inertial range. Thus, the limit of zero dissipation is not physically relevant, the limit is a finite amount of dissipation set by the large scales of the system of interest. This deepens the implications associated with any study of completely dissipation-free dynamics being utterly unphysical. The dissipation-free system is separated from the real world by a finite and non-vanishing distance.

This feature of the physical world should be reflected in how we numerically model things (this is my philosophical point of view). It gets to the core of why I chose the equation to ink on my skin. A lot of numerical work is focused on trying to remove every single bit of dissipation from the method while maintaining stability. This mantra is tied to the belief that dissipation is bad and one is fundamentally interested in the numerical solution to the dissipation-free Euler equations. I believe this is utterly foolhardy and unproductive. The dissipation-free Euler equations are close to useless. The key dissipative relations I’ve introduced above tell us that the dissipation is never zero, but rather non-zero in a very specific way that is irreducible.

Some would argue that this non-zero dissipation should be the target of modeling, and the numerical methods should be pure and not intrude into the modeling. I believe that this perspective is laudable, foolish and unworkable practically. I favor more holistic approaches that combine modeling and numerical methods into a seamless package. This approach works wonderfully well in numerical methods for shocks, and produces a set of methods that revolutionized the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). I believe the grasp of these methods is far greater and extends into turbulence through implicit large eddy simulation (ILES). ILES implies strongly that the turbulence modeling is strongly addressed by techniques that practically solve compressible flows in the vanishing viscosity limit.

Generally for turbulence this approach has not been taken and the reason is clear to see. Turbulence modeling remains to this day a dominantly empirical activity. The core reason for this is the comment above about knowing what the dissipative structures are in turbulence. In compressible flows we know that shock waves are the thing to focus on and where the invariant dissipation occurs. Shocks are the hard thing to compute numerically, and we know what to do. For turbulence the same things cannot happen and the result is empirical modeling without targeted numerical methods. What remains is a philosophy that drives numerical methods to be innocuous, and allow the modeling to hold sway. The problem is that the modeling is blind to what the real physics is doing and the precise mechanisms to connect the large-scale flow to the dissipation of energy.

Nothing limits you like not knowing your limitations.

― Tom Hayes

As far as the tattoos are concerned, I haven’t decided yet if I’m getting more ink or not (its probably a yes). Maybe I’ll keep to the theme of science on the left side of my body and personal meaning on the right side of my body. Ideas are hatching, and I need to mind my tendency towards obsessive-compulsive behavior.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

— Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

Wigner, Eugene P. “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. Richard courant lecture in mathematical sciences delivered at New York University, May 11, 1959.” Communications on pure and applied mathematics 13.1 (1960): 1-14.

Bethe, H. A. “On the theory of shock waves for an arbitrary equation of state.” Classic papers in shock compression science. Springer New York, 1998. 421-495.

Kolmogorov, Andrey Nikolaevich. “Dissipation of energy in locally isotropic turbulence.” Akademiia Nauk SSSR Doklady. Vol. 32. 1941.

Grinstein, Fernando F., Len G. Margolin, and William J. Rider, eds. Implicit large eddy simulation: computing turbulent fluid dynamics. Cambridge university press, 2007.

Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.

― Albert Einstein

My wife and I take part in a discussion group twice a month at our church. We get an innocuous sounding word to focus upon and set about answering deep questions about it. Everyone gets a chance to speak without interruption and everyone else focuses on listening. It’s hard (I’m really bad at listening), and it’s rewarding. Last week the word was “play”. In talking about what the concept of play means to me first in the context of childhood then adulthood I had several epiphanies about the health and vitality of our current society and workplaces. Basically, the concept of play is under siege by forces that find it too frivolous to be supported. Societally we have destroyed play as a free wheeling unstructured activity for children, and crushed the freedom to play at work under the banner of accountability. We are poorer and more unhappy as a result and it is yet another manifestation of unremitting fear governing our behaviors.

We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything, than when we are at play.

― Charles E. Schaefer

The greatest realization in the dialog came when I took note of how I used to play at work and all the good that came from it. The times when I have been the most productive, creative and happy with work have all been associated with being allowed to play at work. By play I mean allowed to experiment, test, and create new ideas in an environment allowing for failure and risk (essentially by placing very few constraints and limitations on what I was doing). The key was the creation and commitment to very high level goals and the freedom to pursue these goals in a relatively free way. The key is the pursuit of the broad objectives using methods that are not strongly prescribed a priori.

Work and play is the same thing just with a different perspective.

― Debasish Mridha

When I was a child, I had immense freedom to play. I would ride bikes around the neighborhood and play at the creek. My parents had a general idea where I was, but not specifically. This level of independence and freedom is almost impossible to imagine today. Children have scheduled and scripted lives where parents know their precise location at almost any time. Instead of learning to manage their lives with a high degree of independence, we teach our children to always be in control. Most of what is being controlled is a set of highly improbable risks that should not warrant such a high degree of control. We are subverting so much of the positive influence that comes from independence to control exotic and tiny probabilities. Societally, the overall impact is counter-productive and hurts us far more than protects us. The treatment of our children is good training for their lives as adults.

The same basic dynamic is working in the adult world of work. We spend an immense amount of time and effort controlling a host of miniscule risks and dangers. The feeling for children and adults alike is that controlling potential bad outcomes is worth the effort. People say things like “if we can prevent just one needless death…” which sounds compelling, but is stupid and inane. Bad things happen all the time, bad things are supposed to happen and the amount of effort spent preventing them is immense. How many lives worth of effort are spent to prevent a single death? No one ever asks if the steps being taken actually have an overall balanced positive effect pro and con.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away people’s initiative and independence

― Abraham Lincoln

A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer pats down Elliott Erwitt as he works his way through security at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2010. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

The TSA and airline screening is a good example. What is the cost in number of lives wasted going through their idiotic screening procedures to prevent problems. We also appear not to be able to control our reaction to bad things either. A terrorist act unleashes an avalanche of reaction that magnifies any harm the terrorists intends by orders of magnitude. Yet we continue to act the same without any realization that our fear is in fact the greatest weapon the terrorist possess. Terrorism is quite effective because the public is afraid and the societal response to terror will assist the aims of the terrorists. We have given up an incredible amount of resources, freedom and independence to protect ourselves from minuscule threats. There is a lot of evidence that we will continue to empower terrorists through our fearful responses.

Of course these trends are not solely limited to our response to terrorism. Terrorism simply amplifies the generic response of society. These trends in response occur in a variety of settings and drive short-term, low-risk behavior almost across the board. We typically encourage adults to focus on very short-term goals and take very few risks in working. The result is a loss of long-term goals and objectives in almost all settings in work. In addition the goals and objectives that do exist almost always entail little or no risk. The impact of the environment we have created is a systematic undermining of achievement, innovation and creativity in work. One way to capture this outcome is the recognition that play is not encouraged; it is actively discouraged.

We are being overwhelmed in the workplace, in the schoolroom and in every aspect of life with the concept of accountability. Accountability is one of those things that sounds uniformly good and no one can argue that it’s bad. Unfortunately I have come to the conclusion that the form of accountability we are subjecting our selves to is damaging and destructive. Accountability is used to control people and their activities. It is used to make sure people are doing what they are supposed to be doing. These days we are supposed to be doing what we are told to do. We are not supposed to be creative or innovative and do something that is unpredictable. Accountability is the box we are all being put in, which limits what we can do.

We end up working extremely hard across everything in society to make sure that bad things don’t ever happen. We put all sorts of measures in place to prevent bad things. We don’t seem to have the capacity to realize that bad things just happen and it’s a fact of life. We spend so much effort trying to manage all the risks that life is just passing us by. This manifests itself with the destructive belief that the government’s job is to protect all of us from bad things (like terrorism). We are willing to give up freedom, accomplishment and productivity to assure a slight increase in safety. Often the risks we are sacrificing so much to diminish are vanishingly small and trivial (like terrorism), yet we are making this trade over and over again. We are allowing ourselves to drown in a sea of safety measures against risks that are inconsequential. The aggregate cost of all of these risk control measures exceeds the value of almost any of the measures. It represents the true threat to our future.

In today’s world, we are in the box all the time whether as children, or as adults. Children’s playtime used to be unscripted and free more often than not. Today it is highly scripted and controlled. Uncontrolled children are viewed quite unfavorably by society as a whole. As adults the exact same thing is happening. Life and work is to be highly scripted and controlled. Anything off script or uncontrolled is considered to be dangerous and highly suspect. The desired result of this scripting and control is predictivity and reliability without risks and failure. The other impact is less happiness and less creativity, less innovation and generally worse outcomes.

Another thread to this thought process is the avoidance of passion in my work. Increasingly I find that expressing any passion or commitment at work is viewed negatively. Work is being driven to be dispassionate and free of deep of emotional connection. In the past when play was very deep part of my productive work life, I also felt great passion for what I did. That passion was tied to the entire way that I worked, and included commitments of quality and learning. More and more today such passion seems to bring nothing but condemnation and seems to be unwelcome. I don’t think that this is disconnected from the issue of play and its diminished role too.

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Our most significant opportunities will be found in times of greatest difficulty.

― Thomas S. Monson

In economic policy it is well known that monopolies are bad. They are bad for everyone except the people who own and control those monopolies (who invest a lot in retaining their power!). They are drags on growth, innovation and progress. They are the essence of the too big to fail problem. In a very real sense the same thing is happening in science. We are being swallowed by monopolistic ideas. We are too invested in a variety of traditional solutions to problem (which solve traditional problems). Innovation, invention and progress are falling victim to this seemingly societal-wide trend.

We are seeing this in both computers and the codes running on the computers. The seductive nature of these quite capable behemoths is holding sway over a future that offers so much more than we are getting. The moment of epiphany came to me a while ago during some strategic planning for shock physics at work. Basically we have no strategy at all. We have 25 and 30-year-old legacy codes that we continue to develop because they are the only platforms viable within our fragmented funding picture today. The way we fund and manage the work in science is undermining progress and innovation as surely as the sun rides in the East every day.

Looking at our soon to be, if not already ancient codes based on ancient technology I asked how often did we build a new code in the old days? Sure as could be the answer was radically different than today’s world, we build new codes every five to seven years. FIVE TO SEVEN YEARS!!!! Today we are sheparding codes that are at least a quarter of a century old, and nothing new is in sight. We just continue to accrete capability on to these old codes horribly constrained by sets of decisions increasingly divorced from today’s reality, technology and problems. It is a recipe for failure, but not the good kind of failure, the kind of failure that crushes the future slowly and painlessly like the hardening of the arteries.

The deeper question is why we are functioning in this manner? I’d posit an initial answer as a tendency to be obsessively short-term focused in our goals. The stream of decisions leading to our current legacy codes is surely optimal in a per annum basis, just as it is surely suboptimal in the long run. The problem is that the long run has no constituency today. This stems from a rather fundamental societal lack of leadership and vision. We are too easily swayed by the arguments of optimal short-term thinking and unwilling to take risks or invest in the long run success. We see this spirit manifested in our political, business and scientific communities.

Perhaps no greater emblem of our addiction to shortsightedness exists than the crumbling infrastructure. The roads, bridges, electrical grids, airports, sewers, water systems, power plants,… that our core economy depend upon are in horrible shape and no will exists to support them. We can’t even conjure up the vision to create the infrastructure for the new century and leave it to privatized interests that will never deliver it. We are setting ourselves up to be permanently behind the rest of the World. We have no pride as a nation, no leadership and no vision of anything different. We just have short-term narcissistic self-interest embodied by the low tax, low service mentality. The same dynamic is happening at work.

When you do what you fear most, then you can do anything.

― Stephen Richards

We want short term, sure payoff, work without the sacrifice, risk and effort needed any long term vision or leadership. It is exactly what we are getting. We are creating a shell of our former greatness. In terms of codes and the opportunity they provide for modeling and simulation our reliance on legacy code is deeply damaging. In the days past we created new codes on a regular basis along with new modeling capability and philosophy. As a result our modeling approaches would step forward with each new code along with providing a vehicle for innovation in methods, algorithms and computer science. As a result we could try out new ideas for size without completely divesting from what came before. Without the new codes we are straightjacketed into old ideas and technology passes us by. The inability to replace our old codes resulting in legacy codes produces a massive cost in terms of lost opportunity.

How much I missed, simply because I was afraid of missing it.

― Paulo Coelho

The loss of opportunity is becoming increasingly unacceptable. We are producing a future that is shorn of possibilities that should be lying in front of us. Instead of vast possibilities energized by continual changes in our foundations, we have stale old codes, models, methods and algorithms that ill-serve our potential. The application of too big to fail to our codes is creating a slow-motion failure of epic proportions. The basis for the failure is the loss of innovation and a sense that we are creating the future. Instead we simply curate the past. Our best should be ahead of us and any leadership worth its salt would demand that we work steadfastly to seize greatness. In modeling and simulation the creation of new codes should be an energizing factor creating effective laboratories for innovation, invention and creativity providing new avenues for progress.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

― Stephen Jay Gould

This week I’m in Las Vegas an appropriately ironic place to see people making stupid gambles on the future. We are having the annual “Principal Investigator’s” meeting for the NNSA’s ASC program, itself a rather ironic name for an echo chamber, which is a more apt description. There is frightfully little investigation or intellectual engagement
in sight, it is more of a programmatic, project meeting with little or no discussion of intellectual depth, at least publicly. Private discussions among the technically oriented attendees are a bit more far reaching, but everyone seems to feel a deep sense of following a fate rather than making choices. The lack of holistic thought and vitality in high performance computing is becoming evident, but the machine focus is a juggernaut too powerful to slow down at this point.

If failure is not an option, then neither is success.

—Seth Godin

Societally, the concept of too big to fail applies to the banking and financial institutions that almost destroyed the World economy eight years ago. We demonstrated that they were both too big to fail and too big and too powerful to change thus remaining a ticking time bomb. It is only a matter of time before the same issues present in 2007 erupt again and wreck havoc on the World economy. All the evidence needed to energize real change is available, but there is simply too much money to be made, and greed is more powerful than common sense. I realized that our application codes and computers probably properly deserve to be thought of in exactly the same light, they are too big to fail too. This character is slowly and steadily poisoning the environment we live in and any discussion of different intellectual paths is simply forbidden.

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

In high performance computing we live in immensely challenging times where deep intellectual engagement is necessary for success. The very nature of the programs seems to be anathema for the very free thought needed for success. The codes and computers are treated as being absolutes for success and immutable. We see decades of investment in codes and capabilities that must be sustained. The systems we have created are immense in terms of expense and size. The idea has taken hold that they must be preserved. This preservation is rather superficial rather than holistic and pervasive; the concept in analogous to playing the codes in amber. As such the intellectual content of the codes is remaining far too static and our intellectual ownership of the contents of the codes is slipping away. It is a dangerous and unsustainable future. Like the banks that should have been split into smaller more manageable chunks, the codes need to be removed from this concept of permanence.

As I said, the depth of intellectual ownership of these very codes is diminishing with each passing day. The essential aspects of these code’s utility and success in our application areas is based on deep knowledge and intense focus of talented individuals. The talent and skills leading to successful codes are difficult to develop and maintain; the skills must be developed by simultaneously pushing several envelopes: the applications, the models, methods to solve models, and computer science-programming. Today we really only focus on the computer science-programming and simply sort all the other details. Rather than continually reinvest in people and science, we are creating an environment where codes are curated. This state is actually a recipe for catastrophic failure rather than glorious success. The path forward should be adaptive, flexible and agile; instead the path is a lumbering goliath and viewed as a fait accompli.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

A code is not an investment and shouldn’t ever be viewed as such. A code is simply a computer executable version of independent thought and intellectual content. It is absolutely vital for all of the capability we have in code to be fully understood and known by humans. We need to have humans who understand the basis of models and how these models are solved. When we curate code this key connection is lost. We lose the fundamental nature of the model as our impression of nature, rather than its direct image. We use models as a way of explaining nature rather than a substitute for the natural World. This tie is being systematically undermined by the way we compute today and results in a potentially catastrophic loss of humility. Such loses of humility ultimately produce reactions that are unpleasant and damaging.

We are creating a program that will collide with reality leaving a broken and limping community in its wake. It has a demonstrated track record of not learning from past mistakes, producing a plan for moving ahead that is devoid of innovation and deep thought. Today’s path forward is solely predicated on the idea that we must have the fastest computer rather than the best computing. It is the epitome of bigger and more expensive is better, rather than faster, smarter and more agile. Perhaps more damaging is a perspective that the problems we face are already solved save the availability of more computer power. We will end up eviscerating the very communities of scientists that are the lifeblood of modeling and simulation. The program may be a massive mistake and no one is questioning any of it.

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

I believe that all of these efforts could vastly benefit from a mindset orthogonal to the prevailing approach. How would we solve the problems facing us today if we had less computing power? If we thought about how to productively solve our problems with less computational horsepower, we could do a far better job with whatever computers we actually have. I find the call for more computer power as a way of dodging deeper and more challenging problems with an effectively kneejerk response. More computing power is undeniably better, but it is almost always a highly suboptimal path to better solutions to problems.

The most effective way to get a better answer is provide a better model of reality to address the questions. If you believe that your model is correct and appropriate for the questions at hand, the method of solution has the most leverage for improving your performance. Many of these solution methods are based on fundamental algorithms, which can provide massive upgrades in performance. In each of these endeavors the use of deep applied mathematics expertise can provide tremendous benefits to the rigor and effectiveness of each aspect. Only when these options have been exhausted should the implementation and hardware be brought to bear as the primary path to improvement. In today’s high performance computing research the highest leverage paths to improved modeling and simulation are virtually ignored by our efforts. Of course part of the issue is the identification of the activity as high performance computing first, and modeling & simulation second. This ordering and priority should be reversed in keeping with their proper role for impacting the real World applications that should be motivating all of our efforts.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?

― Michael Lewis

Left to right: Steve Carell plays Mark Baum and Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennett in The Big Short from Paramount Pictures and Regency Enterprises

Over the Christmas holiday my family and I went to see “The Big Short” an excellent movie about the financial collapse in 2007-2008. It was almost impossible to come away from the movie without feeling a deep sense of rage over how things unfolded. The level of criminality, greed and distain for humanity that fueled the collapse has largely gone unpunished, and driven precious little change in the system that allowed things to unfold. The reality is that we are primed for the same thing to happen all over again with only the details changing. The issues that allowed this calamity are infesting society at large and corrosively aimed at almost every great institution we depend upon.

“Guys who can’t get a job on Wall Street get a job at Moody’s,” as one Goldman Sachs trader-turned-hedge fund manager put it.”

― Michael Lewis

One scene in “The Big Short” stands out as helping define the depth of the dysfunction in the system, the trip to Moody’s, the rating agency for the securities. The securities created by the banks were incredibly unstable and literally junk, yet the ratings agencies kept putting their top seal of approval on them, AAA. When pressed on the matter, the woman representing Moody’s said, “if we don’t give them the rating they want, the guy down the street will, we want the business.” The people watching the system for fraud were completely in bed with the crooks. The reality is that this practice and problem are everywhere. It is true where I’ve worked, it is obviously true in politics, and sports, and education, and… Our whole nation is living in the Golden Age of Bullshit. This serves no purpose but perpetuating the existing structures of power at the cost of progress, quality and ethical behavior.

Mark Baum: We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food. Even baseball…

– The Big Short

The issue exposed in the Big Short is permiating society. The basic problem is that no one can be responsible bcause being responsible will just get you replaced by a more corrupt or corruptible irresponsible person. The sorts of peer reviews that we see at work are the same thing. Everything is graded on a curve, and a bad failing grade is never allowed. Failure isn’t allowed, if it comes up the messenger is “shot” (usually by being dismissed from the peer review). We never confront any problems until they blow up in our faces. This tendency basically allows progress to grind to a proverbial halt. Failures are the fuel for progress and when you disallow failure, you disallow progress.

The signs of this form of corruption are everywhere. We cannot have a decent or deep conversation about anything controversial. Climate change is a great example of the sort of bullshit responses that hamper us today. If everyone is an expert then no one is an expert. If people don’t like the information they get, they find someone else who gives them a different answer. As a result science in our society is in decline. Actual science is being hurt, and science’s role in society is similarly degrading. Look at the whole anti-vaxxer movement, which has absolutely no basis, but lots of proponents. We get ideas where any risk at all is unacceptable and we allow progress to grind to a complete halt. Failure, problems and the identification of things that need to be improved creates the basis of valuable work. We have structurally destroyed mechanisms for doing this by our addiction to praise and inability to identify and confront problems while they are small.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

― Clive James

I run in a lot circles where large scale decisions are made and money is distributed. A culture of empty-headed management has crept into how things are done. People managing scientific programs are much more interested in milestones and Gantt charts than whether the work is any good. They seem to have conflated the practice of project management with quality. As a result we end up managing the wrong things and syphoning off the key elements in useful progressive research.

The ability to make progress and innovate has very little to do with anything project management provides. Progress often comes from applying new thinking to old problems. One of the key things to do is identify and take on unsolved problems, another name for failures. Making progress is often the antithesis of things that can be managed in today’s common fashion, so progress makes way for management satisfaction. The key is the project management is simply a tool, and a useful one at that. It is not a recipe for success or an alternative to thinking deeply and differently.

Lastly, we have a seemingly ever-present din of the question, “will things ever be done?” I hear this repeatedly from those managing and funding stockpile stewardship. The answer is NO and will always be NO. At least if we want a competent and reliable science basis for national defense, the economy or just a generally progressive society, the work is never done. This question is so utterly lacking in thought and intellectual depth that it should be met with complete distain.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.

― Henry Ford

People thinking that science is something with a finite starting and stopping point have no business whatsoever being in any form of leadership. Science is a quintessential human activity and we humans make progress continually. To deny progress should be against the nature of our species. Killing progress is certainly opposed to the best interests of society at large. Science in support of national defense has been one of the most fruitful avenues for progress in science with benefits far beyond killing other people more efficiently. Most of today’s economy is founded upon the results from defense related research. These opponents of progress are basically enemies of the state, trying to undermine the foundations of our Nation’s strength. They’re out there, enemies of progress, friends of corruption trying to keep us from solving our problems. They’re everywhere.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

― Carl Sagan

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

― Christopher Hitchens

Even with a day off, work last week really, completely sucked. I got to spend very little time doing my daily habit of writing in a focused manner. Every day at work was a pain and ended the week with hosting a group of visitors who are responsible for part of the new exascale computing initiative. Among the visitors were a few people whom I have history with both good and bad. If you’ve read this blog you know that I’m not a fan of the exascale computing imitative. Despite this, I was expected to be on my best behavior (and I think that I was). It was not the time, nor place to debate the program’s goals or wisdom (to be honest I’m not sure what the right time is). It’s pretty clear to me that there hasn’t been much of any debate or thought put into the whole thing. That’s a discussion for a different day.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.

― Henry Ford

Nonetheless some good came from the experience aside from demonstrating my own self-control. I won’t say much about the visit except that the exascale initiative is not terribly compelling as programs go, and I thought it went well from our official perspective. I have a better idea of how they are viewing the program and its objectives and priorities. We had a chance to talk about how we are approaching a similarly structured program. No one is thinking about all the missing elements from the approach in a constructive way, and lots of old mistakes are being made all over again. People show a remarkable lack of historical perspective and ability to engage in revisionist history. The refrains of my “bullshit” post on lack of honesty in the view of success rang in my ears.

Stop thinking, and end your problems.

― Lao Tzu

I also noted the distinct air of control from the visitors and discussion of their colleagues who run our programs. The programs want to give us very little breathing room to exercise our own judgment on priorities. They want to define and narrow our focus to their priorities. Given the lack of technical prowess from those running things it’s dangerous. Awful programs like exascale are the direct result of this sort of control and lack of intellectual thought running research. Everything is politically engineered and nothing is really composed of elements that are designed to maximize science. The result is a long-term malaise in research, progress and science we are suffering from. Ultimately, the system we are laboring under will result is less growth and prosperity for us all. It is the inevitable result of basing our decisions on fear and risk avoidance instead of hope, faith and boldness.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

― John Kenneth Galbraith

Because our program is all about stockpile stewardship the meeting was held in a classified setting. This means no electronics and a requirement that I unplug. It might be a good excuse to get some reading done, but I had to look like I was paying attention all day. So I took copious notes. Not much interesting happened so most of the notes were to self and captured my thoughts, reflections and perspectives. This alone made the entire experience valuable from a personal-professional perspective. I managed to digest a lot of my backlog of thinking that the well-connected World distracts you from constantly. I had some well-structured time with my own thoughts and that’s a really good thing.

The only freedom you truly have is in your mind, so use it.

― M.T. Dismuke

Getting away from the electronic world of web pages, text messages, email for a while is a blessing. I could approach my thoughts with a literal clean sheet. I started by reflecting on all the good ideas I’ve had recently, but haven’t gotten the time to work on. It was a lot, which has a depressing aspect. There is so much to potentially work on that I can’t. Its worse that I don’t exactly see the value in what I am working on. It’s a bit of a personal tragedy. I suspect its one that plays out across the World of research. We have less and less time to work on things we judge to be important.

Aside from the deeper thoughts I also realize that it pays to think in many different ways even from a mechanical point of view. I try walking each day along with a walking meditation, followed by free association. It ends up being a very effective way to self-brainstorm. I keep a notebook for each day in a cloud app. There is this blog, which allows for a freeform prose, but done in an electronic form. Writing things down on paper has subsided a lot, and last week I rediscover the virtue of that medium albeit by the nature of the circumstances. For a long time I kept a pad of lined post-it notes in my car since a lot of good ideas would just come to me driving to and from work. It might be good to force myself to use paper alone more often. By the power of cameras and remarkable text recognition the paper can go directly into my electronic notebook any way.

The important thing to me is to capture the ideas that move from the background of my thinking to the foreground. Some of these thoughts are half-baked, but others are really genius. The human mind is a remarkable thing especially when it’s subjected to lots disparate input. The day away from electronics was good for rebooting how I approached free thinking when its available. I’d like to think its what I’m paid for, but honestly that isn’t really likely to be the truth. Everything about how I’m paid is about not really thinking about the deeper meaning. We are encouraged to simply putter along doing as we’re told. The mantra of today is quit thinking and get back to work.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

― John Steinbeck

Now we get to the darker aspects of free association, you start to turn your gaze toward the shit show unfolding before you. Life today is full of things that should be regarded with contempt. Our overlords encourage us to ignore the carnage they are subjecting the world to, but it is there hidden in plain sight. Today we live in a coarse and belligerent culture that threatens to undermine everything good. I’m not talking about the sort of moral decay social conservatives would point to. I’m talking about the fundamental rewards, checks and balances that encourage an environment of selfish and greedy behavior. At the same time these same forces work to undermine every effort to pay attention to larger societal, organizational and social imperatives that collectively make everything better. We act selfish in the service of maintaining the power of others, and avoiding the sort of collective service that raises everyone.

So I was offered a front road seat at a primo shit show, and here is what it made me think.

Our research is now running on the basis of money as a scoring system with no real concrete societal objectives in sight. In the 20^th Century many great things were accomplished and the technology that dominates our economy was invented through scientific discovery. A great deal of that discovery was directly associated with fear, first of Germans and then the Nazis then the Soviets. The atomic bomb, hydrogen bomb, jet aircraft, microprocessors, cell phones, GPS, and almost every in our modern world owe their discovery to this response to fear of existential threats. These were real adversaries with well-developed technology, engineering and science requiring a serious response of our Nation-State to the threat they represented. Today, we see a bunch of disorganized barbarians as an existential threat. It is completely pathetic. We really don’t have to have our collective act together to compete. It’s all fear and no benefit of accomplishing great things, and we aren’t. We just have the requisite reduction in freedom in response to this fear without any of the virtues. This dismal state of affairs results in a virtual emptying of meaning from work that used to be important. I work at a place where work ought to have value and importance, yet we’ve managed to ruin it.

Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.

― Frank Herbert

It is utterly stunning that working for an organization committed to National Security does not provide me with any sense that my work is important. I don’t have enough
latitude and capability to exercise my judgment to feel truly empowered at work. All the control and accountability at work is primarily disempowering employees and sucking all the meaning from work. I ought feel an immense amount of importance to what I do. My management, writ large, is managing to destroy something that ought to be completely easy to achieve. This malaise is something we see nationally as the general sense that your work has little larger meaning is used to crush people’s wills. Instead of empowering people and achieving their best efforts, we see control used to minimize contributions and destroy any attempt toward deeper meaning. This sense is deeply reflected in the current political situation in the World and the broad sweeping anger seen in the populace.

The love affair with corporate governance for science is another aspect of the current milieu that is deeply corrupting science. Our corporate culture is corrupting society as a whole and science is no exception. The greed and bottom line infatuation perverts and distorts value systems and has systematically harshened the cultures of everything it touches. Increasingly, the accepted moral thing to do is make yourself as successful as possible. This includes lying, cheating and stealing if necessary (and you can get away with it). More corrosively it means losing any view of broader social, societal, organizational or professional responsibility and obligation. This undermines collaboration and free exchange of ideas, which ultimately destroys innovation and discovery.

Accountability has been instituted that allows people to ethically ignore the broader context in favor of narrow focus. They are told that doing this is the “right” thing to do, and basically they should otherwise mind their own business. This attitude extends to society as a whole and we are all poorer for it. We keep ideas to ourselves, and the narrowly defined parochial interests of those who pay us. Instead we should operate as engaged and collaborative stewards of our society, organizations or professions. We have adopted a system that encourages the worst in people rather than the best. We should absolutely expect problems to be caused by this culture of selfishness. The symptoms are everywhere and threaten our society in a myriad of ways. The only portion of society that benefits from our present culture is the rich and powerful overlords. These systems maintain and expand their ability to keep their corrupt and poisonous stranglehold on everyone else.

A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

― Theodore Roosevelt

What I cannot create, I do not understand.

― Richard Feynman

The Richard Feynman quote “what I cannot create I do not understand” appeared on his chalkboard at his death. I realized that I have generally run my professional life by this principle. It isn’t enough merely to demonstrate rote knowledge; one needs to understand the principles underlying the knowledge. One way to demonstrate the mastery over knowledge is utilize the current knowledge and then extend the knowledge in that area to something new. This gets to the core of our current problem in science, we are not being asked to extend knowledge, and we are asked to curate knowledge. As a result we are losing the ownership that denotes mastery.

A core example of the issue is the capability to completely understand the material they are responsible for. If we are implementing things in a computer code can we rederive all the expression in the code? Do we understand the assumptions, conditions and caveats with the actual expressions? Can we extend or modify the expressions as the situation calls for it? Today in very many cases the answers to these questions is no. This is true for models we use, methods used for solution and algorithms we depend upon. This broad-based lack of intellectual ownership is a direct threat to our ability to ably provide stewardship of our missions dependent upon these products.

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

― Richard Feynman

I want to be very clear about what I’m commenting on, we have substantial intellectual ownership of the code we write, but not necessarily what that code does. What we often do not have ownership of is the contents of that code, the models, the methods solving those models, and the algorithms the methods are based upon. We own the contents of the implementation, the software libraries, and the mapping of all of these to modern computing architectures. Because of the demise of Moore’s law we are exploring a myriad of extremely exotic computing approaches. These exotic computer architectures are causing implementations to become similarly exotic. In a sense my concern is that the difficulty of simply using these computers has the effect of sucking “all the oxygen” from the system and leaves precious little resource behind for any other creative endeavor, or risk taking. As a result we have no real progress being made in any of the activities in modeling and simulation beyond mere implementations.

A large part of my argument hinges upon the intellectual core of the value proposition associated with modeling and simulation. The question is whether progress in modeling and simulation is most greatly benefitted by greater computing power? Or improved models? Or improved methods? Or improved algorithms? The answers to these questions are not uniform by any means. There are times when the greatest need for modeling and simulation is the capacity of the computing hardware. At other times the models, methods or algorithms are the limiting factors. The question we should answer is what is the limiting factor today? It is not computing hardware. While we can always use more computing power, it is not limiting us today. I believe we are far more limited by our models of reality, and the manner in which we create, analyze and assess these models. Despite this lack of need for improved hardware, computing hardware is the focus of our efforts.

The program I work under is called stockpile stewardship. We act far more like stockpile curators. The general state of affairs is rapidly evolving to a state where no one really has the intellectual ownership of the content of their work. There is frightfully little freedom in defining a path toward greater understanding. The inertia of the “this is the way things are done around here” is so strong that it derails a great degree of progress. Intellectual ownership and progress are intimately related. The true ownership of knowledge and the capacity to produce progress are often, if not almost always one and the same.

In computational modeling we are largely in the business of stewarding legacy codes full of knowledge being curated. The choice of legacy codes is predicated on the ability of the codes to simulate issues of interest from an application point of view. It is a safe way to proceed in the short term while immensely dangerous in the long term. These codes are immensely complicated and full of wide swaths of both explicit and implicit knowledge. In many ways the models, methods and algorithms in the code are most completely documented in code, and other forms of documentation are woefully incomplete. Much of the knowledge of the decisions made in defining the code is contained only in the head’s of the people who originally wrote the code. Over time those people go away and the logic and rationale for the code’s form and function begins to fade away. We often find that certain things in the code can never be changed lest the code become non-functional. We are left with something that looks and feels like magic. It works and we don’t know why or understand how it works, but it does.

As I stated above I run my professional like by recreating existing the things. This makes dead certain that I understand something, and the only way to validate this understand is to move past the strictures and barriers of existing understanding. To truly own knowledge is equivalent to expanding that knowledge. You confirm your ownership of knowledge by the process of creation. This creative process is part of the essence of research. Thus by the virtue of the creation of legacy codes we are confirming the lack of research in the areas of knowledge vital to stewarding our stockpile.

I think nature’s imagination Is so much greater than man’s, she’s never going to let us relax.

― Richard Feynman

With the stewardship program we are in a very precarious position. We are not allowed to design new weapons. We are not allowed to fully test our ideas either. An important part of the space of knowledge is taken off the table and relegated to being purely curated. This full demonstration has the role of providing an important feedback of reality to the work being done. Reality is very good at injecting humility into the system when it is most needed. When the knowledge is curated we rapidly remove important and essential aspects of stewardship. We have immense issues associated with the long-term responsibility of caring for a stockpile. New issues arise that are beyond the set of conditions the systems were originally designed for. All of this needs a fertile intellectual environment to be properly stewarded. We are not doing this today. Instead the intellectual environment is actually being steadily eroded in favor of curating knowledge. In computing, the creation of legacy codes is a key symptom of this environment.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

― Richard Feynman

In taking the raw intellectual material going into a production code many things must be simultaneously integrated (by production code I mean the codes we use to do serious application modeling for applied programs, like stockpile stewardship). This integration of intellectual material includes fundamental models, the closure of those models, the methods of solving those models and the utilization of algorithms for those methods. Furthermore there is a specific implementation in computer code that is suitable or better yet, optimized for the computing hardware.

A number of tricks, or practical accommodations are made in getting the models, methods and algorithms to work effectively for solving “real” problems with all of their dirty and realistic aspects. Most of these tricks are not something people are proud of, or can even explain in a coherent way. In many cases, the trick simply works and often a number of other tricks were tried first, and didn’t produce the desired outcome. The trick itself is rarely documented as such, and the tricks that didn’t work are usually undocumented. Many of the tricks are far more obvious and logical to use, and their failure is usually unexplained. Hence the production code works on the basis of tricks of the trade that are often history dependent, and rarely explained, yet utterly essential.

It is this point where the real horror show of legacy codes unfolds. The production code becomes a key aspect of executing an applied program, and the tricks necessary to make the code work are encoded into all of the results. The author of the tricks gets older and ultimately retires or dies, or gets a better job. When this happens the tricks become part of legend or lore and their capacity to make the code work achieves a magical status. The code’s results depend on all of the tricks, and the custody of the code passes to new people. These new people can’t change the tricks because they don’t understand the tricks. In very many cases, the tricks don’t look any different than the rest of the code and are indistinguishable from the parts of the methodology that are coherent and logical. It is all one big mess of coherent and incoherent ideas that simply gets stewarded much in the manner that monks steward old religious texts.

This is a generically awful situation that happens over and over again. In the programs I work for it is the standard way things unfold. The reason this happens is because creating a new production code is a risky thing. Most of the time the effort fails. The creation of the code requires a good environment that nurtures the effort. If the environment is not biased toward replacing older codes with new codes (i.e., progress and improving technology), the inertia of the status quo will almost invariably win. This inertia is based on the very human tendency to base correctness on what you are already doing. The current answer has a great deal greater propriety than the new answer. In many cases the results of existing codes provide the strongest and clearest mental image of what a phenomena looks like to people utilizing modeling and simulation especially in fields where experimental visuals do not exist.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

― Richard Feynman

Why should things be easy to understand?

― Thomas Pynchon