Tuesday, May 06, 2014

One true path and other silliness...

Something worth reading, some not real good news, and is not “climate disruption” a scary phrase...

I suspect my mother was the source the first time I heard the old adage that there were more than one way to skin a cat... Which any way you cut it is a scary thing to say to a kid with a rather vivid imagination.

But, I suppose, there really is more than a single way to skin a cat and, as such things go, this may have been my first contact with the premise that there is no one true path...

Pretty much everything we do on boats is at best a compromise and this seems to bother people. Compromise is taken as some sort of failure or affront but, in truth, compromise where boats are concerned is art and a high art at that.

On the other hand, being that we live in the real world, failure to compromise is a recipe for disaster of the Mobius strip circular logic sort and that gets nasty real fast.

The matrix of wind and water by its very nature is a fluid environment and it calls for design with similar properties...

So, there really is no one true path in boat design or boatbuilding because it just does not work. Show me a boat designer that talks the one true path jive and, while he/she may have designed a great boat or two, they'll never be a great designer. One true path and cookie cutter designs being the antithesis to good thinking and art in boat design.

We'll look at how that works next...

Listening to Red Molly

So it goes...