AFT Blog
September 14. That is the day I consider to be AFT's official birthday. In 1993 I resigned from my job in the power industry and started working on AFT Fathom 1.0 full-time that day. Thirty years ago today I was assembling a business plan and figuring out how I could finance the founding of AFT. I have found myself reflecting a lot this year – on A...
I suspect Europeans who live near world history sites just accept this as normal. For a backwater American like me, it is amazing to come across the final resting places of Isaac Newton and Galileo. I recently had that privilege in London and Florence. On my 60th birthday in early April, I had the privilege of visiting Westminster Abbey. Among the ...
In April I became old. I mean really, really old. I might even be called ancient. But not as ancient as the Romans. You see, in April I had my 60th birthday. The day fell a week short of a twice-delayed waterhammer conference held in The Netherlands. When my wife asked me what I wanted to do for my 60th birthday, I responded "Since we will already ...
Last month I presented a technical paper that was both the easiest and the hardest paper I have written. The paper was on a waterhammer accident in 2016 at an alumina refinery which caused a slurry pump to catastrophically fail. The pump casing exploded and the hot, caustic slurry it was pumping sprayed onto a technician nearby resulting in severe ...
Last week in Tucson, Arizona I attended the annual meeting of the Hydraulic Institute – the largest association of pump manufacturers in North America. There I heard about the latest updates on the fluid handling industry. Then I went on my first tour of a wastewater treatment plant and learned about how they use 2500-year-old pump techno...
Here we go again. Robots. AI. ChatGPT. I decided it was time to talk again about how technology will destroy jobs and we will all be out of work. Again. Or not. One can look back at literally centuries of such fears and predictions about the future. While each doomsayer's fear is of a different technology relevant to their day, they have at least t...
Here we are in January and another new year has begun. You know that because of all the "predictions" being made. The old saying goes something like "even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day". Three years ago (at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic) I wrote an article "Predicting the Future is Easy". My point there was that if enough p...