One of the most important—and often overlooked—aspects of good systems engineering is first principles thinking. In an excellent article on first principles thinking in his Farnam Street blog, Shane Parrish discusses first principles thinking in the context of Julia Child’s French cooking. Arguing that what made her extraordinary television show …

Complexity is a term that not only defies any disciplined usage in our usual discourse, but also lacks a rigorous definition even in academic circles. It is often confused with complicatedness and is popularly invoked whenever we see many parts arranged in intricate relationships and interacting in hard-to-predict ways. In …

Commonwealth: May it please the Court, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. The defendant in this case, Commonwealth v. Systems Engineer, stands charged with the modelslaughter of the system model. The deceased model in this case is not an ancillary or limited representation of some aspect of the system, but …