Regular readers might be familiar with my (hopefully mild enough) scorn of copying and pasting examples and watching YouTube tutorials when it comes to finite element analysis. These might be handy for disassembling a particular bicycle rear hub or other concrete tasks at hand, but in the long run it is my firm belief that general concepts trump special cases by a huge margin. This is reflected in one of my favourite quotes by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (though probably misattributed):

There is nothing more practical than a good theory.

Now recently by chance in a very different context, I stumbled across an old article that kind of backs this up:

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/science/25math.html

This should give those of you who are eager for click-by-click tutorials ("How to model a bridge in Abaqus") or examples ("I always copy the *PLASTIC option from an old .inp file, since I am not sure about the Abaqus syntax") reason for pause. The article provides good food for thought, but it takes more time to read than an average Twitter tweet. Well worth the < 5 min.