About the Name

There are two reasons behind the naming of this here blog.

First, I simply have heard too much of the word "suboptimal". This owes mainly to the need for a proper business-speak way of saying "bad", "terrible" or "seriously, are you out of your frickin mind"?

The problem is that people are using it out of context. It should be used when you try to convey a trade-off. I think the idea is probably most apropos for algorithms. In simple sorting algorithms, there will be an optimal solution that solves the problem in the fastest time (really the major thing that computer science academics care about). However, implementing that fast algorithm might take up gobs of memory. In that case, it's acceptable to implement a slower, suboptimal algorithm.

In business speak and presentations now, "suboptimal" is often being used to describe a painfully obvious wrong choice. I really want this convention to stop. Don't be nice, call out faulty logic, and just say a choice is wrong instead of dressing it up by calling it suboptimal. So yes, the name is a rather lame attempt to rant about out one of my pet peeves.

As an aside, the only other business speak word I hate worse than "suboptimal" is "synergy". The synergy craze has existed forever, first rising to prominence in the 1960's when everyone wanted to become a conglomerate (forgetting the fact that sometimes there's just not that much synergy between making Beatles albums and making CT scanners). Synergy has also come into play the last decade with the increased activity in M&A and LBO transactions. Even in these cases real synergy was limited and oftentimes just a euphemism (as in "much synergy will be created after we acquire you and terminate 35% of your workforce").

Synergy as a word got so out of control that I actually heard an ad on the radio for an HR company that promised to deliver "synergism" to your company. It seems to me that synergism is either a convoluted way of saying "synergy" or a porno starring Dirk Diggler and Roller Girl. Of course, seeing as to how I'm painfully uncreative, I named my fantasy football team Synergism for two years in a row, leading to 1st and 3rd place finishes. Maybe that HR company was onto something after all...

To take us even further away from the focus of this post, I just wanted to point out that the wiki entry for Business Speak has a See Also section with the entries for Legalese and Bullshit. Good to see we're starting off on such an exciting high point.

Yes, Brian Griffin rapping in the classroom is indeed SupraOptimal

But I digress. The other reason for using SupraOptimal is to convey the idea and hope that we are always searching, always looking for better solutions. The word supraoptimal is actually a legit scientific term used to describe greater than optimal conditions. Notice, not better, but greater, in nominal values. So, for example, your harvest for the year may be down because of supraoptimal temperatures during the season.

At this blog, I will be endorsing the idea of SupraOptimal as "better" than optimal. It will be the embodiment of Robert Browning's famous quote: "man's reach should exceed his grasp". Despite my usually sarcastic, smart-ass tendencies, I am unabashedly an optimist at heart. Like Howard Roark, I see the skyscrapers and think about the limitless potential of human achievement. I can only hope that at times this little web space will be SupraOptimal.