Everything leads to two-phase flow

I have already mentionned how the use of tools like Visicalc were shown to give a false impression of control to the user. Most of this discussion was based on a discussion by Peter Coffee on how to go beyond the usual spreadsheet analysis by adding probability distributions to cells in a spreadsheet environment like Excel. DecisionTools Pro seems to be one of these products as well as Crystal Ball Pro. Both of these products are priced in the range of 1500 plus dollars. Not a bad price, but does it you an additional impression of control without really have any ? What seems very akward is the sense that one knows the probability distribution of an event. Indeed, the idea that a particular process may have a certain probability distribution known in advance (i.e. for instance a gaussian) is very suspicious. One knows the law for a specific process only after having gathered much data on the same process. This really means that either one is a specialist of this very specific process in a monotonous environment or that the company has been gathering data over the years on it, both situation being very particular and overall pretty unusual. Either way, as Coffee points out it really puts the perspective of failure as an issue rather than believe that everything will work. Another software mentioned by Coffee is that of Projected Financials , a new way of doing business forecast using a different interface than the traditional error-prone excel spreadsheet, in his words " A revenue stream, for example, has certain characteristics, such as when it starts and what trend it exhibits. A financial statement aggregates some numbers, such as monthly profits that sum to yearly profits, but reports others, such as accounts receivable, as levels rather than flows. ". It so happens that this is really a little bit what we do with our application (task manager), a task is a very specific object with many attributes and a history and can very hardly be quantified as a number. I am currently evaluating how to use this concept to make our software more universal. This approach is akin to many of the approaches displayed in building a Domain Specific Language (DSL). Funnily enough, it so happens that one of the case study for this software (projected financials) is that of Joe Marsala who in turn does two-phase flow for a living. For those of you who never wanted to ask me the difference between two-phase flow and single phase flow cooling here is the presentation that you might find interesting.