`Automobile spot welding quality`

Used as a self-illustrative example of communication-driven pedagogy. Tom recounts giving the 1989 Gatlinburg keynote on resistance welding and discovering that the memorable framing ("three thousand spot welds because you need two thousand good ones") got quoted back to him a year later. The case stands in for a recurring corpus topic (automotive spot weld reliability) but is deployed here as a story about how to teach, not about the welding itself. ## Figures and recurring numeric anchors

In 1989 I gave the scientific keynote, and I was talking about resistance welding, which is how they put automobile sheet metal together. I said: they put three thousand spot welds in the average automobile because you need two thousand good ones. I'm trying to make a point about the quality of spot welds and the inability to inspect them. A year later I'm at another welding conference, and it's a little cocktail mixer party, and I hear someone behind me say, you know, they put two thousand spot welds in the average automobile. They were quoting me. Why? Because I said it in a memorable way. If I had just gotten in and started talking about, well, sixty-seven percent of the spot welds are good and we have thirty-three percent bad, who would care? It changed the way I taught. Now I tell stories, because it turns out you'll remember those things. So communication skills are important.

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