The Hobbit Hole XXIII - Let them go! Let them go!

[Ramius]

[sigh] I'm sitting here at da hole. I'm trapped into talking to this kid next to me who is, certifiably, the "Dumbest Human on Earth" (tm).

Really... the dumbest person I've ever met... and believe me, I've met a lot of dumb people. Never before have I found a level of dumbness that was worthy of mention. And really... I don't pretend to have some air of intelligentsia about me that demands only the finest of minds... I'm saying that this guy is stupid on ANYBODY'S list of stupid. Matt Damon would look down on this guy. Really. It's even worse than that.

He's off playing pool now, thankfully. Inexplicably, he's called in some girl to play pool with that looks pretty much like Jessica Simpson. HOW is this POSSIBLE?

Lemme give you a 'zample: He was talking to me for the *longest* time about how he was working for his father's company and was going to re-design his fathers business around the web and make everything work together on a web site.

"Cool..." I said. "It's good to put those HTML skills to work..."

"HT... what? " he said.

"HTML" I said.

"What's that stand for?"

"Oh, my..."

It went WAY downhill from there. The more questions I asked the less I had wished I'd asked them.

But... there he is over there playing pool with Jessica Simpson.

There you have it. Life is in fact unfair... and the greatest irony of it is that those who it is being the LEAST unfair to, have no clue that it is happening at all.

[HairOfTheDog]

I'm sure they have a few feed stores there too!

[ecurbh]

Life is unfair

[Ramius]

That must all play into the difference in "how people think"... thing.

I'm useless with math *until* I get to vectors, and a more geometric view of things. I'm OK with visualizations of vectors in two or three dimensions. Maybe that's why I really got into navigation... which is really all about vectors in two dimensions. For me I didn't have to solve for the answer, but I'd just visualize the solution and 'see' it. It was the geometry of the solution that just fell into the spaces.

But give me an algebraic problem... and I'm helpless until I can work it out on paper. If then...

[RosieCotton]

I'm sure! Especially north and east of here.

But it means driving on the interstate. And going to strange new places. Maybe one of these days...

[Ramius]

Heh... that's too true to be from the Onion. :-)

[2Jedismom]

Well, I'm back.

The BA CHEF re-organization meeting is over...it lasted three hours and I'm mentally and physically exhausted.

I'm also leader over Membership.

:-)

Andrew showed up to give their side of the story (when asked).

I cried off and on through the whole thing. But I'm determined to help make this support group a great one...even if it's small.

[SuziQ]

I think I left the company cell phone in Charlotte.

Ruh Roh.

[Ramius]

So... How was "their" side?

[Ramius]

Niters, all...

Time to go.

:-)

[Peanut Gallery]

Can you switch her now?

[Lil'freeper]

Gooood morning!

[TalonDJ]

Yeah, in this guys case it was almost the reverse problem. When a chain of cause/effect lead to a force it is not very accurate to point to the first force and say 'see? that is the real cause'. The child is in-fact 100% accurate about the reason the toy stopped moving. Intimate understanding of friction can be blinding if we get confused as to momentum and then refused to believe anyone was pushing the toy in the first place. It fits my mind set as a 'systems' thinker to always step back and say, 'but where did that input come from?' Many times I have used generality to characterize a problem only to have a more 'narrow' minded (I mean that literally) engineer tell me I am wrong because he is focusing on the specifics still. My best example was when I told someone that turbo props and high bypass turbo fans are conceptually the same. Focused on the many engineering differences he refused to see my point. They have many design and performance differences but both are built to increase the thrust and efficiency of a given gas turbine engine by using it to drive a bigger set of blades. One just uses constant rpm and variable pitch while the other uses constant pitch and variable rpm. This sort of thing is one reason why many science types get all bent out of shape over intelligent design. They are to busy looking at the particulars of life and, not finding anything supernatural, concluding there is none. When stepping back and looking at the mass conplextity pure chance does not seem a compelling argument. Getting 'caught up in the details' is a trap that most scientists and engineers fall into.

Oh my, don't pay any attention to that rambling. I should not get tro rambling before my second dose of caffeine.

[Lil'freeper]

Oh my, don't pay any attention to that rambling.

Taken under advisement. ;)

Being able to drag yourself up from the nitty gritty details and see the overarching concepts and the interconnectivity of ideas and patterns just means you have a poetic streak. (It also helps keep your frame of reference in perspective)

And that's not a bad thing.

[Lil'freeper]

This sort of thing is one reason why many science types get all bent out of shape over intelligent design. They are to busy looking at the particulars of life and, not finding anything supernatural, concluding there is none.

In that vein, you might be interested in reading Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." He wore out the word paradigm for me - and I'll never forgive him for that - but he's been my guiding philosophy for not getting mired down in the whole crevo-id debates and missing neutrino debates and 'what-killed-the-dinosaurs' debates.

He argues that scientific revolutions are the ruptures of paradigms and the establishment of new ones where the paradigm is a framework of rules governing the universe. The framework is fleshed out with examples of how the system of rules works to make predictions and explain phenomena. Think how Galileo disproved Aristotle, how Newton built on Galileo but was supplanted by Einstein.

Revolutions and new systems of thinking.

The other key part of Kuhn is that there is no way to objectively judge the 'correctness' of a paradigm from within in. You need an objective frame of reference to compare between two paradigms or you need to destroy the paradigm and build a new one.

So in my mind, it is entirely possible that every law of physics (all sciences are physics once reduced down far enough) we currently cling to could be *wrong.* We could have a scientific revolution that changes *everything.* Call me gnostic, but it allows me to be smug and not get uptight over silly arguments.

[Overtaxed]

Izzit Thursday yet?

[TalonDJ]

We could have a scientific revolution that changes *everything.*

Considering we don't even REALLY know what gravity is I consider it highly likely we will have such a revolution. My guess is it will be inside of 50 years and probably much less. Thanks for the recomendation. Might have to dig that one up.

[JenB]

Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing some discombobulated scientists one of these days.

Or not; the problem with science is that it's done by people. When you spend your whole career talking about stuff from within a paradigm, it's much easier to say someone who suggests something new is wrong than to actually look at the evidence.

[Overtaxed]

*Looks around*

Where is everybody?

[JenB]

Waiting for the caffeine to hit?

I'm about to take off for work, hope it doesn't rain on me.