{"id":142,"date":"2008-08-27T21:27:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-28T05:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/?p=142"},"modified":"2008-08-27T21:27:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-28T05:27:00","slug":"simplifying-the-disciplines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/simplifying-the-disciplines\/","title":{"rendered":"Simplifying the disciplines"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m thinking.<\/p>\n<p>Science is all about gradually figuring things out by trial and error &#8212; making predictions and see if they hold up.  You hope to be surprised.  Engineering is all about clever hacks &#8212; breaking the rules while following the <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">real<\/span> rules.  Design is about constraints &#8212; tradeoffs, compromises, and innovative solutions that manage to support all of the constraints.  Art is about free association &#8212; thinking outside the box at all cost and doing something simply because it is new.<\/p>\n<p>What is liberal arts?  I think liberal arts is all about critical thinking &#8212; pushing an argument to its full logical conclusion.  This is important in <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">all<\/span> of the above areas.  For example:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Science: if light travels at a constant speed, the logical conclusion is that time slows down as objects speed up (special relativity).<\/li>\n<li>Engineering: if transistors can perform a basic bitwise operation, then lots and lots of transistors can produce artificial intelligence (or at least Windows Vista).<\/li>\n<li>Design: if computers are good for organizing information but bad for portability, pocket devices should be fully managed using a computer (iPod).<\/li>\n<li>Art: if everyone paints only important or unusual objects, why not paint objects that are fully mass-produced and pedestrian? (Andy Warhol)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Do you see what I mean? It&#8217;s just another vindication of the liberal arts.  I kind of got sidetracked from my original point, though, which was just new thinking about the essence of science and engineering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m thinking. Science is all about gradually figuring things out by trial and error &#8212; making predictions and see if they hold up. You hope to be surprised. Engineering is all about clever hacks &#8212; breaking the rules while following the real rules. Design is about constraints &#8212; tradeoffs, compromises, and innovative solutions &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/simplifying-the-disciplines\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Simplifying the disciplines&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}