11 Oct 4702
My metabolism is shift
as usual with the Fall season, making red and orange leaves fall from my anus.
Cleaning the bathroom is a simple matter of finding the right-sized rake.
Ordinarily I would attribute the shift to the newly-modified diet of cafeteria
food finally taking hold of my usual intake. This year I can only blame my own
cooking, and am left puzzled. Getting good at puzzles is a deceptive talent. Too
often one accepts a talent developed for one single puzzle as a breadth of
understanding of puzzles, and this understanding is tenuous, perilous, and a
three part list. Take the rubix cube for instance. I have met many people who
can twist a rubix cube to the color pattern they want, and then claim that they
have "problem solving skills" because of this feat. And what if I were to
disrupt the now subconscious pattern-recognition mechanism in the solver's brain
by painting some of the squares the wrong color in the wrong place so that the
standard "solution" becomes impossible? What of the cube now? Pose theoretical
solutions all you want, but do not try to tell me that the solver wouldn't be
schizoid by the novelty. Skills at one kind of problem do not beget skills at
all problems, and this is the engineer's paradox.
At all times, the engineer is at odds with the mathematics he uses, because he
uses laws that are good everywhere (that is math) to work out a specific
solution (that is engineering analysis). Why odds? Because instead of studying
and getting better at problem solving, math, he gets better at solving problems,
engineering. When the engineering student comes across something novel, even
when the problem is simple, he is often baffled because it is too different from
what he has done; what he has been trained to do.
The great mathematician is in every way different from the great calculator. A
mathematician takes developments and proves. A calculator takes proof and
develops. Engineers are trained to become autistic calculators of problems.
Those skilled at the art of mathematics can discover and prove the art of
engineering, and until we breed this into the academic process, the same
stagnant race of autistic engineers will grind into the system as passionless
and unimaginative as their predecessors. Only the mad scientist really
appreciates science.