

Ask YC: How do you feel after watching Planet Earth? - babyshake

I just watched the full-length Planet Earth film, with Patrick Stewart narrating.<p>It absolutely blew me away, but left me with mixed feelings as I opened my IDE this morning.<p>On one hand, the elegance and complexity of nature is inspiring to engineering, and makes the mind reel at the thought of what could come from genetic programming.<p>And yet, it's very disheartening to see just how puny our engineering efforts are when compared to the fine handiwork of the gods.<p>How do you feel while/after watching a really good nature documentary?
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akd
Patrick Stewart? Doesn't David Attenborough narrate?

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alaskamiller
I felt pretty good after watching Pineapple Express.

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babyshake
Haven't seen it. Tropic Thunder is great.

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RobertL
I spend pretty much every weekend hiking, snowshoeing, and/or cross country
skiing in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

I'm also an engineer. So I've been dealing with this conundrum for pretty much
my entire adult life.

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hhm
And how do you deal with it? What do you feel?

I think that while engineering has a limit for how beautiful it can get, maths
is much more nature-like in this regard.

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RobertL
The fact that I've been going back to nature every weekend for the last 4
decades should kind of speak for itself.

Math is one of the foundations of all engineering disciplines and some of the
great mathematical minds like Newton and fourier and laplace considered
themselves more engineers than mathematicians.

But nature is nature and engineering is engineering. Both have their
fascinations but both are different.

They need to be apprciated as they are. I find no need to ask questions like
"Is one better than the other??".

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babyshake
I appreciate that.

Maybe I'm just not spending enough time outdoors.

