
It Is, in Fact, Rocket Science - petethomas
http://nytimes.com/2015/05/16/opinion/it-is-in-fact-rocket-science.html
======
maxander
Next time you're wondering why more kids don't go into STEM in this age of
wondrous scientific and technological progress; virtually any bright 10 year
old knows the story of how and why Archimedes leapt out of his bathtub
shouting "Eureka!", but none of them would have the foggiest notion of what a
real scientist does at work on a day-to-day basis. Neither would their
parents, unless they are scientists themselves. Even students halfway through
college on course to _become_ such scientists often have only a vague notion
of what their careers would actually look like- they just know they like the
coursework. Its a leap of faith.

Same goes for most kinds of engineering, and mathematics, and a bunch of other
disciplines that are inexplicably underrepresented in children's career
aspirations.

(I suppose software engineers are the exception, since the popular notion
"they just sit at computers all day typing arcane things" is actually _true_.
: ) )

~~~
weinzierl

        I suppose software engineers are the exception, since 
        the popular notion "they just sit at computers all day 
        typing arcane things" is actually true. : )
    

I know you are joking, but it has to be said. In my experience most software
engineers spend considerable time in (formal or informal) meetings.

According to "Mythical Man Month" the average productivity is 10 lines per
developer per day.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
Yeah, but MMM also mentioned a 10x productivity range between average and
exceptional programmers. 100 lines per day isn't _too_ shabby.

I just try to work with exceptional programmers. :)

~~~
jes5199
I try to be LOC neutral. A good day on a healthy team lets me delete at least
as much code as I write.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
I agree that LOC isn't an ideal metric. But there isn't really an ideal
simplistic metric.

Out of curiosity, I thought I'd look at a recent productive day. In actual
numbers, my 42 check-ins totaled 409 new lines of code compared with 213 lines
deleted, so close to 50% (not counting check-ins with simple line changes).

At the end I had several new features implemented and a lot of code refactored
to be cleaner.

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edtechdev
Yeah once you learn about the "lone genius" myth, you see it all over the
place, especially in movies and textbooks.

There were several articles about it this past year:

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/07/10/lone_geniuses...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/07/10/lone_geniuses_and_entrepreneurs_success_are_really_built_on_team_efforts.html)

[https://medium.com/the-aspen-journal-of-ideas/the-myth-of-
th...](https://medium.com/the-aspen-journal-of-ideas/the-myth-of-the-lone-
genius-6a5146c7da10)

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/lone-g...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/lone-
geniuses-are-overrated/381340/)

[http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/06/the-
powe...](http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/06/the-power-of-
two/372289/)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-
of-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-
genius.html)

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/how-
thomas...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/how-thomas-
edison-mark-zuckerberg-and-iron-man-are-holding-back-american-
innovation/2012/05/22/gIQAk6r1hU_blog.html)

~~~
dalke
I have an example of a lone genius, Calvin Mooers. He's best known for his
work in information retrieval; he coined the terms 'information retrieval' and
'descriptor', among other things. He's also known for the TRAC programming
language.

But he's little known in my field of chemical information. You have to read
the original papers carefully to discover that he came up with the first
concrete method to represent a molecular structure on a computer, a proposal
for how to search molecular structures via arbitrary query topology, and the
idea that there is a simple algorithm (though not practical) for producing a
canonical description of a molecular graph.

As far as I can tell, he was 5 years ahead of the rest of the field, and the
founding papers in my field all cite him as a source of their ideas. (That
said, his ideas were not all implementable. His method for substructure
isomorphism is hand-waving optimism, for example.)

Unlike the other pioneers of IR, he was self-employed (Luhn was high up at
IBM, Taube was originally high up at the Library of Congress, etc) with no
collaborators. But to all accounts, it was not easy to work with him. As one
person described it, he didn't like other people playing with his toys. (Eg,
see the fallout on his attempt to protect TRAC by trademarking its name. He
was 10 years before Microsoft's much more famous 'Open Letter to Hobbyists'.)

------
lordnacho
This is also a warning against genius worship. Sometimes it really does seem
like someone has pulled something from thin air (esp in mathematics. You may
recall on more than one occasion learning something that seemed unsolvable
until it was obvious), but most often those people have placed themselves
-through hard work- in a position where they are most likely to make a given
discovery.

------
nabla9
“Genius is 2 per cent inspiration and 98 per cent perspiration.” ― Edison,
[http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/14/genius-
ratio/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/14/genius-ratio/)

~~~
danielam
Another quote:

"In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind." ―Louis
Pasteur

We cannot ignore the influence of prior knowledge on observation and
reasoning. Observation is theory- and paradigm-laden. (See also the Duhem-
Quine thesis.)

------
mariobertschler
I agree with the story and liked it - but the _aha moment_ still might be at a
lonely place doing something totally different. The human brain needs both
intensity and distance to generate new thoughts.

------
aporetics
"Two thousand years ago, Aristotle’s “Physics” was a wide-ranging set of
theories that were easy to state and understand."

I'm having a hard time imagining that anyone comes away from just having read
Aristotle with the impression that his work is easy to state and understand.
Science is great, but let's shed ourselves of the need to belittle other
disciplines in order to make our own accomplishments seem more grand.

~~~
thaumasiotes
The Physics isn't all of Aristotle.

------
danielam
The same reasoning can be applied to the popularization of science, a
contradiction in terms. If you want to understand a science, you've got to do
the science. Trying to lure people into science by presenting an entertaining
counterfeit is not only disingenuous and intellectually vacuous, but it is
likewise harmful. Open ignorance is a good thing. Having to unlearn bad
metaphors and a habit cheap thrill is not.

------
moioci
He says this statement is not true: "[Darwin] discovered the theory of
evolution after studying finches on the Galápagos Islands". Granted, there is
certainly more to the story than that, but unless he's suggesting that Darwin
devised his theory before he went to the Galapagos, the statement is literally
true.

~~~
quonn
Well, "after" has two meanings (temporal + causal) and the one implied here is
"because".

~~~
moioci
News to me. Cite, please?

~~~
redacted
I think this dual-meaning for 'after' is quite common, at least in Ireland and
UK (and Australia). Here's an example in lieu of a formal citation:

1\. After getting dinner, Alice and Bob met friends at a local bar \- Purely
temporal, one thing followed the other

2\. After hearing Alice recommend her gym, Bob signed up for a membership. \-
Causal (and temporal of course): because of the first thing, the second thing
happened

You can disambiguate this in many ways, the most common in my experience is to
make explicit the time

"Darwin discovered the theory of evolution many years after studying finches
on the Galápagos Islands"

~~~
SilasX
I don't think that's different meanings of after, but different typical
inferences that a listener might make.

------
exabrial
"that is in fact not true"

Wow... what a forest.. trees... head up arse... Sheldon Cooper moment.

What's more important, the story or the theory?

------
fu9ar
Why are Americans okay with education being an exercise in repeating
falsehoods?

~~~
api
Most human communication is oblique and symbolic, not literal.

These are fairy tales, and fairy tales do say something. They just don't say
what they literally seem to be saying. They contain layers of symbolism, often
saying things about the culture, the inventor, _and_ the invention/discovery
at the same time.

For example Newton's apple is interesting for its Genesis reference -- an
apple from a tree. What is this myth actually saying about knowledge, science,
and discovery? What's it saying about Newton? Newton was known to be a
religious heretic and a practicing alchemist/occultist as well as a scientific
thinker. You don't hear much about that, but you do get it in an indirect way
via the apple symbolism I suppose. So perhaps the myth is a way of condensing
down a lot of information about both the discovery (falling, gravity,
mechanics) and the discoverer (heretic, religious outcast) into a single
compact vignette.

~~~
dTal
I think it likely that the story evolved memetically, rather than being "for"
anything in particular. It might have started with something as simple as
Newton mentioning a falling fruit by way of illustration during a lecture, but
as people pass the story around embellishments that resonate stack up. Apples,
as you note, have rich cultural connotations involving intelligence in general
and instantaneous revelation in particular (interestingly, Genesis does not
actually mention apples, referring only to "fruit", which would seem to
suggest that apples get their symbolism from somewhere else. Possibly their
brain-like cross section?). The more recent retellings have added the
embellishment that Newton was not just inspired by a falling apple but
_literally struck_ by one, the apple serving as a physical manifestation of an
idea.

So I think the guiding principle is not so much "how can we poetically
represent Newton" as "what do humans think is cool".

~~~
api
Evolution is a type of intelligence. The two are not mutually exclusive --
memetic evolution _is_ design.

