eugene@eos.arc.nasa.gov (Eugene Miya) (12/20/88)
I received some mail from Baer on this and I see the Tasmania posting 8-).
There was a quote by J.B.S. Haldane on how disciplines progress.
First there is lots of confusion, followed taking tons of data,
far too much for most to understand. Then some one comes around
and makes it all clear and it's all old hat.
The value of taxonomies (for all but funding agencies) is probably best
characterized by the periodic table (hence probably why Hockney liked it).
With such a table, not only can you characterize compounds, but you can make
some general predictions of what will work and what won't. States and models
are simple. Computer architectures have considerably more complexity.
Consider we haven't constructed the perfect uniprocessor yet (and I know
funding agencies who think it can be). They keep adding zeros and
predict faster machines.
Other taxonomies (like the Linneanian Genus species) are purely
descriptive and you can't get any more than that. I can tell you the
Latin for a gorilla, but it doesn't say what a gorilla is. Funding sources
and vulture capitalists don't understand (don't want to try and understand
[is this a question of scientific illiteracy?]) and only wish to avoid
spreading their money too thinly and avoid duplicating the efforts of other
Agencies. A few seek short term gain, but some bright projects were
funded in the past because some intelligent scientists ran some far-sighted
funding Agencies.
We are going to have to use those adjectives (fault-tolerant,
tighly/loosely coupled, shared/local memory, ad nauseum architectures)
for some time to come. I offered the little exercise about
reducing one's vocabulary for understanding. Give it a try.
The physicists did something similar in the 19[23]0s to understand
light (particle NWF, wave TTS, rest on Sunday).
Another gross generalization from
--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@aurora.arc.nasa.gov
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