So, who wants to win 1 million Euro?

[ka9q]

Our second son, who's two-and-a-half, is constantly asking "Wot dat?" about all sorts of things, whether a roll of wrapping paper or a bird flying past the window.

He will probably become an engineer or scientist some day. My dad can regale you with stories of how I never stopped asking questions about everything as a kid. I was so young at the time that I don't even remember most of his examples. He also relates how angry he got at an uncle who once asked if I ever shut up.

Every Nobel winning scientist I've ever seen interviewed says much the same thing: how fortunate they feel to have retained his/her natural childhood curiosity into adulthood and to actually get paid for indulging it.

[Noldi400]

I'm glad you were able to find another analogue for that.  I fear what I wrote above sounds elitist.  It's not; it's just the way engineers see the world.  And when you say that artists see the world different, I can relate.  I've seen photographers, lighting directors, and set designers become very attuned to the behavior of light in the mundane, ordinary world.  This is how they know how to create certain effects in the artificial world of the studio and theater.  We become attuned to the world through the way we focus on it, and that gives us different perspectives at different levels of abstraction.

I can hand you another one. After all those years as a practicing Paramedic, it's all but impossible for me to look at someone without making an automatic assessment - stance, breathing rate, skin color (as in pale/flushed/ashen, not melanin content), general appearance, etc.  I think maybe the inability to 'turn it off' is a sign that one has thoroughly absorbed that discipline, as opposed, say, to simply learning some useful information that can be referred to at need.

I'll be very surprised if that made any sense at all.

[Sus_pilot]

I'm glad you were able to find another analogue for that.  I fear what I wrote above sounds elitist.  It's not; it's just the way engineers see the world.  And when you say that artists see the world different, I can relate.  I've seen photographers, lighting directors, and set designers become very attuned to the behavior of light in the mundane, ordinary world.  This is how they know how to create certain effects in the artificial world of the studio and theater.  We become attuned to the world through the way we focus on it, and that gives us different perspectives at different levels of abstraction.

I can hand you another one. After all those years as a practicing Paramedic, it's all but impossible for me to look at someone without making an automatic assessment - stance, breathing rate, skin color (as in pale/flushed/ashen, not melanin content), general appearance, etc.  I think maybe the inability to 'turn it off' is a sign that one has thoroughly absorbed that discipline, as opposed, say, to simply learning some useful information that can be referred to at need.

I'll be very surprised if that made any sense at all.

It very much makes sense. 

When I'm caught at a grade crossing (level crossing to you Brits and Australians), I can't help but do what is called a roll-by, looking for dragging equipment, hung brakes, hot bearings, etc.  and, yes, my phone has some key emergency numbers for my company and other railroads.

When I'm around any airplane, I start looking for things that are not right: drips, flat tires, etc., etc., etc.

It's all in what we're trained to do...

[nomuse]

...I've been aware of that whole "not turning off" aspect of being an engineer.  I hung out around a lot of science geeks when I was younger, and they were constantly running napkin-sketches of random questions that occurred to them as they were walking around.  Of course, they were as likely to calculate the Endor Holocaust as to estimate the Ke of a passing fire engine.

It is akin to the artist's eye.  As a lighting and sound designer for live theater, I spend a lot of my out-of-the-theater time going, "What was that?  What made it sound like that?"  Of course, as an artist, in parallel with looking to see how the sound reflected off a nearby surface, estimating the effects of the wall covering and the size of the standing wave etc., etc., I am also asking, "What did the sound remind me of?  What was its effect on me emotionally?"...

I'm noticing the same thing as a parent. Our second son, who's two-and-a-half, is constantly asking "Wot dat?" about all sorts of things, whether a roll of wrapping paper or a bird flying past the window. It's also nice to be able to talk to our older son, who's five (and starting Big School in a week), about things in the world around us. This includes, I'm happy to say, accepting that the Moon is sometimes visible in the sky during the day. (It also includes, which makes us a bit nervous, anatomically correct bodily processes and names; thus he accurately describes the process by which his little sister was born, which is bound to make a few adults blanch.)

I don't normally (in fact, I almost never...!) post Youtube links, but there is a great, great jazz standard that describes this:  "Dat dere" -- 

[Andromeda]

It is akin to the artist's eye.  As a lighting and sound designer for live theater, I spend a lot of my out-of-the-theater time going, "What was that?  What made it sound like that?"  Of course, as an artist, in parallel with looking to see how the sound reflected off a nearby surface, estimating the effects of the wall covering and the size of the standing wave etc., etc., I am also asking, "What did the sound remind me of?  What was its effect on me emotionally?"

I'm a knitter.  I routinely ask people if I can examine their knitted clothing to see what stitch/colourwork pattern was used.   

[Noldi400]

I don't normally (in fact, I almost never...!) post Youtube links, but there is a great, great jazz standard that describes this:  "Dat dere" -- 

+1

[raven]

A child's curiosity is one of the most beautiful things in the universe, its loss one of the most tragic.
Thank you for sharing that.

[gillianren]

Our second son, who's two-and-a-half, is constantly asking "Wot dat?" about all sorts of things, whether a roll of wrapping paper or a bird flying past the window.

He will probably become an engineer or scientist some day. My dad can regale you with stories of how I never stopped asking questions about everything as a kid. I was so young at the time that I don't even remember most of his examples. He also relates how angry he got at an uncle who once asked if I ever shut up.

Every Nobel winning scientist I've ever seen interviewed says much the same thing: how fortunate they feel to have retained his/her natural childhood curiosity into adulthood and to actually get paid for indulging it.

Okay, this has been bothering me.  Do you have a sample group of liberal arts majors who didn't do that?  Because we are curious about the world around us, too.  We just explore it differently. 

[nomuse]

I've been thinking about this.

Everything looks like a nail, but some people have a more flexible hammer. 

If I tried to analyze orbital mechanics using my tool chest of audio engineering, I wouldn't get very far.  Heiwa's tool kit of a freighter on the open ocean isn't helpful here, either.  But "hard" engineering, as well as baseline physics, are tool chests that do pretty well for most of the technical aspects of the Apollo Program.

And they are probably a good general approach as well.  Trying to work out many aspects by analogy to familiar, Earth-bound activities and processes is a poor match.  Working from first principles will get you closer -- with the caveat that where the cutting head hits the rotating workpiece there are all sorts of nasty little "technical" details that will foul you up.

The big caution being that they too can be taken too far.  The literature of other sciences is full of jokes about physicists who come along and say, "But really you could just reduce the whole thing to this simple equation.  Plus some minor variables, of course."  And there are plenty of engineers who have decided that Kirchoff Laws are all they need to understand cosmology, and they can get rid of all that messy stuff like dark matter (or even General Relativity).

But way, way back on the other side of the question, about the observer's mind... I have to agree that most artists have some form of it.  But it isn't a given.  I was thinking earlier about my experiences in the Poser community (entry-level 3d render application specialized towards depictions of the human form).  My comment, over and over in chats and critiques, was, "Please go outside and look at real people."  Because I saw render after render that failed to understand the basics of how people move, how they sit, how they hold themselves, how they balance, how they express themselves in body language.

[gillianren]

Oh, certainly true.  One of the ways Graham amuses himself of an evening is to look over other people's Deviant Art pages.  I saw a "tutorial" someone had done of the facial muscles where they'd put the ears way too high and otherwise not drawn a decent face.  But good artists are just as much observers of the world around them as good scientists.  It's the people who don't observe who aren't good at either.

[nomuse]

Don't get me started on people who draw only based on drawings based on drawings which, way back in the misty past, might have actually been based on real people and animals and buildings and shadows.

Not to say there is anything wrong, per se, with extremely stylized art.  I'm all for cartoons which rely on established symbolism and have left behind any attempt at representation.

But what too many fail to realize is that even the simplified facial anatomy of anime is based on (in most cases!) the artist having a conception of underlying reality.  There are these incredibly subtle dips and curves in the line that if you are just copying, you don't see.  You only see them when you realize, "Oh, right...there's a tiny jog here because from that angle, the outside corner of the jaw becomes visible."

And the difference in the result is obvious; the difference between a superhero artist who thinks, "There's this little line over here," and the one that thinks, "And here's the outside margin of the deltoid."

[gillianren]

It's why Graham took human biology for his lab-science requirement toward his AA.  It's the most useful class for an artist.

[ChrLz]

This discussion has re-raised a question (or maybe just a bonnet-living bee..) of mine.

Why don't we teach Systems Analysis from grade 0?

When I was first introduced to SA (as part of a role I had way back in the 80's to introduce computers and database systems in a large gov't dept), it was a Wow! moment.  When I look back at my education, I can't help but think that we were only taught stuff - we weren't taught HOW to learn stuff, HOW to 'think', and WHY it was important to be curious about everything in your environment (and beyond).

It seems to me that if we taught thinking skills earlier and much more directly than we currently do, then more people would be able to avoid becoming a Heiwa or Patrick or Dakdak or ...

I guess educators would argue that we do that, but the more I see teaching curriculums (and I've had a fair bit of exposure to them), the less I think we are doing a good job.  And the more 'outcome' oriented we are, I believe the less we are teaching our kids to actually learn, and to continue that process later in life.  Instead we are teaching them to remember stuff for long enough to pass that test/exam...

{/rant}

[ka9q]

Instead we are teaching them to remember stuff for long enough to pass that test/exam...

I absolutely agree. Unfortunately, we don't do enough to attract the best people to the profession, and we don't let them teach in the right way.

I'm a big believer in open-book testing as a far more realistic test of students' problem solving skills. People in the real world certainly don't memorize all the facts they'll ever need, so why expect that of students? (Believe me, good open-book tests are not easy. The hardest tests I've ever taken were open-book.)

Unfortunately, each open-book test can only be used once, so they're much more work for the teachers. That's why we have so many closed-book tests that are more about the students' ability to memorize and regurgitate facts than in actually applying them to problems.

A good education teaches not facts so much as methods -- especially how to use your references and design tools to solve problems that no one has solved before, with no answers to memorize or look up in the back of a book.

[gillianren]

The main reason we don't teach it in the US, at least these days, can be summed up by a single piece of legislation--"No Child Left Behind."  It's so incredibly important for the teacher and the school that as many children as possible pass the tests that they aren't able to be more experimental in teaching.  And the best teacher I ever had couldn't give open-book tests, because we basically never used the textbook.  The one we had for her class was so old that it didn't know how the Korean War ended, and I don't mean because it technically hasn't.