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+---
+layout: "article"
+title: "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering"
+subtitle: "Learning To Learn: A few quotes and thoughts"
+publishDate: "2023-12-02T20:49:41.713Z"
+readDate: "2023-12-02T20:49:41.713Z"
+serif: true
+
+book:
+  title: "The art of doing science and engineering : Learning to Learn"
+  author: "Richard W. Hamming"
+  publusher: "Stripe Press"
+  publishDate: "2020"
+  reference:
+    amazon: "https://amzn.to/3TsRb4i"
+    worldcat: "https://search.worldcat.org/title/1227304365"
+  ISBN13: "9781732265172"
+  ISBN: "1732265178"
+  OCLC: "1227304365"
+review:
+  rating: 3.5
+  outOf: 5
+---
+
+> Now this fact, once understood, impacts good design! Good design protects you from the need for too many highly accurate components in the system. But such design principals are still, to this date, ill understood and need to be researched extensively. Not that good designers do not understand this intuitively, merely it is not easily incorporated into the design methods you were thought in school.
+>
+> Good minds are still need in spite of all the computing tools we have developed. The best mind will be the one who gets the principle into the design methods taught so it will be automatically available for lesser minds!.
+>
+> -- p.268 in the context of H.S. Black's feedback circuits.
+
+>...pages or colorful pictures on the oscilloscope. If you are the one to make the final decision, then in a real sense you are responsible.
+> Committee decisions, which tend to diffuse responsibility, are seldom the best in practice—most of the time they represent a compromise which has none of the virtues of any path and tends to end in mediocrity.
+> Experience has taught me that generally a decisive boss is better than a waffling one—you know where you stand and can get on with the work which needs to be done!
+> The "what if..?" will arise often in your futures, hence the need for you to master the concepts and possibilities of simulations, and be ready to question the results and to dig into the details when necessary.
+>
+> -- p.274 on Committee oversight of simulations
+
+> I have said again and again in this book, my duty as a professor is to increase the probability that you will be a significant contributor to our society, and I can think of no better way than establishing in you the habit of anticipating things and leading rather than passively following. It seems to me I must, to accomplish my duty to you and to the institution, move as many of you as I can from a passive to a more active, anticipating role.
+> p.284
+
+> Let me now turn to predictions of the immediate future. It is fairly clear that in time "drop lines" from the street to the house (they may actually be buried, but will probably still be called
+"drop lines") will be fiber optics. Once a fiber-optic wire is installed, then potentially you have available almost all the information you could possibly want, including TV and radio,
+> and possibly newspaper articles selected according to your interest profile (you pay the printing bill which occurs in your own house). There would be no need for separate information channels most of the time. At your end of the fiber there are one or more digital filters. Which channel you want, the phone, radio, or TV, can be selected by you much as you do now, and the channel is determined by the numbers put into the digital filter-thus the same filter can be multipurpose, if you wish.
+> You will need one filter for each channel you wish to use at the same time (though it is possible a single time-sharing filter would be available) and each filter would be of the same standard design. Alternately, the filters may come with the particular equipment you buy.
+> But will this happen? It is necessary to examine political, economic, and social conditions before saying what is technologically possible will in fact happen. Is it likely the government will want to have so much information distribution in the hands of a single company? Would the present cable companies be willing to share with the telephone company and possibly lose some profit thereby, and certainly come under more government regulation? Indeed, do we as a society want it to happen?
+> One of the recurring themes in this book is that frequently what is technologically feasible, and is even economically bet-ter, is restrained by legal, social, and economic conditions. Just because it can be done economically does not mean it should be done. If you do not get a firm grasp on these aspects, then as a practicing seer of what is going to happen in your area of specialization you will make a lot of false predictions you will have to explain as best you can when they turn out to be wrong.
+> p.284-285
+
+
+> The Hawthorne effect strongly suggests the proper teaching method will always to be in a state of experimental change, and it hardly matters just what is done; all that matters is both the professor and the students believe in the change.
+> p.288 on the Hawthorne effect
+
+
+
+> But a lot of evidence on what enabled people to make big contributions points to the conclusion that a famous prof was a terrible lecturer and the students had to work hard to learn it for themselves! I again suggest a rule:
+>
+> **What you learn from others you can use to follow;**
+> **What you learn for yourself you can use to lead.**
+>
+> To get closer to the problem, to what extent is it proper to compare physical muscles with "mental muscles"? Probably they are not exactly equivalent, but how far is it a reasonable analogy?
+> I leave it to you to think over.
+> -- p.292