new organizational discovery

I am obliged to tell them what I think is wrong, but that's all I can do. If they blame failures on us, I am obliged to push back... some. Actually, I'll take the blame as long as we keep getting POs.

Right, Faraday had no formal education. Vacuum tubes. Jumping genes. Airplanes. Light bulbs. Genetics. Telegraph and telephone. Steam engines. All sorts of stuff.

It's not education that makes a scientist... to my mind all great "tinkerers" are scientists at heart. You have an idea, you make some measurements, maybe you change your idea... you do more measurements/tinkering... things start to work.

Steam engines. All sorts of stuff. Yup, science and technology is fun.

George H. :^)

The scientist - as opposed to the tinkerer - looks around for documents describing how other people tackled similar problems, and gets a few extra ideas that way, as well as a feel for which approaches don't seem to have worked too well.

Nothing ever seems to documents the prior art in enough detail to allow you to extract a cut and dried solution to your problem, but some documents can be remarkably helpful. Not just Win's ...

Why do you think tinkerers do not look at what others have done?

Dan

or that the only way forward for scientific people is to look at what others have done, via documents, & make small steps. It's Bill as usual.

NT

The irony with some companies in SV like Reddit is that they've even gone beyond hiring MBAs with actual business experience for executive positions and seem to now draw their leadership talent from Web 2.0 tech nerds, Twitter pundits, VC weenies, and random "social justice" ideologues/fanatics that to my mind pretty much represent the worst caricature of what the Left is about.

You get the sense that if they were to hire someone with an MBA and 5 years experience running a potato factory at a profit they'd be in a much better position

Because they can't afford to access scientific journals?

Profit is not now a primary goal, as it wasn't in the first .com surge. The goal is to get a lot of attention and go public, make some billions, leaving ordinary stockholders in possession, lately without even voting rights.

Uber is a great example. And Twitter. Both are losing roughly a billion a year.

A share of Twitter was $69, now it's 15.

They (we) do, but such documents are viewed as "application notes" to be taken in other directions, or like those old Radio Shack Cookbooks, more outlines than blueprints.

Speaking of which, I've been looking for some time for a non-pay version of the "kilomegacycle Ultrasonics" article from June 1963 Scientific American, and finally found a DL-able PDF, but now I can't find the link to share.

Mark L. Fergerson

He was Sir Humphrey Davy's lab assistant for years. Grad student advisors don't come much better than that!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Experience.

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ts describing how other people tackled similar problems, and gets a few ext ra ideas that way, as well as a feel for which approaches don't seem to hav e worked too well.

ers have done, via documents, & make small steps. It's Bill as usual.

Einstein made a large step or two, but they were based on what other people had done. Plank never took the idea of quantisation all that seriously but he did publish Einsteins's 1905 paper on the photo-electric effect without sending it out to referees. I've mentioned that here before.

NT doesn't read much, and remembers less.

rote:

ents describing how other people tackled similar problems, and gets a few e xtra ideas that way, as well as a feel for which approaches don't seem to h ave worked too well.

thers have done, via documents, & make small steps. It's Bill as usual.

le had done. Plank never took the idea of quantisation all that seriously b ut he did publish Einsteins's 1905 paper on the photo-electric effect witho ut sending it out to referees. I've mentioned that here before.

Bill back to his childish tactics already.

My experience is exactly opposite. The tinkerers spend lots of time looking at what others have done and do very little themselves.

Dan

Many amateurs have advanced the cause of science, often by exploring ideas that scientists of the day discounted. As an example - Astronomy is rife with amateurs making significant discoveries which they share. They don't get good at what they do without research.

Please don't be a total snob about scientists (having a degree) vs amateurs. Of course there are crackpots - there are some scientist crackpots vs. a plethora of amateur loonies. However you can't deny there are a number of well informed and productive amateurs who advance knowledge. Not all of them are trumps. (new adjective)

John

True.

But "the race may not go to the fastest horse, but that's the way to bet".

I'm /sure/ you mishspelled "chump".

I don't think that anybody is. My operational definition of a scientists is somebody who has got stuff published in a peer-reviewed journal that is good enough that other people have cited the work in other peer-reviewed journals.

There's nothing about having a degree in that, or getting paid for what you have done.

I've got a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry but no formal training electronics. I certainly did get paid for doing my part of the work that I did manage to get published, but I wasn't paid to write it up.

Couldn't agree more.