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kickahaI screwed up.
Ever get to the end of a long journey and realize that you battled long and hard, fought well (generally) and emerged victorious... only to realize you really don't want to be where you ended up?
I'm finishing up my dissertation in computer science... and have been 'finishing' it for, er... two years now. It's turning into the albatross. Is it because I can't do it? Nope. I are a braight won. Is it because it isn't doable? Nope. It's solved.
It's because I'm bored with it, because I find myself not liking it anymore.
Not the project, the field. The instruments of it, the boundaries of it, the *essence* of it.
madness237's quote struck a chord in me that I've mentioned before. And this time it's sticking hard.
A have a friend down here who does genetic studies of tropical plants, complete with in the field collection expeditions. A few weeks ago, in preparation for this summer's jaunt around the world, she went to the Smithsonian in DC to inspect some original color plates in a text a couple hundred years old. I was *SO* damned jealous. The smell, the feel, the liveliness of the paper, the gentle embossing of the inkpress, the decades of tiny funguses, mildews, and molds that have taken refuge in the spine, imparting a life after life to the tome... all of it comes to a fruition of sensation and memory, of body and intellect.
Computers are dead. They spark, they whine, they glow... but they never *live*. It is a dead thing that sits under my fingertips at the moment, and in a life so devoid of life as mine, it feels intolerable. This *is* my life - the phosphor, the ferrite, the silicon... of dead things.
I hate it.
Ironically, computers were my first love, and physics a major I took because I had to declare 'something'. And yet, it was one of my professors there who spurred me to graduate school, who was the first in a long line of so called teachers to take me aside and say "You're good. You're too good not to go to graduate school." Unfortunately, I didn't take her advice and go into material physics - I think I would have vastly preferred it.
You see, computer science isn't a science. It's barely even an art. It's constructed fiction we all tell ourselves so that we can nod knowingly, keep the vestal hearth of silicon fire burning, and feel good that we are Doing Something Important(tm). We're not. It's all a lie.
"Any discipline that has to tack the word 'science' onto its name to be taken seriously as such, isn't." - Fred Brooks, head and founder of my department, and CS luminary... and one of the few folks in the field that sees that the emperor has no clothes.
CS isn't discovery, it's creation. But it isn't creation in a passionate, vibrant, *necessary* sense... it's the most distanced, abstract, intellectual masturbation of creation acts.
It. Doesn't. Matter.
When all is said and done, it gives us, what... PlayStations? Windows Media Player? Napster?
Whee. Big whoop.
I want to discover natural laws, basic principles on which the world works. I want to see those laws put to concrete use for the good of all.
Computers are just a fiction. There are no formulae, no laws, nothing you can point to and say "This is how it IS"... just intellectuals fighting over whose ego posturing is going to make their particular combinatorial justification for their work get the most funding bucks. It's a small short step above 17th century Russian literature studies, when it comes to its scientific merits.
I was drawn to computers, and programming, because I saw a meshing of art and science, of human creation and automated efficiency, of acts of will becoming electronic flesh.
It's all a lie.
There is no art, just MCSE certification courses.
There is no science, just stillborn attempts at formal discipline.
There is little human creation, just cubicle farms of coders.
There is little efficiency, just minds and souls being used to recreate the same old shit as last year.
There are no acts of will, only venture capitalists.
There is no electronic flesh... just the shadows of dreams broken on illusory shores.
So now what? I'm going to finish this fucking dissertation. I will *NOT* let it beat me into submission... but my heart isn't in it, other than to see it *DONE*, and behind me.
Unfortunately, I've then managed to specialize myself into a corner... what next?
Bongo drum concertinas for ballet, anyone?
Ever get to the end of a long journey and realize that you battled long and hard, fought well (generally) and emerged victorious... only to realize you really don't want to be where you ended up?
I'm finishing up my dissertation in computer science... and have been 'finishing' it for, er... two years now. It's turning into the albatross. Is it because I can't do it? Nope. I are a braight won. Is it because it isn't doable? Nope. It's solved.
It's because I'm bored with it, because I find myself not liking it anymore.
Not the project, the field. The instruments of it, the boundaries of it, the *essence* of it.
madness237's quote struck a chord in me that I've mentioned before. And this time it's sticking hard.
A have a friend down here who does genetic studies of tropical plants, complete with in the field collection expeditions. A few weeks ago, in preparation for this summer's jaunt around the world, she went to the Smithsonian in DC to inspect some original color plates in a text a couple hundred years old. I was *SO* damned jealous. The smell, the feel, the liveliness of the paper, the gentle embossing of the inkpress, the decades of tiny funguses, mildews, and molds that have taken refuge in the spine, imparting a life after life to the tome... all of it comes to a fruition of sensation and memory, of body and intellect.
Computers are dead. They spark, they whine, they glow... but they never *live*. It is a dead thing that sits under my fingertips at the moment, and in a life so devoid of life as mine, it feels intolerable. This *is* my life - the phosphor, the ferrite, the silicon... of dead things.
I hate it.
Ironically, computers were my first love, and physics a major I took because I had to declare 'something'. And yet, it was one of my professors there who spurred me to graduate school, who was the first in a long line of so called teachers to take me aside and say "You're good. You're too good not to go to graduate school." Unfortunately, I didn't take her advice and go into material physics - I think I would have vastly preferred it.
You see, computer science isn't a science. It's barely even an art. It's constructed fiction we all tell ourselves so that we can nod knowingly, keep the vestal hearth of silicon fire burning, and feel good that we are Doing Something Important(tm). We're not. It's all a lie.
"Any discipline that has to tack the word 'science' onto its name to be taken seriously as such, isn't." - Fred Brooks, head and founder of my department, and CS luminary... and one of the few folks in the field that sees that the emperor has no clothes.
CS isn't discovery, it's creation. But it isn't creation in a passionate, vibrant, *necessary* sense... it's the most distanced, abstract, intellectual masturbation of creation acts.
It. Doesn't. Matter.
When all is said and done, it gives us, what... PlayStations? Windows Media Player? Napster?
Whee. Big whoop.
I want to discover natural laws, basic principles on which the world works. I want to see those laws put to concrete use for the good of all.
Computers are just a fiction. There are no formulae, no laws, nothing you can point to and say "This is how it IS"... just intellectuals fighting over whose ego posturing is going to make their particular combinatorial justification for their work get the most funding bucks. It's a small short step above 17th century Russian literature studies, when it comes to its scientific merits.
I was drawn to computers, and programming, because I saw a meshing of art and science, of human creation and automated efficiency, of acts of will becoming electronic flesh.
It's all a lie.
There is no art, just MCSE certification courses.
There is no science, just stillborn attempts at formal discipline.
There is little human creation, just cubicle farms of coders.
There is little efficiency, just minds and souls being used to recreate the same old shit as last year.
There are no acts of will, only venture capitalists.
There is no electronic flesh... just the shadows of dreams broken on illusory shores.
So now what? I'm going to finish this fucking dissertation. I will *NOT* let it beat me into submission... but my heart isn't in it, other than to see it *DONE*, and behind me.
Unfortunately, I've then managed to specialize myself into a corner... what next?
Bongo drum concertinas for ballet, anyone?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-02 12:10 pm (UTC)Robots to help with household tasks (ok, they aren't as good *yet* as say. helper monkeys or assorted service dogs- but they don't throw feces when angry either.)
And a hundred other uses.
CS attempts at trying to progam AI's have led to new insights into the way autists percieve the world (and those who work with autists have been able to give the AI folks some pointers, too. it flows both ways... -example here; a computer can't tell a scream of joy from a scream of pain because it hasn't been programmed w/ facial expression recognition algorithms. So they study faces, and talk to high functioning autist who say things like "I watch the eyebrows and the mouth wrinkles and I've just memorized it, and the CS guy hmms and programs and comes back with "the way the eyes squinch up is important too...")
For those of "normal" abilities the computer is perhaps a fun but meaningless toy. We can certainly live without and have for hundreds of years. But for thousands who before computers were assumed to be mindless idiots because they couldn't communicate, they are vital...