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In engineering school, what this toy is apparently trying to teach is conveyed through (for eg) the differential equations for RLC circuits and spring-mass-damper systems being similar. It’s a math class, not a shop class. It’s basic literacy needed to do the stamp collecting.
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I think many toys make this mistake. They try to teach basic theoretical concepts that you’ll eventually learn with math/physics classes. Cute but redundant. But you get an illusion of learning stamp-collecting side that you can’t learn in a math/physics course, when you’re not.
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In a way all the maker stuff I’m playing with and posting about right now is an attempt to kinda set aside the math/physics foundations, and re-establish hands-on stuff on independent empirical/phenomenological “stamp collecting” foundations.
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The math/physics is still important, but as a cost of doing business. It’s an entry-level boundary condition that separates engineering from vocational technician skills.
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That divide btw is an interesting one. Somehow industrialization created a vocational layer mostly sealed off from engineering. Welders, machinists, electronics assembly people, plumbers,… a vast universe of technicians who can get away with very limited math/physics.
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Industrial vocations are partly descended from artisan trades, partly, artificial constructs like video games. You may intuit physics of wood if you do woodworking, but there’s no chance a minimum wage circuit assembler can intuit semiconductor physics with no textbooks.
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Yeah, good point. There is “infrastructure fluency” in a few key tools (like a soldering iron) but in general, fluency is neither a thing in engineering, nor particularly central. You *expect* work to feel awkward and non-fluent half the time.
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Replying to @vgr
you also have significant diminishing returns to mastery of the components. checking the docs while coding isn’t that costly. being deeply fluent won’t actually gain you that much. contrast music, where that kind of fluency is absolutely crucial
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Another good point. Advanced math starts to feel like extremely discriminating stamp collecting. Once you get past foundations and basic skills, all the action is in the “rare stamp” theorems that are *both* true and important in the ocean of unimportant trivial truths.
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Replying to @vgr
I suspect some parts of math are like this, and others not. I remember an undergrad prof characterizing graph theory as the "area in which it is possible to pose an unlimited number of unimportant but new theorems." This, he said, is why it was the topic used in summer schools.
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One of the reasons I didn’t get far in math is that though I was good at the raw skills like manipulating trigonometric identities or differentiation or Laplace transform mechanics, I never developed a “taste” for how to wield the important and charismatic theorems/equations.
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Things like the CHT or say the Brouwer fixed-point theorem are like temperamental tools with strong “personalities” (think soldering iron) that give you superpowers once you master them. I’m citing these because they are among the few I *did* gain some literacy in.
Replying to
By contrast, I gave up on topology after the first grad course because it is just *full* of such things. Topology is the “fantastic beasts and where to find them” part of math. Really advanced stamp collecting. If I understand correctly, Grothendieck was a sort of Newt Scamander.
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I’m possibly doing an injustice to music and martial arts here, but I think they’re closer to Euclidean geometry than engineering. As in, the combinatorial space covers most of it, and what isn’t covered is more subconsciously/tacitly learnable.
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Replying to @vgr
You're selling music a little short here. There may be only 12 tones, but the true building blocks are a multitude of combinatorial complexity.
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While there’s stuff beyond the combinatorial space of scales/ragas etc, it it’s mostly tacit. Things like instrument-specific timbre and elements like microtones (raga musicians in particular go on and on about that and entire schools rest on microtonal aesthetic theories)…
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Fair enough… I imagine you might suddenly run into a particular weird “new physics” effect while experimenting with a particular combination of formal scale/instrument/microtonal flourishes. Often those are what I personally like best in music. New emergent effects.
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Replying to @vgr
Maybe complex rhythm or polyrhythms or something are like the thermistor of music. It seems like there's always a new concept that can radically change the boundaries of somewhere you thought was your back garden.
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I can believe it. I have a suspicion that kata is bullshit work. Practicing basic combinations/drill (kihon) and sparring (kumite) make sense, but kata never made sense to me. I gave up karate after a year in grade school because they only did kata and it bored me to tears.
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Replying to @vgr
if you read bruce lee he points out that katas are just as bad in martial arts
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Come to think of it, this may also be why I never pursued music. My tabla teacher had me doing kata-like drills for years and I never got to accompaniment performance (the equivalent of sparring) while some friends in more musical families were learning accompaniment from day 1.
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Maybe conclusion from this thread is that kata/etude like things don’t just fail in engineering, but they don’t even really work where they are common by tradition. Probably overstating the case, but why not. Null hypothesis: all kata-like things are bullshit work. Any defenders?
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I’m tempted to connect kata like things to pattern language type ideas and call bullshit on that too, since they’re clearly cousins. But I don’t want to be murdered by the Christopher Alexander mafia 😆
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Friction is real action, flow is self-indulgence? 🤔
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Replying to @rhettford and @vgr
I’ve even seen this in software where folks become so adapted to their mature project that remembering how to compile a quick snippet to test out an idea creates real friction. Friction means you’ll search for a different way.
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The problem here is that there’s no real value to repeating the exercise. It’s a one-time thing, and doing it again or even on a new board doesn’t do much. The essence of kata is repetition. I don’t think anybody would do 100s or 1000s of led-blink or hello-world programs.
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Replying to @vgr
Would a simple exercise like plugging an LED and resister into a breadboard and making it blink with an Arduino count as a Kata? I think it’s real easy to get lost in specialization and forget how to start something from scratch.
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