somebody wrote:
> "Patrick Elliott" <sel### [at] npgcablecom> wrote in message
> news:48de7b90@news.povray.org...
> 
>> Experts are often blinded by their own narrow expertise. And as much as
>> you hate examples. One group of Computer Science people went in to look
>> over the systems used by Astrological researchers and found that their
>> "expertise" was so narrow they had no clue that modern debuggers
>> existed, where still coding their projects by hand using text editors,
>> and that 9 out 10 ten of all experimental projects would **failing**,
>> for no other reason than that they couldn't debug the complex code well
>> enough to make those experiments "work properly".
> 
> I assume you mean "astronomy", not "astrology".

Sigh.. Been spending too much time arguing with quacks, I am starting to
sound like them. lol

> Yes, I agree with the fact
> that today's science is extremely specialized and often, scientists miss
> cross discipline applications, or, like you mention above, don't work
> efficiently because they do not keep up with technology. But neither of
> these are specific to science. I know many manufacturers firsthand that
> employ outdated technologies, and do things the hard way. That's not an
> argument against directed research. The solution is not to do away with
> directed research, but to hire programmers and organize the research so that
> the astronomers write the specifications, and pass in on to coders; they do
> not write code. It's absurd to expect an astronomer to wear a programmer's
> hat too *and* excel at both tasks.
> 
The problem being.. A programmer is not, somewhat ironically, competent
enough to *code* for such a discipline, without in depth knowledge of
the math and theories either. So.. Your stuck with either an astronomer
that hasn't a clue how to code, or a coder that hasn't a clue how to
design the applications needed. :p Its kind of a mess in some
disciplines, due to those issues.

> And yes, unexpected applications of scientific discoveries of course occur
> from time to time. But that's not an argument against directed research
> either. By definition, there's no telling when or what the unexpected
> applications may be. It's a bonus when they happen, but you cannot model a
> research project after that. You still plan your research, set your goals,
> but keep an ear and eye open to other researchers who are doing interesting
> things, as well as communicate your discoveries to them so that you can
> maybe mutually benefit. There's already the mechanism of refereed journals
> to facilitate this type of communication. Again, it gets harder and harder
> as volume and depth of research increases. But doing away with directed
> research is not the solution.
>  

Never said that there is anything wrong with applied or directed
research. The issue is.. major leaps don't happen via that methodology.
There are several key factors that make it very unlikely, or even
impossible, in some cases. 1) accidents don't get recognized, 2)
progress is calculated based on results, not discoveries in general, and
3) most businesses are "so" focused on the result they want, that they
will shut down programs that fail to produce the results they want, even
if they are producing results that *could* be later beneficial to
someone else. Things have gotten so specific now that research that is
targeted at specific goals will simply either a) fail to meet them, do
to too many people having all the wrong pieces, and none of them either
sharing those, or even aware they exist, or b) reach them in a way that
is more expensive than necessary, more time consuming than needed, and
result is a product that falls "below" what is actually possible. The
only time this isn't true is when some lab doing this stuff drops
chemical X in test tube Y by accident and it turns out to work 50 times
better than the "directed", and carefully planned, path being followed.

Research that only looks at the end goal, and ignores everything else,
especially basic research, where people just ask questions for the sake
of figuring things out, can and do dead end "often", due to being "too"
focused on those goals. Many companies have figured this out and now
support "basic research" within the bounds to their own directed system.
But, they are not going to be the people finding some new energy source,
based on yet unknown math, involving factors about matter, which we
don't yet understand, resulting in something the size of a battery that
is 500 times as efficient. They are going to be the guy that stumbles on
a way to make a battery 3% more efficient, based "purely" one the
"known" data. Such companies are, based on the same argument used here,
**never** going to build a LHC to find that information in the first place.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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