It Rained
Not news to many, no doubt, but last week we had the first rain since Christmas day. I had already been watering the pots and ground out front to encourage the bulbs I planted last atumn to get going, h first time I have watered at this time of the ear. Anyway, many bulbs are now in flower , ound 20 crocus across theroad ans a large pot of daffodils on top of my porch. I’ve also created a barrrier of stones across the road to keep the compost I’ve dumped there in place and so that water doesn’t simply run off into the road. It’s still too early to remove the ttissue protecting pots from cold nights and see what has survived so that is about as much as I can do at the mment.
How We Think And A Marking Experience
When I was quite young, 26 years ols, I became a member of a NATO think -tank through a series of accidents and coincidences. It was the 1968 meeting that coined the term software engineering and had some renown in the evoluyion of computing. I should never have been there but benefitted enormously from the experience. However I was by about 15 years the most junior and the east qualified ; everybody else was either a professor of maths or engineerig or a head of research at a mjor company so it occurred to me to wonder what I was doing there ; what could I offer. I ventured to ask the question and as told that I was a catalyst : I made others think in ways that they would not normally think.
That experience marked me. In a subsequent job, trying to identify interesting IT projects around the World, it brought me into contact with many leading lights in IT and while I pondered on what they knew and did what most intrigued me was the train of thought that had brought them to where they were. What was their framework for thinking ? That intrigued me because I had become accustomed to how mathematicians and engineers would typically approach a problem but many of these people had added something else, something « out of the box ». What I sought was less to understand what they were doing and more to understand how they had got there, to get inside theeir minds.
That itrigues me still. The more I understand about science ; physics in particular, about the weather and politics and many other things, the more I understand the huge complexity that has yet to be unravelled and which can probably only be done so in way that we have not yetur thoght of.. Ouvery culture from which we can escape only with extreme difficulty, conditions us to view the world in predetermined ways. Does Asian music sound discordant to weestern ears ? How does western music sound to Asian ears ? How can Sanskrit symbols or Egyptian hieroglyphs be tranlated into precise European words ? They can’t. The answer is interpretation, a way of thinking, a way of looking at what we believe is reality.
It’s athought, and just that, but maybe the most important thing for the future is to discover how people think and not to use that but to cget them hallenge it.
