3 Oct
2011
3 Oct
'11
12:12 p.m.
On Sun, 2 Oct 2011 arcarlini at iee.org wrote:
I have a lovely set of 3 books called 'Amateur Telescope Making'.
Although telescope design has moved on since these were written, there's
a lot of interesting stuff in them. It's interesting, too, that the
authors of various sections are people like the Director of the Harvard
Observatory. Back then it appears that astronomers did understand the
instruemtns they were using.
But then these days it's seems to be common to treat eveything as a black
box and not understnad it. The usefulness of results obtained in this way
is questionable to say the least...
Dijsktra believed that "computer
science" should have been called
"computing science" (and - iirc - also said that you wouldn't
expect studying astronomy to teach you how to build a telescope).
Yet, an astronomer would have to be an idiot not to learn the principles
behind his tools. Wouldn't building your own [admittedly crude] one be a
good way to learn? And then give that [professionally inadequate] one to
a schoolkid. That said, having seen the occasional syllabus
for a few "computer
science" degrees, perhaps they are correctly named after all :-)
Is "computer science" an engineering discipline for designing computers?
Or is it an information science discipline for developing algorithms for
prociessing information?