Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I started thinking about what I stated about computing (and Sun) regarding the simplification and rise in popularity of scripting languages. What I find funny (at least from my perspective) is that outside of computing, I haven't found too much of the same thing with other fields like math. Okay, maybe doing a derivative is still faster than doing the limit thing to find the rate of change in an equation. But something bothers me that we're teaching kids the *HARD* and tedious ways of approaching things like math. It's good to know how to perform math equations and such by hand. However, as technology advances, should we also advance the techniques so we can bypass all the crap to allow new breeds of engineers to produce at greater rates? If you look at the scientific community, you'll notice that nothing ever grows simpler; the world actually grows more complex with the proverb being "asking more questions from the answers we derive." What good is that? Shouldn't we find manners of simplifying that, creating short cuts and cheats that help in the accuracy of our research? Sometimes I feel like what school is doing is simply throwing more monkeys to solve an easy equation. We're not asking the appropriate questions nor approaching the problems correctly. It's like we do the hard stuff to torture ourselves. Makes no sense. A friend of mine once mentioned intelligence augmentation from devices like PDAs. It was an interesting observation because those devices save us from headaches when we need to remember something critical. Something just is massively wrong about the way we're doing things.