Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: NTY: Buy Apple gadgets, use Google services, buy media from Amazon

Posted by Steve Smith on Feb 18, 2014; 2:31pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/NTY-Buy-Apple-gadgets-use-Google-services-buy-media-from-Amazon-tp7584915p7584931.html

Carl and others have made several good points...

What I think I'm hearing from Glen is that while it's nice to use power-planers and router tables to shape wood, one should know how to use the right type of hand-plane, chisels, and scrapers in case you lose electric power.

Well, I dunno.   Several points along these lines.

...

That said, yes, its good to know some hand drafting before you get into CAD.  But "fundamentals" and "foundations" can be slippery concepts.

I believe Marcus made some points about "paying dues" and other references to expectations "the group" has on the individual for being admitted into the "masters" category, as it were.

I tried to keep my own ideologizing down to "knowing the names of the Turtles (who are all the way down)" because as Carl points out, the fundamentals (acoustics in materials, material fabrication, kinesthesiology, etc.) are *all* fundamental and for the most part, it is possible to become "good" at the process without necessarily understanding all of that stuff, even if it is extremely interesting and useful to the geeks in the crowd.

Since Carl invoked Drumming over Programming which is overtly a more sensorial and perhaps spiritual activity (at least the way Carl does it?) it is worth noting that I believe there may even be some value in *NOT* knowing the technical fundamentals of the drums and the kinesthetics of the human body involved.   It may *add* to the mystical power of the experience to learn and practice it entirely "rote", coming to insights about the underlying processes and materials entirely from one's own direct experience without any formal explanations to draw from.

To be fair, there is probably a school of programming which is parallel...  I *do* remember a time for myself when the magic of code was mystical...  mostly as I learned the intricacies of debugging my own faulty logic and code-generation and of profiling and then algorithmic complexity, memory management, etc.    Had I had *more* formal training up front, it might have undermined that mystical experience of discovering so many things "the hard way".   So rather than "knowing the names of the turtles all the way down", I got to/had to make up names for them as I met them, and only later discover that they had been named many times already.

- Steve

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