On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 5:51 PM, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Engineering in the real world is nearly always a mixture of rigor and > > intuition. Just like analysis of complex biological systems is. > > > > AIEEEEEeeeee! NO! You are clearly not an engineer because a true engineer > just wouldn't say this. > > Engineering should *NEVER* involve intuition. Engineering does not require > exact answers as long as you have error bars but the second that you revert > to intuition and guesses, it is *NOT* engineering anymore.
Well, we may be using the word "intuition" differently. I'll give a very simple example of intuition, based on the only engineering paper I ever published, which was a civil engineering paper. What we did was use statistics to predict how likely it was (based on several physical measurements) that the soil under a house was going to settle over the next few decades (causing the house to sink irregularly). This formula we derived is now used to determine where to build houses in the outskirts of Las Vegas, and what kind of foundation to use for the houses. Not too interesting, but rigorous. However, one wouldn't bother to use this formula if the soil was too different in composition from the soil around Vegas. So in reality the civil engineer uses some intuition to decide whether the soil is close enough to the right kind of soil, to use our formula. Now this *could* be made more rigorous, too ... in principle ... but in practice it isn't. And so, maybe some houses fall down ;-) But not many do. The combination of rigorous formulas applying to restrictive cases, together with intuition telling you where to apply what formulas, works OK. Anyway this is a total digression, and I'm done w/ recreational emailing for the day! ben ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
