On Fri, 13 Jan 2012 05:29:57 -0800 (PST), "
wrote:

On Jan 12, 9:23*pm, Ed Huntress wrote:


Regarding engineering, this is also the reason I got out of it. There
are few college programs that are narrower or that have less allowance
for electives in fields other than engineering itself and the
peripheral prerequisites and so on. Although the result is a very high
level of vocational training, the education of an engineer depends
mostly on how successful he is at learning things outside of his
college program.

Some do, some don't. The ones who don't tend to see everything through
that filter, and to be very defensive about it.

--
Ed Huntress


Depends on the college. The college I know the most about, had very
loose requirements on what was required. Although I know one friend
that changed from engineering to physics in order to take a course he
needed to get into med school.

Yeah, well, that must have been kind of unusual. At Michigan State,
engineering students barely were given room to breathe. For a while,
even their Freshman English classes were conducted *inside* of the
College of Engineering.

--
Ed Huntress



Dan

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:01:37 -0500, "Jim Wilkins"
...
I'll go off on a tnagent here, with apologies for self-indulgence,
because it will give you a sense of where I'm coming from with this
issue. Of all the things I've ever studied, the most important to me
is the history of ideas, or, "How in the hell did we wind up HERE?"
g I came to it suddenly one day in 1969, when I was sitting in my
academic advisor's office and he embarrassed me more thoroughly than
any embarrassment I had ever suffered. He had a classical education
and I had a typical public-school and land-grant university education.
His father was a renowned professor of epistemology and he had degrees
from Oxford and Princeton. In just a few words, he made me realize
that I didn't understand anything important because I didn't know
where our ideas come from. Everything I had learned was the result of
walking into the middle of a conversation. And it left me ignorant and
incapable of putting anything, from politics to mathematics, into
perspective.

Ed Huntress

Then perhaps you know the quotation I can't find.

The contrast
between chemists' and actors' interests, world views, motivations and work
habits could hardly have been greater.
[Can't find relevant Sir Francis Bacon quote]

I didn't see it in his essays.

Maybe it was from Roger Bacon, another early proponent of experimental
verification, but I haven't located "Communia Naturalium" on line and my
Latin isn't up to speed-reading anyway.

It was about the various types of minds and what satisfies them, intense
human interaction for an extrovert versus the quiet intellectual contentment
that serves a scholar.

jsw

On Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:41:19 -0500, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:


"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
.. .
On Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:01:37 -0500, "Jim Wilkins"
...
I'll go off on a tnagent here, with apologies for self-indulgence,
because it will give you a sense of where I'm coming from with this
issue. Of all the things I've ever studied, the most important to me
is the history of ideas, or, "How in the hell did we wind up HERE?"
g I came to it suddenly one day in 1969, when I was sitting in my
academic advisor's office and he embarrassed me more thoroughly than
any embarrassment I had ever suffered. He had a classical education
and I had a typical public-school and land-grant university education.
His father was a renowned professor of epistemology and he had degrees
from Oxford and Princeton. In just a few words, he made me realize
that I didn't understand anything important because I didn't know
where our ideas come from. Everything I had learned was the result of
walking into the middle of a conversation. And it left me ignorant and
incapable of putting anything, from politics to mathematics, into
perspective.

Ed Huntress

Then perhaps you know the quotation I can't find.

The contrast
between chemists' and actors' interests, world views, motivations and work
habits could hardly have been greater.
[Can't find relevant Sir Francis Bacon quote]

I didn't see it in his essays.

Maybe it was from Roger Bacon, another early proponent of experimental
verification, but I haven't located "Communia Naturalium" on line and my
Latin isn't up to speed-reading anyway.

It was about the various types of minds and what satisfies them, intense
human interaction for an extrovert versus the quiet intellectual contentment
that serves a scholar.

jsw


Sorry, it doesn't ring any bells. If it was a Bacon, it much more
likely was Francis.

I don't know any Latin.

--
Ed Huntress