I was installing a 3G data card and my computer said “Can’t read disk” to which I repeated out aloud to myself. The girl I work with then passed me the install CD it came with. I started explaining how the error message had nothing to do with this CD to which she cut me off and explained how she had no interest and didn’t care.
Which is fair enough …
But …
I don’t understand it. It’s beyond my comprehension how you might not want to know how something works. I just can’t fathom why anyone would not want to know how anything works. Whether it’s the 3G modem, or the social anthropology of why people use facebook or why you can’t pour concrete too quickly.
Life to me, without understanding what’s beyond the veil, what the depth is, they why and the “no really why, I mean exactly why and how and what’s the bit do here” is just grey and bland and dull.
I thought the same thing listening to Mark Kermodes podcast on Attonement and was thinking how interesting it is to know why he think the movies fails and what the director was doing wrong from a film making perspective. The movie might still be perfectly passable, enjoyable and good, but that doesn’t mean one cannot learn by looking at what the flaws might be.
Yet so many people want to, and in fact choose to live a life where they purposely avoid knowing why something fails, why it doesn’t work, what’s beyond the veil. I cannot understand why someone would be happy flicking a light switch and never knowing how it comes about that the room is illuminated.
Life might seem quite magical, but it’s all a lie. I’d rather know the truth of life, and believe a magical lie. In fact the truth of life is far more fantastical anyway.
This is why I call myself an Engineer (occasionally scientist), even though I practise neither. It’s because of how I think, and I how I perceive the world, rather than the particulars of the day to day job I might I have.
I is Engineer. And mighty proud of it too.
1. QE
What happens if you pour concrete too quickly?
I’m always interested in how things work. I can’t see how people can simply not care, but I do at times have to accept that some people often don’t have enough spare capacity to take in and retain the information they’d find if they started wondering.
2. Adrian
It heats up and doesn’t set. It’s because concrete sets through a chemical process and if you pour too much or too fast, it can’t cool.
For example, with the Hoover dam,
The Bureau of Reclamation engineers calculated that if the dam were built in a single continuous pour, the concrete would have taken 125 years to cool to ambient temperature. The resulting stresses would have caused the dam to crack and crumble. To solve this problem the dam was built in a series of interlocking trapezoidal columns. Each pour was no more than 6-inches deep.
3. Dragon
How does punctuation work, Adrian?
4. Matt
Speaking as someone who almost every day has to fix something that doesn’t work, and in doing so has to find out why it’s not working, I agree wholeheartedly with this.
There’s nothing more annoying than something that works one minute, and not the next, without there being any obvious or not-so-obvious reason why.
5. Adrian
Punctuation works as a result of the social construct within which a language develop in the written form to bring non verbal queues to the written word.
6. Destructor
Plumbing still freaks me out.
7. Aiden
Adrian, if your explanation of punctuation had itself contained some punctuation I might have been able to understand it!
In my first Lit. Studies class at uni a girl declared that she didn’t want to ‘dissect’ any books, or discuss how they were constructed, because knowing about the mechanics would detract from her reading pleasure. My opinion was that knowing how something like a novel or a movie is put together increases my appreciation of it. In terms of light switches and concrete, I think that many people gather information in terms of practical knowledge. If there’s someone else around to fix it, why do they need to know? This works quite well until the IT guy is off sick.
8. Willy
I love this bit from the wikipedia link:
Because of this depth it is extremely unlikely that construction workers were accidentally buried alive in the concrete, contrary to popular folklore.
:)