I was listening to the most recent episode of TWiT’s Security Now, Episode 225, Same OriginTroubles.  For the first seven or so minutes of the show, they found themselves on a bit of a sidetrack, they were talking about what is engineering, and what is required to be an engineer.  As such, I thought this would be an interesting discussion to have, especially when debating the difference between Computer Science, and Computer Engineering.

The standard repository for all of human knowledge (wikipedia), has this to say on Engineers:

Engineers work to develop economical and safe solutions to practical problems, by applying mathematics and scientific knowledge while considering technical constraints.^{[1] [2]} The term is derived from the Latin root “ingenium,” meaning “cleverness”.^[3] The industrial revolution and continuing technological developments of the last few centuries have changed the connotation of the term slightly, resulting in the perception of engineers as applied scientists. The work of engineers is the link between perceived needs of society and commercial applications

That seams like a valid enough place to start.  Engineering is the useful application of science.  So, while scientists are always trying to break things down, and get everything to the smallest possible level, engineers are taking these discoveries, and building them up, in order to make a richer, more powerful world.  Seams simple enough.  Most people in engineering degrees are going to be screaming at me right now, saying I should talk about black box abstraction, but to them I say that will be a topic for another day.  (For those of you who are interested though, black box abstraction is a process in which you take the gritty details of a machine, and simply remove them.  In it’s place, you put a spot for inputs, outputs, and enough documentation to let your users, whether they be end users or more developers, know how to run the apparatus, you can find more information by watching this video from MIT).  Also, those who are particularly cranky about the pseudo debate over evolution and ID (intelligent design) will be begging me to talk about how this either proves that evolution or ID existed and the other could not have possibly happened.  Alas, to them, I also say  no, this is another topic for another time.  If you would like to discuss this, there is a comments section below.

So, this line breaks down dramatically when we discuss computers.  In particular, where does computer engineering end, and computer science begin.  Or, should we go along with the philosophy of “Hackers and Painters” and state that there is on such thing as computer science, but only hacking, and systems administration.  It seams as if academically, the dividing line between computer science and computer engineering is software and hardware.  If you are working more with hardware, you are doing computer engineering, and if you are thinking about software, it’s computer science.  I would like to state that that is completely and utterly untrue, at least based on this definition of engineering, it is false.

Before I go any further in discussing the matter, I must state that like everything else in this world, I am incredibly biased.  I am currently majoring in Computer Engineering, however, I am debating about double majoring in mathematics as well.  If I don’t double major in math, I will certainly minor in it.  As such, I tend to think that that Computer Engineering is something that you can get a degree in, where as computer science is something that can only be learned as a pseudo hobby.  Not something you do in your spare time, but something that can only be learned by doing it.  Analogous to getting a degree in entrepreneurship, why would anyone ever want to do that?   If you want to be good at start ups, you need to play the game, not get a degree in it.  Likewise, if you want to be a good computer scientist, or ‘hacker’, you need to practice, not simply sit and pontificate on some algorithm.  This way of thinking has me so biased in fact, that I would rather hire someone who has got a degree in mathematics, and has dome series computer hobby projects, than hier someone who has got a degree in computer science, at least, depending on the job I wanted done.  If I wanted a computer designed, I would rather higher computer and electrical engineers.

Well, based on the previous paragraph, you can see where I draw the line.  I think that computer engineers, whether they be software or hardware engineers, make things.  They are the people that designed the computer as we know it.  They tend to have a low level knowledge on how the system runs, but can also operate on a higher level.  On the other hand, computer scientists think of the computer as a black box.  Yes, while engineers also think of stuff on as a black box, after all, if any one engineer were to suddenly be able to hold the entire workings of a computer down to an atomic level, or even something like a desktop computer being thought of on the capacitor level, would simply loose their mind.  Believe me, I’m trying to do it, and I have lost my mind already, does that stop me from trying though?  No, not really.  Still, computer scientists look at a computer and see a machine that is capable of calculations.  They are then handed a toolset or an SDK, at which point they mathematically figure out what they want to do.  Oddly enough, this sounds like engineering too me.  So what else separates compute science?  Well, system maintenance, and other IT based stuff.  Computer Scientists work to try to make a computer system, such as Unix or NT, stick together, so that it will be sustainable in the future.  However, that still sounds like trying to build something that will last, based on engineering principles.  Thus, we have only broken down computer science into two parts, comptuer engineering, and system administration, in which a person has little experience on designing computers, and only has used them to such a great depth, that he knows how they work.

Thus, from the great words of the people who made the Wizards’ Book, computer science isn’t really about science, nor is it about computers.  End of story.  I suppose this is where I am supposed to rap things up and make a nice conclusion.  But I won’t, I’ll just end it like that.   Do you think I’m off my rocker?

Oh physics, how you hurt me.

You seam to be a promising kin to math, using numbers and logic to solve your quandaries.

Using simple deduction, combined with induction, a fine twix of logic it makes.

But lo, it is not, physics deceives.  It causes great pain, and leaves me to grieve.

I look at a problem, and simplicity surrounds, until finding velocity is what’s needing to be found.

Conservation of moment, energy, or vector calculus, but no, no solution to be found.

Other friends on this quest, for their help do I ask, but neither they, nor I know the solution to this task.

I rush to my textbook for aid do I seek, to find a flash ebook, designed by a cheek.

Impossible, no, it’s solvable you say.  Than why have I have I been sitting here this way?

To this day I still struggle, my pen in my hand, calculator ready, and CAS to be had.

But the solution lies, just out of my grasp.

Oh Physics, how you hurt me, but I still love you back.

I am sitting in a room adjacent to a room that is adjacent to a television, in which, in which, a large portion of my relatives are watching the two major locals schools playing football. As many people put it,’the holy war’. As such, I thought it would be appropriate for me to share with you my opinion of football. First, don’t get me wrong, I love a good game of sports, at least, as long as I’m playing it. But I really don’t get what is so special about watching two groups of people running back and forth on a field of grass, carrying a package of compressed air.

Okay, so I admit I am a bit nerdy, and that some people enjoy watching it. Sure, I’ll give you that, in fact, I’m willing to wager that while you’re reading this, you likely are one of the many that enjoy watching football. But what boggles my mind is the violence that ensues from this simple game. Seriously people, it’s JUST A GAME. Yes, you may be saying ‘it’s more than a game’, and sure, fine, for the sake of argument, I’ll go with that, for the moment anyway. But still, for things that I feel passionate about, such as programming, I don’t really get violent when I see a design that I don’t like, all that I do is scoff, maybe make fun of it, and move on.

So, people, I have a challenge for you, find something that you feel passionate about, something that you love. And look at how violent that you get over it. Then, look at how other people see it, not only other people that oppose you, but other people that are apathetic to your situation. Then, reflect on how you feel about your passion. I don’t mean to diminish your passion, passion is good and can take you far, but channel it, control it, make it move you, and move others.

I just finished watching the newest Star Trek film, the one by JJ Abrams, and I must say, I really did not like it. Now, while this film is now relatively old, and my review of it is relatively useless, I believe that the abstract ideas that I provide are still very valuable. In particular, movies now seem to tend toward showing a bunch of credits, maybe a pause for ten seconds for scientific babble, and back to the explosions, after which the problem is magically solved, you see a sex scene, and the main character flying away, after which, you see the credits. As much as it pains me to say it, the best part of this whole sequence, is the credits. The music that the credits provides is amazing, however, the rest of the movie fails to match up to that music.

First, I must point out the obvious lack of character development. During the whole film, I felt no attachment to Kirk, Spoke, or the rest of the crew, well, okay, I will make an exception for Scotty, he was amazing. I also felt some emotion for the old spoke, but that was just due to the actor, not the actual character. This seams to be a constant among many modern films, for example, in the recent creation of the movie “Angles and Demons”, based on the novel by Dan Brown, you never felt any attachment to Robert Langdon. He’s just this guy running around, from place to place, trying to find the next thing. This film is analogous, Kirk is going from place to place, getting in fights, and getting beat up, with little to nothing behind the character.

Next comes the science. I must admit, I am an avid Stargate fan, with the exception of Stargate Universe, which is horrid. So, I am used to have great amounts of pseudo science, after all, not everyone can write with the amount of good pseudo science that Micheal Crichton wrote with. However, movies seem to be having a diminishing amount of actual explanations for what’s happening. Spoke did provide a good enough one in this case, however, as they seem to make this a very hard core sci-fi film, a better explanation could have been provided, even there it was full of non-stop action.

Anyone who has lived in the United States of America for the past few years has noticed the polarity that has grown between the people in the country. Or maybe, it could just be me, but I think that this polarity exists nation wide, even if many local groups do join together. Is this a side effect of growing technology, or an intrinsic part of human nature? Either way, that is not the point of this post. I believe that I have found the root of the confusion of one, just one of the issues. The issue of global warming, environmental danger, and sustainability. Most people talking about this are going to say that either an evil oil company conspiracy is ruining us, a few may also say that the government is to blame. Others will say that it is all a myth, and doesn’t matter at all. Many more, will live their entire lives without even knowing that the problem, or at least the perceived problem exists. I am not going to touch on any of that. But rather, I believe that the whole cause for the debate is that no one sees the ‘big picture’, and those that do, are completely infective in telling anyone about it. Or worse, is like a specific person who ran for president at one point in time, but never really dealt with the problem, only a bunch of useless rhetoric. The problem exists, however, the vast majority of the world does not see the problem, which is good, because the people that are supposed to take care of the problem, scientists and engineers, are doing a good job taking care of it. Such a good job in fact, that everyone who is not directly related to solving a particular problem, ends up thinking that it is a useless hoax, a ploy for money or power.

This idea came to me while in my engineering ethics class, which I was required to take for my degree in computer engineering at the University of Utah. I must confess, I did not want to be in class that day. There were two people from two different engineering fields, mechanical and biomedical, that were trying to enlighten people about their department. I was staring at my calculus book, wishing I could do math homework instead, when I realized something amazing between the difference between how engineers see the world, and the general population sees the world. If you were to ask an engineer if he was trying to save the world’s energy problems, solve global warming, end pollution, or just save the planet in general, there is a good chance he will say no. Some may say yes, but the answer will have a good split. However, if you were to ask an engineer if he or she was trying to make the best solution for whatever engineering problem he was working on at the moment, be it making an efficient aircraft, or simply a faster algorithm for Google, he will likely say yes. At least, I certainly hope so, as a computer engineer wannabe, I certainly do.

Thus, if we were to sum up all of the efforts of engineers around the world, trying to build better solutions, and scientists, trying to make better tools for them, and other parties using these tools, creating a demand for them, we can see the solution to global crises. It is solved at the level of, as Jeff Jarvis from Buzz machine http://www.buzzmachine.com, ‘a mass of niches’. In other words, the problem is solved by each individual firm, person, organization, doing what they do best. One chemistry lab may work on the ozone layer, but under the facade of being a refrigeration manufacturing company. Only a reliantly small amount of people that work on saving the planet, actually work in the name of, saving the planet.

One of the problems that plagues me as I design computer systems is heat. Following Moore’s law, the number of transistors on silicon doubles every 18 months to two years, and thus computing power doubles. For a long time, the problem was figuring out how to fit that many transistors onto a card. However, that is rapidly changing. The new problem is heat. The heat of your computers is growing at an exponential rate, and if the pattern is not changed, the heat that the sum of the computing power that we have on earth, will be equal to the heat of the sun, in about a decade. As such, we are rapidly working out a way to make more efficient computers, that can deal with the heat properly, and hopefully generate less of it, or at least put it to good work. Currently, the solution is to make multi-core processors, as they will generate less heat than a single processor with the same power as the summation of the two. However, this comes with it’s own set of problems, and is not sustainable.

Now, does the general public notice this? No. They are perfectly content to push the magic button with a picture of a circle with half a line through it, watch some lights blink, and be on their way to surfing the net. If I were to tell them that the very existence of the way they use computers hangs in the balance, they will scoff, for as they see it, the computer is just a magical box that does what they want. People have told them that there were major problems with it in the past, however, none of them ever affected him, as they were solved by the engineers before it even got to that level. And if a problem did ever get to that level, all research in that vein of technology will have been halted for several decades, do to a large amount of fear from the general public.

Even if engineers do manage to solve the heat problems in computers, there are many more hanging the balance. Computers are beginning to get small enough that Quantum Physics ruins the Newtonian Physics that computers are currently based upon. A problem? Yes. Will it be solved by engineers and scientists creating a faster, more advanced, more efficient society? Quite Probably. Will the general public take any note of it? Some will, the future engineers, and the well educated that care about that sort of thing, but in general no.

Now, you may be thinking that this is all well and good, but if this was the case, than why haven’t the engineers and scientists done anything about it, or have made coalitions to stop it? First of all, several people have. However, the majority of these people don’t know any particular niche thoroughly enough, to describe it, at least not in a way that doesn’t come across to the general public as political propaganda. Even worse is those that do use this fear for the soul purpose of trying to gain such power. However, a large part of scientists, and especially engineers don’t really care about such global scales. Like most people, they happily plug along with their task, try to build their efficient system, and try to do it better than everyone else, and happily ignore everything that doesn’t matter. For example, even though I am aware about the problems with current fossil fuel consumption, I am not very worried about it. It is not my problem. Yes, I have a broad enough understanding of the world to see that it is a problem, but not anything big enough that I need to alter the way I run my life. I will let the scientists and engineers that deal with that sort of thing guide my life, at least in that aspect. When they have found a way to make it cheaper for me to change the way I get energy, I will change, probably faster than the majority of the world. If they manage to find the magical way to remain using fossil fuels, or better yet, manage to change the world without the world even knowing, as happens constantly, than I am all the better for it.

This, is what went through my head as I was in lecture. Unfortunately, I still had to wait about an hour before I was able to do my calculus homework.

Well, it’s the end of the first of the summer semester here at my local community college, yes, the one that I love to toss around like a beach ball.  With this situation as thus, I think you, the beloved reader who has yet to stop reading these excessively passionate entries.  With that being said, on with my initial impressions.

My Calc 2 class is interesting.  My professor teaches the subject in a very unorthodox way (that’s unorthodox to the rest of the school, I happen to actually like the way he teaches, even if I did get a bad score on my first exam, go figure).  He spends most of his time proving the obvious, but don’t let him hear that I said that.  He thinks that students need to know the proofs of why they believe what they believe, even though a lot of it is staring us right in the face.  Yet, out of all of this, I now know why the number e, exists.   And how to define any number a, such that it’s raised to the x power (a^x), we just need to put it in terms of e, e^(xlna), or, to simplify things, when differentiating, d/dx(a^x)=a^(x)ln(a).

I would like to state one last thing about this class before I go on.  Can you say slow?  I am a bit behind the syllabus on my homework, doing the homework that is required for the beginning of the week, where as he is still two weeks backlogged on his lectures.  (This is possible because this is the one lass which started 3 weeks ago).

And now, on to happier, matters, Intermediate Writing.  It’s an interesting class, I like the name of the text though, “The Questioning Reader.”  That, along with the whole first chapter is about asking deep, analiticalquestions, makes me happy, especially to know that there is other people in the world, outside of being lawyers anyway, who ask such harsh questions.  The professor reminds me something of myself.  He talks, and he talks, and he talks, most of what he shouts out is the names of schoolss, and people, but he does seam to know quite a bit, and he’s fun to listen to, not to mention it seams like this has the potential to be a  nice fusion of ToK, and English, so this should be fun.  Infact, I probably should be writing the opening paragraphs to my first essay, instead of this post, but I want to do this at the moment, so you get to read this.  The first topic for my first essay is very interesting though, I had for choices, but because I asked several people which one to choose, and they all said I should write about my love life, I am going to do that one.  This is incredibly ironic, seeing as I have no love life, I may even have a negative number for a love life.

Finally, for Microeconomics, wow, I only have this class one day a week, but it sure is a long one.  It starts at 8 in the morning, and ends at 1 in the afternoon.  I don’t know if I like this way of class yet.  Sure, I like the idea of spending a lot of time in one block, to get a course out of the way, but if I were to do that, I would rather spend a week, each day like that, and get the course done like that, rather than spreading it out throughout the whole semester, but it should be fine, I hope.  I do have to say that I am slightly disappointed though, I was hoping that there would be some calculus in this class, but nope, at most, it’s basic algebra, and usually not even that.  “Can you tell me what this is?”, “It’s a demand curve.”,  “Good”.  Yet again, I like the professor, he reminds me of my ninth grade biology teacher.  He also had a good quote, which I think came from somewhere else, but I’m far too lazy to spend the minute it would take to google it, even though I’ve probably spent the time I could have, just typing up this sentence.  Anyway, he said, “Teach a parrot to say, Supply and Demand, and you have an economist.”  Very nice.

There was one student in that class who is very interesting.  He was reading an article about the resent PRIDE event, when asked what he thought about it, he said, “If Gay people want to be miserably married like the rest of us, I say let them.”  I later found out that he has gotten married, and divorced twice, and his still happy about both of them (including the marriage part), interesting, I wouldn’t know how normal that is.  However, on the other hand, he kept saying that I secretly liked to view pornography.  The only way I was able to get him to stop, was too tell him that my idea of an orgasm, was to read about the latest new piece of technology from Sun, or to finally learn how to integrate by parts (by integrate, I mean the mathematical term for anti-derivative, not interesting form of assimilation, although, I think the two are somehow related).

Well, I believe that’s all I’m willing to write for now.  So, until next time, farewell, and have a nice summer, unless you live on the other side of the globe, at which point, have a nice winter, and good luck not getting a copy of Influenza A.