Month: May 2010

Quality of Engineering

Very interesting talk from Christof Bartneck at TU/e (Technical University of Eindhoven) explaining Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ) in simple design and engineering terms.

As an engineer I might have used the word engineering as much as he used the word design, (and he says in the Q&A session he doesn’t make a real distinction here) but I like the simplified common terminology (in parenthesis) and the venn diagram showing design in the same space as quality overlapping people and artefacts. Love the defence of engineers at the end … creativity in solving problems is the essence … in the root of the word “ingenious”, and the ingenuity means that the creativity is not necessarily visibly obvious to the naked eye.

Like the use of the word “explore” too … really brings out the qualitative / direct participation aspect so much better than generalizing the word research beyond specific scientific methodologies.

Also like the focus on the qualitative choices ahead of scientific methods … wonder if Nick Maxwell, philosopher of science, is on his radar ?

Working With Your Hands

Interesting to see Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft” published in Europe as “The Case for Working with your Hands”, and reviewed here in The Irish Times.

It was the working with your hands lyric from Lamb Lies Down on Broadway that came to mind when I reviewed the US edition just about a year ago. (And followed-up on later reading.)

Thanks to Henry for forwarding the link.

Where were you ?

When you first heard Nessun Dorma ? Nope, not the world cup / championships / olympics / whatever, watching The Killing Fields, that’s where. Nice touch where Sydney just turns up the volume to bring it from incidental background to explicit foreground.

Rewatched on DVD over the weekend. Don’t know whether it was a director’s extended cut, but the balance was quite different to my earlier recollection. The killing-fields sequences are actually quite brief – enough to shock – but most of the film is the interpersonal responsibility and cameraderie of the groups of multi-national  journalists helping each other out, and later Pran taking care of the young son of one of the Khmer’s factional leaders as he escapes.

In fact the words trust and (nothing to) forgive stuck in the later episodes, even the US engagement in Cambodia is treated as a pragmatic tactic of war. The naive doctrine of the Khmer – anyone old enough to remember pre-revolutionary life is part of the problem – is clear and briefly dealt with. The cheesiest moment has to be the irony of being helped by the young guy who remembers being given the iconic Mercedes star. John Malkovic (great character BTW) returns to voice Sydney’s responsibilty.

And, I didn’t even recall the somewhat cheesey use of Lennon’s Imagine in the closing scenes. Maturing with age, the viewer that is.