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First The Comets Strike Us. Now We Strike Back
For those of you keeping up with NASA, seems like on the 4th of July we're going to crash a space probe into a comet to see what happens. After billions of years of Earth getting hit by comets, it's about time we struck back! I believe this is called "active science" The idea is that you can look in a microscope all day, but wouldn't it really be fun to blow something up?
In the computer world, most of what we do is ephemeral (thinking stuff as opposed to real stuff). I think one of the most fascinating aspects of robotics is its interaction with the real world -- active science.
But it doesn't have to be that way. High quality programs are modeled on things in the real world: banking programs are modeled on money and what we do with it, e-commerce programs are modeled on shopping at a store, etc. The closer we can stay to the "active world", the better our solutions are going to be.
I know this sounds pedantic, but it’s not meant to be. We all start out talking about concepts in the real world (Make that order system quicker). But somehow we end up coding arcane item #43, and having our users click through 17 screens to request something simple.
How does this happen? We lose track of the big picture. Everybody is so immersed in what they like doing that they lose track of how they should be doing it. As Stephen Covey says, sometimes we don't need a stopwatch, we need a compass. Now that we know why ice melts, maybe we can even learn how comets blow up.
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