Why?

If you think about it, there is really only one question worth the effort - and that is "Why?". As in, for instance, "Why is this blog, ostensibly about electronics - the zen and the art of it, specifically, talking about things like productivity and Dunning-Kruger?"

Well, the short answer is - "Wax on, wax off!"

And now for the long answer.

One of the points of this blog is to explore insights - insights that help understand better. If you think about it carefully, you will realize that every time you really mastered something, it was because of some insight - some tiny but invaluable piece of the puzzle - that caused a change in the state of your understanding of the subject.

This is almost like a state change in digital electronics - you went from a zero to a one in a very short time, and all that was needed was a triggering event. One hopes that this blog will provide you with triggering events which, zen-like, will take you to a deeper fundamental understanding of not only engineering, but how it all interconnects.

Alright, to kick off, here's an insight - look around you. Everything man-made thing you see in the physical world was was made by an engineer. In fact, one must put forward that the mere act of creating something is the very definition of engineering.

In the broadest sense of the term, even creating art - such as a painting - is also an act of engineering. The technical aspects - paint, brushes, canvas, the mixing of paints, the adhesion to the substrate - all these are obviously an application of a science and thus are engineering, but this is not what one means. The true act of engineering is the first spark of imagination in the mind of the creator when he conceives the picture. Think of everything else as "implementation details".

This is the "art" in the title of this blog. There is a little spark of an idea, a few key insights and voila! a new engineering masterpiece has the potential of being born. So who is capable of such high art in engineering? Surely such geniuses must be one in a billion or about six in the entire population?

Not at all.

One postulates that engineering is really a state of the mind, and not really a process or whatever else it is that one learns in engineering colleges. To use the informal language of the current time, it's like the zone that your mind must be in before you can learn the hows and whys. It's about the zone. And one strongly believes that anybody can be an engineer (hat tip to Chef Gusteau from the movie "Ratatouille" - "Anyone can cook!") - given the right nudges in the right directions.

The raison d'être of this blog is to get you into that zone. To do this one must take the "wax on, wax off" approach (hat tip Mr. Miyagi from the movie "The Karate Kid"). That is, one must talk and think about and discuss topics that seem at best peripheral, and at worst perhaps not even connected to electronics and engineering. After all, you can learn how to bias a bipolar junction transistor from any textbook - what is missing is all the peripheral stuff. The "why should I do that in the first place?" type discussion, or even better - "I want to do this, so should I bias the BJT like that?" and best of all, the "should I even use a BJT?" discussion. That's the missing element.

You can't make those choices until you have thought through the peripheral aspects of the device - something that no formal institution has the time, resources or inclination to teach. Thus we reach the sorry state of affairs wherein someone with an engineering degree is still too inexperienced to be put in a position of responsibility. He needs to be groomed, possibly by working with others more experienced than him, perhaps by fixing broken things, perhaps by advanced degrees - to be able to  use his knowledge to actually create something.

That almost sounds like being initiated into an art form - and it is understandable for even the smartest engineers to feel disheartened that they do not (yet) belong to that set of high artists. Despite this feeling, the truth is that people who create great things - the high artists - are no different than anyone else. 

As a matter of fact, you'd be surprised - well not so surprised if you've worked any length of time in the industry - that many astonishing creative achievements were made by people with little formal education. Some people may think that this is innate ability, or that this is luck, or that there is some intangible factor involved in all of this - but that isn't so. These people may not have had formal education, but they did not lack knowledge. They knew what they wanted to create - and they then went about acquiring enough knowledge to either create it - or to communicate clearly enough to others who had more specific and detailed knowledge.

In a manner of speaking they were already in the "zone", and while they may have lacked formal education, as they proved time and again, those were "implementation details" that they could acquire relatively easily and more or less on demand.

Another thing that is important to note is that often knowledge about something may not necessarily even be available - the theory of relativity is a monumental act of discovery, for instance - that did not exist in the superset of human knowledge prior to Einstein's publication. Thus it must be that the sum total of the prior knowledge of a discoverer or creator of something was of little consequence to that discovery other than to set the background. After all, knowledge that was known up until that time was available to all of Einstein's peers. What was it that Einstein had then, that allowed him to deduce his theory, but that others did not have?. What led Steve Jobs to conceptualize the iPhone but not others at Motorola or Nokia? Certainly it wasn't the availability or lack of knowledge.

Knowledge is relatively easy to acquire, especially if you know what you don't know. This was one of the conclusions of the Dunning-Kruger paper, remember? That's a key insight that one shouldn't lose sight of - know what you don't know. If you're thinking that this is a contradiction in terms - how could you possibly know what you don't - then you are beginning to see why one must take the Miyagi approach.

Extending the thought further, one realizes that formal educational institutions are in the business of providing education, if not knowledge - the implementation details, at best - and it is futile to expect them to provide the metacognitive ability to imagine and create. This is true of all institutions - regardless of what they might pretend to be; the conclusion follows simply from the understanding that life is a superset of an educational syllabus, not the other way around.

If you see that as a big, gaping hole, then this blog's purpose is self explanatory - it is to bridge that gap.

So please follow along - one hopes that we'll discover something (perhaps some things) together!

P.S. Please feel free to comment. Comments are moderated, but only to ensure relevance and decorum.