[lit-ideas] Re: Could an academic discipline do this?

On Dec 28, 2007 7:10 AM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> This is an excerpt frim the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of
> Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
>

Robert,

Thanks so much for sharing this. It is one of the best defenses of liberal
education that I have ever seen. It reminds me of something I have mentioned
before but always find worth repeating, from Roger von Oech, _A Whack on the
Side of the Head_:

--------

 I once asked advertising legend Carl Ally what makes the creative person
tick. Ally responded,

 "The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all
kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current
manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he
never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may
happen six minutes later or six years down the road. But he has faith that
it will happen."

-----

This sort of thing appeals to me in part because that logic course I took my
freshmen year at Michigan State has played a similar, if less spectacular,
role in my life to the role that calligraphy played in Steve Job's. Along
with the honors calculus course it introduced me to the idea of axiomatic
systems and the idea that infinitely many and complex conclusions can be
drawn from a small set of primitives and a small set of rules that govern
their combination. It helped me to understand what Watson and Crick had
accomplished by cracking the genetic code, how Turing engines work, why the
number of possible combinations of human genes exceeds the number of
electrons in the visible universe, and how a theory of everything might
involve only a couple of dozen elementary particles. It also made me
susceptible to enthusiasm for Levi-Strauss' metaphors, a "Mendelevian table
of the mind" and a "logic in tangible qualities," an influence that
contributed in important ways to my dissertation on Taoist magic. On a
practical plane, it made it possible to acquire knowledge of computer
programming with relative ease, which secured me my first job in Japan,
editing a daily news translation for IBM Japan and, then, became a stepping
stone to advertising,  via a combination of a friend who shared my interest
in personal computing and an agency producing ads for high-tech companies in
Japan, at a time when writers who also understood at least the rudiments of
digital technology were still rare. Like Steve Jobs, I couldn't have begun
to predict how these dots would be connected as a freshman taking that
course. Looking back, oh, yes, I am glad I took it.

Best wishes for a happy New Year.


John



-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/

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