One of the reasons I dropped out of college is that I don’t believe in memorizing stuff. There are things that I remember just because I use them all the time, but in my mind there is no difference between SQL operations (which I should remember) and emacs keyboard shortcuts (which I often have to look up).
There is actually a method to my madness.
You’re #CuriousAboutData, so read on!
Information is everywhere and is easy to get. Why bother using up precious limited space in my little brain on things that I can easily find?
Also, information isn’t very useful by itself. It needs to be interpreted, and categorized in order to become knowledge or a skill. That’s where I invest my memory resources. There are few things that need to happen to information before it becomes useful. We’re not going to cover all of them in this edition, but will mention a couple of main ideas that separate “boys from men”.
First of all, we need to understand how to identify and categorize things.
Channel our inner Charles Darwin, if you will.
Many people think that this is a trivial step, but it can get very complicated – and in fact, at least 80% of the same people who think it trivial don’t know how to properly categorize things.
For example, consider a wheel. How do you define what it is? Especially if you want a computer to make the determination for you. Is a steering wheel the same as a wheel that supports a car? Intuitively, we know that it isn’t. But how do you explain it to a computer?
So, questions of identity are anything but trivial and can result in big problems if handled incorrectly.
Next, we need to know how to navigate the multitude of attributes that a given object has in order to add meaning to information and to create “virtual” categories that can be used for our purposes. For example, in our driver safety software we can define how far a steering wheel can deviate from its ideal state before it’s considered dangerous. As it crosses this threshold, it leaves one virtual grouping and enters another. This dynamic is “knowledge”.
So, while the world is drowning in an ocean of information, these methods can be our tools to transform the chaos into something meaningful and useful. At BitWise, we take complicated things and make them simple.
We like people, so feel free to call or write. Humans only.
