The work is what it means It is desirable to bear in mindâwhen dealing with the human maker at any rateâthat his chosen way of revelation is through his works. To persist in asking, as so many of us do, âWhat did you mean by this book?â is to invite bafflement: the book itself is what the writer means. Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker ââThe meaning of musicââââNo more than a sketchââââOn 'The Master and His Emissary'ââââOnly a mind opened to the quality of thingsââââTranslation is always a treasonââ meaningart
The quality without a name There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. There are words we use to describe this quality: alive whole comfortable free exact egoless eternal But in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building ââNo words to describeââââThis language without wordsââ beautylifemeaningspirit
The meaning of objects The meaning of objects is harder to grasp than that of words. The Interpretation of Microstructures of Metallic Artifacts meaningobjects
The meaning of music Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano. What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again. David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress ââThe work is what it meansââââNo more than a sketchââââOn 'The Master and His Emissary'ââ meaningmusic
A creature of bones, not words In building connections, [articulation work] builds meaning and identity, sorting out ontologies on the fly rather than mixing and matching between fixed and stable entities. Articulation lives first and foremost in practice, not representation; as its proper etymology suggests, it's a creature of bones, not words. When articulation fails, systems seize up, and our sociotechnical worlds become stuff, arthritic, unworkable. Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair meaning
The shape of the sentence You've been taught to overlook the character of the prose in front of you in order to get at its meaning. You overlook the shape of the sentence itself for the meaning it contains, Which means that while you were reading, All those millions of words passed by Without teaching you how to make sentences. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing meaningstructure
To build a folly To build a folly is essentially to do something a second time, something at an inopportune moment. That something is always the memory of something forgotten, about which we can paradoxically say "There it is again." Follies were misunderstood, purposeless constructions. They were often only small, extravagant gestures in a garden, easily whisking off the imagination to distant lands, a sort of time capsule built to awaken the memory and induce surprise in passers-by. They marked locations, organized secondary paths in a park, or simply predicted the arrival of better timesâa demarcation, a sacred spot, a mysterious trail, a hill whose tragic rocky nature begged for a tower, a party, or the arrival of summer. Smiljan RadiÄ, Death at Home ââDesigned to be ruinsââââFolliesââââThermal aediculaeââ meaningpurposeconstruction
Let the meaning choose the word What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get oneâs meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies meaningwords
Taboo your words Albert says that people have âfree will.â Barry says that people donât have âfree will.â Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by âfree will,â on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase âfree willâ at all. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies meaning
The arbitrariness of the sign A key difference between verbal language and the modernist ideal of a visual âlanguageâ is the arbitrariness of a verbal sign, which has no natural, inherent relationship to the concept it represents. The sound of the word âhorseâ, for example, does not innately resemble the concept of a horse. Ferdinand de Saussure called this arbitrariness the fundamental feature of the verbal sign. The meaning of a sign is generated by its relationship to other signs in the language: the signâs legibility lies in its difference from other signs. Ellen Lupton & J. Abbott Miller, The ABC's of âČâ â: The Bauhaus and Design Theory ââGods of the Wordââ soundmeaninglanguage
The eye does not see The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities meaningseeingimages
The utter nothingness of being Everything written symbols can say has already passed by. They are like tracks left by animals. That is why the masters of meditation refuse to accept that writings are final. The aim is to reach true being by means of those tracks, those letters, those signs - but reality itself is not a sign, and it leaves no tracks. It doesnât come to us by way of letters or words. We can go toward it, by following those words and letters back to what they came from. But so long as we are preoccupied with symbols, theories and opinions, we will fail to reach the principle. "But when we give up symbols and opinions, arenât we left in the utter nothingness of being?" Yes. Kimura KyĆ«ho, On the Mysteries of Swordsmanship ââThe Elements of Typographic Styleââ zenmeaningsymbolsbeingreality
Whereof one cannot speak My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ââWhat can be put into wordsââ meaning
Not knowing quite what they mean "Do you understand all the symbolism?" "Not really, besides its being Venus and Cupid." "I didn't even know that, so you're one up on me. I wish I'd read more about ancient mythology," she continued. "But actually, I like looking at things and not knowing quite what they mean." Alain de Botton, On Love meaning
Things cannot be other than as they are âIt is demonstrably true that things cannot be other than as they are. For, everything having been made for a purpose, everything is necessarily for the best purpose.â â Professor Pangloss Voltaire, Candide purposemeaning
50 reds If one says âRedâ (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color perceptionmeaning
No words to describe If there is no term for something, it might be thought that the commodity is of small importance. But it is just as likely that this something is of such importance that it is taken for granted, and thus any conveniences, like words, for discussing it are unnecessary. Donald Richie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics ââThe quality without a nameââââThis is Waterââ meaningwords
That is not it at all It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all. T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock meaning
A soft and fitful luster Who decided that the American public couldnât handle âa soft and fitful lusterâ? I canât help but think something has been lost. âA soft sparkle from a wet or oily surfaceâ doesnât just sound worse, it actually describes the phenomenon with less precision. In particular it misses the shimmeriness, the micro movement and action, âthe fitful luster,â of, for example, an eye full of tears â which is by the way far more intense and interesting an image than âa wet sidewalk.â Itâs as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poetâs ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off. James Somers, You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary meaningwords
Reference and Is-ness There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call âinherent meaningâ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is âIs-nessâ meaning. Inherent meaning is a wordâs identity, and reference merely its resumĂ©, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. âIs-nessâ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing â the word â appear to be many things â its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word. Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word meaningwords
The demand of a new word Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand âfeltâ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that âjerkâ and âtwerpâ and âpunkâ and ânitwitâ and âdorkâ and âassâ and âgoonâ and âtwitâ and âdodoâ and âbumâ and ânerdâ and âdunceâ and âturdâ and âboobâ and âchumpâ and âbitchâ and âbastardâ and âprudeâ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add âturkeyâ and âsquirrelâ as well? Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word wordslanguagemeaning
Apparency Half a century ago, Stern discussed this attribute of an artistic object and called it apparency. While art is not limited to this single end, he felt that one of its two basic functions was "to create images which by clarity and harmony of form fulfill the need for vividly comprehensible appearance." In his mind, this was an essential first step toward the expression of inner meaning. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City artmeaningimagesharmonyform
Fish and water How does one speak about something that is both fish and water, means as well as end? Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology meaningwords
The word invents itself Posits certain neologisms as arising from their own cultural necessityâhis words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you're getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King wordsmeaningnoveltyinvention
AI-art isnât art An Essay by Erik Hoel erikhoel.substack.com AI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful. âŠJust as how something being either an original Da Vinci or a forgery does matter, even if side-by-side you couldnât tell them apart, so too with two paintings, one made by a human and the other by an AI. Even if no one could tell them apart, one lacks all intentionality. It is a forgery, not of a specific work of art, but of the meaning behind art. artconsciousnessbeautymeaningai
The Future Is Not Only Useless, Itâs Expensive An Article by Dan Brooks www.gawker.com This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean something. ââA particular deficiency of which they all partakeââ technologyfuturismmeaning
The Gifted Listener: Composer Aaron Copland on Honing Your Talent for Listening to Music An Article by Maria Popova www.brainpickings.org The poetry of music, Copland intimates, is composed both by the musician, in the creation of music and its interpretation in performance, and by the listener, in the act of listening that is itself the work of reflective interpretation. This makes listening as much a creative act as composition and performance â not a passive receptivity to the object that is music, but an active practice that confers upon the object its meaning: an art to be mastered, a talent to be honed. ââMusic and ImaginationââââTo see is to forget the name of the thing one seesââââThe core assertionââ musicpoetryartmeaning
On 'The Master and His Emissary' AÂ Quote by Ian McGilchrist www.ttbook.org People who make works of art, whatever they might be, have gone to great trouble to make something unique which is embodied in the form that it is, and not in any other form, and that it transmits things that remain implicit ...Works of art are not just disembodied, entirely abstract, conceptual things. They are embodied in the words theyâre in or in paint or in stone or in musical notes or whatever it might be. ââThe work is what it meansââââThe meaning of musicââââIf a book can be summarized, is it worth reading?ââ artmaterialmeaningform
A brief foray into vectorial semantics An Article by James Somers jsomers.net One of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its âimportantâ words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. Thatâs the idea behind Amazon.comâs âStatistically Improbable Phrasesâ: Amazon.comâs Statistically Improbable Phrases, or âSIPsâ, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!âą program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. mathmeaningwordsnotetakingsearchchance
The way an oyster does A Fragment by Kay Ryan www.csmonitor.com Her poems, [Kay Ryan] says, don't begin with a simple image or sound, but instead start "the way an oyster does, with an aggravation." An old saw may nudge her repeatedly, such as "It's always darkest before the dawn" or "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "I think, 'What about those chickens?' " she says, "and I start an investigation of what that means. Poets rehabilitate clichés." poetrymeaningcliché
The primacy of interpretation over sensation AÂ Fragment by Mark Liberman languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Our memory of exact word sequences usually fades more quickly than our memory of (contextually interpreted) meanings. More broadly, the exact auditory sensations normally fade very quickly; the corresponding word sequences fade a bit more slowly; and the interpreted meanings last longest. These generalizations can be overcome to some extent if the sound or the text has especially memorable characteristics. (And the question of what "memorable" means in this context is interesting.) memorysensesmeaningspeechwords
The body image AÂ Quote The body image is informed fundamentally from haptic and orienting experiences early in life. Our visual images are developed later on, and depend for their meaning on primal experiences that were acquired haptically. ââMetaphors We Live ByââââGods of the WordââââThe Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Sensesââ bodymeaning
Meaningness AÂ Website by David Chapman meaningness.com The word âmeaningâ has two quite different meanings in English. It can refer to the meaning of symbols, such as words and road signs. This book is not about that kind of meaning. People also speak of âthe meaning of life.â That is the sort of meaningness this book is about. So I apply âmeaningnessâ only to the sorts of things one could describe as âdeeply meaningfulâ or âpretty meaningless.â meaninglife
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn AÂ Book by Richard Hamming www.amazon.com The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is the full expression of what "You and Your Research" outlined. It's a book about thinking; more specifically, a style of thinking by which great ideas are conceived. ââGifts of knowledge to humanityââââHamming-greatnessââââIt cannot be taught in wordsââââPreparing for problemsââââStudent's future, not teacher's pastââ+33 More ââYou and Your ResearchââââChance favors the prepared mindââââSerendipityââ learningscienceengineeringdiscovery
Gifts of knowledge to humanity There are many commonalities we can admire in these endeavors: the dazzling leap of imagination, the broad scope of applicability, the founding of a new paradigm. But letâs focus here on their form of distribution. These are all things that are taught. To âuseâ them means to learn them, understand them, internalize them, perform them with oneâs own hands. They are free to any open mind. In Hammingâs world, great achievements are gifts of knowledge to humanity. Bret Victor knowledge
Hamming-greatness Hamming-greatness is tied, inseparably, with the conception of science and engineering as public service. This school of thought is not extinct today, but it is rare, and doing such work is not impossible, but fights a nearly overwhelming current. Bret Victor
It cannot be taught in words How to be a great painter cannot be taught in words; one learns by trying many different approaches that seem to surround the subject. Art teachers usually let the advanced student paint, and then make suggestions on how they would have done it, or what might also be tried, more or less as the points arise in the studentâs headâwhich is where the learning is supposed to occur! teachingart
Preparing for problems I firmly believe in Pasteurâs remark, âLuck favors the prepared mind.â In this way I can illustrate how the individualâs preparation before encountering the problem can often lead to recognition, formulation, and solution. ââChance favors the prepared mindââ
Student's future, not teacher's past Teachers should prepare the student for the studentâs future, not for the teacherâs past. ââAmbitions for someone else's mindââ teaching
If you know what you are doing In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.
The homogeneity of knowledge The standard process of organizing knowledge by departments, and sub-departments, and further breaking it up into separate courses, tends to conceal the homogeneity of knowledge, and at the same time to omit much which falls between the courses. Another goal of the course is to show the essential unity of all knowledge rather than the fragments which appear as the individual topics are taught. In your future anything and everything you know might be useful, but if you believe the problem is in one area you are not apt to use information that is relevant but which occurred in another course.
An information service society Society is steadily moving from a material goods society to an information service society. At the time of the American Revolution, say 1780 or so, over 90% of the people were essentially farmersânow farmers are a very small percentage of workers. What will the situation be in 2020? As a guess I would say less than 25% of the people in the civilian workforce will be handling things; the rest will be handling information in some form or other. In making a movie or a tv program you are making not so much a thing, though of course it does have a material form, as you are organizing information. ââAuditory Hallucinations from Offworld MegafarmsââââData Farmingââ farming
From hands to machines It has rarely proved practical to produce exactly the same product by machines as we produced by hand. Mechanization requires you produce an equivalent product, not identically the same one. ââThe Nature and Art of WorkmanshipââââThe Real World of Technologyââ
A matter of choice and balance More than ever before, engineering is a matter of choice and balance rather than just doing what can be done. And more and more it is the human factors which will determine good designâa topic which needs your serious attention at all times.
Central planning gives poor results Central planning has been repeatedly shown to give poor results (consider the Russian experiment, for example, or our own bureaucracy). The persons on the spot usually have better knowledge than can those at the top and hence can often (not always) make better decisions if things are not micromanaged. ââThe management strategy that saved Apollo 11ââ management
"Real programmers" At the time the Symbolic Assembly Program (SAP) first appeared I would guess about 1% of the older programmers were interested in itâusing SAP was âsissy stuff,â and a real programmer would not stoop to wasting machine capacity to do the assembly. programming
Using your own expertise Almost all professionals are slow to use their own expertise for their own work. The situation is nicely summarized by the old saying, âThe shoemakerâs children go without shoes.â ââThe cobbler's children go barefootââ
History tends to be charitable History tends to be charitable. It gives credit for understanding what something means when we first do it. But there is a wise saying, âAlmost everyone who opens up a new field does not really understand it the way the followers do.â The reason this happens so often is the creators have to fight through so many dark difficulties, and wade through so much misunderstanding and confusion, they cannot see the light as others can, now the door is open and the path made easy. invention
Mass production of variable products Computers have opened the door much more generally to the mass production of a variable product, regardless of what it is: numbers, words, word processing, making furniture, weaving, or what have you. They enable us to deal with variety without excessive standardization, and hence we can evolve more rapidly to a desired future! ââThe Nature and Art of Workmanshipââ
Thinking is a matter of degree Perhaps âthinkingâ is not a yes/no thing, but maybe it is a matter of degree. ââI Am a Strange Loopââ cognition
Making coal miners into programmers Many humans at present are not equipped to compete with machinesâthey are unable to do much more than routine jobs. There is a widespread belief (hope?) that humans can compete, once they are given proper training. However, I have long publicly doubted you could take many coal miners and make them into useful programmers. ââManual laborââ
A minimum size to fish There is the famous story by Eddington about some people who went fishing in the sea with a net. Upon examining the size of the fish they had caught, they decided there was a minimum size to the fish in the sea! Their conclusion arose from the tool used and not from reality. ââEvery Tool Shapes the Taskââ tools
Spelled with a lowercase letter I used to tease John Tukey that you are famous only when your name was spelled with a lowercase letter such as watt, ampere, volt, fourier (sometimes), and such. fame
Why it can't be done Moral: when you know something cannot be done, also remember the essential reason why, so later, when the circumstances have changed, you will not say, âIt canât be done.â When you decide something is not possible, donât say at a later date it is still impossible without first reviewing all the details of why you originally were right in saying it couldnât be done.
Intellectual shelf life Let lab equipment lie idle for some time, and suddenly it will not work properly! This is called âshelf life,â but it is sometimes the shelf life of the skills in using it rather than the shelf life of the equipment itself! I have seen it all too often in my direct experience. Intellectual shelf life is often more insidious than is physical shelf life.
Beware of jargon Beware of jargonâlearn to recognize it for what it is, a special language to facilitate communication over a restricted area of things or events. But it also blocks thinking outside the original area it was designed to cover. Jargon is both a necessity and a curse.
You cannot consume what is not produced The only law of economics that I believe in is Hammingâs law: âYou cannot consume what is not produced.â There is not another single reliable law in all of economics I know of which is not either a tautology in mathematics or else sometimes false. ââScientific writingââ economics
I walked the crest of the dune Thus piece by piece I walked the crest of the dune, and each time the solution slipped on one side or the other I knew what to do to get back on the track. euphony
God loved sand âGod loved sand, He made so much of it.â I heard, inside myself, that we were already having to exploit lower-grade copper mines, and could only expect to have an increasing cost for good copper as the years went by, but the material for glass is widely available and is not likely to ever be in short supply.
The Hawthorne effect At the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric, long, long ago, some psychologists were trying to improve productivity by making various changes in the environment. They painted the walls an attractive color, and productivity rose. They made the lighting softer, and productivity rose. Each change caused productivity to rise. One of the men got a bit suspicious and sneaked a change back to the original state, and productivity rose! Why? It appears that when you show you care, the person on the other end responds more favorably than if you appear not to care. The workers all thought the changes were being made for their benefit and they responded accordingly. In the field of education, if you tell the students you are using a new method of teaching, then they respond by better performance, and so, incidentally, does the professor. A new method may or may not be better, indeed it may be worse, but the Hawthorne effect, which is not small in the educational area, is likely to indicate that here is a new, important, improved teaching method. It hardly matters what the new method is; its trial will produce improvements if the students perceive it as being done for their benefit.
What you learn for yourself What you learn from others you can use to follow; What you learn for yourself you can use to lead.
The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics We now see that all this âtruthâ which is supposed to reside in mathematics is a mirage. It is all arbitrary, human conventions. But we then face the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Having claimed there was neither âtruthâ nor âmeaningâ in the mathematical symbols, I am now stuck with explaining the simple fact that mathematics is used and is an increasingly central part of our society, especially in science and engineering. We have passed from absolute certain truth in mathematics to the state where we see there is no meaning at all in the symbolsâbut we still use them! We put the meaning into the symbols as we convert the assumptions of the problem into mathematical symbols, and again when we interpret the results. Hence we can use the same formula in many different situationsâmathematics is sort of a universal mental tool for clear thinking.
What can be put into words It is not evident, though many people, from the early Greeks on, implicitly act as if it were true, that all things, whatsoever they may be, can be put into wordsâyou could talk about anything: the gods, truth, beauty, and justice. But if you consider what happens in a music concert, then it is obvious that what is transmitted to the audience cannot be put into wordsâif it could, then the composer and musicians would probably have used words. All the music critics to the contrary, what music communicates cannot (apparently) be put into words. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, for painting. Poetry is a curious field where words are used but the true content of the poem is not in the words! ââEverything that can be saidââââWhereof one cannot speakââ
Initial psychological distance Creativity seems, among other things, to be âusefullyâ putting together things which were not perceived to be related before, and it may be the initial psychological distance between the things which counts most.
Tossing an idea around Can we do anything to increase creativity? There are training courses, and books, as well as âbrainstorming sessionsâ which are supposed to do this. Taking the brainstorming sessions first, while they were very fashionable at one time, they have generally been found to be not much good when formally done, when a brainstorming session is carefully scheduled. But we all have had the experience of âtossing an idea aroundâ with a friend, or a few friends (but not a large group, generally), from which insight, creativity, or whatever you care to call it, arises and we make progress. ââSceniusââââThe Small Groupââ
Prepare your mind for the future Probably the most important tool in creativity is the use of an analogy. Something seems like something else which we knew in the past. Wide acquaintance with various fields of knowledge is thus a helpâprovided you have the knowledge filed away so it is available when needed, rather than to be found only when led directly to it. This flexible access to pieces of knowledge seems to come from looking at knowledge while you are acquiring it from many different angles, turning over any new idea to see its many sides before filing it away. This implies effort on your part not to take the easy, immediately useful âmemorizing the materialâ path, but to prepare your mind for the future.
Stuck with a problem If you cannot drop a wrong problem, then the first time you meet one you will be stuck with it for the rest of your career.
Experts and impossibility If an expert says something can be done he is probably correct, but if he says it is impossible then consider getting another opinion.
Always time to fix it later As the saying goes: There is never time to do the job right, but there is always time to fix it later, especially in computer software!
The average adult Averages are meaningful for homogeneous groups (homogeneous with respect to the actions that may later be taken), but for diverse groups averages are often meaningless. As earlier remarked, the average adult has one breast and one testicle.
Solution to evaluation and back again A second reason the systems engineerâs design is never completed is the solution offered to the original problem usually produces both deeper insight and dissatisfactions in the engineers themselves. Furthermore, while the design phase continually goes from proposed solution to evaluation and back again and again, there comes a time when this process of redefinement must stop and the real problem be coped withâthus giving what they realize is, in the long run, a suboptimal solution. ââCo-Evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Designââ
The heart of systems engineering While the client has some knowledge of his symptoms, he may not understand the real causes of them, and it is foolish to try to cure the symptoms only. Thus while the systems engineers must listen to the client, they should also try to extract from the client a deeper understanding of the phenomena. Therefore, part of the job of a systems engineer is to define, in a deeper sense, what the problem is and to pass from the symptoms to the causes. Just as there is no definite system within which the solution is to be found, and the boundaries of the problem are elastic and tend to expand with each round of solution, so too there is often no final solution, yet each cycle of input and solution is worth the effort. A solution which does not prepare for the next round with some increased insight is hardly a solution at all. I suppose the heart of systems engineering is the acceptance that there is neither a definite fixed problem nor a final solution, rather evolution is the natural state of affairs. This is, of course, not what you learn in school, where you are given definite problems which have definite solutions. ââWhat the problem isââââComplete and consistent requirementsââ