Clarification

In my previous entry, I wrote "Israeli youth do not read Orwell or Eliot in school; they read the Bible (in what seems to me to be the least most important subject, even less useful than trigonometry)."

I didn't mean to give the impression that the Bible (old testament) is less valuable or even less literary than Orwell or Eliot, although that is exactly what I did. If my fellow workers would quote the Bible at appropriate moments, then I would be pleased. But it seems that the Bible is taught more as a historical story and less of a moral approach to life, and that's why fewer people quote it.

If someone can find a reference which will help us in purchasing strategies, I would like to be the first to know.

Teaching at schools seems to miss the point frequently. The point about trigonometry is not the trigonometry itself but the fact that it introduces new mathematical tools into the student's toolbox, a new way of looking at the world. As I frequently say when I see Excel being used for something for which it is not the appropriate tool, "when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". Schools are more geared to teaching the students the specific knowledge, instead of training them how to generalise the knowledge in the hope that they might use it in a completely different situation.

I was going to write "Literature informs computer science - how quaint!", but then I remember that in Stephen Levy's book about the Macintosh, "Insanely Great", the developers (especially Jef Raskin) did exactly that - look to literature and art in an attempt to improve their product, and make it more "human" as opposed to more "computer".

Another example: I was explaining to someone the other day how modular our ERP program (Priority) is, and how there is very little "program" - all the screens and all the reports are actually defined in database tables, and the "program" loads these screens or runs the reports as necessary. Thus it is virtually indefinitely extensible. One day later, I was talking with my occupational psychologist about the 'aptitudes' program which we have been developing, which contains several different mini-exams (finding the odd one out, vocabulary, etc). I had only developed a very early - but functional - version of the program, in which every mini-exam had its own table (and structure), its own data entry screen and its own exam screen. She wanted to extend the program without me having to add infrastructure, and then it occurred to me that I should write the program in the same vein as the ERP - allowing the administrator to define new exams, to enter the questions and even display them in a modular structure. I spent most of yesterday doing that.