Juxtaposition: Science versus Art
A few years back I was working at a large corporation and, for those of you who care to guess, the company had the largest payroll in the world, outside of General Motors. We were a tightly knit software development team; some were from Canada, another from Rochester, and I was from Detroit. Colleagues and friends prior to the project, we had all been shuttled in to do a pretty sizable re-engineering project. We had been working with some vendors to put in a high availability system with RAID 5, I think. I’ll omit the actual date to preserve my youth, but at the time the combination was complex bordering on impossible. I’ll never forget a conversation with the Sun and Oracle guys who were on site. We had been working through the configuration of the new system for several days when one of the boys chimed in and said, “You know, this isn’t science anymore, it’s art.”
Well, I’m no genius but I often get the opportunity to work with folks who are. And the jist of that comment was this: There is a funky, invisible line where science — with all of its binary zeros and ones: 01010011100 ceases to be strictly science and it flows into something that is quite exotic and beautiful. Remember how beauty is in the eye of the beholder? When disparate pieces of technology ~ code, configuration, hardware, some fiber, a few firewall settings ~ can be thrown together and a system somewhere down the line begins to chug, chug, chug! Sweetheart, there ain’t nothin’ more purty than that. Smile.
There are many concepts in my world, which pose a juxtaposition:
– work versus rest
– hope versus presumption
– opportunity versus impossibility
– spiritual versus religious
How about you?
Herpaintedbunting's Blog 
February 25, 2011 at 9:21 pm
is there where i can “like” this? i’m new to blogs. 🙂
May 23, 2012 at 10:18 pm
I’m always logged in when I’m here on the site, Marie, but I think the Like button is at the top of the page. Cheers!