Radical novelty

[Rob Seaman]

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about  
telescopes."  - Edsger Dŷkstra

Today marks the 20th anniversary of Dijkstra's essay "On the cruelty  
of really teaching computer science", available in the original  
handwritten format:

	http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF

Slashdot is all over this:

	http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/02/1410254

The first half of the essay seems quite pertinent to the semantics of  
time domain astronomy, eg.:

> 	The usual way in which we plan today for tomorrow is in yesterday's  
> vocabulary. We do so, because we try to get away with the concepts  
> we are familiar with and that have acquired their meanings in our  
> past experience. Of course, the words and the concepts don't quite  
> fit because our future differs from our past, but then we stretch  
> them a little bit. Linguists are quite familiar with the phenomenon  
> that the meanings of words evolve over time, but also know that this  
> is a slow and gradual process.
> 	It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means  
> of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the  
> novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change,  
> it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity,  
> however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the  
> name "common sense", our past experience is no longer relevant, the  
> analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more  
> misleading than illuminating. This is the situation that is  
> characteristic for the "radical" novelty.
>

Rob
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