I recently finished Neal Stephenson's book Anathem (which is splendid, btw - much more science fictional than The Baroque Cycle) and one of the things that happens to the protagonist Fraa Erasmas is that he has The Book thrown at him (there is a spoiler here, since I describe the nature of The Book, but I don't discuss the circumstances of the throwing, so to speak).

The Book is a series of problems which are meant to waste the time and, more critically, the mental energy of the student. Some of them are just futile activities (learning digits of pi) while some are internally consistent but objectively flawed dissertations. It is used as a punishment, forcing the student to learn these wasteful things instead of doing useful or interesting work. The student is tested on their command of this useless material.

I feel a bit like Fraa Erasmas at the moment.

The work I am doing is generally fine, but there is a whole class of problems that I keep on tripping over which can only really be solved by learning the detailed idiosyncrasies of a particular piece of software, and it is almost exactly the kind of work that I dislike: not just because it takes time away from interesting and useful things, but because it fills up my brain with things I do not wish to know.

Well, back to The Book I suppose.

Posted by Dunx at January 28, 2010 12:50 PM