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How to Make Toast: Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science (2001)
- intrepidhero 7y agoI dunno. I've got a 15 year old toaster with a bimetallic thermostat. Still works fine. Maybe everything doesn't have to be "smart"?
- imgabe 7y agoBut how is it at making a ham and cheese omelette?
- chrispeel 7y agoExactly. I'm an electrical engineer, and if I thought the king wouldn't behead me for saying so, I'd suggest that he skip the embedded computer.
- chiph 7y agoBut then how could you make toast when you're not home, like at a conference, or driving in your car? /s This is a pretty cool toaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y
- Enginerrrd 7y agoYeah we need a multi-platform smartphone app.
- LegitShady 7y ago...did you read the link?
- intrepidhero 7y agoYeah I thought they both overcomplicated it. ;-)
- LegitShady 7y agoI must have higher toast standards. I sear mine with a Bernzomatic TS8000. It's just another level of toast. Who needs bimetallic anything when you have gas and fire. Keep it simple right?
- vsskanth 7y agoI've flagged this because this is needlessly inflammatory and doesn't really contribute to meaningful discussion.
- crgwbr 7y agoI’d hardly call it inflammatory. It’s merely a humorous story about over-complication in engineering problems.
- helpPeople 7y agoWait... The computer scientist is not an engineer.
- ncmncm 7y agoExactly. Use an engineer for an engineering problem. Mark Twain wrote, "An engineer is a [person] who can do for a dime what any damn fool can do for a dollar." Adjusting for inflation, the engineer can do for a million dollars what any damn fool can do for a billion.
- na85 7y agoAu contraire, I think it's a parable about software departments being overstaffed and producing churn to fill the hours. See: Uber Engineering, Google rewriting everything all the time, Javascript frameworks of the month^H^H^H^H^H week, etc.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- alecbenzer 7y agoI think the EE vs. CS framing is somewhat inflammatory, but the general lesson of not over-complicating designs is a good one.
- chiph 7y agoThe language and word-choice actually reminded me of Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad, in which Trurl doesn't challenge Klapaucius to building a better toaster, but should have.
- helpPeople 7y agoSince we are comparing in this thread, why are computer science grads often afraid of math based solutions? For example, I had a physics problem and a computer science buddy was opposed to solving it ourselves. He insisted we needed an expert. When at worst it needed differential equations that ended up cancelling out. It wasn't a hard problem, it just took some effort. Is this a rare experience? Or have other people found a reluctance of math in comp sci?
- jolmg 7y agoWhy do you think them being a computer science person has anything to do with it?
- true_religion 7y agoSo, I did computer science almost two decades ago and our school as part of an engineering degree. Our school taught differential equations as an optional course. However, for all other engineers it was a required course. Today, computer science at my old school is part of liberal arts and differential equations isn’t listed anywhere on the curriculum. Because many aren’t taught differential equations it’s hard to know what they can do, or how to use them so it’s easier to just get an expert.
- ThrowawayR2 7y agoI can't really blame him/her. CS focuses mostly on discrete mathematics. While there are some required calculus courses in a CS program, IIRC they don't go up to diffeqs and most CS courses never really make much, if any, use of the calculus that is taught.
- perl4ever 7y agoI can say, as a CS graduate, that I liked discrete math and hated anything in-discrete. I avoided statistics (as opposed to discrete probability) entirely.
- ncmncm 7y agoWhen you want engineering done, hire an engineer. If you need science, hire a scientist. I have not been able to discover which of those a Computer Science graduate is. By observation, a piler-on of frameworks, most usually. But some scientists and some engineers get CS certification, so you can't be sure, by the label.
- rubayeet 7y agoOnce upon a time, there used to be companies who made money by selling toasters. When toasting bread went out of fashion, these companies found their businesses to be in peril. They wanted their businesses to respond to the change in the market and pivot. The ones whose toasters were software-driven were able to survive, while the ones who hardwired them to do just toasting breads, did not.
- alecbenzer 7y agoI think a hard engineering problem in general is knowing when to adopt what level of flexibility. Erring too far in either direction gets bad.
- dsr_ 7y agoThat's an interesting take, but what actually happened is three different things: 1. microwave ovens became affordable, popular, and then discovered to be terrible for browning things, but so good at generally warming food that they became a smash hit. 2. toaster ovens were introduced, with two hardware controls instead of one (heat and time), which did an acceptable job of toasting but also handled lots of other small warming and browning tasks. 3. toasters came back as a nostalgic luxury good. In all of these markets, the companies with more robust hardware capabilities were able to charge a premium, attract customer loyalty to their brands, and use the brand reputation to diversify to related kitchen goods.
- cameronh90 7y agoIs toast not popular in the USA? Still going strong in Europe!
- smnrchrds 7y agoSame in Canada.
- ImprovedSilence 7y agoIt is, we just toast it in toaster ovens and not toasters these days...
- maerF0x0 7y agoMeanwhile every time I put a new kind of bread / bagel / muffin in my toaster, it comes out unsatisfyingly burnt or underdone as is the particular setting of the day. See, the objects I insert into the toaster almost _never_ resemble the model bread that the EE designed for. If the toaster had a shade selector, a built in camera and was factory color calibrated, then no matter what I stuck in the toaster it would come out that color (or hit some global MAX_TOASTING_TIME) . Good software engineers design robustly without increasing the problem domain (much).
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago> "If the toaster had a shade selector, a built in camera and was factory color calibrated, then no matter what I stuck in the toaster it would come out that color (or hit some global MAX_TOASTING_TIME) ." ...which would fail on dark breads like pumpernickel or be confused by marbled or cinnamon swirl breads.
- jvanderbot 7y agoseems to me radiated heat should indicate internal done-ness. Maybe a heat feedback somehow.
- ThrowawayR2 7y agoI think that's only true if the thickness and heat transfer rate of all things inserted into the toaster is uniform, which may not be the case.
- jvanderbot 7y agothings should absorb heat until they reach equilibrium, regardless, no?
- ThrowawayR2 7y agoHow do you determine whether the object being toasted has reached equilibrium from radiated heat measurements which are from the surface of the object?
- dangus 7y agoHa Ha, thanks for the cool email forward.