Courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, I bring you a cartoon comparing scientists, philosophers, and engineers. It speaks for itself, of course, but I’ll make two observations about it nevertheless.

First, the cartoon thinks it’s mocking scientists and philosophers, but when I read it, it’s the engineer who looks like the idiot.

Second, the philosopher panel offers a particularly efficient counterpoint for object-oriented ontology. For us, stuff is indeed stuff. Imagine that.

cartoon.gif

published February 26, 2010

Comments

  1. Chris DeLeon

    SMBC is brilliant. I’m glad to see this posted here.

    In the partial defense of the engineer, the slide behind him makes him seem more like a designer, or possibly someone from the marketing department. The engineer, as a true specialist, would be the poor soul receiving that diagram from the “creatives”, tasked with finding a way to make it happen.

  2. Aaron Lanterman

    And the engineers would be left trying to explain to marketing why it would be impossible to put ultra spacejets *and* giant lasers into that particular form factor. 😉