Mental Fresh Air
Posted by Quinn Jacobson, June 19, 2010
I am a junky for that “aha” moment of finding an solution to a technical puzzle. It is why I love being an engineer and working in the technology field. There are always problems to solve; either something is not working the way it is suppose to and you need to debug it; or even better it is working exactly the way it is suppose to but you need to make it do something else. I know I will never win a Nobel Prize, but I still can find and solve pesky problems and feel very satisfied. Sometimes you get stuck in the doldrums, overwhelmed by lots problems and apparent lack of elegant solutions. And, I do not know any magic to force inspiration to come on command. But, last week I did remind myself that there are good ways to get some mental fresh air and get a fix of aha moments.
Every spring my kid’s school has parent volunteers come in and teach mini-classes to the 4th and 5th graders on Friday afternoons for the last month of school. Last week I taught a group of kids Boolean Logic. I got to share in that moment when one by one each of the eight kids had the aha moment and understood the basic Boolean logic functions and could relate them to the truth tables. Then the excitement when they realized their understanding was scalable and they could work through a logic function propagating values.
Determining the difference between an AND gate and an OR gate by seeing when the light lit up on a bread board did not solve any of my problems at work… But, an afternoon working with the kids did remind me that the aha moments are out there. So I start this week a little bit more optimistic and energized.
-Quinn
Dr. Jacobson is a Research Leader at Nokia Research Center,Palo Alto. He leads the Mobile Computer Systems team researching next generation high-performance mobile platforms. Dr. Jacobson has been with Nokia since 2006 leading efforts in both mobile services and system architecture. Prior to Nokia he was at Intel and Sun Microsystems where he was, among other things, the Chief Architect of Sun’s UltraSparc IV processors.