the Information Age is pre-industrial: it has been over 150 years since the majority of people owned the tools they use to make a living; perhaps the Industrial Age is an aberration.

everyone is important: which is why Motorola encourages bickering, tension, and dissent with "minority reports". (Financial World editorial, 9/14/93)

what to avoid: the case of one government lab may be typical: Cynicism and skepticism prevails among the staff, the lab is too hierarchical, bad news never travels upward and pay isn't tied to performance. (With no mistakes, Motorola people predicted, the lab could be transformed into a competitively run business in at least four or five years, although seven is more likely.) And with thick layers of bureaucracy that "not a lot of companies could afford." responsibility: Can the lab, like any business, hold people to their goals, convince them to work with others and act for the good of the entire lab, instead of just their own pet projects?

People with the ability to:

• make an immediate impact on problems
• work calmly and effectively with minimal supervision
• persevere in spite of setbacks
• overcome obstacles with self-confidence
• act -- rather than react
• accept responsibility for their own actions
• ignore distractions and discern the difference between the trivial and the important

People who are:

• tactful and patient
• fair, honest, and professional
• resourceful in asking questions and discovering information
• willing to do whatever it takes to make their work a success

Dissent into the Future: a Financial World editorial (9/14/93) on Motorola mentions their "research intelligence division".

proprietary knowledge: a flawed philosophy, this; whose philosophy is this, anyway? when did knowledge come to be considered proprietary? "Property is theft." -- P.-J. Proudhon (French journalist, 1809-1865)

knowledge is dynamic: not a library, not a museum. Knowledge has impact that can make change; not merely exploit change, but make change, create a demand. Perhaps there always was a demand, but it was not articulated; this is the essence of the radically new.

• either they have time for questions or they don't get the account
  • questions to ask: (see ASRG 8, 13, 14)
  • lawyer: contracts, taxes, licenses, regulations (and may recommend others)
  • accountant: financial records, accounting system (see ASRG 34)
  • business consultant: marketing
  • banker: future financial needs; knowledge of outside resources
  • local/regional/national messenger/courier service
• SCORE - service corps of retired executives (ASRG 5)
  • 1720 Peachtree St NW, 404-347-2441
• SBA
  • OnLine; district office?

Perhaps mathematics itself will prove unsatisfactory: As Spengler notes in The Decline of the West, mathematics leads to a mechanical view of the world. Applying mathematics to certain scientific problems may be a "misdirected attempt to deal mechanically with the living content of scientific knowledge." It is important to recall that Newton, Galileo, and Kepler advanced mathematics to study heavenly yet inanimate bodies. Spengler cites the existence of several different though equally valid geometries (Euclidean and the various non-Euclidean ones) to show that mathematics is known by logic, not experience; it has validity, but not fact-foundation. Mathematics may disserve science by creating a logical world rather than the world that we experience.

It may be to biology's advantage that it uses little math (something which I originally thought of as a shortcoming), instead drawing upon its huge fact-foundation coupled with induction and thus jumping beyond math's limitations. Spengler also notes that the science of Goethe avoided mathematics in favor of an ever-changing world. Perhaps it is time to reexamine Goethe's science.

For instance, Lamarck hypothesized ever-becoming and had no concept of species. Maybe we need less emphasis on species and more on development, which is ever-changing.

In the beginning was the Object:

Let's begin with one of OOP's key concepts: inheritance. Its chemical counterpart is periodicity. Consider, for example, the similarities between C and Si; N and P; O and S; and the noble gases. However, OOP is beginning to emphasize "composition" rather than inheritance as a better approach to reuse; likewise, periodicity only plays a small role in chemistry, and chemists know that composition is far more powerful.

Second, OOP is beginning to emphasize data structures over algorithms, just as synthetic chemists emphasize chemical structure rather than the physics underlying bond breaking and formation.

In fact, it was these two shifts in emphasis that highlighted the object-oriented nature of chemistry for me. Although I have been familiar with OO concepts since 1991, at first the concept of inheritance seemed to have more to do with taxonomy than chemistry, so there was no compelling reason to implement scientific algorithms in anything other than FORTRAN.

But, with the recent shifts towards composition and data structures and away from algorithms (beginning in 1994 and not yet complete), the usefulness of OOP to chemistry is potentially great. For instance, proteins in a sense are composed of structures (witness motifs and domains). There is reuse of combinations of structures throughout biochemistry -- much like "design patterns" are now being reused in OOP. (Recently, in an interview regarding the state of the art in OOP, Bill Joy included chemistry in a list of examples of knowledge that can be represented as OO components.) If "the evolution of life is the evolution of macromolecular structures", this becomes even more interesting.

Of course, the most interesting chemistry involves interactions, and that is where the power of OOP comes in. For instance, proteins are composed of amino acids, objects which form relationships with one another through their attributes (size, shape, charge, hydrophobicity, reactivity) and peptide bonds according to a template (RNA).

Last modified: 12/12/98