Technophile Telegraph
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Technophile Telegraph We've all heard the expressions "turn a blind eye" or " . . . a deaf ear," implying being oblivious (intentional or not) to input. 1 A few months ago, while settling into my airline seat and listening to a friendly passenger strike up a conversation with me, I noted he fell silent, mid sentence, for no apparent reason. Responding to my quizzical glance he explained that he was letting me listen to the perfunctory safety briefing the crew had just begun. "Oh," I retorted, "I never hear those things unless someone calls my attention to them." Whereupon he quipped, "I see, you have a notch filter.2" NOTCH FILTER? My background allowed me to immediately typecast this fellow as a double-E, 3 but how would the nontechnical or, worse yet, the technophobic listener react. My goodness, having a notch filter could be terminal, or at least insulting! Without saying whether it's good or bad, we technical types can certainly telegraph 4 our vocations when we transplant the vernacular of lab chatter to the everyday world. Of course our language boasts plenty of words and phrases to express everyday ideas, but somehow taking a technical phrase out of original context and mapping 5 it onto analogous normal concepts adds a bit of clever charm to the technician's repart6 and stilted confusion for the lay listener. Some phrases have inculcated themselves into the public's imagination. Quantum leap leaps to mind. 6 Of course, its small discrete meaning has been corrupted into a large step (usually forward) with some psychological minimum size but no discrete 7 spectrum beyond that. (Clearly a step into the continuum. 8 ) As a student at Caltech, I was privileged to hear several lectures by Richard Feynman. Whether on thermodynamic irreversibility, his diagrams, or whatever—I always felt a euphoric sense of clarity and deep understanding...until I left the room. Absent the charismatic presence, I could not reproduce the arguments that led me through the didactic maze to the "obvious" conclusion. I expressed my frustration to a lay neighbor by noting that "my understanding of that stuff just decays 9 exponentially. 10 " Well, the "decays" part gets transliterated to "rots" and that's OK, but "exponentially" generates a unique facial expression that mixes quizzical and intimidated with a strong dose of tolerance for the weird. Among the many issues to which we scientists and engineers are asked to attend is education of the public about science... take some of the mystery out of it and reveal the practical and aesthetic values. This cause has many exponents and is an admirable goal. Dejargonizing without gross distortion for public consumption is a worthwhile and not easy task. A little nudge toward demystification of scientists and science in the social setting might be achieved if we were to let everyone in on the meaning behind those blurted "foreign" phrases and were to find an easier way to do that than is exemplified by the extended footnotes below. If we do a good job of it, then the next time you ask a frien
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