Monday, July 07, 2008

"A Related Philosophy Class
Addressed the Morality of the Action"

Larry's reading the NYT obits again (link):
In the 1970s, Dr. Bennett introduced a popular undergraduate course for humanities and social-science students at Yale, intended to show the problem-solving promise of nascent computers.

A colleague, Werner P. Wolf, a professor emeritus of engineering and applied science at Yale, said the course proved to be both prescient and persuasive, and “made the whole concept of computers exciting.”

Part of the course, Dr. Wolf said, was dedicated to practical challenges; Dr. Bennett told his students to calculate the ballistics of catapulting frozen loaves of bread across the New Haven campus.

1 comment:

The New York Crank said...

>>Part of the course, Dr. Wolf said, was dedicated to practical challenges; Dr. Bennett told his students to calculate the ballistics of catapulting frozen loaves of bread across the New Haven campus.<<

What's so impractical about that?