you know i have tons of work to do if i start writing a blog post with actual substance

let's talk about how.

it's my experience that when i say "how does it work," i mean something completely different from most people. if i ask someone "how does the vcr work," they will show me the remote control, and the various buttons. to change the channel you press this button, etc. the tape goes in here.

excuse me, but that's not how it works, that's how you use it.

i see the same problem on a bunch of wikipedia pages. for example take XMLHTTP. I have no clue, after reading that article, how XMLHTTPRequest works. I know how you use it (via browser scripting languages), what you use it for (to communicate asynchronously between client and server in a web application) and some examples of applications that use it. I even know how some web browsers implement it (IE used to use an ActiveX component).

But I still don't know how it works, and hence, I still don't what it is. "What I cannot create I do not understand" -Richard Feynman.

However, my criticism of Wikipedia here should not be seen as general. There are many articles on technical subjects which are quite excellent.

But to the extent it is a problem, I think that this is a kind of manifestation of the old "computers are scary" syndrome. There definitely seem to be wikipedia editors who are frightened that if they include "technical" details like i am suggesting that the articles would be more like a technical manual and thus these details are not "enyclopedic." I would argue that this is somewhat backwards. Details like the "known problems" section of the XMLHTTP article are far less encyclopedic.

i am now going to take a very foolish stab at reformulating feynman for my self: when you understand how it works, you can understand why you use it that way, and when you understand why you use it that way, you can understand how you use it.