Click for printer friendely version of this HowTo Problems Vs. Disciplines As we progress in our education, we find ourselves specializing in a specific discipline. Some of us study physics, others study genetics or statistics. These different disciplines have, over the years, been created by a rather arbitrary process. Where does biology stop and chemistry start? Or, where does chemistry stop and physics begin? Thus, it comes as no surprise that real problems do not always fall nicely into a single discipline. In fact, it is the gray areas that fall between disciplines that often offer us the most interesting problems because it is only these problems that allow us to see the big picture. As a result, multi-disciplinary is becoming the new buzz word in the scientific community. Hundreds of years ago there were so called Renaissance Men. Men and women that understood the details in many different fields and could successfully contribute significant findings to all of them. Over time, however, each discipline became more and more of an island due to the massive amount of discovered knowledge and the impossibility of one man being able to master it all. Each new concept was built on an increasingly formidable hierarchy of existing theory within a particular discipline. While the general trend for each discipline to become more and more specialized as it becomes rich with knowledge has not changed, our ability to access the information has. When books and libraries were our only source of information, it was not feasible to have collections of reference books for all disciplines within reach on our desk at the same time. Not only was the possibility of having a library that contained them all incredibly small, but our desks were simply not big and strong enough to hold them. Even if we did have access to the books we would need to become our own renaissance man, there was no means to efficiently search through them. With the internet and search engines, we solve all three problems Our desks only need to be strong enough to support a computer (and often times, a laptop computer does not even need a desk), almost all of modern scientific knowledge can be accessed through the internet and we can efficiently search through it all with google. Quick and easy access to information allows us to now focus on the main ideas without having to be bogged down with memorizing all of the details. The details are right at our fingertips when we need them. This body of work that you are now reading represents information obtained from personal experience, which has allowed us to isolate and identify what we are calling ``main ideas'' from our own thinking, books and the internet. When this project began, almost all of the text was derived from books and personal experience. However, at this point, the vast majority of the writing is inspired by information found on web pages. Click for printer friendely version of this HowTo

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