An Observation!

[R W Burgess]

While handling a friends car related project today, I realized that I had lost some intelligence/talent with the high tech world we live in today. Back in 2005 I had changed a written document into a jpeg file to enable it to be put on this very forum.

Well, today, two years later, I couldn't handle this problem for the life of me. I spent all morning working on it, determined not to give up. But, alas, I figured that my time was more valuable than to waste on something that a friend could do in seconds(Thanks, Judy!).

What concenns me is that over time, or should I say centuries, I wonder how much more talent/information/intelligence has been lost because the human race doesn't practice what we know often enough. Or, maybe it's because we don't document this information when we still have the means to remember it. Deep thinking here, right?

Deep thinking for another day?.....

...I'm working this stupid computer today for "all get out" (on the problem stated above), when I look over and see the wife on her laptop, then realize my son's on his laptop in the living room.

My mind is quickly reminded of a Si-Fi movie about 10 years ago about our decendants coming back from the future to fix "holes in time".

How does this relate? Well, as the time travelers go back to their earth in the future, the "viewer" gets to see their "families" "stuck" in glass capsules with tubes and wires connecting them to their world.

Ummm, my family sure resembled that this morning!

Funny how so many of those Star Trek gimmicks have become fact in 2007!

Wayne

[bill pritchett]

Hi Wayne,

I do not know what you are complaining about. For my 61 Olds, I have put one of those new fangled carburetors that will get me three hundred MPG and I am also adding a miracle pill I got from my friend in Nigeria that will increase my gas mileage about 75%. With all the modern miracles we have today the future probably will not have anything like the miracles of today.

I only will be on the this forum for the next two or three minutes as I won a lottery in Antartica and now I must send the money for the taxes that are due. While I am doing that, I will also send the extra money back to my other friend in Nigeria who sent me a very large check for my copy of Newsweek from two weeks ago. You have no idea how hard it is to get there and he was very generous in the amount he sent me.

Oops, I forgot I have to log into my bank account now to update my personal information as I just received an email from my bank who must have outsourced the security to a firm in Latvia. However, as long as it saves the bank money that is good for me.

I think we have it very good at present with all the good things I described above. Got to go as my wife is saying something about me being on the computer 15 hours a day and not talking with her enough. I cut its usage back from 17 hours a day, what else does she want.

[R W Burgess]

"What else does she want?"

Probably a new husband by now, one that has a well stocked bank account, and is not in jail for killing some poor "useless" kid hiding behind a computer somewhere overseas.

Wayne

[Rusty_OToole]

No doubt an enormous amount of skill and knowlege is lost every day. I know I learned a lot from old friends alas no longer with us but how much did they take with them? And others I never met?

Saw something a few years ago in a book about architecture. This was a conversation that took place in the 50s. One architect was bemoaning the sterile glass boxes that were all the rage and wished someone would build another skyscraper like they did before the Bauhaus movement. Another architect remarked that you couldn't do that if you wanted to because all the old workmen had died out (probably due to starvation)and no one could produce that kind of work anymore.

There are old books describing surprisingly ingenious techniques for doing all kinds of thing but I'm sure only a tiny fraction of the old knowlege is preserved.

In recent years historians and archaeologists have tried to recreate the world of the ancient past and let people live in them to see what happens. They rediscovered some surprising things but these re enactors were only amateurs compared to the people who really lived it.

You could take this all the way back to the stone age, when the skill of flint knapping died out due to the introduction of bronze tools.