71–80 of 189 posts
> Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers. "Some" is doing a ton of work in this sentence describing 19th century children.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's way more children today with electronics/electricity skills than back in the day...
From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god…
How dare Amun-Ra come into my house and attack me like that! Sure, I'm using Wikipedia to debate stuff on the Internet, but my cell phone makes me a post human augmented, cybernetic being, not a half-educated layman with a fondness for sophistry. Right?
For me, I draw the boundary based on latency, unconscious guidance, and predictability. I can send a thought to move my hand, and it moves as I think of it. The hand is within the boundary of "me". Holding a pencil, I do not need to consciously consider how to form each curve of a letter. The pencil is within the boundary of "me". I can predict what emacs will do when given keystrokes, so emacs is within the boundary of "me".
On the other hand, there is a large delay between deciding to open a door and it responding to my pull, so it clearly is not "me". I need to consciously consider what search terms to query, and cannot do so at an unconscious level. Even when I repeat the exact same query as I did a year ago, I may not find the results I was searching for, and so there is no predictability. These lead me to feel that a search engine is not within the boundary of "me".
It would be interesting to see articles like this for various common elements of UI widget toolkits, which I guess kind of mix metaphors in that some of them (buttons, sliders) evoke electromechanical devices while others (checkboxes, text boxes) evoke paper forms.
I'm going to write one about the idiocy of the "flat" design fad. I wonder how people of 1900 would have felt about having to experimentally poke at things that looked like plain labels or placards, or decorative swatches of paint, to operate a machine.
It's interesting to see that what some companies like Apple are doing nowadays has such historic precedence. And it ties in with the current state of affairs - fewer and fewer people understand electronics. Children are less computer-literate than ever.
The question is wether you really need to be literate. As a software developer I cannot write correct assembler code ( with aligning rules, red zone and what not), but at least I can read it. I would guess most programmers cannot do even that. But do they really need it? Isn’t that the advance?
As a french I cannot write correct english but at least I can read it. /s
I used to spend ridiculous amounts of money on Halloween displays. The thing that scared people the most was a big red button I encouraged them to press. My plan was to give the first person who pressed it all of our candy and a cash prize. No one ever did.
Plus you were never sure you wouldn’t receive an electric shock!
But the electric shock will help you remember what not to touch again.
From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god…
I don't know how hating on writing is related to people being disoriented by pushbuttons, and maybe if you stated what you thought the parallel was, you could have saved everyone some time and effort in reading hard-to-parse prose.
From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god…
How dare Amun-Ra come into my house and attack me like that! Sure, I'm using Wikipedia to debate stuff on the Internet, but my cell phone makes me a post human augmented, cybernetic being, not a half-educated layman with a fondness for sophistry. Right?
From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god…
Did you have a point with this? That couldn't be placed at the top? I don't know how hating on writing is related to people being disoriented by pushbuttons, and maybe if you stated what you thought the parallel was, you could have saved everyone some time and effort in reading hard-to-parse prose.