On Fri, Jan 04, 2019 at 12:15:03PM -0800, Heather Madrone wrote: [...] > The question recurs for me. Sometimes I wonder if it's environmental > pollution in the form of plastics, hormones, antibiotics, and other > chemicals. Is human sexuality being altered the same way certain > types of pollution change the sexes of fish?
I think that slight and inevitable (in our times) changes to ingredients in potable water is going to be recognized one day as one of the most dangerous factor. Just think about the hectolitres of water ingested over the year by a human, about water role in embryo development, about dissapearance (or mutations) of the frogs and smaller birds and bees. I have no idea if there is any kind of research trying to sum this up. [...] > I don't know much about the radio generation or the telephone > generation or even the early automobile generation. Me neither, but when I look at writers fed with radios as children, they were titans of imagination (MHO). Of those known widely (for a liberal definition of "widely"), Stanislaw Lem, Philip Kindred Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut come to my mind almost immediately. They were not alone - there were a number of less known writers (as well as more known mainstream i.e. non-sf writers), whom I am not going to mention here, and there were a number of non-writers, who likewise had been risen on radio waves and good quality paper. They have, for one example, put a man on a Moon, multiple times (but not the same man, mind you) with the help of a pencil and logarithmic scale (and plenty of screwdrivers). Those same people banged out ideas which are being recycled nowadays as if they came in afresh (I cannot serve the canonical list of such ideas, but from time to time I come upon one or another, and think "yeah, thirty/sixty years went, how much a world had changed, hohoho"). Similarly, I can scratch my head a bit and give some names for talegraph era writers-philosophers, like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Jack London, H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Of course, there were plenty of idiots in both eras, most of them forgotten, some left papers, some not. On the other hand, I wonder if future generations will recognise any such titanic writer-philosopher figures from this era of cells. [...] > Young people will lose some of what we had because they have gained > so many things we didn't have. They have their mix of environmental > conditions, and they do the best they possibly can with them. I am afraid (but) I have to ask: what have they gained? It may look like they have plenty of things I had not access to, but then they also seem to be haunted by small daemons and deficiences of their own. [...] > I am of the pre-graphics computer generationback to the days of > having to spell out the UUCP path. It's text all the way, baby. I > can construct entire universes out of ASCII characters. I don't need > no stinking images, no movies, no audio. The Internet was better > when it was a non-commercial sea of plain text, she says with a > curmudgeonly snort. > > That day is gone, the day of Usenet and mailing lists, and it's not > coming back. Perhaps it is the other kind of thing. There were always very few people on Usenet and very few email users (i.e. long form writers). It is just that this other part of humanity finally has got their toys, too. Looking from this perspective, there was never going to be an upgrade for them into textual world, because their preferences are so much different and text is so alien to them. [...] > Email programs continue to get worse. The color of my text changed > somewhere mid-email, and some update got rid of all of the menu > options to change the appearance of text in email. A judicious > copy-paste fixed it, but I wonder what functionality will go next. Some (not me) are installing a whole virtual environment on their Android smartphone, consisting of Debian (or maybe some other Linux) base, plus any software that one might want to choose from sixty or ninety thousands of readymade packages. There, one can have any decent terminal emulator with any decent email software known to text-based humanity. But I would rather get a used laptop and install anything, even if only a text console (this should work even if L*x/*BSD cannot do X windows on said hardware). There are (or were) models smaller than what passes as a phone nowadays (I mean _Pad with 11'' display is a phone, right?). > Not only do I get to look forward to the loss of functionality in my > human body, but I also get to experience it in my virtual life. I dare to say you had not lived if you had not seen a "word processor for handwriting": http://www.styluslabs.com/ (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17858641 ) They take a two kilobytes of text and blow it up to two megabytes by replacing each handwritten letter by a multiple lines of Javascript whose purpose is to render a line on a canvas object. Looks like Postcript was very decent in comparison. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **
