bring back the luddites

Products and tips

Moderator: Site Mods

pj
Gold Member
Gold Member
Posts: 471
Joined: 2006 Jan 26, 14:01
Location: Florida

Re: bring back the luddites

Post by pj »

And so, yet again, the unwashed masses point to their grass and mud huts and declare that their achievements outshine the Eiffel Tower... :roll:

<sigh>

----------------------------
PJ in (air so moist ESD doesn't stand a chance!) FL
Kilmatead
Platinum Member
Platinum Member
Posts: 4573
Joined: 2008 Sep 30, 06:52
Location: Dublin

Re: bring back the luddites

Post by Kilmatead »

Well, you're not setting the bar very high... the Eiffel Tower is just a hunk of metal that was for (of all "auspicious" things) the World's Fair. A mud hut is a home. Homes are hard to come by, whereas hunks of metal are commonplace.

Curiously, in the background of the great unwashed are the origins of the cave paintings - what makes them notable is not the who or the why or the wherefore - but most importantly the "What". Failed offshoots such as Denisova hominin aside, if you were to take a human child from that time period and raise it in today's "educated" milieu, it would develop to be intellectually indistinguishable from you or I. "Great," you intone, "yet another brat playing Grand Theft Auto on a hardware foundation he is unequipped to comprehend."

And indeed, I would be inclined to agree. Except that in the historically anarchic morass that is Punk Rock, it could be argued that such mindless rebellion was necessary not so much to destroy the excesses of the day (we note here the passing of the great Keith Emerson, RIP) but simply to preserve the very notion of (Western) music's baroque foundations which inspired those excesses in the first place.

For example, given the familiarity of every Richard Feynman that anyone who ever attended even the lowliest of science classes knows, there exists his lesser known partners in time, such as the great William Whewell. Where Feynmann had an innate rhythm, an obsession with mad tribal drumming which may be witnessed in the successes of his free-associative approach to reasoning, Whewell was a polymath of the highest order (what your great unwashed would call a "Renaissance Man") - yet his contributions to the scientific curriculum be many, I would focus on the arts of his rational bereavement: tracing Goethe to Schiller, Schiller to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare to the very anguish and joy of life itself.

Which brings us back (stream of unconsciousness) to our Video Game obsessed 40,000 year old teenager with her ochre fingers and her on-line wherewithal... when the too careful boffins of the day scoff and diminish grass and mud hut accomplishments (that's Wattle and Daub to you) one perches upon the precipice of not just paths of knowledge and Bruce Chatwin's songlines, but the very disorder necessary (that's Necessary with a capital N) for understanding why any of us do this in the first place.

Are there great repositories of specialised knowledge which should remain sacrosanct only to the well rehearsed ministrations of that knowledge's disciples? Or, as history may dishonestly suggest, need we fear the thuggery which aims to cheapen our own experiences at the expense of a fascination for fear and violence, mayhap threatening to destroy that very knowledge itself?

Despite appearances, I have consistently claimed to be a Medievalist, eschewing the fancies and bromide lies of the Ivory Towers for the preferred (if cold, dark, and suspicious) blunt knife that Caliban and his thousand twangling instruments could strum. If that means I take tech and throw it back at the gods that punished me with it in the first place, then so be it; I will relish in this role of miscreant, I will shout louder, longer, and with a terrible justice against the contemporary beliefs I was taught to respect in school.

Like the Punks,
like the educated iconoclasts
- I will rebel against the received "rules" of experience,
and in so doing introduce
a hinting wit
that
unsettles the coffins of
intelligentsia,
grins and snarls,
where Rimbaud meets Guillaume de Machaut
crushing Villon
under the polyphony of
the
lay
itself
Like the Punks,
Like the educated iconoclasts.

:wink:

Even the smallest achievements must (and do!) outshine the Eiffel Tower - that is the very reason it exists: a counterbalance to the storm of learned mediocrity which kowtows too little and too late to its conservatist masters. Long live the unwashed masses, may their difficult deaths ultimately count for something. :twisted:
pj
Gold Member
Gold Member
Posts: 471
Joined: 2006 Jan 26, 14:01
Location: Florida

Re: bring back the luddites

Post by pj »

Tl;dr
Kilmatead
Platinum Member
Platinum Member
Posts: 4573
Joined: 2008 Sep 30, 06:52
Location: Dublin

Re: bring back the luddites

Post by Kilmatead »

Which is why Allan Bloom had you figured out 30 years ago, Buckminster Fuller a decade before that, and Paul Goodman another 15 years afore. :D
pj
Gold Member
Gold Member
Posts: 471
Joined: 2006 Jan 26, 14:01
Location: Florida

Re: bring back the luddites

Post by pj »

None of those insightful gents are Irish, correct? :lol:

And I thought the Irish had a sense of humor. :roll:

No blarney detected here I fear! :?

-----------------------------------
PJ in (back from the hinterlands of) FL
Kilmatead
Platinum Member
Platinum Member
Posts: 4573
Joined: 2008 Sep 30, 06:52
Location: Dublin

Re: bring back the luddites

Post by Kilmatead »

Well, I suppose Allan Bloom could be the spurious child of the fictional Ulysseans Leopold and Molly Bloom, which would make him as Irish as as an Indian Summer... but that's a long shot. And according to babynames Buckminster means "monastery where deer dwell", which is close enough to medieval as to being Irish. And (because I know you're curious) it's also the 2,899'th most popular baby name for boys, apparently. :D Nikos sure missed a gamble there.

As for humour... I decided that in turning 48 yesterday there was nothing funny about it, so my weekly demeanour has taken a decidedly dour turn for affected effect. :wink: I can but trudge about the place, hoping for a glint of sunlight to appease the wrath of my demons dark. :shrug: I hate birthdays.

Not to mention spending the day dissecting verbose Spy++ message reports for suspiciously ephemeral events that don't reliably occur does not tend to lift one's spirits if they are below sea-level to begin with. :evil:
pj
Gold Member
Gold Member
Posts: 471
Joined: 2006 Jan 26, 14:01
Location: Florida

Re: bring back the luddites

Post by pj »

Kilmatead wrote:... in turning 48 yesterday ... I hate birthdays...
Happy birthday young man!!!!!

:party: :beer: :wave: :beer: :party:

Ah, but to be so young and brash! And dour to boot!!!!

As to having another birthday (59 coming up soon!), it sure beats the alternative :devil:

-----------------------------
PJ in (God's waiting room) FL
Kilmatead
Platinum Member
Platinum Member
Posts: 4573
Joined: 2008 Sep 30, 06:52
Location: Dublin

Re: bring back the luddites

Post by Kilmatead »

I am decidedly of the opinion that ageing is something that should only happen to other people (like you and Nikos, for example). I've had my full of it. :D

There's a tech-site I'm forever frequenting and they often have "contests" where you can win bits of tech... I've never won anything, but every time I enter I have to give them the usual email, blah, blah. There's always a question which asks my age... am I between 19 and 27, 28 - 35, etc. And the last one is always "45 and up". When I was 44 I didn't mind because I was still in the group that started at 36, and that's fine. But "45 and up" is like having to buy 50+ vitamins.

It's just not cool.

Curiously enough, this same tech site happily keeps sending me an email every year just to say "happy birthday". Not that there's anything creepy about a computer wishing you something, but I just have this weird feeling that it will still be sending these messages long after I get hit by a bus while standing on the edge of a cliff drinking Strychnine-based whiskey and loading a pistol. See, it's the part about the bus that really sells it. :wink: But still that damn server will just stubbornly keep sending me emails, wishing, wishing, wishing...
User avatar
nikos
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 15771
Joined: 2002 Feb 07, 15:57
Location: UK
Contact:

Re: bring back the luddites

Post by nikos »

death and taxes, and afterlife is but a questionable conjecture
having small children helps one feel fresh and perky, even at 47, something you may consider. If you survive the first couple of years it's good fun :)
Kilmatead
Platinum Member
Platinum Member
Posts: 4573
Joined: 2008 Sep 30, 06:52
Location: Dublin

Re: bring back the luddites

Post by Kilmatead »

nikos wrote:having small children helps one feel fresh and perky, even at 47
Methinks you somehow just conned the wife into doing all the real work, and then you swoop in and take all the credit wondering what all the fuss was about. Or, unbelievably, has the stock behavioural-genome of the Greek Male changed so much in the last 10 years compared to the previous 3,000? If it has, it didn't make the papers here. :wink:

And, back on topic, Moore's Law is no more, so hopefully every tech-article written for muggles will stop quoting it henceforth, finally giving the long-besieged Luddites a bit of a breather.

And, just for laughs, did you know that the average graphics-card for a computer has upwards of 2 billion transistors on it? And yes, that's billion with a 'b'. And it's only getting worse. Or better, depending on your Luddite-empathy levels. :D
Kilmatead
Platinum Member
Platinum Member
Posts: 4573
Joined: 2008 Sep 30, 06:52
Location: Dublin

Re: bring back the luddites

Post by Kilmatead »

Score for the Luddites: What kind of company puts its faith in Google Maps? :roll:
Kilmatead
Platinum Member
Platinum Member
Posts: 4573
Joined: 2008 Sep 30, 06:52
Location: Dublin

Re: bring back the luddites

Post by Kilmatead »

Kilmatead wrote:Razor blades begone!
So when all is said and done, the barbarians have spoken:

CPU Delid Tool: 213 backers with $10,000 pledged of a mere $600 goal.

That's a bit more than hoped for. If nothing else, it shows there is a market for those who wish to bring only chaos and destruction to a world where most people are so conservative as to treat everything high-tech with fear and trepidatious handling.

There's a lot to be said for risking a €300 processor just to save an extra 10°Celsius which in turn will be spent on a few more hundredths of a volt which itself transmutes into another few MHz. Is 5 GHz possible on air-cooling? We shall see... probably not, I admit, but a stable 4.8 would be close enough to keep this barbarian happy. Bloody civilians safe in their little worlds of Facebooks and Emails and <insert whatever other popular-nonsense here> will never understand what this computer-hardware-lark is really all about. :wink:
Post Reply