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.: Saturday, June 04, 2005 :.
So the asshole factor is back. In the open that is, it was never really gone if you count underbreath mutterings. But hey, if you can ruin someone's day by pointing out the obvious, then that person had it coming.
There's a life motto if I ever heard one.
Somewhere in the last 100 years we got caught up in this fanciful thing called luxury, whereby people do things for us when we ask. In the process we forgot how to do things for ourselves. If it ain't broke don't fix it, hell, if it ain't broke, assume it works and use it. The problem being that anybody that knows how the things got working in the first place is long since dead. The days of true innovation are gone, welcome a new age of refinement.
Never would i claim to be guilt free. I get a shallow feeling when the magic whirly box reheats yesterdays dinner, much to my ignorant glee. I do try to dig for information when said shallow feeling becomes me. Often the resulting descriptions of functions are shallow in themselves.
I could, for instance, come to the very general conclusion that a microwave oven heats food using microwaves, which are just like radio waves (http://home.howstuffworks.com/microwave1.htm). This conclusion would be clouded by the fact that I have no idea what microwaves or radiowaves are exactly, and hence my understanding is false.
In order to be able to say that I know exactly what a microwave oven is i'd have to research how every bit of it functions, how its made, the theory behind it, and how to create all of its individual parts from scratch. No less. A massive undertaking, and the reason why no one person (or very few) is capable of recreating their own microwave.
So our basic knowledge is spread amoungest many people, computers, books, and factories. Imagine that one of those facets is destroyed completely. Suddenly we would have no idea how to mine for metal, and once we had that metal, how to make a fine, strong wire. Society as we know it is ruined because we can't make something as basic as wire. Kind of makes you want to know how wires made, doesn't it?
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