From Ye Old Blogge: Saturday, April 17, 2004

Memory Lane

From Ye Old Blogge: Saturday, April 17, 2004

You may have noticed that every so often, something about this format changes - a word here, a sentence there - and it seems to go in batches. Because I only do these repost articles in batches. They are a dry dry way to add content, but also, they compare and contrast with my current articles, too. And sometimes, they show things that have stuck with me.

Like this post about early learning that not all the people I looked up to were smarter than a four-year-old. Or that I could travel by book, and now still travel by words on electrons.

Saturday, April 17, 2004

Travelling By Print, Travelling By Electron

"Of course you get more spam, you travel to more of the Internet than I do." That's Trish's explanation of the spam epidemic I'm experiencing.

So it seems that the Internet now looks like geography to people, and you need inocculations and precautions to avoid viruses and spam....

And yeap, we do travel - as a kid I liked to read, I could go through books at the rate of several a week when our Library had stock. In fact, I reckon books outfitted me for later life much better than school did. Books let me go to some interesting places without leaving the loungeroom rug.

Let me explain that. I'm no prodigy but I've always enjoyed knowing about things around me, to the point that one of my earliest memories is of my much older half-brother Michael giving me an electric motor and a battery when I was almost four. Michael made powered electric cars, which were THE toy for kids in the early 60's.

Unfortunately, he didn't leave me any wire to connect the two together.. And at age four, I remember thinking that wire must be very costly. But I asked my mother anyway, and then she earned my eternal disbelief with her answer.

"Use a bit of cotton" she suggested. And even at that age I remember wondering how someone could not know that cotton doesn't conduct electricity...

I'd looked at Michael's instructions for making his cars, you see. And while I couldn't read I could understand pictures. One of the pictures was of double-cotton-covered (dcc) wire... And even I knew that the cotton kept the electricity in...

Mum was hoping to baffle me with bullshit, because she too probably thought it would cost too much. My first ever snow job...

So from that time on I determined that I needed to not be like Mum, I needed to know what goes on in the world around me. In books, I could travel to other places in the world, learn about them. I could travel to laboratories, observatories, and conservatories. I could see Galvani wiring up his frog's-leg dinner, I could watch Boyle experiment with the properties of gases...

So when my primary school teacher four years later told us hot air rises I was ready. "Please Sir, it's actually cold air that sinks and pushes the hot air up, otherwise air would just keep rising and we wouldn't be here."

I was told off in front of the class, and lost all respect for so-called "teachers" who know less than their students.

(Hey, this should actually be one of my "Pride In Incompetence" blogs!) He was baffling all of us kids with bullshit because he was not a specialised teacher, and his knowledge of general science was shaky. 

(It was also the late 60s/early 70s... TedPTEC3D)

With tourguides like that it's no wonder I found books to be much better, and now find the Internet to be the ultimate book, the ultimate guide... And as a traveller here who started out around the mid-90's, I guess I am a bit blase about it all.

And while some of us are using the library to find out about it, there are some who, just like my mother, miss the point and try to use their limited knowledge to divert and misdirect, who, like my teacher, don't know enough to make a contribution but will bluster and bully. And they are the people who create the social conditions in which spam, viruses, and overcommercialisation flourish.

Just like early "travellers" who had no idea about hygiene and no words for "freedom of religious expression" these people now wander around cyberspace and are even less equipped to handle it than their predecessors.

---

These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.