OT: (NOT A JOKE) Be careful what you wish for....

[Fairlight]

>From inside the gravity well of a singularity, Richard Kreiss shouted:
> 
> As you say, especially with automated address books, people no longer
> remember phone numbers. I make a special effort to manually dial phone
> numbers that I need to recall quickly. It takes me three of four times
> before I actually remember the phone number.

I know all my phone numbers by heart.  I don't think my wife knew our cell
number for like a year or so.  I don't think she knows our Google Voice
central number, as I pre-programmed it into the address book in the cell.
:)

I have clients on speed dial, and in my GV contacts lists, but I also have
the numbers elsewhere in text files.  I used to remember most of them, but
I've since not bothered.

I look at it this way...some things aren't actually worth the cost in
memory or processing.  I'm almost never -not- near a contact file of -some-
sort.  My shell account files on individual clients, I can access anywhere
there's ssh access, or even web access, as my ISP has a secure web-based
ssh client, lousy as it is...it works in a pinch.  Or I'll be out and have
my cell.  Or I'm home and have my speed dial, Google Voice, -and- client
files.  The cost:benefit vs risk:reward odds really say that there's about
a 0.01% or less chance that I need to manually remember those numbers
manually.  So why not free up the mental NVRAM and "battery power" (ie.,
mental energy used to sustain the memories) for other facts that -are-
essential to remember?

You can only sustain so much at a time with a decent degree of coherence
and fidelity.  Yes, only 10% of the human brain is actually usually in
use.  Theoretically there's tonnes of room for storage yet.  Alas, nobody's
figured out how to harness that yet.  (My pet theory is that it's meant
as backup redundancy, for incidents such as strokes, where part of the
brain is damaged, so functionality may move from one part of the brain to
another.)  If you have only a 100GB quota on a 1TB drive, why fill it up
with information that's accessible "in the cloud" that you don't need at
instant-recall (like programming syntax for 6-10 different disciplines at
once for a project)?  Ration your space for information that isn't
available elsewhere, is the way I see it.

> In my younger days, teens, if I could remember a girls phone number when she
> gave it to me in writing, I felt that subliminally I didn't want her take
> her out. 

No offense, but that sounds like a minor bit of a superiority complex.

> Using a search engine like Google to do research, may be quicker than doing
> research in the library, but you lose a lot. I remember doing a research
> paper in college where I needed to use the New York Times microfilm file. As
> I viewed the microfilm, I came across many interesting facts from the early
> 1950s. Although these articles had nothing to do with the paper I was
> writing they were very interesting nonetheless.
> 
> The other problem with Google searches is that humane mess other pertinent
> information regarding the subject.

Those two observations are, as Jay Ashworth would have said, orthogonal.

The non-relevant information that you despise in paragraph two is exactly
the kind of thing you espouse as a virtuous thing in paragraph one.

> When the power goes off and people try to use their cordless phones at home,
> they find they don't work. When New York City had its major blackout,
> cordless phones and cell phones did not work. However, the old-fashioned
> pots phones worked as they got their power from the phone lines.

And the odds of that happening to the city the scale that the mobile
infrastructure in an area becomes unusable are probably about 4hrs/year in
most areas, maybe more in hurricane states, tornado valley, and earthquake
zones--or California, where their grid is stretched to the max.  The odds
of it being vitally important to call someone or take a call during that
-particular- normal 4hrs of power outage are probably on the order of
100k:1 or better against.  Unless, of course, you're one of those Very
Important People[tm] that the world simply can't do without for 4hrs, even
if there's a perfectly legitimate reason for your unavailability.

> It is bad enough that kids today don't learn how to do math properly. They
> depend too much on calculators or computers to get the answer. In many cases
> they would have no idea what the correct answer should be and therefore when
> an error occurs they don't realize it.

Right.  So the 60+yr old Exec VP that I worked for when I was 19 was
exempt from blame for giving me the wrong formula for a 40+ page book of
spreadsheets for a major fashion show.  Kids aren't the only ones that make
mathematical mistakes.  Hell, I just had someone the other week give me a
screen mock=up for a site, and they were meaning to add 3.9% to a total,
but the mock-up said (literally) "x0.039%".  I caught the error given
the context, and confirmed what it actually should be.  It was an honest
mistake made by someone who has more math as part of their life by a factor
of probably 100, compared to me.

I'm usually the first to find fault with kids, but they're by far not the
only ones that'll make errors and not catch them.  All you have to be is a
little bit too tired on a bad/long day.

Now the ones that literally can't make change at a store or fast food place
when the register -tells- them the ever-lovin' amount?  THERE, I'm with you
on your complaint.  That's just gross incompetence.  But hey...they can
tell you how to recycle, and cite fictional statistics on global warming in
a heartbeat!!!  Just goes to show you what our schools are -really-
indoctri--er, "teaching" kids the last few decades.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.