Fresh from the half-bakery

[hirez]

It's daft to try to model human thought processes by using computing terms. They're just not the same sorts of thing. Yet that doesn't stop me calling the state of having too many things to think about 'thrashing' and having it be a useful analogy.

And yet. I begin to wonder that as the bloody devices have actually started to become useful, rather than something that you could solder up, laboriously type in '10 PRINT "STEVE IS ACE"' or spend half an hour pissing about with a cassette recorder so the thing could go 'Splurp! Splurp! Splurp!' like a clock-radio having a danger wank, so we've quietly changed the way we arrange (in several senses) our lives to accommodate the way they work.

I seem to remember that we're changed by our tools, so this isn't entire news.

It would not surprise me to learn that there are those who base their people-management skills on what they've learned from LJ friends-list drama.
(Bad for-instance. I'm having trouble thinking about this. In the same way that I'm sure I read a piece about the way that the scientific method was hopelessly mired in western-european/judeo-christian thought processes.)

Perhaps I should attend to some DNS. Yes. That would be best.

Comments

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

If it's not a rude question, is it a specific sort of data? I have prosopagnosia, but while my prosop is quite mild, my recognition problems extend to other things (the dangerous one being traffic - I see cars coming towards me, yet somehow the message, 'do not step into the road now!' doesn't accompany it.).

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes. It's the 'sort of' which I think is the interesting bit.

For instance, I remember reading the Lisa issue of Byte and just Not Getting It at all. Since I was coming from the soldering-and-CP/M direction, that method of interacting with a computer made no sense. Yet here we all, clicking in boxes and typing our brains via a UI that's got even less to do with offices and documents than ever.

Hm. I blame Unix.

[easterbunny.livejournal.com]

There is no management that cannot be improved or at least postponed through the addition of polls.

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

I do tend to think of and describe my prosopagnosia in computerish terms - retrieval problem, storing the information but unable to access it all the time etc. It makes it more understandable for other people too.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

I read somewhere that the Victorians tended to talk about psychology in pneumatic or hydraulic terms. It was all about competing pressures and flows and so on. Those were the systems they were familiar with, so that's where they found it easy to find analogies.

There's probably a sort of Turing-equivalence going on here. Any sufficiently complicated system will have a part which is suitable for drawing analogies with any real-world situation you care to name.

[badnewswade.livejournal.com]

I know that more immediately before computers people used a telephone exchange metaphor; when I was a kid I read a rather wizzy Ray Bradbury SF story where the last person on Mars rigs up the phone system to ring him up and talk to him and at some point it somehow gains sentience... or something.

Of course before psychology was invented people just thought in terms of biological juices or "humours", which in a way is more accurate, at least in principle anyway.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

the Victorians tended to talk about psychology in pneumatic or hydraulic terms.

We should revive that.

Probably with a booth at Lincoln.

"The Doctor is raising accumulator pressure, before the next consultative venting".

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

We need to marinade in this for a bit:
http://www.amazon.com/Ingenious-Mechanisms-Designers-Inventors-Set/dp/0831110848
to get our analogical glands properly pressurised.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Have you _seen_ my upstairs bookshelves?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Dr Augustus Henge's Patented Hydrodynamic Curative As Demonstrated To The Vienna Exhibition, Proved Efficacious In Cases Of Maundering, Congenital Idleness, Weak-mindedness And Hysteria Of The Female.