A good percentage of my friends, given flour, eggs, and other appropriate ingredients, could not bake an edible cake or make pancakes with these things. Almost none of them could do it without a recipe they follow in a “cargo cult” fashion. And they don’t think this is a problem – after all, we live in a world where if you want a cake there’s a bakery down the corner shops and a packet of cake mix at the supermarket.

Do you know how to build a house? Could you turn a pile of cement, bricks, lumber, etc. into a usable dwelling or would you call in a builder? Do you know how to shear a sheep and process the fleece into usable wool which you can then knit into a jumper? Do you know how to turn apple seeds into a healthy orchard, given time and water? Do you think that not knowing all of these things makes a person’s life sadder … I do and I don’t, in different measures at different times.

NONE of us can know a lot about everything, the sum of human knowledge is too large. I don’t think that it’s bad that many people don’t want to know about the building of software, any more than it’s bad they don’t want to know about the building of their houses, cars, food, etc.

So if the geeks of the next generation don’t need to know about Deep Computer Wisdom(TM) to keep their machines going, what will they put their energy into? When Dad was learning about cars, computers were at the level of punched cards and FORTRAN – there’s no way to forsee what the geek energy of future generations will be focussed towards, but I have to believe it’ll be as fantastic (in all senses of the word) as today’s PCs are to a guy who remembers punched cards and FORTRAN…

Ricky
(Who, incidentally, knows how to bake pancakes and cake from scratch without a recipe, grow trees and vegetables, milk cows (haven’t done it for years though – I’d need practice), spin a little (ditto), knit, crochet, make patterns for clothes and then sew them, weave, do a fair bit of the stuff involved in house building, and program computers too. I’m the woman you want to have around after the apocalypse happens!)

Fucking, cunting, twatting brilliant. Sweary, ranty letters are always good and this is the best I’ve seen in a while. I’m sure you’ll get a pathetically politically correct reply from them if you get one at all, but at least your excellent letter will have given some poor sod at ScotRail whose job it is to read customer complaints some amusement.

Well done.

John

This post was mentioned on Twitter by semanticist: New blog post: Scotfail. http://semantici.st/archives/144:scotfail...