Whatever

17 March 2011

Tags: everyday absurdity

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2 Responses to Whatever

• the apocolyte says:

  30 March 2011 at 23:49:30

  Hilarious!
  And yet sad...
  A fitting example of how our technological society is trapped in a virtual moebius strip of stupidity, packaged in a glossy wrapping of progressive wisdom.

  Evidence we are all therefore doomed.

  Claiming to be wise, we show ourselves as fools.

  Extrapolating and diverging my thoughts further on a tangent...I don't have current figures (maybe you do) but figures from ten years ago revealed that 168 million people in the US have a personal computer...I can only guess that the amount has possibly doubled or tripled today. With the incredible resources now within arms reach of practically every human being, rather than finding cures for cancer and other diseases, rather than using this god-like technology for solving issues like global starvation or other high-minded causes, the overwhelming majority of computer users today utilize this gift by posting pictures of themselves drunk on social networking sites and searching for pornographic imagery to masturbate to.

  Conclusion:
  We are all destined to be swept away in this tsunami of shallow humanity and drown in a morass of mediocrity. Like H.G. Wells' eloi, we are en toto metamorphosising into a society of drooling morons who lack the will or the awareness to care about little but our own immediate sensual gratification, such as "what can I eat" and "what can I fuck"...
  That's why obvious absurdities such as you point out are often overlooked and commonplace today.

  Reply
  • Daniel says:

    31 March 2011 at 01:10:20

    Oh, I suspect that the person who made the mistake that I highlighted (as well as misspelling successfully) is actually quite bright, but just got a little careless. At this specific point, carelessness would be Very Bad if MiKΤΕΧ were a product for general users, many of whom might be flummoxed. But such users couldn't work with ΤΕΧ nor with LAΤΕΧ anyway. One worries, of course, that the carelessness here were a marker for carelessness elsewhere, but MiKΤΕΧ seems to work well once installed.

    With the present population of the United States being less that 312 million people, the number of people here who own personal computers cannot be double the figure that you cited. But, indeed, computers are mostly used for trivialities. If one looks at technological advancement more generally, over the last (say) 30 years, it seems that the change that it has brought to the lives of most Americans is mostly in entertainment, in which one should include the 24/7 parties being conducted over the super-network of computers and of phones.

    But the truth could have been seen upon the arisal of the telephone network, if not before it. With that network, we had the ability to connect people over much of each industrialized nation (certainly in all major population centers of such nations), and to a fair extent across nations, in real-time communication. People could be in conference almost at will. Well, some of them used it to work the Great Problems, but mostly it was used for the mundane.

    The people who can't or won't work on the Great Problems using paper or a mail system or the telephone aren't typically going to be willing and able to work on the Great Problems with personal computers or with some network thereöf.

    On the other hand, if those folk didn't want personal computers at all, then computers (of all sorts) available for higher-minded use would almost certainly be far less powerful to-day.

    But, back to MiKΤΕΧ. It actually represents someone working on a part, however small, of the Great Problems. ΤΕΧ is a mark-up language and program (from one fellow) for generating technical documents. LAΤΕΧ is an attempt (primarily from another fellow) to make ΤΕΧ friendlier to those who want to wrestle less with the how of the typesetting as such. MiKΤΕΧ is an attempt (by yet another fellow) to bring these to various operating system. Its programmer is trying to give technical folk as such communication infrastructure.

    So I sighed at the final instruction of the installation routine, and I don't regret or retract that sigh. But that last instruction is really just a small misstep, by someone who seems to be making the world a better place. (I don't know whether the principal author of MiKΤΕΧ is responsible for the final text of this installation routine, but the point is valid in any case.)

    Reply

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