Tech

Love on the Net

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(This is a Photon Courier post from 2004…I was reminded of it by a link from this site and thought it might be of interest to Chicago Boyz readers.)

George McCutcheon was in the business of selling periodicals, and he wanted to be able to take orders on the net. He wasn’t very into technology, so he asked his teenage daughter, Maggie, to handle that part of the business. Maggie soon had the connection working, but also used it to flirt with many men she met on-line. She invited one of them, Frank, to visit her in the real world. Her father found out, and was furious…furious to the point that he threatened to kill her if she saw Frank again. Maggie had her father arrested and charged with threatening behavior.

Yawn, you say…why is this newsworthy? Things like this probably happen all the time.

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One Day We Will Video Everything in Our Public Lives

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Well, maybe. Here’s a situation where a video record came in handy:
 


 
Ouch. The caption accompanying the video explains: This video was captured by a woman riding on her motorcycle. She was wearing a helmet camera (visit www.helmetcamera.com) just in case anything happened to her. Unfortunately it did. The black car locked it’s brakes and swerved due to slowing traffic. The person driving the black car later tried to blame the accident on the cyclist. Fortunetly the woman had everything on video and was able to prove she was not at fault.
 
Seems like it was a good idea for the motorcyclist to install the video camera. Why not put them in automobiles etc? That would probably be a good idea, but I don’t know if people will want to do it if it’s required, say, by insurance companies or legislation — anything that looks like a black box where only Big Brother gets to access the data will be a tough sell. But such concerns evaporate if individuals control their own tapes. As video cameras become cheaper, more people are going to think, Why not have one in my car/front porch/living room? You never know when it will be useful.
 

“Simple” Old Technology

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It only looks simple in hindsight, when compared to modern technology. But at one time “simple” technology was state-of-the-art, the most sophisticated equipment available. And however simple it seems to us now, it was generally more complex to operate than the machines we use to do the same jobs. The parallel trends throughout recent human history have been of machinery becoming simultaneously simpler to use and more complex in design.

Here’s an account by a railroad enthusiast of the many tasks he must perform to get an antique steam locomotive up and running. I’m sure professional crews did it faster, back in the day, but the point is that a lot of work has to be done — and done in precisely the correct way and in the correct sequence — before the locomotive will move. How long does it take to start a Boeing 757? A few minutes? And compare the modern Boeing, which can be flown by two people, to large piston airliners of sixty years ago, whose power, fuel, electronic and navigational systems were so complex to operate as to require an additional one or two dedicated crew members. The same trend is evident in automobiles, which are easier than ever to drive, and extremely reliable by historical standards, while being tremendously complex under the hood (and in the computer).

To paraphrase Saint-Exupery, the steam train was once as radical as space ships are now; one day our modern Boeing will be as much an antique as that old locomotive seems to us. Life in the old days was not simpler. People had fewer options than they do now, and task-for-task many of the things they did required more work, often much more work, for the same results.

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Related: More “Simple” Old Technology