Month: June 2011

Did He Say What I Thought He Said?

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I got into a pissing match with Eric S. Raymond, the famous programmer, author and Open Source Software advocate. I want the opinion of others, preferably people with no specialized programming knowledge, to tell me if I read one of his responses correctly.

I objected to what I regard as a hysterical over reaction to a patent application Apple filed for an infrared augmented reality tag system. The technical issues aren’t that important at the moment.

I would like you good readers to read one of my comments and Raymond’s next response and then answer some questions after the jump. Please don’t read my questions until you read Raymond’s response because I don’t want to prejudice your impressions.

Here is my comment. The only thing you really need to know before reading Raymond’s response is that it was he who used the phrase “complete control” in the parent post.

Here is Raymond’s response.

The parent post is here if you want to read it.

Now, here are my questions:

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Doting Dads of History

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Just in time for Father’s Day, this puff piece purports to list the 12 most doting dads in history. Its criteria for measuring paternal dotage are vague but seem to center on dads who educated their daughters when it was historically unfashionable to do so. Charlemagne (#10), Thomas More (#8), and Lt. Col. George Lucas (#7, not the one you’ve heard of) get mad props for being pioneers of women’s rights.

Based on that criteria, I’d add three more doting dads of history to their list:

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The War on History

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…it looks like the schools have won and history has lost. A recent survey indicates that less than a quarter of American students are scoring at or above the “proficient” level in their knowledge of this subject. For twelfth graders, the number is only 12%.

More from Joanne Jacobs and her commenters. Few high school seniors were able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought the U.S. during the Korean war. Most fourth graders were unable to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure. Only a third of fourth graders were able to identify the purpose of the Declaration of Independence. And only 2% of 12th graders can name the social problem — school segregation — that Brown vs. the Board of Education was supposed to correct, even after reading: “We conclude that in the field of public education, separate but equal has no place, separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” That number is two percent.

While these results are disturbing, they should not be surprising to anyone who has been keeping up. Evidence has been building for years that the American school system is generally doing a very poor job in the teaching of history. I’ve seen data from 2002 showing that 15% of high school students actually believed that the U.S. and Germany had been allies during World War II. And the failures of history teaching extend through college level. In 2008, historian David McCullough spoke to seminar of some twenty-five students at an Ivy League college, all seniors majoring in history, all honors students. “How many of you know who George Marshall was?” he asked. None did.

So why is this happening?

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Backing Up The Hard Drive Of Civilization

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This post at Technology Review muses about what happens if high tech crashes. Would our store of technical knowledge, which is increasingly found exclusively in digital form, survive? Or would we suffer a terrible backwards slide as people struggle to reinvent what was once taken for granted?

Glenn takes this to its logical conclusion, saying that there should be efforts to build an Encyclopedia Galactica. A vast repository of knowledge, the sum total of everything known up to this time, could be printed in a durable form and cached in a remote area. If any of the myriad civilization-smashing dooms should come to pass, then there would be a base of knowledge that would allow the survivors to rebuild in a very short period of time.

This dovetails neatly into the Social Cycle Theory of history, a discredited model that states flourishing civilizations are doomed to descend into periods of darkness and barbarism. Vast libraries might be constructed in cosmopolitan cities where culture and knowledge are revered, but those same books filling the libraries are going to be burned by illiterate savages when they sack the toppled empires.

So, if it is impossible to avoid the total destruction of all you hold dear, wouldn’t it be neato-keen to squirrel enough knowledge away so that the contributions made by your culture to the human condition are not lost?

There actually has been at least one effort to do this very thing that I am aware of. Known as the Georgia Guidestones, they are massive slabs of rock arranged in such a way that many are reminded of Stonehenge.

(Picture source.)

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The Art of the Remake II

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Dan had an earlier post featuring the original Joy Division version of the song “No Love Lost” and a remake by LCD Soundsystem. Dan’s admonition: “If you are going to cover a song, rip it apart a bit and make it your own.” The Clash did just that in this case.

The Equals, Police On My Back (1968)

The Clash, Police On My Back (1980)

You can hear a hint of the Bobby Fuller Four’s I Fought the Law in the Equal’s song, and of course, the Clash did a cover of that one, too.

I may have a few more of these comparisons … .