Useless Facts

I normally do a scribble, try to write what I'm planning to, or blah blah blah.

 

I just got Sunset Overdrive and its DLCs as well as all the add-ons for Dragonball Xenoverse 2. Finally two games that'll break my addiction of Fallout 4.

 

You never actually touch anything, their will always be a small gap at the atomic level
preventing contact from ever happening.

 

I can now identify a diamond mine at a single glance from an aerial fotograph.

 

Barcodes don't scan the black bits. It's the white parts that reflects light which they read.

 

If this is real, you just changed my world.

 

The first product to have the barcode scanner was in a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio.

 

How do you upload videos from your iPad camera onto here?

 

View attachment 10123 One button to the right of 'post reply' .... Upload a file, select your file and hope it works. I've never tried before.

 

Well that didn't work from an iphone.... So ignore what I said.

 

You are asking for a useFUL fact. This thread is for useLESS facts. Here on WF, we don't have a specific useFUL facts thread, because after all, we're WF.

 

So every thread is full of useful facts, right?

Except for this one...

 

In the early nineteenth century (1821) old teachers complained that easily-available paper was lazy and students would not know how to deal if they ran out of paper. They should use a slate like they used to. This pehomoneon is literally all throughout the historical record. Even ancient Greek philosophers complained about lazy rebellious youths with their new stuff. It's called juvenoia, a psychological bias, and it is often based off observed characteristics of youth rather than youth "these days". Every generation has been "kids these days" to older ones and then half of them become those old naggers themselves.

 

That be mighty interstin swabby, explains alot 'bout the old grouches thing.

 

It's also based of fear of new technology. Which is based mostly of survival paranoia.

 

I think there's more to it than that. When you go from memorizing everything, to writing everything down, there is a legitimate skill loss there. When you go from researching in a library to instantly searching the internet, there's another skill loss there.

The problem is, people focus on the loss and don't account for the net gain. Yes, we're not all that great at searching through books for information, but now we're getting pretty good at identifying legitimate sources on the internet, which can give us a whole lot more information much quicker.

 

I'm not talking about the internet though. I'm talking about every new invention. Whether there's a great argument, a half-decent one or only poor ones. The instinct of survival paranoia will cause some people to oppose it.

 

He literally gave evidence where people were complaining about moving from slate to paper, both using writing skills. The phenomenon has existed throughout history. Not to mention that internet research is essentially looking at the sections area of the library. As someone currently in academia, the chances are what you will find will not be useful.

 

Alright, I have quite a bit to unpack here, I'll probably muddle my message along the way, but here we go.

True, but there is always going to be (somebody) that (something). you can throw anything into that sentence and you'll get a hit.
Someone makes a new fan, some dude is going to get his dick stuck in it. That's just life.

Yes, but there is a loss going from slate to paper, you lose quantity. Saying slate is inherently worse than paper is wrong. Once the means of production increase, yes, paper is a better choice, but not before. Depending on availability, those teachers might have been right.

Just because something is new, doesn't mean it's better. Whenever you're looking at resistance to change, you're looking through hindsight colored glasses. Of course they're all wrong, we know what happened, but what you're ignoring are the much more numerous changes that didn't happen for various reasons. Why aren't we all flying jetpacks right now? The technology is there, it's a faster form of transportation, but we're not because so many people would die.

It's easy to create a label like survival paranoia and throw it on everything that looks like it might apply, but if you look back at history, every label is either proven wrong or drastically changed. It takes a lot of effort to look at each situation and think critically about their actions, often you end up putting in more effort than they did, but it pays off.

ETA: When we say slate, we're talking about a chalkboard type thing right? Because if not, and we're talking about carving letters into stone... well, I have a completely different argument for that.

 

I'm not saying every complaint about new things is wrong. And I'm not saying every wrong argument was completely stupid, or even necessarily stupid at all. All.I'm saying is there's always instincts that influences our actions. And in the case of opposing change or difference the relevant instinct is called survival paranoia. Survival paranoia is the instinct that makes you nervous when a twig snaps. When you hear an unrecognisable noise. It's the instict that makes any weird thing into potential horror fodder. Because it programs us to be nervous of that we don't understand. It's a cautionary mechanism. Pretty much every species displays this. If you don't know; be careful. It makes sense. The only problem is when in complex human situations with all our other instincts and higher thinkings it can create weird fallacies. Like disliking gayness; where do you think that comes from? Racism; we have a long history of "tribes". We still do it. No wonder we get people developing irrational views based on it. Thus we can observe that fear of mee inventions can be biased by this instinct's effects.

 

I get the desire to want to blame hate on a subconscious phenomena.

Alright, so I pulled out your two examples. (and I hate to turn this into a debate thread, but mods, strike me down now if you must)

Where do I think the 'disliking gayness' stems from? Now lets work through this starting from the very beginning.
- would being gay help or hurt human reproduction?

I would assume hurt. If we are to imagine early humans with extremely low life spans, an individual who wasn't interested in sexual reproduction would pose a potential threat to the continued existence of that genetic line. At least with men, we can assume that each non-reproductive individual would increase the chances of a small group dying off.

Today though? Populations are booming. Not having kids is a positive step, and would you look at that, humanity is changing to accept homosexuality.
We could be exactly where we are technology wise, which would equate to around the same intelligence, but if society as a whole needed to increase the population, we would still be oppressing homosexuality in effort to increase the population.

I can hit on racism as well, but I feel like if you don't understand where i'm going by this point, then you're not open to consideration, and I'd just be spewing words for myself. Which to be honest, isn't a terrible thing, I like exploring ideas, but I'm not feeling it right now.

My point is it's easy to miss something when you think you already have the answer.

 

Uh, guys? Debate room's over there --->

Back on topic for a useless fact: I can only get most Hula Hoops (a brand of crisps/potato chips) over the knuckle of my little finger. Sadness.

 

Faking it must be a real project.

 

Sadder still if they slid easily over the length of some other body part.