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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stan_hughes who wrote (87444)	10/8/2007 8:57:08 PM
From: Real Man	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Oh, you are definitely incorrect about that - kids know how computers work and can program them better than you or me can. Granted though, these druids can't read. Kids might teach them how to do that for them in future - way to much information to digest -g-

To: stan_hughes who wrote (87444)	10/9/2007 12:13:02 AM
From: Sea Otter	Respond to of 110194

It should be fairly obvious where I see this is all headed Endless prosperity?

To: stan_hughes who wrote (87444)	10/9/2007 1:21:02 PM
From: benwood	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

One can see further standing on the shoulders of others. To single out math is just silly. Here you are typing away on a PC <g> DO you really know what's truly going on under the hood? I do, but I'm an electrical engineer. Even so, I could not build one. There are millions of hours of labor and expertise and advancement that have gone into the design and development of integrated chips including microprocessors and incredibly high speed bus control circuitry. Web surfing... so much goes into that and very, very few know what's actually going on. Look how reliant we are on electricity -- this forum would fold if our power infrastructure went kaput. Gas? I've never known anyone to refine their own, let alone ever seen a drop of crude oil. I dropped an envelope in the mail the other day and my brother in law got it 8000 miles away. I zoomed along eight miles above the ground a few months ago, nearly traveling the speed of sound, and sat there wondering what to play on my MP3 player. I do think there's use for doing one's own addition, subtraction, multiplication and simple division, namely, to keep one's brain sharp and to ward off dementia in later years. But crossword puzzles and playing chess or Scrabble would serve the same purpose. Do you do your own square roots? I did one time, in high school, along with my class, to demonstrate the concept. Even my father in 1940 didn't do his own square root or cube root. He used a slide rule. Cosine, sine, or tangent? By using computation power, however, I can solve far more complex problems than the simple stuff I replaced with a calculator. An MRI would show my brain activity to be equal to using pencil and paper to solve a relatively simple math problem. Yet what I accomplish would be a thousand or a billion times more involved. It isn't that we aren't thinking -- it's that we are thinking while using tools that allow the results to be obtained far more quickly and accurately. Like a farmer using a plow instead of a stick or his bare hands. I watched my daughter compare the ratio of the surface area of Jupiter to Earth last night, using her calculator. She understood how to employ the formula and did so using her calculator. Doing the actual multiplication and division would not have gained her anything except less sleep and reduced opportunity for actual learning. We are reliant on the foundations of civilization itself. James Burke wrote a book about 30 years ago called "Connections" and created a TV series with the same name regarding how these interconnections work and what happens should they fail. Things get backed up really fast and eventually you'd better have the manual tools (and land and seeds) available to grow your own food. Houses would be very crude, esp. after the steel is gone and there are no saws nor hammers nor nails nor concrete. How many people know how to make their own mortar so their walls wouldn't be as porous as burlap? Give us global nuclear war and sure we might end up beaten back to the dark ages. But it is a mistake to think that the use of a calculator means one isn't thinking. The calculator is just a tool to improve accuracy and speed of the raw calculations, but one has to reason through exactly what they want to compute.