Slashdot Mirror
Is the Seeking of Lost Skills/Arts a Hacking Analog?
bigattichouse asks: "Having just finished my first batch of home-brew beer, I've been thinking about my attraction to 'lost arts', and collecting books on 'how to do stuff'. Some I try, some I just read: metalsmithing, sewing, baking bread, making soap, knot tying, brewing beer, woodcarving, yogurt and cheese.. there are so many skills 'lost' in the modern 'american' lifestyle... but I find my fellows tend to have books on these subjects lying around, too. Is this common in geekdom? Is this an expression of 'hacking' outside of machinery/engineering?"
I think this guy's right. If you really want to see a bunch of nerds going crazy with esoteric endeavors, look no further than the Society for Creative Anachronism. They're pretty much the only people left in the world who make battle-quality chain mail, scale mail, and plate mail in the medieval style.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Thats why their geeks. The thirst for knowledge need not be contained in any one discipline. I know I personally hop from new hobby to new hobby and become bored with things once I feel I have enough skill.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
"Having just finished my first batch of home-brew beer, I've been thinking about my attraction to 'lost arts'
Drinking a skinful of beer will put these thoughts in your head. I usually solve all the worlds problems after a few. Can never seem to remember the solutions the next day though
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I've been hacking over 30 years. I also brew beer, distill whisky, hunt, grow food, etc. These are definitely all the same expression: to know how things work.
-- Rich
Free your mind and your Ass will follow -- George Clinton
Just read k5.
They seem to have it figured out...
We're all preparing for Y2038.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Hacking is just like being the One. No one can tell you you're hacking, you just do it.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Slashdot staff taking some time out to seek the lost art of a decent Slashdot article?
Engineers love to tinker, find out how it all works, rip it apart and put it back together. Whether it's mechanical, chemical, or physical we want to understand. The only expression of the Renaissance Man left...
Isn't it obvious? Hacking is an expression of our inner need. And the inner need we are expressing is for Knowledge, pure and simple. The people who hack, today, are the people who would have been working on their cars 30 years ago. :)
Yes I would consider that part of the hacking life style . Trying to understand everything around you , maybe even doing it your self is part of the "life style" . Most hackers I know (traditional use) are very keen with not only computers and electronics , but chemistry (read explosives) , metalworking , and a few are interested in nature (they even go out while the "day star" is still outside). The hacking life style is really one about knowledge and understanding so any activity/tool (reasonable priced of course) you can expect a hacker to have at least a passing interest in (and some times more so than one) . That being said , is this worthy of a slashdot article?
Yes, I think you're on to something there. Not only do I brew beer, but we also sell homebrew supplies in my hardware store. My informal observations of the customers who shop for home brew supplies leads me to the conclusion that most hombrewers are geeks (That's a compliment!).
:-)
Getting back to my subject, I've also discovered that my passion for pinball (started at MIT in 1977) is shared with numerous folks on the net and around the world, and there is definitely a connection between the lost art of pinball (face it, pinball is dying, especially electromechanical machines) and geeks. I own an old Faces EM pinball machine myself which I've been restoring to it's former glory, in between brewing batches of homebrew and playing Asheron's Call.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Am I this way? Of course. I love blending the old and the new, the modern with the retro. Hell, my ideal computer case design would be something that would look like it belongs in a victorian parlor. Geeks love the anachronism, because if something from the past Just Works, why not use it?
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I started learning how my car works because all that "moving stuff" is elegant and complex. It's the figuring out part that gives me satisfaction.
I will never do metalsmithing, but Maxwell's demon may be my next experiment. Too wierd to be missed!
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
For me it is just an expression of curiosity. Of wanting to know "how does this thing work" or "how the hell do they make this".
Computers are (for me) the uber-want-to-know. They are just more complex than every other thing in your direct environment, so we are attracted to them (like a moth to a bulb, if you ask me).
Tolkien thought that the further you got away from the earth and your ability to live off of it, the more and more you lost your ability to be a creative person. And the less magic you were able to see in the world.
It is a loss of this self suffency which is going to cause the greatest problems in our society. Just think of much of our food today is preprocessed or transported from someplace else.
What happens when the whole system breaks down. (When was the last time a complex system like the ones we have today didn't break down).
I think it's our mentatility to think about these problems becuase we get to think about them every day when it comes to computer systems.
I suspose I could ramble on about the philosophy and religious implications about subcreation and why good subcreators worry about this, but I think that the skills, determination, dedication, and ego that it takes to be a good programmer/sys admin/hacker are the same skills which cause us to worry about some of the more basic things in real life.
Ted Tschopp
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
I guess you could consider it related to hacking if one considers hackers to be just people who "thirst for knowledge." I know I rarely sit in one discipline for long and I want to know everything about anything. I don't consider that being a hacker, or part of a "hacker" nature though...I'm just nosy.
The primary reason for the decline of homebrewing as a hobby is the wide availability of quality micro-brewed beers. When homebrewing as a hobby took off (late 1980's, early 1990's) it was tough to find good quality beer in most of the country. People brewed so they would not have to settle for Budweiser or (gack!) Coors.
:-)
Once every corner deli and bar started carrying Sam Adams and the beer distributor added Belgian Abbey and Grand Cru, why go through the trouble to brew it yourself? However, those that continue to brew it themselves are mostly geeks.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
After giving some thought to the issue, I think that the answer is quite simple: for the same reason why I go to FreshMeat to get the source code of the programs I use. I could download the binaries, but I don't; I prefer to go through the pain of ./configuring, making and make-installing, to say the least. In other words: I want to control the process of creation as much as possible. The same spirit of OpenSource which animates most geeks is present in each and every aspect of their lives, not only in computing.
Self-made-making and Open Source are all about the same: to keep control of our own lives.
Strength, balance, courage and reason. If you know what's this about, contact me!
... that the Amish are the 31337est hackers?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
"Lost" implies that they need to be "found" for some compelling reason. They have been supplanted with skills necessary for the modern world, such as computing, engineering, math, making $100 million movies, watching TV, surfing pr0n, and building space shuttles.
The world needs historians as much as it needs rocket scientists and porn stars. These skills are documented because people are out there keeping the knowledge alive. He's not suggesting that everybody give up their modern conveniences and go back to the 19th century. It's just that the old school arts and crafts give you a connection to the world and the way things work that's all too missing from our pushbutton world.
As for your suggestion to grab a Bud instead of a homebrew- you might as well say don't bother with a homemade Thanksgiving turkey, go grab an Oscar Mayer Lunchable.
Is the seeking of lost skills and arts a hacking analog? Well, I wouldn't say so. Hacking is about creating the means to an end oneself, independant of any official or sanctioned guidelines. Seeking lost skills and arts is simply undertaking a nostalgic quest, much like deciding to collect Christian Archie comics from 1973 or something. The process may involve some hacking, as "lost skills" no doubt have less than perfect handbooks for them... but there's nothing that necessarily makes it analogous to hacking.
:)
One is a method -- one is an interest. I can see people who are into hacking being interested in lost art/skill revival though...
unnecessary maybe. but that doesn't mean the workmanship and ideas involved in a particular task aren't beautiful. For that reason alone they should be kept alive as tribute/homage/appreciation to man's ability to invent/create/adapt despite whatever his technological limitations may have been at the time.
When St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York was being redone a few years back, construction crews didn't know how to work the stones. All the modern technology and literature out there weren't able to figure out the clever way in which the original masons had put parts of the structure together. The solution (after I'm sure x number of consultants was hired) was to find some old men (80+) living in Scotland who had once done this type of work at the beginning of the 20th century. So skills do get lost and we've probably lost more than we'll ever know. Some of which was probably really quite clever.
Learning skills that are necessary for modern life is one thing, but learning skills because you appreciate the intelligence behind them is what tends to separate the inquisitive (i.e. geeks!) from the rest.
Jargon File entry: http://www.hack.gr/jargon/html/sections/a-portrait -of-j-random-hacker.html
Because homebrewers of today are the professional brewers of tomorrow. At least, that's how I got started. Now I brew for a living. At the moment (17:00 pst) I've got 450 gallons of proto-brown ale on the boil. You need people who are enthusiastic about beer in order to brew--it doesn't pay enough to encourage people to do it. Homebrewers are still the best source for that.
- Why am I so fascinated by the old computers of generations gone by?
- Why are those old mainframes that can do less than a PDA so fascinating?
- Why would I rather save up money to buy a personally crafted writing table as opposed to a $50.00 one made out of particle board by machine?
- What is so "magical" about UNIX-like operating systems?
- Why is it fun to spend a weekend hiking in the desert, where there is no running water, freezing your butt off, sleeping in a tent with all kinds of weird things crawling on you?
- Why is some really complex source code, script, configuration file, etc. so interesting?
- Why does code, highly optimized beyond readability (especially assembly) have a "feel" to it?
- Why is some PDP-11 with tape for storage so intriguing?
- What is so interesting about Lord of the Rings?
- Why is it so much fun to play games with words, making up double-meaning phrases and the like?
The answer is a bit complex.First of all, things that are crafted together by skilled hands have an intrinsic value that doesn't exist in mass-marketed consumer products designed for an excessively consuming society. It all ties together. The way yogurt is made, the way beer is brewed, the way a unique muscle car is built, the way a particularly crafty piece of code is written (whether new or old), the way an oak writing desk is made, the way a 25 year old 4-bit computer can multiply 16-bit integers faster than the newest Pentium 4's, the way the computer on Voyager II can be reconfigured from a million billion miles away without crashing, the way your personally hacked Linux kernel does something nobody else has thought of... it all happens because of craftsmanship. Yeah, those old mainframes probably crashed more often than Windows does today, but there is some kind of value (for which I cannot find a word) that exists in things made by the truly skilled... by the wizards, the gurus, the master craftsmen.
Secondly, there is something in the "hacker culture" (see the Jargon file) that draws people like us to the values that I'm describing in the paragraph above. It doesn't matter what your other hobbies are, whether they involve nature, ham radio, literature, etc. There is something about freedom, quality, beauty (even if it isn't physical beauty), correctness, practicality, craftiness, challenge... It's a way of thinking that people outside the hacker community have apparently forgotten.
Climbers have always customised or made their own gear. Perhaps because if it breaks they have to fix it while being snowed on and hanging next to a vertical cliff face. Or perhaps they are happy with taking risks.
I don't know, as far as the gear that keeps me alive goes,(Eg harnesses and boots) I'm personally happy with getting OTS gear and breaking it in until it fits me. Cutting, stretching, or otherwise structurally altering it is only something that I'd pay somebody else to do, so there's somebody else's eyes on the job to tell me if my idea is suicide.
On the other hand those modified zipper pulls are damn handy.
Back to the stone age! Cool!
- I'd be the first stone age hacker^h^h^h^h^h^cracker: I'd wait until you invented something really useful, then creep stealthily up and use my stone age nmap (a large club).
When you awoke, you'd see that I'd also defaced your site (cave wall) with crude and insulting cave paintings: "T&K h4s 0wnored ur firez!", "All your fires are belong to us" etc.
I'm so excited I can't wait. When do we start?
T&K.
Political language
Once homebrewing became legal again (which happened in the 80s, if I remember correctly), the homebrew industry started to regain strength. At this point, I wouldn't say that brewing is by any means a lost art...I've brewed hundreds of gallons at this point. The stuff is like zucchini...if you produce it, you produce a LOT of it...and let me tell you, nothing moves your data mining requests to the front of the line faster than giving the DBAs lots of homebrew! :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
If you live in Wisconsin like I do, brewing your own beer is not a lost art it is required.
Got Code?
90% of skills come from the doing!
Something that couch potatoes do not comprehend.
BTW your first home brew, should if you study, will kick ass out of any shitmyster BUD that is made with rice. Most couch spuds can't tell the difference so that is why BUD seems so great.
Get off your ass study and do.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Hm, I wonder how medieval style chain mail would look like?
And yes, I do know that we are really talking about body armor.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
I think hacking and pursuit of lost skills go hand in hand. After all, they're both (to me anyway,) about the pursuit of knowledge, preferrably handy knowledge.
:D
Personally, I know some obscure things like miscellaneous bladesmithing info concerning metallurgy and blade geometry, soldering techniques, Japanese language, and operation/maintenance/repair info for a wide range of contemporary firearms (fairly obscure knowledge up here in Canada.)
It's all about better living through superior knowledge. There are so many things people don't bother to learn nowadays that are just HANDY at times. Hacking is just a modern day manifestation of "tinkering" with things to learn how they work, often to repair them. The only real difference is the transition from physical to virtual.
Brewing beer is an excuse to make your apartment smell horrible, making soap is an excuse to see how quickly various household items dissolve when exposed to lye, and metalsmithing is an excuse to pretend that you're Sauron.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
One of the best theories I've heard to describe modern times is that we are living in a Dark Age. Of course we don't call it that overtly, but in a few hundred years the history books will describe it that way. For example, we've reduced the cost of manufacturing things so greatly that the major cost of many items is simply shipping. And, we've become so dependent on manufacturing these cheap things that we're deliberately designing them with a short lifespan to perpetuate the further manufacturing and shipping of things, which will then need to be replaced so more of them can be built. It's kind of like a virus. Or rather, has tricked our central nervous system. Now we just want to keep making things, and we've lost sight of the reason we ever started in the first place.
Anyway, I would add hunting to your list. Being able to go out to the woods and bring home free dinner for a month is a pretty awesome skill to have. And it's going to be much healthier meat than the beef or (even worse) chicken you get at the grocery store.
Just recently I learned how to cut up a whole chicken, and I will never pay $5.99 a pound for boneless skinless chicken breasts again. Plus, you can make an awesome soup from the parts of the chicken you don't use anywhere else.
Oh, and hunting comes with guns, which are pretty cool. Or, if you want to go ninja style, there's crossbows and stuff you can use. Who doesn't like crossbows?
The amazing thing about it all is that in developed world, practicioners of the 'lost arts' make pretty decent money, whilst the artesans in the developing world make very little.
:)
In Chile one can buy a 4 foot high handmade, hand painted earthernware flowerpot for all of 50 bucks. That same flowerpot in the US would probably cost (if you could find it), 300 dollars or more; all this because the artesan is practicing a 'lost art'.
Out in the country down here you can still find a 'smith' and a 'cooper'.
Knot tying is not so big here, but ohhh the cheese
You're trying to pull a "John Katz" type association, ala Columbine: "Geeks are oppressed. These kids were oppressed. Thus, these guys were oppressed geeks, like we are, and we must sympathize and condone what they did." No.
Hacking is hacking - whether it's with computers, cars, or some other technical device. You're making things work better, improving on them.
Learning "lost arts" of the likes of brewing, breadmaking, metalwork, etc. are not hacking. Doing so is simply seeking out knowledge. It is the self-enlightenment of the mind. It is the original concept of 'education' (as stated by the Greeks) fullfilled. Hacking might fall into this as a subset, but "hacking = learning" is a crock of katzism: an intellectual and logical farce.
(Thank the Maker he's not around anymore, btw)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
of is "The Forgotten Arts and Crafts" by John Semour. Amazon.com has it and lets you look at lots of it online. Check it out.
It's full of how to do "outdated" arts like thatching a house, making fences with hand built tools and materials gathered in the forest, and blacksmithing, in addition to household type crafts such as making cream and butter and soap. I bought it a couple months ago after finding an enormously positive review on the net somewhere. It is full of enough diagrams to satisfy the average geek.
As for why seeking lost skills is an attraction to geeks, I think it comes down to problem solving. Problem solving is a trait universally desirable in geeks. It doesn't matter if the problem is how to get your program to run in less than x seconds or how to get information from here to there quickly over the phone system or how to make your own yogurt. It's all problem solving.
Books like this appeal to geeks because they open a new (old) world of problems and give elegant solutions to them. The solutions are time-tested and have come from the collective mind of thousands and thousands of clever people. It is a natural geek thing to do to admire their elegant solutions to their problems.
There's also a huge feeling of escape from the headaches of technology when you imagine life without computers, electricity, etc. I'm not sure about all of geekdom, but I enjoy understanding and imagining a technologically simple life that doesn't include depending on a keyboard and screen for a livelihood.
"metalsmithing, sewing, baking bread, making soap, knot tying, brewing beer, woodcarving, yogurt and cheese.. there are so many skills 'lost' in the modern 'american' lifestyle..."
You may need those skills before you know it. I think it was former CIA director Richard Helms who is said to have had a stone axe in a frame behind his desk. The caption underneath said simply, "The Weapon of the Future".
Insert witty sig here.
Not to mention that a tremendously successful pickup line is "did you know that in the Middle Ages people use to have sex just like we shake hands today?"
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Our lives are so overly-analytical we don't know where we come from or where we're going. The analytical approach (cutting things into smaller and smaller _separate_ pieces, building walls, barriers lines etc) is so pervasive it's in danger of damaging or even destroying society.
What's great about making things ourselves is that we are connected to those things in a world where connections (real ones not electronics illusions thereof) are more and more difficult to come by.
When we learn how to do things for ourselves rather than just buying things, we get a better sense of how things work and where they come from . I would like to see neighborhood butcher shops where locally-raised animals would be slaughtered on the premises. Killing our own meat (or seeing it done) would make some people vegetarian, and others would have more appreciation of the sacrifice other beings make for us. That's just one example of course.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
Belgian beer is the *WORST* swill I have ever tasted. I have drunk beer all over Europe. Some is good, some is great. Belgian beer sucks.
Not to mention the fact that you said a *VERY* dirty word...
The answer is yes and potentially.
First off, instant bread in a bread machine doesn't count. The advantage of hippie parents: we grew our own wheat, ground it up on the back porch in small batches, (ok - so the mill was an electric "magic mill"), then kneaded and baked. The best bread ever, and completely irreproducable except by hand.
As for beer, I brewed my first batch in 1986 and at that time, it was a practically lost art. Finding supplies was hard, but since Vertmont had just upped the drinking age and I missed the grandfather clause by 3 months, I had no choice but pursue the higher knowledge. Glad I did too. Also, I'm glad it's become popular - a hedge against it getting lost again. I remember those summer days in the basement, Doors blaring, cracking open a home brew - nothing like it!
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Semi-tangential, magician Ricky Jay isn't just a performer; he's also a devoted student of the history of magic. He often talks about how important this historical knoweledge is to understanding his art, and his own place in the greater timeline of that art.
It's a lesson that could probably be applied to most contemporary professions...
that seems like a dull way to have sex.
ôó
For me, it's about self-reliance. I'm a do-it-yourself guy. People in modern society depend on a huge network of people, almost all of them strangers. We all learned in "Intro to Economics" that when two people specialize, they can produce more goods. However, it's satisfying to live by the fruits of your own labor, if only partially. In order to do so, you have to learn a lot of diverse, basic skills.
I went through a phase where I took this idea to its logical conclusion. I wanted to learn everything necessary to survive by myself indefinitely. This is a daunting (and mildly insane) task, and it should come as no surprise that I backed away from it. But it's still fun ponder every now and then.
irb(main):001:0>
People who hack have other hobbies. Big deal. Lots of people have lots of different hobbies, and hacking doesn't necessarily have to be one of them. Most total slackers I've known have been interested in things like "metalsmithing, sewing, baking bread, making soap, knot tying, brewing beer, woodcarving, yogurt and cheese." Those are the kinds of things they do instead of working.
As to this going to the core of some essential geekness, I think that is just self-centered, elitist garbage. The human race is such a diverse set, that attempting to draw boundaries around groups based on many traits usually ends up being vapor.
So now that the geeks have claimed interesting hobbies, does that mean the cool slackers will have to watch more television or something? Perhaps we could patent all these hobbies, and sue the slackers for infringing on our turf.
I don't mean to be a party pooper. By all means, all of you go ahead. I just won't be participating in the circle jerk. I hope you don't revoke my membership to geekdom. Fleeing elitism and arrogance is what made me an outsider in the first place.
I'm not trying to troll here or anything, but what does it matter? If you like doing it, keep doing it, it's basically the same with hacking (or any other hobby.) Some people like working in their yard, some people like doing weird science projects, some people like hacking. It's not the same thing, but they're both good hobbies.
I do have to say though editors, can't we get some more relevant questions? I thought this site had "Stuff that matters."
I do these things because I want to be in control. There is nothing worse than a stupid situation that you *know* you could get out of with some basic skill...
This is one of the greatest attractions OSS currently holds for me. I know that anything I learn to do with OSS tools, I will continue to be able to do for a long time without getting permission, paying fees, or dealing with silly restrictions that only benefit companies who have enough already.
On a personal level it makes sense as well. Taking the heat for something you are not directly responsible for sucks.
Anyone willing to stick their neck out in order to champion some proprietary software is just gambling with their career. You think they really care?
They don't, it is just about revenue and nothing more. If your problem is shared by many you can be safe in the knowing it will be addressed. You can even look like you are on the ball while advocating your marginal 'standard' in the box thinking. The real truth is you are more lucky if you stick with the crowd.
This attitude promotes strong in the box thinking combined with a healthy and well refined finger pointing and blame shifing skills. Innovation? forget it. Competitive advantage comes down to how hard you can make your people work and how big of a ball buster you have for a purchasing agent. Boy, that sure makes me want to come to work early... (cough)
I once worked in a shop where one of my job duties was to make sure that what I made was correct and within stated tolerances. This shop had a quality assurance department to help make sure this was true, but it was expected that you had tools, knowledge of the machine and the ability to read and understand the specifications because the quality people sometimes made mistakes too.
Well, one batch of rather large and expensive parts was found to be defective one day. It was right after I had complted my stage of the work.
I was found to be at fault for not making sure the guy before me did his job right. I was pissed at first, but thought about it and it made some good sense. Afterall I had the information and tools to evaluate the work done before --why not?
I made damn sure afterword to have the skill and information needed to evaluate both my own work and those before me just to make sure I had the ability to deal with what I was responsible for.
So take this ethic in the context of systems being sold and used today. It's scary.
On one hand you have to trust the software is designed well and does what it says because you cannot actually see the work of others before you --even if you have the skill.
On the other, the company that pays your way wants you to be held accountable for what those same systems do. You did ok the purchase right?
The creator of the software takes almost all of your rights through the legal wrapper that comes with the package while you take the heat and have to deal with the issues.
So you can evaluate basically nothing, must pay blood money for fixes and updates out of your control and take the heat for the fuckups of one of the most cash rich companies around?
At least with Open Source you can examine what you are getting. You can learn how it works and why it does so. You can implement how you see fit and act in a responsible manner.
I was called the fool for hosing up so many parts. I was asked why I worked so hard at doing the right job on parts that were wrong.
Today when I see all the win32 problems I shake my head and wonder at the foolishness of it all. Who in their right mind would actually step up and take that kind of responsibility understanding that they are more or less powerless to act on it?
I guess ignorance is really an excuse in IT. Can't find any other reason for it.
Franky, the whole mess makes me sick.
So, back to the skills. I like knowing that I can go into the woods and make fire, shelter weapons do just fine. Sometimes th
Blogging because I can...
Perhaps you think I should spend more time building skills that will allow me to earn more money or better secure my intended path in my career?
- The only blacksmith I know makes about $60k and spends more time with his kids than any other 40 year old I know. IMHO, that's real wealth.
- I schedule time to learn new professional skills during work hours and I spend plenty of time exploring new databases, playing with new languages and language features. We're talking about things to do after hours and on the weekend.
Since what we're talking about really is leisure time, perhaps you're bothered that I'm choosing to do something outside the ordinary with my leisure time? Perhaps you'd prefer it if I spent a lot more time in front of the television (currently only hooked up to a DVD player). Perhaps I should not find things I enjoy doing in my home (where the rest of my family resides) and I should spend time in clubs and bars pursuing one-night stands and reinforcement of my self-esteem from strangers more interested in style than substance?Perhaps not.
I make certain that I have leisure time in my life and what I pursue with that leisure time may suprise you. Like many other people on here, I prefer the taste of a beer that I have made to one that I bought, I prefer to sit on a chair that I crafted from wood to one that I bought, I enjoy sitting in a garage on my chair drinking my beer after completing a valve adjustment on my motorcycle.
Learning to be self-reliant by picking up new hobbies that I enjoy is not a waste of my or anyone else's precious time. If anything, it is one of the most rewarding things that I do with my time, not only because I enjoy the challenge and the exploration, but because most of these can be enjoyed with others who are important to you. If you have a spouse and/or children, ask them if they'd rather you do what you first thought of when writing your post or spending it with them making cheese? The answer might suprise you.
Regards, Ross
In a few hundred years, few books from this century or the last will exist. Since about 1850, when paper made from wood-pulp was first produced, many books have simply disintegrated as a result of the acid content. I have a number of books from as recently as 1987 which are already disintegrating.
That is what's going to make this a Dark Age.
I think another facet of "hacking" things is the feeling of being more in control. For much of our lives in modern society, from manufactured products to fast food, things are created by other people to be sold to us at a profit. What's really in that chicken pot pie?
Doing for yourself gives back some measure of control and satisfaction, even if it is in relatively small ways. For example, I prefer to drive a manual transmission car. I would bet a larger percentage of the Slashdot population drive manuals than the general population in the USA.
I also ejoy making pancakes, scons, and biscuits from scratch. Similar recipes, yet quite different outcomes. With that level of control, I can make custom pancakes by adding whole wheat, or other types of wheat. Yummy pancakes you will never find in a predefined one-size-fits-all mix at the store. As a bonus, it's also cheaper than buying mixes too.
Computer hacking is just one way to reclaim self-sufficiency.
It's been my experience that hackers are fiercely self-reliant. Not only do they resent being micro-managed at the office, they hate being "consumers". They hate depending on others, because they are, by nature, distrustful.
All hackers I know embody the "if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself" mentality. This is why they learn to code, for when the system fails them. This is why they learn to defend themselves, for when the system fails them. This is why they learn to hunt/make food and basic essencials of life, for when the system fails them.
Hackers are, in very many ways, survivalists, adapted for the "Information Age".
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Check out the 'foxfire' books... they are a combination of mountain man tall tales and 'how to skin a bear' manuals... popular in the 70's I think. http://www.foxfire.org/public.htm
Years ago I did a yoga retreat, and learned enough of the history to discover that some millenia ago, yoga and meditation were the hot happening things that occupied the brainiest people then living, the then-equivalent of today's startups and stock options and IPOs. Interesting.
This essay describes a historical cycle that takes place in Thailand, repeating every century or two. Somebody goes out into the forest and meditates like crazy, rediscovers the Buddha's original findings, and starts a monastic forest tradition. Then the local authorities re-domesticate Buddhism, harnessing it for nationalistic and social purposes. After a few generations the forest tradition burns out, leaving behind a state-endorsed religion that discards the investigative orientation on which the forest tradition thrived. A century or so later, somebody else starts the whole thing up again.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Most /.'rs still have 'sex' like they're shaking hands. atleast it involves shaking hands.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
>> ..things like make soap...
> That's not the first skill I'd associate with the > SCA.
That's because you have to issue make clean as well:
localhost$ make soap; make clean;
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I hope I'm not too late in this thread but I am surprised that nobody has mentioned the Foxfire books (at least I haven't seen anything modded up yet).
The Foxfire Fund was established to preserve the vanishing folkways of Appalachia and, let me tell you, those people knew how to provide for themselves.
There is an extensive series of books covering such diverse utilitarian topics as wood lore, blacksmithing, instrument making, weaving and so on.
Check it out at The Foxfire Fund.
Why? Because hackers see themselves as artisans, not consumers.
Artisanship is, in my experience, a strong influence in the makeup of many hackers. The best ones remind me of my father, who was a master calligrapher: in their love of making beautiful things, and in the scrupulousness with which they treat their "mystery". I dare say that hacking is the last bastion of artisanship left in our consumption-oriented McSociety.
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I see some people making disparaging comments about cities, but I don't think we need to succomb to that excuse. Even the smallest bits of nature bring their own magic with them, and there's plenty of room for just a little something here and there.
I live in the city and have a little balcony garden. When I get home from work in the evening, I carefully water the plants that need it, remove the aphids from my chives by hand, fertilize the poppys, check if any of my strawberries are ripe, remove dead and sick leaves from other plants, make sure neither my mint nor my oregano is getting the upper hand in its fight for space, etc... This all sounds very mundane, but somehow while I'm doing it all, the world seems much more beautiful then it did the rest of the day.
Then I go and use my home-grown thyme, oregano, cilantro, etc, to make a beautiful meal, better than you could get in any restaurant. I eat it while watching the bees come and go from my columbine and bleeding hearts. And that's an important portion of the joy in my life.
Most of those things are good to do as a hobby, and you can make most of that stuff cheaper than buying it. I think that we need to keep that knowledge in case something happens to the world and we need to start over again. Also it is good to see how things used to be done.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I've seen several articles bashing 'rediscovering' older techs at unneccessary but those people are missing a key point. Some of these 'older'concepts haven't been revisited in a while and could probably be improved by a creative insight with modern techniques.
;-)
A significant portion of our technology is based off of early 1900's designs. For example, the way we generate electrical power (ie heat + water = steam >>> turns turbine > spins magnet > generates electricity) hasn't changed since it's discovery. There are some newer areas (solar cells, fuel cells) but for the most part we power 99% of our society this way.
A lot of basic technology is still very fundamental to our culture and I'm glad to see people revisiting it - it's the only way to continually shock the technology base of an advanced civilization.
These advances can come from anywhere, so what if the SCA are rebuilding medieval style armor? What if one of them comes up with a superior chainmail and merges it with Kevlar, reduces the weight and sells it to the military?
How about new designs for soap? New styles of paper? Are the old ways the best? You'll never know until you research a couple. There were tons of expirements in radio control in the early 1900's many of which were abandoned because the technology wasn't there - how many of those could be useful now?
Do the funamentals of our wireless transmitters remain the most efficient way to transmit information?
And it's fun, did I mention it's fun?
You might also search for the bootstrap encyclopedia...
What to do in case human kind re-start from nothing but knowledge ?
Imagine if there is no steel, no electricity, no tools, nothing but you in the wild nature with the bootstrap process in your brain.
First find food (ok), then wood (easy) and minerals (how?) and start the process with some other folks.
How many weeks for your first steel tool ?
How many months will you need to get electricity ?
How many years to get a real power plant ?
Many games ( Civ, AOE ) simulate this but who really knows enougth to complete this start from scratch ?
Is there a how-to-do-it-all-from-scratch encyclopedia ?
As as geek I often wonder if anyone else in the geekdoom tried to find it or to gather pieces of it.
Any feedback anyone ?
Your question and the number of replies show that geeks often have a hacking around spirit, creation oriented, and easily imagine themselves in an analog process I mentioned above.
Yet it seems engineering is always close to the lost art studied by the geek ( metalsmithing, sewing, making soap rather than some old kind of music, painting, poetry ). You see, your fellows aren't really hacking outside of engineering, it's an other way to exercise the same mind thinking "how to do this?" and then "yes I've made it!"
Great post of you, I'm looking for answers to my own question in the threads.
Yes, I think that a deeply held interest in the basic mechanisms of how things work is inherent to being a geek. Back in school you could tell which kid was going to grow up to be a geek because if you asked him what time it was, not only could he tell you the time, but he could (and would!) also explain the inner workings of his watch, discuss the theoretical physics behind our planetary time zones, and get off on a tangent about fluctuations in space-time and the potential implications. (Yeah, simple stuff now, but pretty heady for an 8th grader!)
/.ers, but Martha Stewart has created an entire industry based on glorifying the domestic arts. Sure, she makes her own yogurt, raises her own chickens for the eggs (which, BTW, are color-coordinated with the décor of her kitchen *gag*), and whips up little "projects" on her sewing machine in nothing flat. Takes "field trips" to a variety of artisans like metalsmiths and stone carvers. And gardening? Fuhgeddaboudit. She's gone beyond the standard squash & peas & carrots - she's cultivating "heirloom" tomatoes with exotic color variations and patterns on them, for chrissakes!
....Bethanie....
That said, I don't think that this interest in making/doing stuff yourself is unique JUST to geeks. This may be completely foreign territory to most
To be honest, aside from the fact that most people really don't CARE how to make stuff themselves, they just don't have TIME to do it. Are you going to come home after having worked all day for a paycheck (to pay for the hefty mortgage, the nice car, the 2-week family vacation) and spend 2 hours cooking a meal that will be consumed in 15 minutes? Or spend 10 hours sewing a garment that might cost $20 at a department store? Our time has become more valuable than the products we can hand-craft, so we buy the cheap manufactured goods and go about our lives.
It takes a deep sense of satisfaction and fulfillment, a pride in good craftsmanship, a true appreciation for things made "from scratch" to pursue these "lost arts" in today's culture. It's making things for the sake of making things and the value we place on them ourselves, unlike the "old days" when time was a less valuable commodity, and the only way to get stuff WAS to make it.
Now, to return to the original issue at hand - WHY does this seem to be more prevalent among geek set? Well, think about it: you've got a bunch of single guys with plenty of disposable income and free time on their hands (due to lack of familial responsibilities and no social life to speak of). It harkens back to the days of the great monasteries. Think about the monks hand-transcribing all those texts (a little like writing code, no?) - no families, no need for money... (no sex!) - just a bunch of time on their hands to spend their days furthering the intellectual evolution of the species. Load a guy down with a family and a mortgage, and *fwip* his available time (and money!) available for geeking out at will just dwindled considerably.
I speak, I daresay, from experience.