For me, Slashdot defaults to 12pt Times New Roman, on a grey background (thanks to good old braindead Netscape3 and the low-bandwidth option), in a window about 750 pixels wide. I can't use the default layout at all, it makes my eyes crazy. And as you say, most web pages are clueless about design for *reading*.
I should have specified that I find the scanned books more eye-restful than not only the plain old screen, but also the ebook readers that I use, which allow me to select font, size, line length, page size, and background. Even with the reader set up to exactly mimic a real book, I find that I can only read a regular ebook for about an hour. Whereas with these scanned books, I can read an entire book, cover to cover, however long it takes.
As I speculate in other posts, the very artifacts from scanning paper may be part of it -- scanned paper (especially *old* paper) is darker than it appears, due to shadowing from the micropits in the paper's surface.
There are definitely times when I miss the old Herc monochrome screen, which was dead-black except where it displayed print. Vastly easier on the eyes than VGA, even when said VGA is set to low brightness and with darker "restful" screen colours.
So, your bookshelf has lots of weird old novels too, eh?:) A lot of them were really very good books in their own way, written to be a relaxing read, not to be studied and analyzed. Sortof the "TV and a beer after work" of their era. But your average relaxing read doesn't attract literature professors, so as the generations pass and the next popular book hits the shelves, the old ones fall out of memory. But they were the books our great-grandparents read and loved.
It bothers me greatly that libraries cull on a basis of popularity. I've even seen classics and rare reference books on the discard pile, simply because no one checked them out in the past two years. And then educators complain that not enough people use the library, yet this narrowing of available materials becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. (And we older folk then complain about how kids have no sense of history.) But you're right -- budgets only go so far (and are largely wasted in some areas, like L.A. County!), and libraries are now driven primarily by popular demand.
As I began to speculate in another post, the very flaws and artifacts may be part of why these scanned pages are easier on the eye: paper isn't a continous surface; it's a web of fibres surrounded by microscopic pits, which appear dark as scanned. So even tho the scanned paper *looks* bright, it's probably much darker than would be the equivalent colour as generated by a computer.
For ebooks, I use a very configurable reader, that lets me pick font, size, page width, and background. With paper books, large fonts tire my brain out (I think because they induce slower reading speed than my norm, which is about 800wpm) but for ebooks and screen fonts, it seems to work the other way around. Might be partly that a book is 15" from my eyes, whereas the monitor is ideally about 4 feet away.
Unlike most folk, I almost never use maximized windows. On a big monitor, my browser is set at 800x600, partly to control line length. Columns exist for a reason!
My eyes are glare-sensitive, so I use a grey background for most stuff... but have found that these scanned books don't produce the glare-fatigue of a normal light-background screen. One suspects there is actually a good deal less "brightness" than they appear to have, because when you scan paper, you're also scanning a lot of microscopic pits in the paper's surface, which appear as tiny bits of darkness.
I've been using the openlibrary.org site for a while now. I find these scanned original pages FAR more restful to the eye than any other form of electronic book. This way, I can sit down and read a complete book on the screen -- without suffering the eye fatigue that comes from reading large swaths of ordinary onscreen text. I think it has a lot to do with print fonts being designed specifically for the eye, and somewhat to do with the normal yellowing of paper that produces a less glary background.
Also, many of these old texts, especially popular fiction from the late 1800s, have been discarded by meatspace libraries, so are otherwise pretty much unavailable -- and quite possibly in danger of being lost to the public altogether. (The first such book I picked at random to read, a late-1800s novel I'd never heard of, also proved to be a very relaxing way to spend an evening.)
Anyway, I've been thrilled with the project, especially with the ability to download the scanned images as well as the plain text.
As someone speculated up above, maybe the lawyers are taking them for a ride... "Look, more free money from the RIAA!" These suits =are= kindof like class action suits (too many of which are equally bogus), but without all the bother of establishing a class or arguing in front of a jury.
I think the shareholders might be very interested in an audit with respect to what these suits cost them -- not only in profits/dividends but in raw price per share. Market analysis timelined against lawsuits could also be quite interesting (even if the correlation is spurious, it could be used to pressure the RIAA cartel).
====== (BTW could you please mark your quotebacks somehow, even if just by a blank or dashed line? It's often hard to tell where the quote ends and your own comment starts. Thanks!!)
Re the last comment on your blog, from AMD FanBoi -- to the effect that this could be used as evidence that 1) that's all the shared songs are worth, and 2) that the RIAA is knowingly suing the wrong people. Your thoughts?
I found this comment (on Ray's blog) by AMD FanBoi most interesting:
========= Seems to me that this just could put the RIAA into a difficult position. Either they sued the wrong person and still made them pay $300 for the privilege of being wrongly sued,OR They sued the right person and admit that the true cost of the alleged infringement is ONLY $300. Either the RIAA admits that they are suing the wrong people, or they admit that the actual value of the infringement at this level is $300, -- a figure for which many sued people might actually settle at. I would love to see this settlement cited in other cases, and see just what the RIAA does to distinguish this case from all the other boilerplate cases. =======
Lancaster, halfway between Bakersfield and L.A. At various times I've tried local bakeries (mostly in Santa Clarita) and was no happier with them. Different from the commercial bread (IMO all the national brands are inedible), but still not Real Bread by my lights. I want plain white real yeast bread, that tastes like bread and nothing else!
Another problem is that in California there is a bakers union and a doughmakers union, and most shops can't afford to support both. So most get in frozen dough and hire only bakers. So what they call "fresh" bread really isn't.
I have a bread droid, but it's not quite the same.
I find most commercial bread inedible for the same reason: it tastes like "sweet nothing". There's no real flavour, just a bland generic sweetness. It's about as satisfying as... er, well, most of the time I'd rather go hungry.
Where I grew up in Montana, the big groceries (there meaning Buttrey's and Albertson's) all made their own bread from scratch, with the full rising and all that. Even their plain white bread had a rich, slightly-yeasty flavour, never sweet, and it was SOOOOOOOOOO good and SOOOOOO satisfying even all by itself... there's nothing like it in California, not even in the "local" bakeries. The nearest I've come across in 25 years here are the plain hoagies at Sam's Club.
There is one pizzeriza here that makes their own crust from scratch, rather than from frozen dough like almost everywhere else -- makes a big difference there, too.
Anyway, you are right -- the simplest way to control your weight is simply cut the carbs in half, especially the ones that make you munchy (refined carbs before noon, soft drinks except with a meal). No need to change anything else.
I think he meant *munchy* -- eating for no reason -- rather than "hungry-with-purpose".
When you exercise, you tend to eat because you feel a whole-body NEED to eat -- to replenish fuel and nutrients.
But when you don't exercise, you tend to eat because your stomach happens to be empty and whining, or because you're bored, or because you ate carbs for breakfast and now your liver is being lazy and wants more carbs instead of using the fat all around it.
BTW, one way to avoid getting the munchies is to eat fat/protein for breakfast, and no carbs (or at least not refined carbs) before noon at the earliest.
The trouble with diet soda is that 1) anyone who can taste the difference between fructose and sucrose can definitely taste the difference between sugar and the artificial sweeteners (hell, I can tell beet sugar from cane sugar from regular corn syrup from HFCS from sucralose from... etc etc.) and 2) the sweeteners in diet soda are no better for you and probably worse. Aspartame has a number of questionable side effects, including being a thyroid inhibitor. The last thing you want when you're trying to lose weight is for your metabolism to run SLOWER!
And the effect of diet soda can be quite contrary to weight loss. I know someone who gets all her soda free, so she takes what the guy gives her... which was almost always diet soda. One month all he had was regular soda, so that's what she drank. Without doing anything else different, this gal lost 30 pounds that month. Just from drinking regular soda instead of aspartame-sweetened diet soda.
I know someone who appears to have dietary fructose intolerance -- some of the more concentrated forms (bottled Coke for one, but not fountain Coke) give her the runs an hour after consuming it -- and the effect is so consistent you can just about set your watch by it.
Fibre is *by definition* any *NON-digestible* carbohydrate, most generally meaning cellulose. You can't digest fibre at all, unless you are a ruminant or a termite. And there is nothing magical about it.
Some forms are more irritating to the bowel than others. Too much fibre can lead to chronic intestinal distress, and even systemic dehydration (since fibre retains water in the bowel that would normally be extracted and returned to your system). Fibre tends to prevent nutrient absorption, partly because with more bulk, fewer compounds encounter the intestinal wall (where they are absorbed) and partly because of increased intestinal mucous (a byproduct of irritation) which coats the food particles, again making them unavailable for absorption. Soy products are particularly bad that way.
OTOH, not enough fibre and you can become constipated due to dry hard stools. But the amount needed is low -- on the order of 1% of your diet is plenty. Upping your intake to 2% isn't the small increase it appears to be, either -- it roughly doubles the load on the gut.
Like yourself, I can taste the difference between fructose and regular sugar. Frex, Nestle Ice Tea mix recently switched to fructose, and then to fructose+sucralose as their sweetener, and now it tastes funny to me (I noticed the new package had an odd taste, then compared old and new ingredient lists... sure enough, they'd changed the formula). I had quite an argument with the Nestle phone representative about their "new" iced tea mix, but the upshot is they'll do as they please, and I've stopped buying their product.:(
I know a lot of middle-aged people who maintained normal weight all their lives -- UNTIL they got a computer and started spending every free moment sitting in front of it, not only losing the casual exercise that used to take up the same time, but also usually snacking on a lot more junk food than they ever did before.
The other problem of course is the "healthy eating" of the past 20 years, where meat and fat are Bad and carbs are Good. This of course is completely contrary to how our metabolisms are set up to work -- we deal well with protein and fat, but insulin levels get wonked when we overdo the carbs.
Who, me? At 52, I weigh the same as I did in college (and I've always been slim), and I don't make any particular effort to maintain that. But my diet is based around red meat; I do at least an hour of physical work first thing every day; when I'm sitting in front of the computer, I don't snack; and I seldom drink soda (and never by itself).
That's probably the only point of relevance here -- since fructose is metabolically LESS efficient than sucrose (sugar), fructose doesn't satisfy like sugar does. So you can unwittingly consume more fructose and more total calories without reaching a point of satiation.
Same as with low-fat and fat-free diets -- the body NEEDS a certain amount of fat, and if you don't get it, you never feel satified and are always hungry.
As to the "high fructose corn syrup" thing -- this is in comparison to *regular* corn syrup, NOT to sugars in general. It still has less fructose than you'd get from metabolizing sucrose.
I usually generalize this somewhat more, by pointing out that most urbanites are now 3 generations removed from the farm, so haven't even had a grandparent who could remember the Olden Days for them -- and in my observation, even a secondhand memory is better than none. Without it, there's this total disconnect between the everyday things of life and their actual origins. Everyone doesn't need to have every skill or experience. But it's good (perhaps even *necessary*, over the long haul) to know someone who can at least relate to those old skills and experiences.**
I started really thinking about this after encountering two *adults* who did not grok that beef comes from cows!! And I'm sure everybody knows someone who never gets beyond "water comes out of the faucet".
As to retroclasses like you mention -- maybe today there are more participants in raw numbers, but as a *percentage* of the population, I suspect they are a tiny fraction of what they once were.
But as a whole, we're losing what used to be necessary skills at an alarming rate, and a relative-few hobbyists are not enough to preserve them. Maybe we don't NEED these skills in modern life. But life isn't static nor is the future guaranteed to be stable, and we may need these skills again someday.
** We have a 2nd and 3rd generation now who *didn't* grow up with a major war no more remote than secondhand experience, and look where *that's* leading us.:/
It's already happened with some skills that used to be considered mainstream. We no longer need horses, we have cars; consequently nowadays most people wouldn't know which end of a horse faces forward, let alone how to get somewhere on one. Try finding someone who knows how to make and set stained glass. Can you bake bread without a recipe or a bread-droid? Etc, etc.
And yes, normally we don't NEED these skills anymore. But is their loss a good thing? Maybe not.
Heh... I'm evidently more of the "mapper" mindset. While I unintentionally collect vast amounts of useless information, what I use are the connections and patterns generated by said information (per my specific skill, spotting *shifts* in patterns).
What if everyone has lost the skills required to fix the machine? there have been a number of SF novels that examine this premise -- a system where no one needs to know anything, because the machines all maintain it for them. But what happens when the machines break down?
What happens if you're deprived of your, uh, offline storage? would you suddenly be unable to contact anyone because the information is not in your brain at all?
But I think the parent poster confuses automating a skill with losing a skill. Just because you use a seed drill to plant wheat doesn't mean you can forget all about why things are done as they are, such as planting depth, soil moisture and temperature, etc. If you DO forget all that, then if the seed drill goes haywire, you have no way of knowing what's wrong (and may not even recognise that it's gone wrong) let alone how to fix it.
But if you haven't LOST the skill (by relying wholly on automation to do it for you), you can still do it by hand if you must.
Good example in today's geek world: my sister was from the last class of architects who were taught drafting with paper and pencil. The next generation all learned AutoCAD instead. When the power goes out in her office, she's the only one who can keep working (significant when you bill your time at $100/hour!) Everyone else has to twiddle their thumbs until power is restored and their computers come back up.
I see the same thing all the time. I pretty much carry a map of my surroundings (and for that matter, most of the western U.S.) in my head, and I'm never lost, and always know about where I am and the most efficient way to get where I'm going. Some of this is a naturally good sense of direction, but most of it comes from having been taught extensive geography and mapmaking skills in grade school (in the early 1960s) -- this conveys the skill of knowing where you are in relation to both your surroundings and to their representative positions on a map. Not only that, but when we were kids, we walked or bicycled everywhere, so we had to figure out our routes for ourselves. No parent was going to ferry us everywhere.
But most of the younger generation have never learned to read a map, let alone had to make one themselves, so they never have a clue where they are or how to get where they're going, unless someone (or something like a GPS) *tells* them. They're completely unable to figure it out for themselves. And when they needed to go somewhere, a parent almost always drove them, so they never learn how to lay out a route.
Slashdot Mirror
For me, Slashdot defaults to 12pt Times New Roman, on a grey background (thanks to good old braindead Netscape3 and the low-bandwidth option), in a window about 750 pixels wide. I can't use the default layout at all, it makes my eyes crazy. And as you say, most web pages are clueless about design for *reading*.
I should have specified that I find the scanned books more eye-restful than not only the plain old screen, but also the ebook readers that I use, which allow me to select font, size, line length, page size, and background. Even with the reader set up to exactly mimic a real book, I find that I can only read a regular ebook for about an hour. Whereas with these scanned books, I can read an entire book, cover to cover, however long it takes.
As I speculate in other posts, the very artifacts from scanning paper may be part of it -- scanned paper (especially *old* paper) is darker than it appears, due to shadowing from the micropits in the paper's surface.
There are definitely times when I miss the old Herc monochrome screen, which was dead-black except where it displayed print. Vastly easier on the eyes than VGA, even when said VGA is set to low brightness and with darker "restful" screen colours.
So, your bookshelf has lots of weird old novels too, eh? :) A lot of them were really very good books in their own way, written to be a relaxing read, not to be studied and analyzed. Sortof the "TV and a beer after work" of their era. But your average relaxing read doesn't attract literature professors, so as the generations pass and the next popular book hits the shelves, the old ones fall out of memory. But they were the books our great-grandparents read and loved.
It bothers me greatly that libraries cull on a basis of popularity. I've even seen classics and rare reference books on the discard pile, simply because no one checked them out in the past two years. And then educators complain that not enough people use the library, yet this narrowing of available materials becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. (And we older folk then complain about how kids have no sense of history.) But you're right -- budgets only go so far (and are largely wasted in some areas, like L.A. County!), and libraries are now driven primarily by popular demand.
As I began to speculate in another post, the very flaws and artifacts may be part of why these scanned pages are easier on the eye: paper isn't a continous surface; it's a web of fibres surrounded by microscopic pits, which appear dark as scanned. So even tho the scanned paper *looks* bright, it's probably much darker than would be the equivalent colour as generated by a computer.
Screen fonts are not quite the same. But...
For ebooks, I use a very configurable reader, that lets me pick font, size, page width, and background. With paper books, large fonts tire my brain out (I think because they induce slower reading speed than my norm, which is about 800wpm) but for ebooks and screen fonts, it seems to work the other way around. Might be partly that a book is 15" from my eyes, whereas the monitor is ideally about 4 feet away.
Unlike most folk, I almost never use maximized windows. On a big monitor, my browser is set at 800x600, partly to control line length. Columns exist for a reason!
My eyes are glare-sensitive, so I use a grey background for most stuff... but have found that these scanned books don't produce the glare-fatigue of a normal light-background screen. One suspects there is actually a good deal less "brightness" than they appear to have, because when you scan paper, you're also scanning a lot of microscopic pits in the paper's surface, which appear as tiny bits of darkness.
Actually, you're wrong -- to "take flight" primarily means to take off, or to start a project. So the usage was correct.
I've been using the openlibrary.org site for a while now. I find these scanned original pages FAR more restful to the eye than any other form of electronic book. This way, I can sit down and read a complete book on the screen -- without suffering the eye fatigue that comes from reading large swaths of ordinary onscreen text. I think it has a lot to do with print fonts being designed specifically for the eye, and somewhat to do with the normal yellowing of paper that produces a less glary background.
Also, many of these old texts, especially popular fiction from the late 1800s, have been discarded by meatspace libraries, so are otherwise pretty much unavailable -- and quite possibly in danger of being lost to the public altogether. (The first such book I picked at random to read, a late-1800s novel I'd never heard of, also proved to be a very relaxing way to spend an evening.)
Anyway, I've been thrilled with the project, especially with the ability to download the scanned images as well as the plain text.
As someone speculated up above, maybe the lawyers are taking them for a ride... "Look, more free money from the RIAA!" These suits =are= kindof like class action suits (too many of which are equally bogus), but without all the bother of establishing a class or arguing in front of a jury.
I think the shareholders might be very interested in an audit with respect to what these suits cost them -- not only in profits/dividends but in raw price per share. Market analysis timelined against lawsuits could also be quite interesting (even if the correlation is spurious, it could be used to pressure the RIAA cartel).
======
(BTW could you please mark your quotebacks somehow, even if just by a blank or dashed line? It's often hard to tell where the quote ends and your own comment starts. Thanks!!)
Re the last comment on your blog, from AMD FanBoi -- to the effect that this could be used as evidence that 1) that's all the shared songs are worth, and 2) that the RIAA is knowingly suing the wrong people. Your thoughts?
I found this comment (on Ray's blog) by AMD FanBoi most interesting:
=========
Seems to me that this just could put the RIAA into a difficult position. Either they sued the wrong person and still made them pay $300 for the privilege of being wrongly sued,OR They sued the right person and admit that the true cost of the alleged infringement is ONLY $300. Either the RIAA admits that they are suing the wrong people, or they admit that the actual value of the infringement at this level is $300, -- a figure for which many sued people might actually settle at. I would love to see this settlement cited in other cases, and see just what the RIAA does to distinguish this case from all the other boilerplate cases.
=======
Lancaster, halfway between Bakersfield and L.A. At various times I've tried local bakeries (mostly in Santa Clarita) and was no happier with them. Different from the commercial bread (IMO all the national brands are inedible), but still not Real Bread by my lights. I want plain white real yeast bread, that tastes like bread and nothing else!
Another problem is that in California there is a bakers union and a doughmakers union, and most shops can't afford to support both. So most get in frozen dough and hire only bakers. So what they call "fresh" bread really isn't.
I have a bread droid, but it's not quite the same.
I find most commercial bread inedible for the same reason: it tastes like "sweet nothing". There's no real flavour, just a bland generic sweetness. It's about as satisfying as ... er, well, most of the time I'd rather go hungry.
... there's nothing like it in California, not even in the "local" bakeries. The nearest I've come across in 25 years here are the plain hoagies at Sam's Club.
Where I grew up in Montana, the big groceries (there meaning Buttrey's and Albertson's) all made their own bread from scratch, with the full rising and all that. Even their plain white bread had a rich, slightly-yeasty flavour, never sweet, and it was SOOOOOOOOOO good and SOOOOOO satisfying even all by itself
There is one pizzeriza here that makes their own crust from scratch, rather than from frozen dough like almost everywhere else -- makes a big difference there, too.
Anyway, you are right -- the simplest way to control your weight is simply cut the carbs in half, especially the ones that make you munchy (refined carbs before noon, soft drinks except with a meal). No need to change anything else.
I think he meant *munchy* -- eating for no reason -- rather than "hungry-with-purpose".
When you exercise, you tend to eat because you feel a whole-body NEED to eat -- to replenish fuel and nutrients.
But when you don't exercise, you tend to eat because your stomach happens to be empty and whining, or because you're bored, or because you ate carbs for breakfast and now your liver is being lazy and wants more carbs instead of using the fat all around it.
BTW, one way to avoid getting the munchies is to eat fat/protein for breakfast, and no carbs (or at least not refined carbs) before noon at the earliest.
The trouble with diet soda is that 1) anyone who can taste the difference between fructose and sucrose can definitely taste the difference between sugar and the artificial sweeteners (hell, I can tell beet sugar from cane sugar from regular corn syrup from HFCS from sucralose from ... etc etc.) and 2) the sweeteners in diet soda are no better for you and probably worse. Aspartame has a number of questionable side effects, including being a thyroid inhibitor. The last thing you want when you're trying to lose weight is for your metabolism to run SLOWER!
And the effect of diet soda can be quite contrary to weight loss. I know someone who gets all her soda free, so she takes what the guy gives her... which was almost always diet soda. One month all he had was regular soda, so that's what she drank. Without doing anything else different, this gal lost 30 pounds that month. Just from drinking regular soda instead of aspartame-sweetened diet soda.
I know someone who appears to have dietary fructose intolerance -- some of the more concentrated forms (bottled Coke for one, but not fountain Coke) give her the runs an hour after consuming it -- and the effect is so consistent you can just about set your watch by it.
Fibre is *by definition* any *NON-digestible* carbohydrate, most generally meaning cellulose. You can't digest fibre at all, unless you are a ruminant or a termite. And there is nothing magical about it.
Some forms are more irritating to the bowel than others. Too much fibre can lead to chronic intestinal distress, and even systemic dehydration (since fibre retains water in the bowel that would normally be extracted and returned to your system). Fibre tends to prevent nutrient absorption, partly because with more bulk, fewer compounds encounter the intestinal wall (where they are absorbed) and partly because of increased intestinal mucous (a byproduct of irritation) which coats the food particles, again making them unavailable for absorption. Soy products are particularly bad that way.
OTOH, not enough fibre and you can become constipated due to dry hard stools. But the amount needed is low -- on the order of 1% of your diet is plenty. Upping your intake to 2% isn't the small increase it appears to be, either -- it roughly doubles the load on the gut.
Like yourself, I can taste the difference between fructose and regular sugar. Frex, Nestle Ice Tea mix recently switched to fructose, and then to fructose+sucralose as their sweetener, and now it tastes funny to me (I noticed the new package had an odd taste, then compared old and new ingredient lists ... sure enough, they'd changed the formula). I had quite an argument with the Nestle phone representative about their "new" iced tea mix, but the upshot is they'll do as they please, and I've stopped buying their product. :(
I know a lot of middle-aged people who maintained normal weight all their lives -- UNTIL they got a computer and started spending every free moment sitting in front of it, not only losing the casual exercise that used to take up the same time, but also usually snacking on a lot more junk food than they ever did before.
The other problem of course is the "healthy eating" of the past 20 years, where meat and fat are Bad and carbs are Good. This of course is completely contrary to how our metabolisms are set up to work -- we deal well with protein and fat, but insulin levels get wonked when we overdo the carbs.
Who, me? At 52, I weigh the same as I did in college (and I've always been slim), and I don't make any particular effort to maintain that. But my diet is based around red meat; I do at least an hour of physical work first thing every day; when I'm sitting in front of the computer, I don't snack; and I seldom drink soda (and never by itself).
That's probably the only point of relevance here -- since fructose is metabolically LESS efficient than sucrose (sugar), fructose doesn't satisfy like sugar does. So you can unwittingly consume more fructose and more total calories without reaching a point of satiation.
Same as with low-fat and fat-free diets -- the body NEEDS a certain amount of fat, and if you don't get it, you never feel satified and are always hungry.
As to the "high fructose corn syrup" thing -- this is in comparison to *regular* corn syrup, NOT to sugars in general. It still has less fructose than you'd get from metabolizing sucrose.
I usually generalize this somewhat more, by pointing out that most urbanites are now 3 generations removed from the farm, so haven't even had a grandparent who could remember the Olden Days for them -- and in my observation, even a secondhand memory is better than none. Without it, there's this total disconnect between the everyday things of life and their actual origins. Everyone doesn't need to have every skill or experience. But it's good (perhaps even *necessary*, over the long haul) to know someone who can at least relate to those old skills and experiences.**
:/
I started really thinking about this after encountering two *adults* who did not grok that beef comes from cows!! And I'm sure everybody knows someone who never gets beyond "water comes out of the faucet".
As to retroclasses like you mention -- maybe today there are more participants in raw numbers, but as a *percentage* of the population, I suspect they are a tiny fraction of what they once were.
But as a whole, we're losing what used to be necessary skills at an alarming rate, and a relative-few hobbyists are not enough to preserve them. Maybe we don't NEED these skills in modern life. But life isn't static nor is the future guaranteed to be stable, and we may need these skills again someday.
** We have a 2nd and 3rd generation now who *didn't* grow up with a major war no more remote than secondhand experience, and look where *that's* leading us.
It's already happened with some skills that used to be considered mainstream. We no longer need horses, we have cars; consequently nowadays most people wouldn't know which end of a horse faces forward, let alone how to get somewhere on one. Try finding someone who knows how to make and set stained glass. Can you bake bread without a recipe or a bread-droid? Etc, etc.
And yes, normally we don't NEED these skills anymore. But is their loss a good thing? Maybe not.
Heh... I'm evidently more of the "mapper" mindset. While I unintentionally collect vast amounts of useless information, what I use are the connections and patterns generated by said information (per my specific skill, spotting *shifts* in patterns).
What if everyone has lost the skills required to fix the machine? there have been a number of SF novels that examine this premise -- a system where no one needs to know anything, because the machines all maintain it for them. But what happens when the machines break down?
I think the point was this:
What happens if you're deprived of your, uh, offline storage? would you suddenly be unable to contact anyone because the information is not in your brain at all?
"In Soviet Russia, crops plant you" -- ??!
But I think the parent poster confuses automating a skill with losing a skill. Just because you use a seed drill to plant wheat doesn't mean you can forget all about why things are done as they are, such as planting depth, soil moisture and temperature, etc. If you DO forget all that, then if the seed drill goes haywire, you have no way of knowing what's wrong (and may not even recognise that it's gone wrong) let alone how to fix it.
But if you haven't LOST the skill (by relying wholly on automation to do it for you), you can still do it by hand if you must.
Good example in today's geek world: my sister was from the last class of architects who were taught drafting with paper and pencil. The next generation all learned AutoCAD instead. When the power goes out in her office, she's the only one who can keep working (significant when you bill your time at $100/hour!) Everyone else has to twiddle their thumbs until power is restored and their computers come back up.
I see the same thing all the time. I pretty much carry a map of my surroundings (and for that matter, most of the western U.S.) in my head, and I'm never lost, and always know about where I am and the most efficient way to get where I'm going. Some of this is a naturally good sense of direction, but most of it comes from having been taught extensive geography and mapmaking skills in grade school (in the early 1960s) -- this conveys the skill of knowing where you are in relation to both your surroundings and to their representative positions on a map. Not only that, but when we were kids, we walked or bicycled everywhere, so we had to figure out our routes for ourselves. No parent was going to ferry us everywhere.
But most of the younger generation have never learned to read a map, let alone had to make one themselves, so they never have a clue where they are or how to get where they're going, unless someone (or something like a GPS) *tells* them. They're completely unable to figure it out for themselves. And when they needed to go somewhere, a parent almost always drove them, so they never learn how to lay out a route.