molbioguy

I'm gonna repurpose this ...

"They can see no reasons 'cause there are no reasons What reasons do you need? Oh oh oh whoa whoa"

Boomtown Rats

Unpopular opinion, but here goes ... The pictures are absolutely charming. This is because they distill the essential qualities of the object (from the child's POV), which is lost when you have perfect representation art. But turning them into real objects results in things that are often terrifying and grotesque, not charming. I don't believe the kids wanted their object to look like that in real life. They may be proud that their creation is realized, but I doubt their drawing is an expression of desire. They just have imperfect skills in representation. In contrast, there is imaginative art that kids excel at (e.g. a puppy with wings and a goatee). That's something that is really cool to see as a real object.

Saruman :)

Greybeard is but a stage. Coding wisdom is accrued, powers tested. I have transformed to the next stage -- whitebeard! Now I wield power openly and code with ease ignoring the stares and doubts of younger coders :)

Yes, that helped you. But you still had to put them back in order :( Visual sorting O(n).

Working with the real thing, I remember the horrible feeling when the rubber band holding the card deck together snaps! The FORTRAN cards all had line numbers, but what a pain for a several hundred line program.

> divided from the hirsute future by a follicle singularity

I love the sound of that! Pretty awesome prose :)

You're right, and you're an optimist! But people lose things not just from a loss of will to maintain them, but rather also from events outside their control. The means to read digital media survive, but could events lead to the loss/corruption of the digital media itself. And the effort to maintain digital archives is sometimes large, especially when tech changes rapidly. Convenience trumps almost everything else! And I'm not talking about my kids. At some point, I'll be too old to deal with the digital archives on my own, but a box of pictures will be within reach.

My grandparents and parents either experienced or personally knew people who lost everything at some point, through war, social strife, or economics, and personal tragedies. Same on my spouse's side. Physical photos and letters were among the few things that often survived, possibly because they are only of value to the original 'owner'. I think that close brush with the impermanence of belongings fueled the habits of preparing for loss by archiving and preserving physical mementos. People trust that digital artifacts will survive through redundancy, but we're so early in the process of testing that belief. And society has been rather stable in comparison to my grandparents' generation ...

I know you're not supposed to complain about downvotes, but seriously?! A complement about a witty comment gets me downvoted. I give up.

Brilliant!

Thanks. Come to think of it, that rings true in my experience.