Sunday, November 30, 2008

Feeling old?

My son had to do a genealogy project in October. After writing out the family tree he had to pick five people and do a paragraph on each. While he fought over this, he had a lot of fun when he finally decided to do it.

Of particular note was my father. I told him that he got a Bachelor's Degree from NC State in Aeronautical Engineering....before calculators had been invented.

While not ENTIRELY accurate it really cracked him and the class up. :-)

I grew up in a school system that discouraged the use of calculators though.

Will my son recall that I grew up in a era before MP3's and DRM were invented? Before the Internet was a common household term? Before Wikipedia and Google?


...(completely random thoughts follow, no direction or meaning whatsoever)...
My neighbor was commenting on library hours recently. Are libraries becoming obsolete? Are more kids doing research through the Internet than in local libraries? While businesses are certainly working on profitable models of using electronic books, what are the libraries doing other than putting Internet terminals out for public use? What direction are they taking in the digital age? People are opposing Google scanning and searching the libraries...but has anyone other than Google really put serious thought into how the book and shelf model grows when you have to keep old and new books alike? Libraries make decisions about what books to keep, and then sell others so even now you can't go to a library and find all the information you need, just what someone else deemed worthy of occupying shelf space. Some of it may have just disappeared.

Ok, going to go mountain biking. It's pouring rain. Things you do for friends....

3 comments:

  1. I love random thoughts!! There should be more of them...

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  2. the underlying question of libraries is this - what is knowledge? i feel my own blog post coming on... but i'll say this - tell stories to your kid. heck, tell stories to anyone who will listen to them. what we lose most in the digital age is the storytelling. everyone and anyone has a blog now (current audience notwithstanding) and the true art of relaying your life and the significant and not-so-significant events in life gets buried underneath.

    related to this, i love that you took the time to recount your trip to yosemite. i love that you post pics of a random day at the park. this is what occupies shelf-space, virtual as it may be, right next to my collection of anime and hentai. haha. wait, strike that last thing.

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  3. I overheard one of my high school students telling his friend that his mom made him use a phone book for the first time that week. I don't know what they had to look up, but it wasn't available on line. He didn't even know they had one in the house. He's 18 and unbelievably smart. It made my heart ache. Phone books, like libraries are a wealth of information.

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