Posted by Raul on July 9, 2010
The area where I work is a new one; it used to be countryside until it was covered by houses and streets just a few years ago. It was a natural habitat for rabbits, foxes and coyotes…now the bigger animals are gone and only rabbits remain.
Without the dangers of predators an easier, safer life for the rabbits has created an overpopulation of those cute creatures, so they now can be seen in big numbers in front and back yards.
Maybe because of this safer habitat, after a couple of generations rabbits have started to show signs of “stupidity” They don’t run as fast as before anymore; they run in any direction, including the wheels of the approaching vehicle, getting killed instantly without giving reaction time to the drivers.
The same situation happens with any specie that finds the elements to easily multiply itself out of control. So is happening with the human race.
People used to know how to drive in snow with an older car without FWD, 4WD, ABS, TCS, airbags, etc, now they easily crash even having all that aid and all the teaching videos available in the net.
People used to find their way around in the cities and long trips using a paper map, while now many depend on a GPS system to not get lost.
I might be sarcastic or cynic, or whatever classification you want to give me, but I really don’t believe in changing people’s minds and turning the cards; that could have been done from the beginning.
The more knowledge accumulated by the human race, the more technology created to increase the living standards of people, the worst the situation becomes. Sure, we live more comfortable and safer than before but, is it better for the planet?
We are after all another specie in this planet, and no matter how advance individuals might be, as a race we still behave as many other species, so the reduction in population and the change in habits to stop the planetary destruction will be all coming as a consequence rather than a planed course of actions. We start saving after we experience a traumatic lack of money.
This entire civilization is based on trade rather than knowledge, so the mentality is about physical and material growth instead of knowledge or spiritual growth. You are valuated in proportion of what you have more than what you are.
In a personal level people can be valuated for who they are, what they do and how they do it, but in society as a whole is not; how many people would be happy to show a picture of themselves with a president, even if that president was considered a dictator? Showing the others a possible personal relation to the big dogs!
Insisting in better behaviors like recycling is fantastic but doomed to fail. It is not just the monetary interests of some few in power, but the laziness of the majority that screams for justice and new practices but remain in the old ways that maintain the status quo of things.
A politician says and act based on what he/she is allowed by the people that refuses to take action by themselves and prefer to blame those in power for all the problems instead of changing their way of life.
Wars wouldn’t exist if people refuse to go by principle, and if that principle was a planetary concept, there’ll be no need for having military forces. In that situation just the proposal of creating a military body would be considered so…anti-human! While throughout history it always has been an honor to serve in the forces!
Big sport utility vehicles still sell while small European style cars are nowhere to be seen around. If conservation is so important for some, how come that the same people waste water in their front lawn?
Changing to sensitive practices implies changing the way of life and stop giving importance to elements like luxury, possession and overstuffing as a reference of success in life and turn to forgotten curiosities like dedication to family, self cultivation and the enhancement of the human part within.
We all know that, we just cannot make it happen as a race to an extent bigger than the promotion of the good practices. So just like the bills come after the impulse shopping, the tag for the planetary use will be handed out and nature will recover of the “day with a fever” to become again what it suppose to be and the human race will be back at the beginning striving for survival.
I’m not saying people have a bad nature, by the opposite, we can see how many are searching inside themselves for the right path; I can see it while reading blogs in the net, and it only means deep inside we all know we must be in the wrong path now and we know things suppose to be in a different way.
If the houses in the area where I work were to be removed it’ll become a disaster for the rabbit population that lost the sense of survival after so many years of easy life; they would die by big numbers and the few survivors would bring new generations of rabbits better prepared to survive while coexisting with the foxes and coyotes.
It’ll be hard for the human race again, but it’ll bring balance in nature and a new opportunity for the human race to start a civilization based in knowledge and self growth where human interconnection is the base of such civilization, rather than trade and wealth as the main references for success.
Raul
Posted by Raul on February 24, 2010
It is so easy to feel smart when we can get something done with just a couple of clicks in the computer; so easy to feel entrepreneurial when text messaging or using the cell phone throughout the day at any time for whatever we just remembered to ask to someone away, but then, what if we had to go on with our lives without all the technology available today?
No microwave oven, no refrigerator, no telephones, no email, cars, etc. So easy to destroy an entire civilization…just turn off the electricity for the next six months!
Only a couple of decades ago many people could cook something simple, but not today; many people could fix basic stuff in their vehicles and around the house, yet today seems to be tasks for experts to call in.
Technology allows us to do more things in less time, which is a good thing, but if we rely too much in it we pass to the point where we become unable to live without it, we become dependant and requiring its existence in our surroundings in order to survive and keep going.
We don’t need memory anymore, we don’t need to calculate, we don’t need to create plans, all we have to do is use our technology to do that for us, and for everything else we can “Google it”
What would happens if suddenly, for whatever the reason, we loose all technology available and have to go back to the times when we had to cultivate the land for food and create our clothing from animal skin? Even not going so extreme but just thinking of having only the technology available to us in the 50’s? And to a bigger extreme; taking out of the equation cell phones, GPS, personal computers, etc, just going back to the 70’s would be catastrophic for many.
It is so easy to feel smart when using all these new technologies we have access to nowadays yet if we think of what could we do without it. Even in small, little details, like when we don’t have a car because of repairs being performed and we have to go somewhere, how complicated it becomes. Or when we don’t have electricity and still have to cook and do our normal activities at home; don’t you still flip the switch when entering a room at night, even if you know that there is no electricity at that moment?
We become so dependant on technology that we stop thinking of living without it and what it’ll be like. Some time ago, with this expanding fear of terrorist attacks, when people I know were talking of a possibility of the city being bombed, some of them hurried up and got prepared for the destruction fitting an extra refrigerator in the basement and stuffed it with frozen food for that possible occurrence; but there’ll be no electricity! Are they going to eat all that frozen food in one day?
I’m not saying we should go back to live without technology; that would be impossible and not logic anyway, but at least, shouldn’t we think of how would we perform our daily activities and how those activities would be changed due to not having the aid of this beloved technology of ours.
If we think about it, in general we don’t know how to cultivate the land, how to care for animals, and then process them for food, we don’t know how to build a house starting from cutting the trees and making furniture using just a bunch of hand tools. (There’ll be no “Google” remember?)
Think of it as going back to living like in “Little House on the Prairie” TV series. It looks pretty nostalgic but how many of us could make it without going nuts, at least for a while.
With this, I’m not saying we should cut off technology and go back to the beginnings so to be prepared, but rather just take a moment to think and stop asking for more solutions from our devices and start seeing them as for what they are, tools to make things faster and better, but not a replacement for our brains and thinking capabilities so we don’t loose our memory, our capabilities of association and our dexterity and therefore we can keep learning and having control of our lives.
And if you excuse me now, I’ll press “Enter” to publish this post automatically 
Raul
Posted by Raul on November 18, 2009
Definitely computer technology is not my strongest point! It’s been several weeks of work just to get this blog up and running mostly because of the different aspects to deal with.
It is about finding the theme that applies better to what I want to show and the way I want to show it so it’ll reflect not only the content but also the “personality”
Also is about tinkering with little details like implementing a contact form for people to send me emails; I know it is just a pluggin that it is pretty much straight forward to install, but when you have no clue on what you are doing (like me) then a thousand mistakes can and will happen along the process, many times forcing you to delete everything and start all over again!
Then it is about implementing the different pages and their content, the kind and size of letter and the color you want to use, and every time something is changed, everything changes in the page and I can here myself saying “What?? How did that happened!?”
For many of you out there, especially young people, probably all of this stuff is really simple and straight forward, but for someone like me that got into a computer just a couple of years ago, and spent most of that time using the computer just to read emails and keep the family pictures, everything about starting a blog is new and sort of a giant task.
Talking about technology, I wrote all my notes, observations and short tales in Spanish from previous years in my computer so to keep them in a more manageable way and discarded the paper to save room; and to make sure everything was safe I made a copy in an external hard drive just in case, but some time ago my laptop crashed and required a change of hard drive, so all the writings there were lost.
No problem, I have a copy in that external hard drive!
After the laptop was repaired and running again I went to plug the external hard drive to copy all the writings back to my laptop and guess what, it didn’t turn on!
I tried the external hard drive in my son’s computer and nope, nothing happened… the external hard drive is crashed too!
So more than twenty years of writings; about 20 Gigabytes of words were lost in time and space!
I was depressed for about a week!
Well…I guess it can be taken as a motivation to learn this computer technology a little more…and have 10 external hard drives just in case!
Anyway, since the tinkering with the blog is mostly done, the time has come to start pouring some content so I hope you’ll enjoy what I’ll be posting the next couple of days.
Raul
Posted by Raul on November 11, 2009
I love Sci Fi; my favorite writer is Asimov and his robot stories.
I’ve read many stories about how in the future machines will have a mind of there own and eventually will take control over people. Is that the future? I believe it’s already happening!
Today you can buy cars with ABS, Traction Control, Computer Controlled Engines, Air Bags Systems, etc.
Did you know that in icy conditions ABS Systems can leave you WITHOUT brakes?
Did you know that an Air Bag can kill you?
Today everything in a car is controlled by a computer that is programmed to act based on input signals sent by sensors around the car and engine.
ABS function is to prevent a wheel lock up to improve braking capabilities (a locked wheel skids instead of braking)
When you use the brakes, the sensors in each wheel will detect a lock up and reduce the brake fluid pressure in the looking wheel. If you are in icy conditions it doesn’t take much to lock up a wheel, so the ABS will reduce brake pressure, often to a point when, no matter how much pressure you apply to the brake pedal, no braking action is taking place in the wheels. You have no brakes!
Another element is TRACTION CONTROL, which works detecting the opposite of ABS, if the wheels are turning to fast in relation to the vehicle speed.
In that situation the TRACTION CONTROL system reduces the amount of accelerator given to the engine to reduce power applied to the wheels to prevent them from spinning and loosing car control, no matter how much you push the accelerator pedal.
Now, some people tend to believe that having ABS and Traction Control in their cars will give them complete grip in slippery conditions, mostly motivated by car manufacturer’s publicity, but the truth is that these systems only help to get the wheels turning in direct proportion to the vehicle speed, which allow the tires to do their job, but it is dependant on the kind of tires you have what kind of traction you get.
If you don’t believe me just take a look at what kind of cars are out of the road when it is snowing: mostly cars with ABS and TRACTION CONTROL!
Several sensors around the engine detect atmospheric conditions like air temperature, air pressure, etc. and from the engine, conditions like engine temperature, throttle position, RPM’s engine load, etc. based on that information the On Board Computer decides the amount of fuel to be fed to the engine, the ignition timing applied, etc.
At one hand it’s nice since now engines work the same when hot or cold, give maximum economy and power, and because of that, can last longer, but at the other hand, if a sensor start sending wrong signals the computer takes wrong decisions and you have a rough running car with no apparent reason. Just open the hood and try to fix the problem!
Air Bags are inflated by a gas that is activated with a small explosive. This explosive is ignited with an electric current of a tension of just a fraction of a volt. If you make a wrong connection while installing a stereo, or wear synthetic clothing (that creates static electricity) you could activate the air bags, which inflate in just a fraction of a second! You’ll never know what hit you. It had happened; just read the warning labels in your car and the owner’s manual.
My point is, with today’s cars there’s no use in carrying a set of tools other that to change a flat tire; there’s nothing you can do. Today’s cars are like the robot maid in those sci fi stories that perform a great job, but when something goes wrong you have no control at all. We are becoming more and more dependant of a technology that as users we don’t understand, and when something goes wrong we have no control.
Even when you take your newer car to a trained technician for repairs what he does is plug an external computer to the one in the car to get the “codes” that indicate what the problem is, and then replace the components the external computer tells him to change, so the only thing left to create is a “walking” external computer that goes and plugs itself without the help of a technician and we have that world of robots in those sci fi stories, but for now a technician is becoming more and more like a “helper” of those “master” computers.
Personally I prefer older cars, those that you could understand and develop a friendship of some sort with them. They were like friends, they helped you all the time, and some times they needed your help. Sometimes they were moody and you had to put up with it, and some times you were moody and they respond to your state of mind.
Mi favorite car is my ’57 Isetta. I just can’t jump in it and go, have to warm it up first, treat it gently and consider how weather will affect it, but we had been in so many places, we both sweat in hot days and shake when is cold. When I need it it’s up to help me and when it needs me I can fix it. We are good friends!
Raul
