The Mindset of the Incoming College Freshmen 383
Beloit College has come out with its annual Mindset List of what the incoming class (of 2013) has always known and has never known. "For these students, ... the Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables. They have never used a card catalog to find a book. ... Tattoos have always been very chic and highly visible. ... Rap music has always been mainstream. ... Except for the present incumbent, the President has never inhaled. ... Amateur radio operators have never needed to know Morse code."
Sorry (Score:5, Informative)
Dave
Sorry buddy, but Slayer is no better than rap (Score:1, Informative)
It's just a different genre of mindless grunting.
Re:Sorry buddy, but Slayer is no better than rap (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sorry (Score:3, Informative)
When I was a freshman in the early 1970s (Score:5, Informative)
Cell phones did not exist, although most doctors had some type of telephone in their cars.
Home computers and on-line banking and on-line shopping did not exist. Text messaging did not exist. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter did not exist (I still don't know what they are).
Some of the older telephones still were the rotary phones, where we had to dial the number. We could hear the pulse type dialing being used. The newer phones probably had the buttons and tones, by then. If we dialed 0, by itself, we could talk to the operator. If I am not mistaken, we still had to pay extra, on our monthly bill, for each extra telephone in the house.
Typewriters were used to type letters. Some were electric and some were purely mechanical.
Many secretaries knew how to take dictation by shorthand.
Slide rules were frequently used by engineers and scientists to perform addition, subtraction, roots, logarithms and trigonometry. Pocket calculators did not exist. However, adding machines did exist.
Nearly all of the appliances that we owned were controlled by mechanical knobs and levers. It was more of an analog world, although large businesses did have computers.
Many businesses still used punched cards to store data for computer databases.
We were being encouraged to used trans fats instead of saturated fats because they were supposedly less dangerous than saturated fats. Now we are being told that trans fats are even worse.
Cars needed a minor tune up every 6,000 miles and a major tuneup every 12,000 miles. Engines usually needed to be overhauled at about 100,000 miles. Most of our gasoline powered cars had carburetors. To start a car when it was cold, we had to pump the gas peddle several times first. On some older cars, we also still had to use a mechanical choke.
Police cars could do about 140 MPH and policemen carried revolvers instead of pistols.
I hoped I would not be drafted and sent to Vietnam. Fortunately, the war was winding down by then, an few people were drafted that year.
AIDs did not exist and I had never even heard of herpes, until several years later.
If a young person asked the barber to not cut his hair too short, the barber frequently cut it somewhat shorter than he wanted anyway (for some reason). Eventually barbers stopped doing that.
In many states our social security number was used as our drivers license number. Grocery stores would not accept credit cards, so we usually paid by check. When writing a check at the grocery store or elsewhere, the cashier or clerk usually wrote our driver's license number on the back of our check. Over the decades, many thousands of people have seen my driver's license number and written it on the back of my thousands of checks.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Some do indeed have a search feature. It's typically at the end of the file.
-dZ.
Re:No, please, stay on my lawn... (Score:4, Informative)
The ++ operator doesn't exist because it's so convenient - it exists because ++ would translate to a faster opcode than regular addition. Python isn't compiled to machine code, so it's pointless to have it. It also occurs much less often in Python, because it doesn't use C's stupid "for" loop. The main (only?) argument for having it is because C has it.
P.S.
(result1, result2)[condition] or, if you prefer a special syntax, result1 if condition else result2.
Re:When I was a freshman in the early 1970s (Score:2, Informative)
Additionally, in most places there were only 3 broadcast TV stations, 4 if you were lucky enough to have a PBS affiliate in town. Cable was just getting started. If your TV had a remote, it was probably a "clicker" that struck a steel bar creating a harmonic tone that triggered an audio receiver in the TV. A lot of people you knew still had a black & white set.
Rock music on FM radio was pretty new. Not many years earlier, FM was all classical and "old people" music.
There was only one telephone company and one phone book. It was illegal to plug anything into the phone system that they didn't build and provide to you. There were no answering machines or fax machines.
Only the wealthy "jet set" rode on airplanes.
Gas was 33 cents a gallon. Your family car weighed at least 2 tons and had a V-8 engine with 300 horsepower or more. Premium gasoline was 102-104 octane as measured by the old method.
Comic books were 15 cents, having jumped up from the 12 cents of the Silver Age at the end of the 60's. Pretty much everyone read LIFE Magazine, which was mostly pictures and articles about the Viet Nam war
Solder was 60% lead, and you could roll your own electronics with parts from Radio Shack or a half dozen electronics mail-order catalogs.
Most of the pennies in circulation were solid copper and you could still occasionally find a quarter, 50 cent piece, or dollar coin in your pocket change that was solid silver. Old Canadian nickels had something like 8 flat sides and didn't work in US vending machines. They were being phased out but you still saw them now and then.
It cost 8 cents to mail a 1st-class letter.
Coke and Pepsi were made with cane sugar.
Young whippersnappers were ALWAYS on your lawn because there were no personal computers, cell phones, video games, MTV, or microwaveable hot pockets to keep them indoors and out of sight.
Re:I must be young at heart (Score:2, Informative)