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
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WHAT THE FUCK (Score:2, Insightful)
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And that's why a lot of new albums are sold in printed cardboard cases. The cardboard provides a skeleton that is more durable than a jewel case, and I think theyn add a little plastic to the mix to make it impressively flexible. The industry is starting to like these for other reasons too: for one, printed cardboard is less expensive than clear (i.e. "virgin") plastic.
There are lots of variations on the design too - you can have pure reinforced cardboard sleeves, or you can combine a cardboard shell glue
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To everything - turn, turn, turn
There is a season - turn, turn, turn...
Re:Sorry (Score:5, Funny)
Girls! GIRLS! GIRLS!!!
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What is a "Britney Spears"?
Re:Sorry (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sorry (Score:5, Funny)
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Planet Rock (www.planetrock.com) in the UK certainly plays recent rock. Take 'Chinese Democracy' as an example. It has been well played on an almost daily basis.
1984 much? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The KGB has never officially existed.
Sounds like something that might have been true all along...
Re:1984 much? (Score:5, Interesting)
The actual link has truth in the list occasionally, but I'm annoyed at the assumptions made.
Re:1984 much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. The only things I could really relate to were the bits about chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, GDP, and Blue Jello.
Honestly, this is basically a list of things to assume about the class of 2013 that you can bring out in conversation to insult their knowledge of history.
Re:1984 much? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:1984 much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny this should come out today... (Score:4, Interesting)
Seinfeld is "classic TV"... (Score:2, Insightful)
My conclusion.. (Score:2)
America is in trouble. These are the same students who think that all countries along the equator are hotter than any desert in the USA.
Heck, I saw and almost touched snow on one mountain in Africa. Quite a revelation to me...I almost froze!
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Why would that put us in any kind of trouble?
You will not categorize "Not knowing anything about other parts of the world" as particularly advantageous, will you? If all [ignorant] college going folks referenced in the article became future politicians, we surely would have "work" on our hands.
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I can think of several reasons why knowing some tropical regions are cold matters. For one, look at geopolitics:
South America - the left edge is where most of the mountains are, often leaving no more than narrow strips before you get to the seacoast. Peru and Argentina are both colder on average than is generally assumed by North Americans. So, is coca a tropical plant? Or is that just another assumption that follows from the first one? 'No one could grow coca in the Rocky mountains - it has to be imported
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No, please, stay on my lawn... (Score:5, Insightful)
...with my eyesight failing from old age like this, it's too hard to aim if you're across the street.
Somewhere between reactionary neophilia and reactionary neophobia, there is a sparsely populated middle ground where things are evaluated on their own merits, and new things are not automatically good nor old things automatically bad, or vice versa. The modern predilection for the new is just as robotic and mindless as the pre-modern predilection for tradition, the only difference being that we're now indoctrinated into neophilia by advertising instead of being indoctrinated into neophobia by religion.
Maybe, if we learned from the past instead of ignoring it, we wouldn't feel compelled to reinvent COBOL every thirty years. Then we would have been spared the horror of Visual Basic, and then later, Python. Can't wait to see what the next lumbering reanimated monster from the forgotten past will be.
Oh wait, I can already guess: another implementation of Scheme.
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The only thing you learn fro history is thaty no one ever learns from history.
Great post oh ancient (4 digit ID) wise badger.
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What the hell is with this obsession of low digit user ID's ?
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Indeed it is.
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Ah yes, the horrors of Python. What are those, again? I mean apart from the standard "wtf significant whitespace" one.
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.
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I was under the impression that pretty much any compiler on earth would end up reducing x = x + 1 or x += 1 back down the same opcodes as x++. They do a decent amount of optimizations on the code before compiling.
Not that I CAN'T use the old x = x + 1 method (my first language was BASIC on a Commodore 64, so I used that a lot), nor do I even know Python, but IMHO just using ++ is much faster when coding. I'm a bit of a curmudgeon though. In general anything that strays from C-link syntax I just don't lik
Re:No, please, stay on my lawn... (Score:4, Interesting)
Although certainly the original reason for ++ was so that a very stupid compiler could still produce the optimal code, it also serves some purposes that are important:
(complicated_expression)++ is much easier to read than complicate_expression = complicated_expression+1. In the second case it is often difficult to tell that it is the same variable. The only "modern" way to express this is with references, such as reference a = reference(complicated_expression); a = a+1.
Also postfix ++ returns the previous value, this is often very useful, though confusing. It can be worked around again with a temporary variable.
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Well, you have to admit that a language with simple syntax, rich object libraries and reasonable performance that runs everywhere and is free has to be a bit suspect. Hell, we can't have our managers thinking we should be productive, can we?
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Then we would have been spared the horror of Visual Basic, and then later, Python.
Burn, you witch, BURN!
I have heard many critiques of/complaints about Python, but you are the first to compare it to COBOL. I would be curious as to how you would make that case.
Too bad history studies were thrown out with NCLB (Score:2)
Inhaled? (Score:2)
"Except for the present incumbent, the President has never inhaled."
The president in the 90s has never inhaled either;)
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Yeah, I am confused by that, as well. Clinton did pot. Bush II was an alcoholic who also did coke. Obama is a smoker who did pot in his youth. What exactly is meant by that "the President never inhaled" statement?
I must be young at heart (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it hard to believe that there aren't still a lot of school libraries out there that still use card catalogues. But what do I know.
I think there's at least a 10-year delay between birth and awareness of international politics; the first UK PM I remember John Major
I do remember the excitement we all felt when Salsa was officially the fastest-growing condiment in North America. Heady days, those.
This is interesting. Wiki tells me the first web pages went up in December 1990. Those early days of the web have really moved into the realm of history, albeit recent history.
I don't recall it ever being socially unaccebtable, though I do know it was considered - and is, if you ask me - a stupid thing to do, up there with jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.
Since when is RSVP out of our lexicon? I never got that memo.
Well, the European Community has existed since the 50s; this one's more of a technicality.
And Tianammen Square happened before they were born! Yikes.
I imagine this has been true since the 60s, at least.
As opposed to what? The GNP?
And I bet there's someone on Slashdot who cares! :)
I don't think there were any flat-screen TVs in 1991 - unless you count those flat-glass CRTs, which don't really count.
Hah! I doubt that happens very often.
Quayle had power? Biden has power?
That only became blase in the late 90s, as far as I'm concerned
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I find it hard to believe that there aren't still a lot of school libraries out there that still use card catalogues. But what do I know.
My sister teaches sixth grade, and last year she mentioned something about the card catalog. She got blank looks from her class, and finally one of the smartest, most studious kids raised her hand and asked what my sister was talking about. There was also an intern teacher in the room, and she vaguely remembered it. She did remember what happened to the cards though; some students took out library books and looked at the back of the check-out card (where they stamp the due date), and they were the old ca
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> Biden has power?
Well, he has power to annoy the Russians by going on about their 'withering economy' [joebidensaidthat.com].
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Archeologists uncovered a tablet from thousands of years ago. Roughly about the same time as "The Epic of Gilgamesh", the oldest written story; in it, the writer sates. "I despair of the children of today, they are too interested in the modern stories, full of fire and fury, and do not pay attention to their crop records and studies."
So that's one thing that's been around forever
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Born in the 80s?
No, you are still young in body. But that's OK.
As we get older, we're supposed to get wiser, but in fact as I get older I don't see most of my peers changing much at all. They were closed minded, ignorant,and obstreperously intolerant youths, and they're aging into closed minded, ignorant and obstreperously intolerant elders. The world moves past them; it changes and they don't change with it. They're too picky about who they learn from to learn much at all. As youths, they see the exper
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"Why is it called 'rolling' the window up or down?"
For the same reason you 'dial' a telephone by pushing buttons.
The more you say "dial" the funnier it sounds.
Any other Beloit Alums on /.? (Score:2)
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Not from Beloit (Reed, actually), but I kicked a few decks of FORTRAN punch cards while I was there. In the 70's, punk. ;-)
This list is probably drivel (Score:2)
I'm extrapolating from the 2002 list, which is the oldest one and for the class that was born the year after I was. Many of the things they claimed people of that age never experienced or were too young for, I knew about back then.
Granted, I'm a little sharper than the average, but it was just /full/ of inaccuracies. I don't expect this list to be all that much better.
I wished it had older years too. (Score:2)
FYI. Clickable links by years: 2002 [beloit.edu], 2003 [beloit.edu], 2004 [beloit.edu], 2005 [beloit.edu], 2006 [beloit.edu], 2007 [beloit.edu], 2008 [beloit.edu], 2009 [beloit.edu], 2010 [beloit.edu], 2011 [beloit.edu], 2012 [beloit.edu], 2013 [beloit.edu], and probably more in the future (just change the year number in the URLs).
I wished it had older years. Are there any similiar ones online from other sources?
And soon Fermat's Last Theorem... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And soon Fermat's Last Theorem... (Score:4, Interesting)
Soon they will also be people who only remember when Fermat's Last Theorem was a solved problem, not one of the great mysteries told to young kids interested in mathematics.
The problem might be solved, but there still is a lingering mystery. Did Fermat have a proof by elementary methods? Does such a proof exist? But I suppose that since there is A proof, the impetus to find another one is mostly gone.
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There's a great passing mention of Fermat's last theorem in the book "The Light of other Days".
In the book, a device allows one to see the past. Someone looks at old Fermat, and discovers he did possess a simple and elegant proof.
That proof ends up spawning an entire new fie
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Don't bet on it. I remember when I was studying Geometry in High School and we got to the Pythagorean Theorem. There was a mention in the text book that there are hundreds of different proofs of it, including one by President Garfield.
Shrek as Green Giant? (Score:2)
I also take umbrage with some of their other points, like "Cable television systems have always offered telephone service and vice versa."
We used to have NYNEX (the New England Baby Bell) for telephone. (Hell, I think I still have a NYNEX umbrella somewhere...) TV was fr
What exactly is the author trying to convey? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Margaret Thatcher has always been a former prime minister"
These statements are not a function of one's age, nor are they true as is. Is the author trying to say that we've got a group passing through that is so self-centered that they refuse to acknowledge any event prior to their birth? I was born in the 80s, but I know it's false to say "Winston Churchill has always been a former prime minister" or "CRT screens have always existed".
But why point out
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Is the author trying to say that we've got a group passing through that is so self-centered that they refuse to acknowledge any event prior to their birth?
Just wait till those freshmen take Philosophy 101.
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Then at the top are lines like "Members of the class of 2013 won't be surprised when they can charge a latte on their cell phone and curl up in the corner to read a textbook on an electronic screen.".... nor should anyone who has recently left the cave. Hell, the first guy I knew that got an eReader was in his 60s. You're not excused from observing your surroundings just because you've made it to (or past) middle-aged.
I think it emphasizes the speed of societal and technological change which has been going on of late (say, the last two decades). I recall hearing in the early '00s how we are now undergoing a greater increase in knowledge as a society in a single day than occurred during the whole of WW2 - or something to that effect. That much change, that quickly, can have a drastic impact on a society, whether intentional or not.
Consider: kids today have, in all likelihood, always had cell phones and SMS. I'm 28 and I r
Few things. (Score:2, Interesting)
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Completely lost on them...... (Score:4, Funny)
"you have died of dysentery"
As well as MS-DOS and the Apple II.
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#76 (Score:2)
They don't truly know what Cc. stands for on an e-mail. Even if they do know it stands for the words "carbon copy" they don't know what a carbon copy is.
Of course this has been true for quite a few years.
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I'm 36 years old. The only place I have ever seen "carbon" paper used for typing was from an old box of office supplies my mom had. She also had an old mechanical typewriter, which I used to poke at as a kid. They may have been used in offices, but I've never seen it done. I only used them when I was a kid playing with her typewriter, proving to myself that I could spell. :) Big deal.
How many people on here learned to type on a mechanical typewriter? Not very many, I'd g
The President Has Never Inhaled (Score:3, Insightful)
They say that "Except for the present incumbent, the President has never inhaled", but that confuses me. Obviously this is a reference to Clinton, but Bush was a well-known druggie and drunk. Am I to believe that he commonly snorted coke off of coeds' naked bodies and drove drunk, but never puffed a joint? I suppose that is possible, but I find it hard to believe.
GDP (Score:2)
Serious question: When was the GDP not the key indicator of the national economy? (I'm ten years older than these freshmen.)
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When was the GDP not the key indicator of the national economy?
Actually, GDP may be on the way out. There's increased interest in watching consumer spending. Financial transactions contribute to GDP in a way that creates illusory "production" through double-counting. Because of the turmoil in financial markets over the last year, GDP isn't a strong indicator of real world economic activity.
Older key indicators were housing starts (1990s; Alan Greenspan was a big fan of housing starts), Gross National P
Cynical observations for the current generation (Score:4, Insightful)
State abbreviations? Card catalogs? (Score:2)
Jesus Christ, *how old are you* person who wrote these questions? I'm 37, and state abbreviations for postage haven't had punctuation in them for most of my lifetime either. I can remember because we had to be able to address an envelope as part of a 5th-grade competency test. And card catalogs were about 75 percent computerized at my high school by the time I graduated.
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.
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Not news new here? Not new.
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Some do indeed have a search feature. It's typically at the end of the file.
-dZ.
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> "They have never used a card catalog to find a book"
Yawn. I was a UM Freshman in 1992. At that point, I think the card catalog was still there, but there were OLD, tattered signs perched on top warning that it was no longer maintained (and apparently hadn't been maintained in years). My high school library had a card catalog, but that was because it sucked. The public library downtown had greenscreen terminals since middle school.
What does having been born in 1973 imply?
* We never understood why our pa
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I was a UM Freshman in 1992... We learned binary by drawing 8x8 grids, writing "256 | 128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1" over them
I was a Mississippi State freshman in 1979, and we still could only fit "128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1" above an 8x8 grid. I hope to God that your UM was Ole Miss!
Re:"Tattoos have always been very chic" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Tattoos have always been very chic" (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a generation that grew up thinking Jerry Springer was normal and acceptable behavior.
Because their parents suck, politically-correct panty-waisted fools who "feel" their children won't love them if a parent say, means, and enforces:
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Re:"Tattoos have always been very chic" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Lol at this retort to a "white trash generation" claim.
Re:"Tattoos have always been very chic" (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe you're hating on generalisations for the sake of them being generalisations. Which is twisted in its own ironic way because it's not based on any proof that abstraction is a bad thing, but rather on the feared result of being subject to some inappropriate application of generalisation to an individual. So really you're damning generalisation as a whole because some idiots misuse it. Generalising generalising not out of its most frequent use, but most feared misuse, a highly faulty premise.
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Re:Sorry buddy, but Slayer is no better than rap (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just a different genre of mindless grunting.
Thank you for showing your ignorance. Death and thrash metal (including Slayer) are both incredibly intricate and demanding styles of music. I am not sure what kind of music you listen to, but Slayer's compositions and playing ability are light years ahead of ANY popular music these days. You might not like it, this form of music may not be your cup of tea, but calling it mindless is just plain ignorant. Each member of that band (Araya excepted) has more musical ability than pretty much everything you hear on the radio. I would be very interested to hear... what do you listen to that you base your comparison off of? I listen to literally everything, and I put death metal in the same vaunted category as jazz and classical in terms of musicianship.
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Don't get me wrong - I've been a Slayer fan since the 80's, but to say that they have more musical ability than pretty much everything on the radio is just plain wrong. They have written some fantastic stuff and have the ability to play fast, but both Kerry and Jeff get sloppy when they play fast. Tom plays simple bass lines and doesn't get too complicated with the vocals. Dave is a fantastic drummer though.
If you want to compare musical ability of metal players with what you hear on the radio, there are
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It might be true but the sad part of it is, with all this distortion, you cannot hear the distinct tones anyway.
Fucked? Hell no! Not yet at least... (Score:4, Insightful)
We're fucked and we've fucked their future. I don't think that one's on the list, but, I'm guessing, it's something any bright grad will know.
Are you fucking kidding me? They've got another 4 years and $95,000 worth of debt to rack up before they sue the college for not being handed a six-figure salary WITH their diploma. Yeah, talk about a fucked system.
IMHO, we haven't begun to see fucked yet, with the ignorance that MTV likes to portray as the Real World. Let's hope there are still some out there who still see the morality of the world today AND are bright enough to see that we have more than ONE political party out there.
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... still - on the the bright side - at least we got fucked....
Re:We're Fucked (Score:5, Insightful)
I quote, "What's wrong withe status quo? It works for me!"
Argh.
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blaming postmodernism for the results of a 30 year assault on the education system in this country is simply intellectually dishonest.
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adding to my last post.. of course someone who was complicit in that 30 year assault on our education system would also be exactly the type of person to use the term "postmodernist" in that fashion..
assuming that i am correct in that then...
you're blaming postmodernist for the results of the campaign against public education that you waged - you're complaining about the exact affects you WANTED to have biting you in the ass and displacing that blame on the group you constantly attack.
Assuming that i'm corre
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"What's wrong with the status quo? It works for me!"
You're much more likely to hear Status Quo than Britney Spears on a classic rock channel.
Re:We're Fucked (Score:5, Insightful)
As a student, I say, fuck that, my dear academic, and fuck your easy willingness to give up on us. We clueless, cynical, little automatons have been tasked with developing our own frameworks for filtering and handling information blasted at us from society's great unmetered firehose even as you sit there whining on Slashdot about your abject failure to connect with us. We, the post-post-modern twerps that you are griping about, have grown up DRENCHED in information, to the point that we're numbed to it. We have not experienced the type of developmental cocoons that previous generations wore into adulthood; we didn't grow up in a crappy town where our best sources of information were an out-of-date encyclopedia, Time magazine, and the evening news. We grew up with Internet access and a TV in our bedroom, and we realized at quite a young age that most of the ideas we thought we were alone in having were actually shared by countless thousands or millions. It's discouraging to the thinker, really; quite often, the instant we have a thought, we type it into Google and realize that the discussion is not merely mature, but closed. We realized early on that we were not alone, yet nobody cared what we had to say.
I can say, without specific knowledge of your field, that your job is fundamentally two pronged: it is the promotion of the best approximation of reality available, and it is also the displacement of the less accurate models which came before. Modernism/postmodernism had an important job to do, and retains some importance as a perspective, a naggling doubt at the back of every good student's mind, but it's beginning to reach saturation in my own, younger generation. The holdouts who haven't either digested the pill to the best of their abilities or passed it through their system are getting rare outside of some fairly recognizable enclaves. It's time to react to that fact. We young people have been told to ask "why?" as a reflex, true, but many of us have unfortunately developed the habit of making snap judgments in the face of informational overload. We have no authorities; we have no role models. The politicians are liars; the businessmen are crooks; the priests are pedophiles. We never learned about righteousness and values; we were taught consumerism and encouraged to swim in knowledge as if we would learn by mere proximity. We are three generations removed from the cultural revolutions of the sixties and seventies. Our grandparents were at Woodstock enjoying sex, drugs, and rock and roll; our parents grew up shaking their heads at the hypocrisy of their suddenly-reactionary baby boomer parents, and now we, their kids, don't know what the hell to think. They say that it takes three generations to breed accent out of spoken language; we've left respect for authority so far behind us that we can't even conceive what the fuss was about.
Our childhood is getting longer, as is our adolescence, although we were exposed to the facts of life as soon as we could reach a keyboard. It seems that college is no longer a privilege, but a right awarded for simply not screwing up massively in life. Many of us arrive with no specific goal in mind, expecting to have our hands held as they were in high school, and we often wind up with a degree in hand and no plans for its use. Alternately, many of us believe (often correctly) that our future employers care little about what is taught in college and that simply completing the routine is what matters. The reasoners, the deep thinkers, and those interested in pursuing science for its own sake are in there too, but we've always been there, Mr. Academic. Our deep-thinking minds have always been attracted to the college atmosphere, but those of us with that mindset make up a proportionally smaller fragment of the new student body. You, sir, are in a situation where you need to search diligently for the part of that scholastically-minded fragment that's interested in learning, but afraid to step forth; the ones that have been repeatedly abused or isolated
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Actually, the implication of 2012 is the end of a period, and the beginning of a new one. It doesn't necessarily mean we're all going to die. I'm sure some people will, due to natural attrition.
I don't discount the idea that 2012 will be the collapse of civilization as we know it, I'm just not packing up my survival gear and heading to the hills to wait out the end of the zombie attack. :) I'm preparing just as hard as I did for Y2K. I bought a couple boxes of ammo, put the
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You missed the first two versions. Somewhere between pathetic and horrible. Originally, I was going to list out all the events that were planned for 2012, both normal ones like the 2012 Olympics in London, and the conspiracy based. I was finding plenty of stuff, I just never found a good format to post it with. So, it's just news. :) At least the casual reader will have something fresh to look at if they visit each day. :)