We are analog beings trapped in a digital world, we did it to ourselves. | Hacker News Reader

We are analog beings trapped in a digital world, we did it to ourselves.

jnd.org

8 pointsJ3nnings8 comments

With that in mind, please write your blog in a font and colors that can be read by analog machines and does not require the accuracy of a digital one. Interesting, yes, but it took me disabling the color scheme and zooming in to even be able to read it.

It's Donald Norman's site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Norman

You'd think a usability expert would know how to make a readable web page, right? When I come across a page like that, I use Readability to punch it up: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Not my project -- I just find it way useful.

Awesome link. Thanks.

Also, their bookmarklet thing can be set as a shortcut for Site Launcher (hotkey-based launcher for bookmarks), so all you have to do is push Ctrl+Space and then your hotkey (mine is R) and you've got actually readable content. I love it.

Take your false dichotomy and shove it -- whether any system is analog vs. digital is entirely dependent on your point of view -- it's not grounded in anything concrete.

Your analog vinyl record is composed of discrete molecules and thus has a hard (and very low) limit on quantization range and dynamics (it's fundamentally digital).

Your digital CD has the data stored with error-correcting parity so that the foil can degrade significantly without losing anything at all -- insta-lossiness is not a fundamental characteristic of degrading digitally encoded media.

The signals in your digital computer are electrical, and thus analog. You can't just say on:off::1:0 -- how would you handle disconnected circuits? So represent signals as 'high' and 'low' -- but then you have to deal with the gray area between high and low -- you don't want to have weird bugs because of a cutoff point. So you end up with a minimum of 4 'binary' states!

Then the analog electricity in the wires is composed of discrete electrons slowly progressing around the circuit -- digital strikes again! It's turtles all the way down, I tell you.

It's like Cocoa vs. Carbon in terms of bullshit dichotomies that get brought up constantly by otherwise intelligent people. You can cross the streams guys, and guess what? They already are in almost any case you care to look at closely.

> [...] discrete electrons [...]

May I add that quantum mechanics blurs the distinction further?

Reminds me of Civilization and its Discontents by Freud (1928), where he treats technology and tools the expand man's ability to perceive the world (telephones, long distance prothetic ear, telescopes are prosthetic eye enhancement) or interact with the world (ships, travel aid, prosthetic feet, etc.)... aka man evolves through technology.

I think you're close, but not quite there yet. "We" (or 'you' and 'I') exist as thoughts in our own head. Not only do we have analog bodies that are trapped in the digital world, we are voices trapped in the outdated hardware of our bodies. When can I get a full body transplant?

Woops, submitted it with an anchor. Scroll up, the introduction is worth reading.

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