What did Gutenberg accomplish?

I’m rereading Gerald Weinberg’s book on General Systems thinking and he provides a story, which I had forgotten, that movable type had been around for awhile, what Gutenberg accomplished was to make movable type acceptable to the reading public. Mind that books were expensive and for the elite. They were used to illuminated text done in fine hand printing. Gutenberg got printing to the point that the results were acceptable to these readers, particularly in the reproduction of those grand illuminated letters in multiple colors. Similarly, we tend to call the theory of evolution by the inheritance of acquired characteristics Darwinian and not Wallacian not because Darwin was first, but because he provided the illustrative proofs that made the theory compelling.
As programmers we celebrate the technical accomplishment, but not necessarily the applicability. I remember when MP3 players first came out, I was intrigued but not enough to try one out. My CD player worked just fine thank you very much. Working with Windows and PC level hardware made me disinclined to waste my time trying to get it to work. I suspect not a few people were of the same disposition. When the Apple iPod came out I thought, what, another MP3 player? I didn’t look into it until the third, or fourth, generation and then it was like Wow! Not that the iPod was great or that MP3 playing was great, but that iTunes make it easy to get music into the beast. What Apple had figured out was a compelling applicability for MP3 players.
I was reared in an era of programming when the thing was just to get the damn functions to work. No eye candy. And software was written for corporate environments, the users had to use it. Now programming is much more complicated partly because the interfaces are much more involved. Because they have to be compelling when proferred in a competitive marketplace. But may just be adding mere expense in a captive, corporate environment.
But, in Gutenberg’s world, what were the markets for books? He printed Bibles didn’t he? Which weren’t for lay people back then. Did he print for a captive market as well? More things to research.

Q&A

In the New Yorker, John McPhee writes about the geology of Europe and mentions that his very young grand daughter knew that the dinosaurs died out because of an asteroid or volcanos. When I was kid, the story was that the dinosaurs existed at all. I wasn’t aware that they all died out at once. Though there was something in Fantasia about dinosaurs and rocks falling I think.
I just thought that they became oil like the green Sinclair Oil dino. Though I had doubts there were ever enough dinosaurs to make all that oil. But when the Alvarezes wrote that an asteroid could have killed off the dinosaurs, that created a story arc that made the question compelling “why did the dinosaurs die off all at once?”
Before that I didn’t know how to ask the question. The question comes only after we know the answer. Well, not for everyone. I suppose Wegener asked the question and looked for an answer. But for most of us–for me anyway–the answer basically frames a story that begs the question.
One take several different lessons from this. Like to be humble in our ignorance, so profound that we may not even know that there are questions. Like that if we start with the wrong answers we have no hope of discovering useful questions.

thinking about thinking

Something I’m still thinking about. I read, or think I read, in New Scientist that feelings and emotions were precursors to rational thought in the evolution of the human mind. That feels right. But what does it mean. I remember reading a long time ago Kant and Hume and thinking they were going to an awful lot of trouble to rationalize what their mothers had taught them. I was a weird little kid. Anyway, do we feel and then rationalize the feeling? I suspect it is something a little different. Feelings and emotions are outside of time. They just are. Thinking has causality: if x then y. But, as I say, I’m still thinking about this.

And what about autistic spectrum disorders, in an un-scientific sense of people who have relating to other people and act out but can have a rich intellectual life inside. Is there a “normal” sequence or relationship between feelings and emotions and thinking and “abnormal” ones and what’s different? If feelings and thinking are tightly related?

I’ve always been intrigued by the notion that in fiction one seeks the Truth through the act of telling stories that never happened, lies. Fiction, stories, work because they create feelings, not just thoughts. Is fiction a path through the feeling-thinking maze?

I don’t actually read conservative opinion pieces, but I do occassionally wander down dark alleys and come across them lying in the dirt. And their arguments just seem to be rants. I assume they sense that about liberal opinion pieces. So has political thinking degenerated to emotional name calling or is it operating at a more elemental, primal form of thinking?

Too much to think about. Not that I’m losing any sleep over these topics.