How the mighty has fallen (Quiet)

The new post count never matches reality. The “chimp-factor”  is very high!

Not that anyone at Key is paying attention, but the New Posts button doesn’t seem to be working. Several of the forums say there is a new post, but I never see anything when I click on the link to be taken to the newest posts.

SG, I did not know that about the Doolittle raid

Hi CD, I do vaguely remember the Mythbusters episode, and hazily recall that they came down in favour of your side of the discussion, but like everything I think the key to it is the wording, and it is impossible to match the belt and A/C in terms of thrust and speed! I was thinking (whilst writing the garbage), of an Aircraft carrier, in the Doolittle raid  not turning into the wind to launch A/C, but turning downwind and making  30knotts, that would make interesting viewing!

It’s not just you … … but on the plus side, we still have our delightful selection of smiley faces!

Not sure if it’s just me or has the PM function stopped working again?

It is funny, I was going through the (full) hard-drive on my ancient PC just the other day and I found all the old threads from this forum that I had archived, and the ‘plane on a conveyor-belt’ thread was one of them. Just reading through it brought back many happy memories; what a different place the forum was then!

I was thinking just the other day that the 10,000 odd posts I’ve written here over the years represents the largest repository of my knowledge and thoughts that exists anywhere on earth; nowhere else in my personal or professional life is there anything like it (and certainly nothing that is so accessible).

That’s quite a sobering thought!

Anyway, returning to the ‘plane on a conveyor-belt’ question, I did notice on YouTube the other day that the ‘Mythbusters’ had done an episode on this very question; I’m not sure when this episode was made but I hadn’t seen it before. The set-up was a bit rough-and-ready but they did use a real aircraft carrying a human pilot; can you guess the result?

Hey CD, that old chestnut “aeroplane on a conveyor belt” has resurfaced on FB, and you’ll be pleased to know I was straight in there!

What I do find interesting, is that in the main, knowledge gained on the quick via giggle, (or some other search facility) is forgotten just as quickly!

Sadly depressing isn’t it?

Something I heard a few years back which sadly strikes all too true…
“If manners and common sense were an App – everyone would have and use it”

Yes, exactly; the so-called ‘post-truth’ world!

We’d better get used to it, it’s the new politics (especially in some quarters)…

…goodbye ‘innocent until proven guilty’, hello ‘cancel culture’!

Do we not, CD, now live in a world in which if something is asserted as true, it is widely and immediately accepted as the truth – even if no evidence has been proffered in support of the assertion (and perhaps none exists)? Too many people seem no longer to have enquiring minds and, instead of maintaining a healthy scepticism whilst demanding and awaiting supporting evidence, accept the assertion as the truth and pass it on as such despite the absence of provenance. The Emperor’s New Clothes are everywhere today!

Can’t imagine a book being written about any discussion on here nowadays….

Well, twelve years old is about right; graduated at fourteen I think.

However, ‘the Internet’ (so now, pretty-much anybody under thirty and all of those with limited ‘critical’ faculties) thinks the youngest Oxford University Graduate is somebody called Joshua Beckford who attended Oxford University when he was six years old!

The thing is, as far as I can find out, Joshua Beckford never attended Oxford University, and certainly not when he was six years old.

But try telling the average ‘young person’ that!

(In the ‘good old days’ a Moderator would be along to tell me that I have veered off-topic, and they’d be right; I think I’m fairly safe these days!)

12

I don’t know if it is just lack of manners or a symptom of generations that need faster and faster ‘gratification’ with an instant answer; I think most of us are guilty of that in many ways these days but the young, who have never known a world without the internet, simply don’t understand what life was like before!

I drove past an eight year old girl walking home from a local school today; I had to be careful as there are no pavements there and she was concentrating on her iPhone…

…I wonder if she realises that she held in her hand more computing power than was used by the whole of NASA to put men on the moon in 1969? And effectively ‘instant’ access via Google to every book in every language in every library in the world…

…yet in six months time she’ll simply discard her phone for a new one!

The problem is, with instant access to all this staggering volume of information, the ability of people (I’m guilty too!), but especially the young, is that they don’t have to ‘know’ anything (because they can look it up with one hand faster that I can ask the question)!

However, the (disastrous!) down-side to this is that they also rarely question anything (anything!) they look-up on their phones!

As an experiment do this: guess (don’t Google!) how old the youngest person to ever graduate from Oxford University was. Write down your answer.

Now Google it and compare the top ten results!

My last couple of posts where I went to any trouble to try and help somebody (a new user with an appeal for information) didn’t even get a response from that user (let alone a thank you)!

I’m afraid, CD, that this is simply indicative of the ‘take it for granted’ society in which we live today – and when, in future, no-one responds to such appeals, because thanks rarely are forthcoming, in all probability the appellant will complain at that!

An Internet forum, especially one with the calibre of user that used to frequent this forum, is the perfect (PERFECT!) media for a company to listen to the wishes of its users / potential customers. The fact that, it seems to me, nobody is listening speaks volumes!

I think I understand the reasons, these are rapidly changing times for the publishing industry, but it seems that a desperate attempt to generate income (through a blizzard of adverts and more hits from new, younger, users) has completely alienated the existing ‘workforce’!

And we are (or were) the ‘workforce’!!!

How much ‘content’ to use the current term do KEY generate on this forum exactly? The answer seems to be NONE.

So unless the ‘workforce’ can be coaxed back to generate interesting and informative content FOR FREE (!!!!!) that people will want to come here to read there will be no post, no hits, no traffic and no ad revenue.

I genuinely hope that this forum succeeds but unless KEY understand and acknowledge this is their business model, or even bother to come here and discuss it, then what is the incentive for any of the ‘workforce’ to return?

It is not as if there aren’t any other options!

In the ‘old days’ by the time I’d written this much there would be ten other posts (even at this time of day – it is 03:00 in the United Kingdom) from all over the world; but I bet I’m the only one here.

My last couple of posts where I went to any trouble to try and help somebody (a new user with an appeal for information) didn’t even get a response from that user (let alone a thank you)!

I’m 55 and spent many happy hours here writing upwards of 10,000 carefully thought-out post that contained (I hope) either rational arguments or helpful information.

It is utterly pointless to try any of that on the current forum as it stands; it is more adverts than discussion (and it crashes constantly).

Google’s search has worked far better than the supposedly built-in search function for many years. That used to work tolerably well but became basically useless several updates ago.