Lawrence Hall, HSG
Human Intelligence,
Human Ethics
From a long-ago Christmas I still have a trio of Radio
Shack instruments in an attractive 1980s plastic case: a battery-powered clock,
a thermometer, and a hygrometer. A barometer would have been a good fourth, but
I already had one.
The Radio Shack gizmos are so old that they were made in a
free nation, Taiwan. My metal and glass barometer is an antique: it was made in
the U.S.A.
Such things have been around for hundreds of years, and
no well-appointed home or office was without them. With them a thoughtful
individual, keeping a record and working out calculations with a pencil and a calendar
from the funeral home or the feed store, could reach reasonable conclusions in
anticipating weather conditions for the next few days. In determining weather
conditions for agriculture, construction, railways, road conditions, hunting, and
other purposes these simple machines and the complex human brain were essential
For years radio and television meteorologists still employed
such devices as well as on-the-ground observations sent to them via radio or
telephone. Now, whenever the electronic hijackers permit, weather casters have
access to all this information and more via computers.
But the electronics are unreliable.
When you look at the thermometer on your porch you are
reading the numbers on that thermometer, not a message telling you what the
numbers are said to be on some other thermometer in the area. Your thermometer
might or might not in itself be reliable, and it might or might not be
positioned properly, but it is in your line of sight.
If the weather services are hacked, if the power fails,
if that far-away thermometer is down, you can still observe your thermometer.
The same obtains with your mechanical clock, your hygrometer,
and your barometer. There are no third parties between you and them – no computers,
no satellite signals, no radio waves, no electrical lines, no hackers.
Most of us, including your ‘umble scrivener, access
weather information via the television, radio, the Orwellian telescreen that
looks like a small version of the mysterious slab in 2001: A Space Odyssey,
and, increasingly, our nifty little Dick Tracy watches.
The problem is that we access weather reports and other
sorts of information only with the permission of people who don’t like us.
I type this on a little machine bearing a fine old
American name but which was made in a slave-labor camp. So was my clever
fruit-named watch, my desk lamp, the glowing electronic components which send
and receive all the household messages, the de-humidifier glowing prettily in a
corner of the room, and most everything else of recent vintage.
Chairman Xi, the Big Rocket Man, can shut it down in an
instant. So can a sixteen-year-old.
Chanting “Back. To. Basics.” is as reactionary a ballcap
slogan as “Learn. To. Code.” but between those two rigid positions there is a
logical alternative: learn and practice the basics (no one ever hacked a steam
locomotive, a slide rule, or a tube radio) and extend them into the limitless
possibilities of research and development IN THIS COUNTRY.
Until we make that happen, we are a third-world country
dependent on the whims of other nations. And that sixteen-year-old.
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