Feb 5, 2018:

I struggle to maintain the concept of “self” long enough to apply it to anything. Like starting a campfire without matches, it’s tough. So while I have this smoldering mass of twigs in my hand, I’ll try to harness it.

If we require “two-ness” (a sense of two selves) to read silently to ourselves and I manage to read silently, then I must possess “two-ness.” If Carr is right to fear the internet threat to the “reading self,” then I’m in danger of losing something I can’t quite understand. This doesn’t mean I don’t feel the gradual erosion Carr described. Maybe writing (often) may be a way to delay this effect. If nothing can be done, is this loss just the price of progress?

One final thought on the self. In the ahistorical proposition of someone from the 18th century riding a roller coaster (properly a wooden coaster, like Goliath at Six Flags Great America), and the question of whether or not they’d enjoy it. What if they did? Would it mean that for a few seconds of controlled over-stimulation they had met their second self?

Feb 7, 2018:

Examining how previous generations solved problems using the tools available in their respective time periods is an enjoyable mental exercise. We have to step outside the way we’d approach the problem today. This may be a form of “two-ness” of self, in a way. A good example of this was the US Navy fire control computer, which mechanically performed complex applied mathematics (Note to self: buy a slide rule and learn to use it. May delay the gradual decline Carr warned about). Watching the workings of the Navy’s mechanical computer reminded me of a show I once watched on Discovery Channel. An archeologist was discussing the statues on Easter Island, and why we modern people can’t imagine how they were moved. The archeologist explained how the ancients (who moved them) weren’t handicapped by a knowledge of modern technology. Ditto the Great Pyramids, Stonehenge, and dozens more ancient engineering mysteries.

Vannevar Bush is one of the most interesting people I’d never heard of before. To some of his contemporaries the Memex concept may have been a Rube Goldberg device with no value. To anyone living today it was the essence of visionary. When I read his “As We May Think” essay, I did an internet search to make sure it wasn’t a hoax, written by a present-day person.

Gen. Montgomery Meigs deserves mention here, because his skills as a logistician during the US Civil War are legendary. After the war, though, tasked with administering pension payments for veterans and their survivors, he really shined. In laying out The Pension Building in D.C., I imagine he pictured all the processes that were to be performed, how they were interrelated, and then arranged a building to accommodate it all. Gen. Meigs was an Industrial Engineer before the term was coined. Think the McDonald brothers perfecting the “Speedee Service System” in 1948, but on a far, far grander scale (see movie: The Founder).

After we see something done a certain way, we accept it as common, and rarely appreciate the thought that was involved. Example: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, the way the Apollo moon missions used separate modules: one to land on the moon’s surface, one to remain in orbit (conserving kinetic energy). Seems like the only efficient solution today, but early in the US space program, the majority of experts favored a method entailing far more expense and risk.