Posted: 8^th June 2015

Old-Fashioned or Newfangled?

Did you enjoy your excursion into the future last week? That week which is now the past? Time's like that, although it may be an illusion. Who knows? Certainly not this couple. They're living in an imaginary future of personal flying vehicles. Aren't you glad that didn't happen? Can you imagine the traffic jams over your house? If the Segway could cause trouble on the roads, think of what those contraptions could do in the air. Some things don't really need to happen.

I've been thinking about that today: the past, the present, material culture, old-fashioned ideas versus newfangled notions, for several reasons. One is that we now have a raised garden bed to grow vegetables in. Not a new invention, but hopefully, an effective way to stop the bunnies from eating our veggies before we can get a crack at the produce. We like bunnies, and ours are tame, but we like veggies, too. The raised bed is one old-fashioned notion. No electrical fences or computer chips required.

Another is that over in Peer Review, people were asking about my entry onflour sack clothing. Now, that was a case of necessity being the mother of invention. People in the Great Depression made clothes out of flour and feed sacks. But one Researcher wanted to know how they sewed – by machine or by hand? – and another queried, 'What is lye soap?' Boy, that illustrates the technological divide between the generations. I've actually held homemade lye soap in my hand. And used it to remove stains. It wasn't a new idea when my grandparents were born.

So, tried and true, or newfangled? Inspired by science fiction, or back to the future? You pick. You write. We read.

This week, we have a whole slew of cool Stuff for you to read up on. There's cinema and home caring. There's art and history and snark. There's even some humour hidden in here, though as usual, you might have trouble finding it. Due to last week's technical difficulties, FWR's short story 'Tickers' is held over for a week-long engagement.

So enjoy. And be thinking about our Create topic. What do you think of the technology we have? What could we live without? What do we still have a crying need for?

Next time, maybe we'll use that engineering test on you, and see what you can make out of a paper clip.

Have a good week!
Stop Press PS: The h2g2 Post has just received an unsolicited email that says, 'I just stumbled across the site ... And I just want to thank you for existing.' As this message was obviously intended for all of you, we thought we should pass it along.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

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