So your complaint is that when you use things, they get used?
I’m not sure any technology is going to solve that problem.
I know this must be a giant pain in the ass to use, and possibly even unsafe - there must be some poor bastards who’ve banged themselves painfully on the flywheel. But it also sounds really, really cool - not technically steampunk (no steam power), but not far removed from that aesthetic. I’d like to see that system in operation.
I don’t know. I haven’t seen The Rock.
God, no, I don’t think anyone makes them anymore. (Although there are still companies that manufacture barred doors and windows and you’d be surprised how much those cost.)
I had actually thought about making the steampunk comparison myself. It’s surprising how high-tech some purely mechanical systems were in the pre-electric age.
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re: the OP – I kind of think dentistry is unbelievably antiquated. I mean, they can do laparoscopic surgery using a computer-controlled laser and camera through a tiny incision; they can correct some conditions using gene therapy…and they removed my bad tooth with pliers and leverage and some swearing. Why does so much of dentistry involve things that look like meat hooks, and scraping, and yanking, and drilling?
It’s like if they made a short child taller using a medieval rack instead of precisely-measured doses of human growth hormone.
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This is exactly what I wanted to come in and say. With variable intensity lasers, all sorts of gee-whiz gadgets and techniques used in ‘real’ medicine, why is dentistry just barely one step above “bite this bullet and don’t yell too loudly”?
Exhibit A: the term “term of art.” There isn’t even a name for the phenomenon that doesn’t require a special definition. Its very existence is none of our damn business. :dubious:
burning teeth stink i think. also it might take longer so it would cost more.
it might be useful in some situations though i don’t think it could be a total substitute.
Assuming you’re not kidding, use of a settled term of art is a perfect example of clarity and conservation of words rather than an attempt at obfuscation. In drafting a will, a lawyer could say that the person decrees that the estate should be distributed:
or he could say that the estate is to be distributed:
Thereby using an easily and commonly understood shorthand way of saying exactly the same thing, preventing the reader from having to reinvent the wheel and redefine and reinterpret the meaning and intent of every rewriting, preventing endless reargument and quibbling over intent. Terms of art are intended to make complicated but nonetheless settled and understood concepts clear to the reader familiar with them. It wasn’t some secret cabal of crazed, handwringing law professors trying to figure out how they could make legal drafting as hard to understand as possible - used correctly, terms of art make drafting easier to parse, not harder.
Anything that needs to be done with snail mail. I rolled over my New York Life 401(k) to a T-Rowe Price IRA. I remember seeing commercials (not neccessarily by NYL or TRP) talking about how “easy” it is to roll over your 401(k). I assumed by “easy” they meant that the two banks could get together and work it out for me. I was surprised when I learned that I had to have a check mailed to me and then I had to mail it out. I didn’t expect that I would have to get envelopes and mail trucks involved in order to take numbers off of one computer and put them on another.
The schedule for the part-timers at my work was previously stored on the boss’s computer as an excel file and it was communicated to the part-timers by printing it out and leaving it laying around randomly somewhere. and I mean randomly. No bulletin board, no fixed place to find it. It just floated around the place. The only copy. It’s all online now but that was only implemented a few months ago.
Now, they’re not always (or even often) used correctly, so in that they can be confusing. But that’s a problem with the practitioner, not the practice.
And they correctly rolled their eyes at you.
What would you propose they do for the 15,000 new spreadsheets with lists that get created in a typical company every month - write a custom app???
What has release date got to do with anything, anyway? If the damned thing just works, then why do you expect it to be continually tweaked?
Further, what you wrote is completely and utterly incorrect. Nobody writes papers in TeX anymore, it’s all written in LaTeX, the major distributions of which (TeXLive, for instance) are regularly updated. The last TexLive distribution was released on 28th May this year; it’s simply incorrect to assert that (La)TeX is “frozen”. A recent major addition was the microtype package, for example, which performs micro-typographical changes to the document as it’s typeset (font expansion in lines, character protrusion, etc).
That’s ridiculous. You centre cell entries using the column descriptor when you declare a table. And EPS? Why are you using EPS? pdflatex (which is what everybody universally uses now, unless stuck in the 1980s) accepts PNG, JPG, and virtually every other modern image format just fine.
LyX is a decent GUI for LaTeX, or so I’m told.
I would pay to see that. From a safe distance, of course.
Behold, the Pyxis.
mmm
Looks good. I doubt NSW Health would spring for several thousand of those, unfortunately.
One of the all-time winners has to be watering fields using a shadoof, which is still done in the Middle East. The process is demonstrably at least 4,000 years old, and very likely much older.
In defense of its use, it works. You wouldn’t want to starve because your newfangled digital shadoof was down.
I agree. It’s an example of what Russel Hirst, a technical writing professor, would call Good Jargon - it saves time, space, and energy for the initiated. (His example is scientific terminology.) Bad Jargon is spin or smoke-blowing, meant to disinform or mystify.
What I meant by criticizing the expression “term of art” is that it conveys a slight elitism: the non-specialist isn’t even supposed to understand *what a term of art is *until it’s explained. One might think at first that it referred to the visual arts, not legal artfulness.
Pyxis machines aren’t actually as expensive as you’d think. I mean, compared to paying extra staff, anyway 
My vote is for checks and all the things that go along with them. I have a student loan through Chase that I HAD to use a checking account for (had to open one specifically for it, since I’ve been using a pre-paid debit card for years as my primary “checking” account), then to sign up for auto-pay, they wanted me to MAIL them a CANCELLED CHECK. I wasn’t about to order checks just to send out a cancelled check, so I never did get enrolled in auto-pay. :dubious:
As I hear it, the practice of writing a numerical amount and spelling it out on checks is a holdover from when the Hindu-Arabic number system was first introduced to Europe.
According the Cartoon Museum in London, most British comic artists still send their work in by snail mail. Since some of them don’t (they would usually create the work by hand but then scan it in), there obviously isn’t a problem with degradation of quality, but some of those artists are pretty damn old and this is what they’re used to.
But actually I’ve been surprised at how quickly institutions over here are catching on; for example, most of the time if I ask ‘does email count as a written request,’ the answer is yes. I’ve used a fax two or three times ever and haven’t written a cheque for at least a decade.
Isn’t it also a useful check (heh) too? To make sure you didn’t put the decimal point in the wrong place or put the wrong number of zeroes?
There’s a term for this doubling of input to lessen errors, isn’t there?
And I’m pretty sure Europe was using Arabic numerals for a long time before cheques came into use.