As a former consultant, I learned or figured out many creative uses for the hotel mouthwash.
The Light Side
Humor and humorous topics
My Take on Coffee
I posted a comment on a website about Keurig K-Cup coffee makers, and I’ve had a constant stream of nitwits trying to argue with me, ever since.
My thesis was that, after having resisted buying a K-Cup machine for about 10 years, my wife finally bought one, and I find that it fits my lifestyle much better than a traditional carafe-based coffee maker.
In the movies, technology is often depicted as a deus ex machina, a convenience for the writer to instantly solve a problem. It’s common for writers to stretch the truth a little bit, in order to facilitate flow or continuity, but with technology, writers can sometimes imbue nearly magical qualities. Rightly so, as Arthur C. Clarke stated, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic“.
And sometimes, the writers just plain get it wrong.
Worse, sometimes, the incorrect depiction is MORE appealing than the real-world functionalities and capabilities, leading to the creation of a mythology that gets propagated until the myth itself is part of pop-culture folklore.
Here are some examples of movie tech myths run amok.
Science and Insanity
Insanity: Repeating the same process, expecting a different outcome.
Science: Repeating a process in order to verify a previously-observed result.
Conclusion
There is a fine line between science and insanity.
You know you need coffee when…
- You make a pot of coffee
- You go to pour yourself a cup of coffee
- A split second before you start to pour, you realize you’re holding a plate instead of a cup
- You put the plate away and grab a cup
- Your sleep-deprived brain flickers dimly, as you briefly note that, for the entire time you’ve owned this particular coffee cup, you’ve never noticed that they printed the picture upside-down.
- You go to pour yourself a cup of coffee
- A split second before you start to pour, you realize that the cup is, in fact, upside-down rather than the picture being upside-down.
- You invert the cup, and successfully pour your coffee!
(Comments and feedback welcome)
Just as with any industry, Information Technology has a common cultural basis. Just as doctors and lawyers from different parts of the country watch the same TV shows and read the same books, IT people have a common cultural basis.
IT culture is formed by movies (IT people generally watch a LOT of movies) and technology, and ironically, by movies ABOUT technology. The goal of this list (“required reading (movie) list”) is to expose a person to all the basic memes (A “meme” is a cultural element) common in IT culture. This is not a “all the cool movies in the universe” list, as numerous fanboys already have dozens of those, and spend countless hours presumably arguing about them.