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- 9. time-binding animals
- =======================
-
- When I was a kid, I read pretty much all of Robert A. Heinlein's Science
- Fiction (the short stories, the early novels, the late novels, everything).
- Heinlein was something of a disciple of a guy named Alfred Korzybski, who had
- built up one of those elaborate intellectual systems where the whole thing may
- be kind of cracked, but there are some interesting ideas in there. You can get
- a sense of the flavor of his work from the fact that he wrote a book called
- _Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General
- Semantics_.
-
- I've never read Korzybski's book, though maybe one day I'll make an attempt.
- One of the bits that stuck for me, via Heinlein's fiction, was the notion that
- humans, unique in the animal kingdom, are "time binders": Creatures capable of
- accumulating knowledge and retaining it between generations, so that one set of
- us can pick up where another set of us left off, not only learning things
- within an individual lifetime, but benefiting from the learning of previous
- lives and transmitting our own progress well beyond the temporal boundaries of
- a single existence.
-
- There's a useful sense in which the history of civilization is the history of
- technology, broadly understood. And a good deal of the history of technology
- is bound up in the ways that technology augments and amplifies memory.
-
- the computer as an extension of memory
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-
- There's an important
-
- To cover:
-
- * scripting
- * makefiles
- * memory
- * command history
- * Ctrl-R
- * version control and that sorta stuff
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