L33t Sk1llz0rz

"You carry on 'cause it's all you know
You can't light a fire, you can't cook or sew"

Garbage - Butterfly Collector


I try not to toot my own tinny and untuned horn, but I've gotten pretty good at micropipetting. See, when you're concocting some unholy microbiological abomination in a 1.5mL microcentrifuge tube (as one does by and by) the dozen odd individual samples and reagents get so small as to require mechanical precision. Hence the advent of micropipettes. But, once you get down to, say, 20 microliters and below, even the precision-machined plungers of Eppendorf cannot save ye! It takes a bit of practice actually centering the tip onto the liquid you want without aspirating any of the surrounding air or jamming it too deep and vacuum-locking yourself out of a sample. So my instructor taught me as her instructor taught her, to practice grabbing tiny droplets of water off Parafilm, where they bead up into a cohesive mass, without losing any volume (except inevitably to evaporation.) Which, come to think of it, is beginning to sound suspiciously like being made to walk on rice paper without tearing it... combined with "wax on / wax off" ... maybe she just didn't like me much? In any case, I now possess a +2 circumstance bonus to sucking. As technology and automation improve, I could see this highly specialized skill drifting out of common use, just as manual phenol-chloroform DNA extraction is now largely a professorial reminiscence of ages past. Humanity's fate certainly does not hinge on the populace's ability to steady a pipette tip.

On a completely unrelated topic, a few of you younger folk might be scratching your heads as to the title of this post. Back in the '80s and '90s quite a few people got sick of chat filters policing their online speech and thus began purposely mis-spelling words by inserting numbers and symbols and fabricating their own unintelligible patois, instantly adopted by the adolescent gamer crowd as an exclusivist badge of in-group pride. Like any other slang. Bro.
Thus "elite" speak was born. Or should I say 7|-||_|5 13375p34k \/\/Uz 80r|\|!!!11(one)
Much like viral polymerases (sorry, I'm on a biology kick today) its very inaccuracy was its greatest selling point, as its lack of conventions made it impossible to pin down, with every group adding their own preferred spellings and catchphrases from week to week. Conversing in 1337 was less a fixed procedure than a personal skill in l1nguist1ck flimflammery. With millennials replacing and rebelling against GenX-ers' brand of coolness, l33t went the way of the d0d0... though the word "pr0n" managed to stick. Go figure.
Aaaand somehow the world neglected to grind to a halt. Good riddens. Maybe it was never that valuable a skill to begin with?

On another completely unrelated topic, sometime last decade one of my uncles complained about modern college students' terrible penmanship and increasingly slow note-taking, bemoaning their lack of skill with a ball-point pen, much less the stately fountain pen of yore. I retorted (smirking superciliously as is my wont) asking why he doesn't also decry our lack of skill in writing with goose quills, or, why not, chiseling clay tablets at breakneck speed. Oh, those heroic Sumerian stenographers! Pencils and pens are just one more technology whose convenience or worth must be judged against necessity and alternatives.

However, there is an underlying skill there, the symbolic representation of phonetic speech, which is indeed utterly indispensable to any society. Illiteracy is deadlier than most diseases at this point. (If you don't believe me, read it on WebMD.) Only the wrist-breaking habit of taking notes in class (mandated by student poverty and expensive printing) has now become obsolete in the face of easy copying and distribution of information. We no longer need an entire population of stenographers to jot down whole chapters out of textbooks. It's a specialized skill put to very limited and specialized use. But writing, which is to say the basic ability to reproduce written language, is still absolutely crucial to each and every one of us. Do it slow, do it ugly, but you still gotta do it, baby! (Wait, how did we get back onto pr0n?)

And unfortunately, the more technologies we accumulate, the more we lose our ability to distinguish between critical and non-critical techne, between the superficial application of a skill and its fundamental roots which help us find our way in the world. Self-driving cars sound like a wonderful idea, and maybe we shouldn't all be forced to operate an automo-car, that very specific and limited mechanism which defined the 20th century. But being able to read a map and possessing a basic idea of roads and the getting around on same, that... sorry, that's not something we can allow to die off like quill pens. A couple of years ago I took my car in for servicing and spent the intervening hours at a nearby mall. When they called to tell me my car was ready, I told the driver of their complimentary shuttle he could pick me up at the mall's North entrance. I would've guessed he was about ten years younger than me, young enough to have gotten his driver's license in the post-GPS era. When we got back, his boss (about ten years apart from me in the other direction) pulled me aside conspiratorially: "you know I had to show him which way North was? And explain to him in which directions the streets run?" This is especially jarring in American towns, which being developed post-industrially by planning commissions and not growing around medieval ruins and meandering trade roads, have the vast majority of their roads laid out in square grids aligned to cardinal points. It seems impossible for any American to get to twenty years of age without learning to "go east on 12th street" but there we have it... Google Maps by the way isn't helping matters by not showing parallels and meridians.

Or, at about the same time (since I've spent so much of this post blurting out biology) I recall a graduate student who, when asked to divide 2 by 0.5, stammered and wavered a bit then had to do so by calculator. Granted, nerves played some role in this as it was a first lab session, but still... you're a Master's student in a hard science discipline. We do numbers here. You may not need to integrate curves or multiply polynomials in your head, but basic two-digit algebra is not up for debate!
And she wasn't even one of the stupid ones. Bright young woman and very engaged in the subject matter and eager to give all the right answers before anyone else, hand always up in the air swatting at those extra credit points, making the rest of us look like chumps. Girl was l33t! When even the good ones aren't showing good skills, it's the system as a whole that's failing them.

Forget institutions, laws or funding. On an interpersonal level, we are no longer challenging each other to rise above the lowest common denominator.

We have to realize that no matter how helpful the technology around us becomes, some mental tasks are simply too intrinsically valuable to ever abandon. Situating oneself in the world, understanding proportions, simple ethics, the laws of motion, a basic familiarity with manipulating numbers or manipulating language. For eight years now I've been babbling about random nonsense on this blog. And, as a surprise to myself, I've been gradually, ever so gradually, improving at it. Weird huh? My posts have become more organized, more evocative and logical at the same time, better able to convey ideas. Who'd'a thunk it, when all I initially wanted was to howl into the void for a month or two? "Blogging" is a figment of our contemporary social fictions. I could take it or leave it, and in two centuries' time I doubt it'll be any more relevant than Sumerian stenography. But improving the techne of wordsmithing transcends my screen and keyboard, and I would not have gained in this intrinsic mental ability if I'd stuck to posting Youtube comments or 140-character flame wars like most of you are doing, or if I'd limited myself to penning a gamer blog or SciFi blog or an anti-religious or anti-feminist blog or some other, more crowdpleasing, limited format. Such subcultures are prone to defining the world in their own very limited j4rg0n.

Why let your clay tablets rule you?