@Tubelab - my Concord was an in dash unit, 10 WPC with Dolby. I had a VW Scirocco (?) with two RS 12"s mounted into the rear deck flap, with a couple of piezos resting on top. Later I got some power amp from Olsons that had an interstage transformer. It went really loud and I beat this other guys system hands down for how loud it could play. That was probably '78 - never pursued car audio since.
"I got to meet a lot of people ... including Jaco Pastorious and Pat Metheny. I was invited to their music lab to help understand a new piece that they had recently acquired, an ARP2600 music synthesizer"
Now you're making me drool. I had taken an elective at the time, which was basically sit in a room with a big Moog (similar to Emerson's), a couple of tape decks (with servo control transport motors) a Dynaco 400 and a large pair of KEF speakers - with blown tweeters for obvious reasons.
I couldnt do much with it musically. (I remember patching the sequencer was fun, controlling the tape speed with an oscillator was fun, Hands-on learning about VCAs and VCFs was fun) But I bet I could have shown those guys "some things you can do". That is, if I wasnt too self-conscious to be able to even speak!
How fortunate!
"I got to meet a lot of people ... including Jaco Pastorious and Pat Metheny. I was invited to their music lab to help understand a new piece that they had recently acquired, an ARP2600 music synthesizer"
Now you're making me drool. I had taken an elective at the time, which was basically sit in a room with a big Moog (similar to Emerson's), a couple of tape decks (with servo control transport motors) a Dynaco 400 and a large pair of KEF speakers - with blown tweeters for obvious reasons.
I couldnt do much with it musically. (I remember patching the sequencer was fun, controlling the tape speed with an oscillator was fun, Hands-on learning about VCAs and VCFs was fun) But I bet I could have shown those guys "some things you can do". That is, if I wasnt too self-conscious to be able to even speak!
How fortunate!
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Yes, my fellow redneck, 'supervised' meant someone over 14 was with us. And it still does in my neighborhood.
BTW, that was a fine grouper you posted over in the food thread!
No, the difference is that now we have social media to record all our stupidities. I'm a lucky guy it wasn't arround in the 80's and 90's when i was a kid/teenager. Otherwise you would have a lot more stupid things on camera of me than that...
So when I read Osvaldo say something like "So I was too happy making connections to anything metallic device that can act as antenna but not too evident to make authorities to suspect". I wonder where this quality of investigation comes from?
Maybe it's not so much that "kids today" are "more stupid", it a matter of there's simply less interest in investigating such real-world things, because there's a nearly infinite (time sink wise) array of virtual-world (in-game, on YT, 500 cable channels) stuff available to consume. So even if you're born with a propensity to investigate this physical world, with today's peer pressure and rampant availability of screen-based reality, maybe it's hard shrug it all off and prefer the physical world investigations for their own sake - regardless of how many "followers" join or leave your "channel".
Maybe it's not so much that "kids today" are "more stupid", it a matter of there's simply less interest in investigating such real-world things, because there's a nearly infinite (time sink wise) array of virtual-world (in-game, on YT, 500 cable channels) stuff available to consume. So even if you're born with a propensity to investigate this physical world, with today's peer pressure and rampant availability of screen-based reality, maybe it's hard shrug it all off and prefer the physical world investigations for their own sake - regardless of how many "followers" join or leave your "channel".
I also have ADHD, and they gave me pills (Ritalin) for that as 8 year old kid, wich was the start of my drugaddictions (speed, cocaine, alcohol, uppers, downers, antidepressiva, ...) of my teenage years. Before i was 20 i dropped those bad habits (including alcohol) and only smoked weed (to wich i'm not addicted, wich is strange) and the older i get, the less i smoke that. Now i sometimes smoke some weed, but not daily and in some periods even not weekly, and drink maybe 5 alcoholic drinks a year. I don't take any psychiatric medecine (i'm also bipolar and autistisc says shrinks), because i don't need it anymore. I can handle myself, and can handle society where i don't fit in. But i'm ok with being the weirdo of the community, and that mental acceptance helps a lot. And those stamps that they put on my head don't tell nothing. It's what you do with it that counts, and you can do more than most think. If i read the psychiatric reports about me as a kid, i'm need to laugh, because none of their predictions about my futur became reality...
So don't let them cage you in because you have this or that!!
I've worked with a few thousand young adults over the years, and IMO there is a noticeably large (and growing) disconnect from the world of real physical objects, and the physical properties of those physical objects.
As an example, I used to run an introductory math lab in a California junior college, and one of the experiments I designed for it involved measuring lengths and diameters of a few roughly finger-sized metal rods, first with a ruler, then with calipers.
To my shock, over the years more and more students began walking up to me and telling me the rods measured four inches in diameter. Not only could they not read a ruler, they also hadn't the faintest idea that four inches is roughly the width of your hand, rather than roughly the width of your finger. (The ruler was marked in tenths of an inch, so they were actually looking at 0.4 inch.)
In Canada, kids grow up with the metric system, but the outcome isn't different; few young adults can tell me if the width of a finger is about a millimetre, about a centimetre, or about a metre.
Try asking young people roughly what a bucketful of water weighs, and there's a good chance you'll find answers that are orders of magnitude away from reality, whether you're talking imperial units or metric ones. Apparently few young people have ever picked up a bucketful of water (or a can of paint), never mind comparing it mentally to something of known weight that they've also carried. In California, the kids don't know if a five-gallon bucket full of water weighs about 0.4 lbs, 4 lbs, or 40 lbs. In Canada, the kids don't know if 2 litres of orange juice weighs roughly 0.2 kg, 2kg, or 20 kg. (This is particularly tragic because one litre of water weighs 1 kg in metric units, and orange juice is basically water.)
Another thing I've noticed, and this one is a striking change to me: watch as people enter an elevator and push the button to select the floor they wish to go to. People over the age of, say 30, will invariably use an index finger to push the knob.
But if your observations are similar to mine, you will see a significant proportion of young people from Gen Z walk up and push the elevator button with their thumb. They spend hours and hours every day thumbing their 'phones, and for them, the thumb has become the dominant digit.
Individual opinions are always prone to individual bias. What about systematic studies? About fifteen years ago I read the results of a study of "functional literacy" conducted on college students in the USA. Researchers gave tens of thousands of college students a bus time-table, and a table listing physical exercise intensity and duration versus expected calorie burn.
Each student then had to figure out how to travel by bus from a specified point A to a specified point B, so as to arrive at point B by a specified time - which bus to take, at what time you would need to catch the bus at point A, and so on. Similarly, students would be asked a question such as "According to the table, how many minutes of medium-intensity exercise does it take to burn 100 calories?"
The results? Only about fifty percent of four-year college students were able to correctly answer both tasks. Only about twenty-five percent of two-year college students were able to correctly answer both tasks.
That was about the time I noticed that the recipes posted behind the counter at the local fast-food restaurant ("Four squirts of chocolate syrup") changed to pictures (an image showing four splotches of brown fluid, in this case.) I suspect Jack In The Box corporate had discovered that many of their young employees could not successfully read the "recipes", and so went to brightly coloured pictures instead.
I'm almost positive that particular functional-literacy study was conducted before the iPhone and Android phones arrived on the market, so it would be interesting to know whether endless hours of phone-fondling have changed those outcomes, and if so, by how much.
-Gnobuddy
I went to an ELP concert in 1971 and decided that I was going to build a synth. My first one was a PAIA2700 kit. I had wired all sorts of DIY stuff up to it, but the quality of the original design left a lot to be desired.
I knew a little about music since I played guitar from age 7, but I knew a lot about electronics and how it applied to analog synthesis. I had designed and partially built a big DIGITAL synth in 1972.
One of the guys from the music frat house (visible from the back door of Olson's) kept asking me questions about how oscillators and filters worked, and stuff, so I assumed that he was trying to build one of the phone phreaking boxes that were common in the early 70's. Then one day he asks me if I would explain some of the things I told him to one of his teachers. I agreed thinking the "teacher" was involved in technology. No, he was head of the music creation lab. That's how I got to play with the 2600. They also had an ODYSSEY, which is pre-patched. I would buy a dead ODYSSEY for myself a few years later and fix it.
My father refused to allow that....even though he was an alcoholic, his kid wasn't going to be a druggie. Later in life I experimented with all the usual drugs including Ritalin.
Weed did help with the ability to concentrate for sometimes WHOLE DAYS, but it's effects diminished over time, and I quit that when I decided to give college a second try at age 37.
Many people, but mostly my father often told me that I was "useless" "his biggest mistake" and "would amount to anything." The domestic situation got so bad that I tossed what I could stuff into my 1949 Plymouth and drove away. Didn't speak to anyone in that house for 2 years. It took that long for one of my brothers to find me. My synths, guitars. speakers, and hundreds of tubes were all destroyed or trashed.
Looking back now I realize that my father was a tortured soul that carried a lot of WWII horror on his shoulders that I never knew about. It took nearly 20 years before we could be in the same house again, but we could never really talk father - son style.
Despite the turmoil, I managed to turn an assembly line job into a 41 year career, with 30 of those years as an electrical engineer, and got Motorola to pay for my two college degrees.....
Those kind of opportunities are simply not available to kids today. The rules have changed.
I'm truly sorry to hear that your father was such an ugly jackass, and that you had to hear such abuse growing up. What a pity that you didn't have people around you who could see and recognize your intelligence, creativity, and drive.
My own father was cowardly, selfish, dishonest, a bully, completely disconnected from his own wife and children, and never took responsibility for any of his own actions, so I have an inkling what it must have been like to grow up the way you did.
I chose not to have kids, because I didn't want to take the chance that I might turn out to be a lousy father myself, as so often happens. Lousy parenting and dysfunctional families are usually a multi-generational disaster that goes on and on for decades or centuries, and I was determined that wouldn't be my legacy.
My siblings all ended up in horribly dysfunctional marriages themselves, and all chose to have children. If I believed in invisible wizards in the sky, I would pray that those young people's lives turn out better than their parent's and grandparent's did.
-Gnobuddy
Speaking of youth being idiots there are currently 14 emergency vehicles outside my house and a 20 something just still alive. Lost control at I guess double the posted speed limit racing his mates after a car meet. Took out a 12"x12" gate post and reinforced gate. Wrote off both cars in the neihbours drive, pushing one 8 feet into the front of the house and the house is going to need a structural survey.
I only went into a hedge at speed at that age... By the grace of god.
Been 1 fatal and one near on that corner in last 3 years. Usually they hit the oak tree next to the gatepost. Not suprisingly they are trying to sell the house!
I only went into a hedge at speed at that age... By the grace of god.
Been 1 fatal and one near on that corner in last 3 years. Usually they hit the oak tree next to the gatepost. Not suprisingly they are trying to sell the house!
I remember honing my copper plumbing pipe soldering skills by fabricating a “rifle” for shooting off Roman candles one handled while riding my bike at Halloween. My folks never found out - pretty sure dad would have laughed his *** off, and mom would have tanned mine.
Kids today.... likely couldn't even dial a touch tone or dial phone if they had to - much less remember someone's phone number, including area code.
Having to dial "911" from memory is about all the newer generation knows.
This is of course, all part of that Dumbing Down Of America so fondly talked about.
I threw a Christmas party one year, invited a bunch of people over.
One guest brought his nephew along, a 20 year old.
At one point, in the dining room, he asked me what that "thing was" that was making music in the corner of the room.
I opened the lid to reveal my 1963 RCA Victor console stereo.
He then pointed to the Garrard 3000 record changer in it, which was playing Nat King Cole's Christmas album...... and asked me what that was. 😱
I assumed his "earbud" level of MP3 education was all he knew.
God forbid anyone young is educated in anything historic.
Talk about someone living under a rock!
Having to dial "911" from memory is about all the newer generation knows.
This is of course, all part of that Dumbing Down Of America so fondly talked about.
I threw a Christmas party one year, invited a bunch of people over.
One guest brought his nephew along, a 20 year old.
At one point, in the dining room, he asked me what that "thing was" that was making music in the corner of the room.
I opened the lid to reveal my 1963 RCA Victor console stereo.
He then pointed to the Garrard 3000 record changer in it, which was playing Nat King Cole's Christmas album...... and asked me what that was. 😱
I assumed his "earbud" level of MP3 education was all he knew.
God forbid anyone young is educated in anything historic.
Talk about someone living under a rock!
You're gonna love this Australian news story from 2009, five years after a psychopath stalker American college student swindled his "friends" and took over ownership of the loathsome website they'd created together to stalk women living in the area.
Here's the story: Trapped girls updated Facebook instead of calling police - Telegraph
-Gnobuddy
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I get a good laugh reading this thread.
It looks like there are no bigger differeces in "great ideas" between generations, except maybe the youngsters of today.
A lot of them are trapped with cellphones and Playstation.
But around here it seems that something have changed.
School are surprised that the youngest classes love to be outside playing.
My wife and I run a childrens group, part of a nationwide organisation, scout-like but no singing around bonfires, not political or religious.
We have the biggest youth organisation in Sweden with about 100 kids between 4 and 15, and that in a small town with 4500 people.
Learning how to dress in every weather, cook, sleep in tent or under the sky. Learn by playing, making mistakes and help each other. Talk about animals, mills in small creeks, Ironage graves, we're lucky to live in a place with so much intresting to see, and we all learn a lot, one can't always answer their questions...
A colleauge to my wife, born in early 90's, asked if we wanted to make elite soldiers of them, but that's not the case.
But the kids don't worry about getting lost, know what to do if there's a blackout, can light a fire in a safe way, and knows a bit First aid if something happens.
With a bit luck they have learned to not remake all the misstakes I've told them that I did.
But there are also a complete different safety-thinking now compared to when I were in their age.
From helmets and safetybelts to watch out for sick people.
Figge
It looks like there are no bigger differeces in "great ideas" between generations, except maybe the youngsters of today.
A lot of them are trapped with cellphones and Playstation.
But around here it seems that something have changed.
School are surprised that the youngest classes love to be outside playing.
My wife and I run a childrens group, part of a nationwide organisation, scout-like but no singing around bonfires, not political or religious.
We have the biggest youth organisation in Sweden with about 100 kids between 4 and 15, and that in a small town with 4500 people.
Learning how to dress in every weather, cook, sleep in tent or under the sky. Learn by playing, making mistakes and help each other. Talk about animals, mills in small creeks, Ironage graves, we're lucky to live in a place with so much intresting to see, and we all learn a lot, one can't always answer their questions...
A colleauge to my wife, born in early 90's, asked if we wanted to make elite soldiers of them, but that's not the case.
But the kids don't worry about getting lost, know what to do if there's a blackout, can light a fire in a safe way, and knows a bit First aid if something happens.
With a bit luck they have learned to not remake all the misstakes I've told them that I did.
But there are also a complete different safety-thinking now compared to when I were in their age.
From helmets and safetybelts to watch out for sick people.
Figge
Good job, Trollet. I never can understand how a person can live the life through a 25cm² screen. Returning to the real life to those guys is a good but hard job.
We now have nearly two generations of people who have newer known life without the little plastic window through which they see and interact with the world.
Think of the world wide panic and withdrawal shock that will occur if the networks go down or fall victim to a major cyber attack.