Quote of the day—Roberta X

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Sometimes I suspect the TV people of deliberately attempting to inculcate superstition in the viewing public; then I realize they’re quite serious about putting chicken bones through their noses, if less so about the Deep Meaning of it all. That, they leave for the passive, receptive blobs on the other side of the screen and there’s nothing we can do about them.

Roberta X
October 11, 2012
7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12;
Or
The Superstitions Of Primitives
[While I have some disagreement about there being “nothing we can do about them” she has a valid point about the superstition of people. The older I get the more evidence I see presented that there is little more than a thin veneer of rationality and civilization over a subset of the human population. The rest has no veneer. You don’t even have to watch the idiot box, as Roberta did, to gather the evidence. I haven’t had an actual powered on television set in my home in at least 10, if not 15, years now yet I have the following examples from other sources:

  • A software engineer that is certain witches can animate a corpse sufficiently that it could be made to “hop down the road to another city for burial” such that the family wouldn’t haven’t pay the higher cost for transportation by conventional means.
  • A PhD mathematician who insisted digital computers were not deterministic. She told me it was a proven fact that if you ran the same program on different computers all solving the same problem they would come up with different answers. I was tempted to point out she was a Mac user but decided her problems went much deeper than that.
  • A senior government scientist who proclaimed he could diagnose injuries and illness by looking at the iris of a person.
  • Racism.
  • Communism.
  • Most anti-gun people.

That doesn’t include any of the people I have seen having an animated conversation with a power pole (in the dark ages before cell phones) or an empty seat on the other side of the bus (no cell phone present and the police were eventually called to remove her from the bus).—Joe]

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6 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Roberta X”

  2. “A software engineer that is certain witches can animate a corpse sufficiently…”

    A witch no, but a properly motivated/disturbed mechanical engineer could.

  4. I remember when we couldn’t play, “Crazy or Bluetooth” and it was just “Spot the Crazy Person Talking to Themselves.”

  5. “A witch no, but a properly motivated/disturbed mechanical engineer could.”

    I am an engineer (MSME) and work in a _very_ large engineering company (>14000 engineers and >7500 “techs”). I have come to believe that a surprisingly large number of them are in the set Joe described as “[having] little more than a thin veneer of rationality and civilization.” Not as large a percentage as the general population but still quite a few.

  6. “A PhD mathematician who insisted digital computers were not deterministic. She told me it was a proven fact that if you ran the same program on different computers all solving the same problem they would come up with different answers. I was tempted to point out she was a Mac user but decided her problems went much deeper than that.”

    That one is hilarious. Of course, I was tempted to add: ‘ Or run it on a Data General … ‘ but I figure that’s too obscure for the whippersnappers these days.

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