Random thought of the day

In my hand I have a computer with nearly the human computational power of an entire planet of people. It has proximity, light, sound, acceleration, magnetic field, and location sensors. It is in near constant contact with a network of hundreds of millions of other computers most of which are far more powerful than it. You can buy one for about a day’s pay.

With all that power, data, and sensor input available what appears one of the easiest paths to fame and fortune with it is to program it to make fart sounds*.

Both Marvin and I have good cause to be depressed.


*Ry pointed this out to me last week. “Thank you” Ry.

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5 thoughts on “Random thought of the day

  1. Got an Android myself….whilst various “AngryBird” games have been installed, played, and deleted, the Fart app has stuck around.

  2. And it blew my mind when I considered that my cellphone has more computing power than all the Lunar Modules who ever reached the moon.

  3. Pingback: On fart apps | Bacon, Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives

  4. A Commodore 64 has more computing power than an Apollo command module; when Apollo 13’s CM was about to go dark, they were using papar and pencil to do calculations. To the moon and back with no more than 3 decimal points of accuracy and here I sit typing my silly comments on a machine that NASA would’ve killed for back then. And a smart phone makes my desktop look stupid. What an age we live in.

  5. It’s been asked before; do other animals find farts funny or is it only humans? But I’ve never heard of any case where any human could determine whether any other animal has exhibited any sense of humor. Not that I’ve ever looked.

    Humans find farts funny, and so making fart pranks, as with porn and obsessive social interaction, is what we’ll do with or without computers.

    The first time I got hold of an electronic calculator, in the 1970s, my friend and I went straight to using it to estimate the number of drops of water in the ocean and similar trivia. I suppose that if it could have made fart sounds and displayed naked women in high deffinition we’d have used it for those things too.

    I certainly remember the big dreams of some new scientific and intellectual renaissance precipitated by the proliferation of home computers, but I think we can safely say at this point that those dreams were unfounded. Culture matters far more than any material tools.

    They put men on the moon with sliderules, but it takes a tremendous network of fantastic computers and display technology to put mobile porn movies on demand in every teenagers pocket.

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