"Simple" Revolvers and Literate Death

First we've got Tam talking about Revolvers.

Let me tell you something about revolvers: People wax poetic about their ruggedness, reliability and simplicity, but when they call a revolver "simple", it makes me wonder if they've ever had the sideplate off of one. The mechanical ballet going on inside a Smith & Wesson Hand Ejector makes your typical autopistol look like a stone axe by comparison. Further, a revolver demands clearances measured in thousandths at both ends of the cylinder in order for it to turn freely and still function with reliability and accuracy.

It's funny how much of a meme that bit about revolvers being the simple guns is.


Then we've got Joanna with an essay about libraries culling "old books" but it's more than libraries.

My concern about the state of our libraries is not, at its root, for the libraries themselves. It is for what they and their state represent. A well-kept library represents the desire of a community to better itself, to attain knowledge, to learn from the past. The library’s contents show that community’s interests and areas of study. Therefore, culling older materials is an alarming sign, not just because of the loss of available knowledge but because it shows, and I mean this without hyperbole, a point lost on the cosmic scoreboard.

There is a bit of an upside see if you can find it from this bit of the anecdote at the core of the essay.

Recently, I have had quite a few patrons requesting different books such as "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Screwtape Letters" and other classics and I was unable to fulfill their request because libraries either do not have them or are unwilling to loan them out anymore.

Sure libraries have failed in their basic duty, but at least people still want to read those books. That's... something.

And why not here's the decay of basic math, with Tam asking: When did people become unable to make change?

So it goes.

Given these trends I don't think humanity will dived into the Eloi and the Morlocks. No, I think we have the risk of becoming a hybrid. The vapid idle hedonism of the Eli with the angry savagery of the Morlocks.