Author Douglas Adams famously made fun of earthlings for being “so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” Shortly before he died, Adams gave a talk at the University of California, Santa Barbara (not far from his home), at the end of which there was a brief question-and-answer session. A woman stood up and asked Adams the question that had been bothering her for decades: what did he have against digital watches? The crowd probably expected him to toss off a witty one-liner in response. Instead, he gave a very thoughtful answer that, in true Douglas Adams fashion, made ordinary human behavior seem self-evidently absurd.
After admitting that his comment had originally been written in the days when digital watches were themselves fairly primitive (and, ironically, required two hands to operate), Adams couched his complaint—appropriately—using an analogy. In the early days of personal computers, he […]

Original post by Joe Kissell