"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
On 07/01/13 23:51, Tim Watts wrote:
On Monday 07 January 2013 21:30 geoff wrote in uk.d-i-y:

In message , Brian Gaff
writes
Well if he can raise the bar, but at the moment I feel that the bar has
not left the ground yet. Mind you I'm flabbergasted by the lack of
knowledge in average people of under 30 years. IE not knowing that
planets
and stars are different or which planets are gaseous and which rocky
and
which have no atmosphere etc.
Also not understanding the rudiments of how electricity works and how
transformers work. There are very simple books on these concepts and we
were taught them as a matter of course.

I see little desire to "find out", no sense of discovery, a lack of
wonderment how and why

we're becoming a nation of hairdressers


Yep...

I wonder if in part, everything is now too complicated?

In 1970, you could open your car bonnet and identify everything - and the
choices when something went wrong were limited.

OK - TV's have always been specialist - but most other machinery was
pretty
simple.

I dont think TVs were THAT specialist when they were full o' valves

--

I think they were. There were a lot of bottle-swappers out in the field, but
not that many of us that were properly qualified to diagnose and repair the
things to component level on the bench. I worked for a large rental company
with many engineers, and I don't think that there was above about three of
us that were proper time-served engineers that truly understood the vagaries
of timebases and video output stages and sync separators etc ..

Arfa