Newer is Better?
July 28th, 2005 | Published in Culture, Technology
From The New Atlantis’s Summer 2005 Notes & Briefs section:
Many trips on trains in Britain are “much slower” than the same trips in the 1980s, when the government ran the train system—and in several cases, the trips are much slower than in the era of steam locomotion. As one advocate for rail passengers told the Times of London, “Passengers are baffled why, despite new trains and advanced signaling, their journey takes longer than it used to twenty or even fifty years ago.” “On some regional routes,” the paper notes, “journeys were faster when Queen Victoria was on the throne.”
And, in another story for the “newer-isn’t-always-better” files, a number of recent experiments pitted some of the world’s fastest “texters”—those who use their mobile phones to send text messages—against veteran Morse coders, one of whom was 93 years old. The high-tech whippersnappers were beaten, badly and repeatedly. “Texting” proved to be considerably slower than the 170-year-old code of dots and dashes, even though the texters were allowed to use common slang and shorthand, such as “UR” for “you are.”