Why have a dash when there’s steering wheel?  (Maserati Boomerang )

I remember the days before string theory and quantum mechanics when if you had half a brain you knew pretty much everything you needed to know to live.  Even me; someone who sucked at sports but excelled in math, science, and even English, could not only find and identify a carburetor, but fix one too.

But with the advent of complex stuff to aid mankind survive our day to day lives ordinary things have become almost magical.  Because computers have always been a bit hard for the average homo sapien to comprehend they have been dumbed-down by using graphical user interfaces (GUI, pronounced gooey).  No more line commands typed into the console required.  This has spread to cover all aspects of our lives.  Can you adjust the carburetor in your car?  Of course not, it doesn’t exist anymore.  It’s now a fuel injection system, nothing here that doesn’t require a computer and some software.

So have you ever wondered why there’s a tachometer in the dashboard of your automatic transmission car?  When automatic transmissions first came out the tachometer disappeared from the dash in most cars, but it’s back!  Most people I’ve asked don’t even know what a tachometer is let alone why they need the information it imparts.  I would think manufacturers would bring back the battery level so it was more like a smartphone.  I’m sure this will happen when everyone is driving electric vehicles.  Even my wife has forgotten that the reason a battery is even in a combustion engine vehicle is so you don’t have to crank start it.  It’s not really there to power the entertainment system and other electronic devices.  What how could the battery be dead?  I wasn’t even driving the car!

Then there’s our daughter who dresses more for form than fashion.  She commonly complains that the car heater is defective; it takes too much time before there’s any heat.  I had to explain that the heat comes from the engine and since we don’t own a nuclear powered vehicle it takes time for the engine to warm up (really “heat up”—it becomes more than warm).

It seems to me that today people are more about memorizing the details than understanding the concepts.  I’m convinced that Standards of Learning tests help reinforce this.  But then maybe it’s always been this way, that’s why there are so many people qualified for government jobs.