Makes me miss the old days of reading bottom samples by hand

Before we got the new auto-sampler on the barge last spring I used to drop a lead line and feel the material through the tube, now it's all just numbers on a screen and I swear I can tell more from the grit between my fingers than any of these sensors, anyone else feel like we lost something when the computer took over?

2 comments

2 Comments

nina1801mo ago

Honestly, you're speaking my language. Ngl, there's something about feeling the mud and sand slide through your fingers that tells you exactly what's down there. The computer gives you a number but it doesn't give you the story of that riverbed. Tbh, I think we traded a sixth sense for a spreadsheet and that's a raw deal.

matthew_wilson461mo ago

Traded a sixth sense for a spreadsheet" - man that got me. I was just reading this article about old school prospectors in Alaska who could taste the dirt to know if gold was near. Crazy stuff. They'd literally put a pinch on their tongue and know the mineral content from decades of doing it. We sit behind screens now and call that "data collection" but we lost the real feel for it. Like you said, the numbers don't tell you the history of how that river moved or what floods changed the sediment. It's like we sterilized the whole process.