Science Fair and Congressional Farce

by Anthony Parr

My first foray into coding was on an Intel 8086 before we installed the daughter board, and it was in BASIC.

DOS was my playground and BASIC was my jungle gym.  As a kid, I wrote loops and basic "IF-THEN" statements for fun.  My dad had a programming book from his college and I just copied code out to puzzle the manner in which it worked.  So in sixth grade, back in 1986, I used this book and this 8086 to create a super simple choose-your-own-adventure game.  Personal computers were rare, so after creating my game I entered it into the school science fair.

It was an underwhelming success.

The excitement that I held was dashed by the utter incomprehensibility of what I had created for the science fair judges.  My story was something they could relate to and I tended to think in black and white at the time, so I slapped together a nice little tale of science versus technology.  Everyone enjoyed the narrative and seemed to enjoy making the choices that took them down various paths.  However, when I showed them my code, they were flummoxed.  It was depressing.  These were very intelligent and capable adults, who, unfortunately, had yet to be exposed to software code, just software.

They swept my efforts in coding aside, gave me a ribbon, and moved on.

The reason I share this tale of "innocence lost" is that we now see congressmen in the news talking about applications and software such as TikTok, and how that software has access to the Internet.  Now, we are not delving into transcoding, editing, or overlays.  We are talking about whether or not TikTok, the app, has access to your local Internet.

What in the world is our government looking for?  Why are they not informed?  The professional, intelligent, and capable adults in our government are behaving in the same manner as my science fair teachers in the sixth grade when faced with something they just don't grok.

This article's position is not to posit that all government leaders take coding classes or edit raster images in GIMP on their personally compiled flavor of Linux, but rather that they become informed by surrounding themselves with objective experts.

However, since we are all working hard to pay the bills, it will probably be up to ChatGPT to solve these problems in the future.  Hopefully, we can all put Dr. Sbaitso behind us.