My 2005 Honda Civic turned 238,900 miles, the median distance to the Moon.
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TECHNICAL WRITER JOB DESCRIPTION
Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts
Saturday, August 15, 2020
Thursday, December 1, 2016
Creature Comforts Show No End to History
It is a wonderful time to be alive. We have become so used to material abundance that we have lost all perspective on where we are in the deep, broad, and swift flowing stream of history. The best is yet to come, but the present is pretty good.
My thoughts here were inspired by a discussion at work as a young lieutenant and an old sergeant wondered about the consequences of Star Trek transporter technology. The transporter is the basis for both the replicator and the holo-suite. Given those, why work? Contrasting our lives with those of medieval serfs, I found lots of reasons to continue working.
My own discussion on this topic with a young captain started the day before, as a result of my buying a knife. On the recommendation of another young captain, I went to everyone's favorite tactical store and bought a Benchmade "Mini-Barrage." The next morning, I went online here at home and read about knives. "Why not a Gerber?" I asked at work. I got the same answer there that I found in an online forum for zombie hunters: the Gerber is a nice every day carry (EDC), but the best Gerber is about like the cheapest Benchmade both for price and quality.
I was astounded at the content about pocket knives in four pages of links even before I got to the reviews of knives from Guns & Ammo magazine. My captain said that I could find people who know that much about luggage or briefcases.
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Friday, January 1, 2016
Welcome to the Future
New Year’s Day is completely arbitrary – and truly necessary
and important. Various days have been the beginning of a new year. The vernal
and autumnal equinoxes became May Day and Hallowe’en celebrations: planting or
harvest, take your pick. The Romans formerly marked the vernal equinox, but
adopted the Winter Solstice from the Egyptians. Julius Caesar made January 1
the start of the New Year. The important fact is that we denote a time to
evaluate and re-evaluate, to leave the losses behind and invest in the
profitable returns.
It is difficult to imagine the future. The Jetsons or the
Gernsback Continuum could only be projections of the known present. Space
travel had been with us since Jules Verne. No one in my childhood had predicted
the consequences of understanding DNA. Now we have CRISPR therapies on the
horizon. CRISPR: Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats are known from prokaryotic cells -
the life forms that existed before the invention of the nucleus. And
who knew that cancer could be contagious? (See The Scientist here.)
 |
| Anousha Ansari and I, May 2011 |
My conservative comrades have a trope they enjoy: the good
old days. They were my good old days, too. We rode our bikes till dark. We made
up our own games. We accepted each other on our own terms, bullies and sissies
alike. No one was diagnosed AHDH. And all that… But they were the bad old days, too. Kids disappeared off
the streets and playgrounds. Kids died of diseases. We expected a nuclear war any day, every day.
Take one measure: automobile deaths. Today as then, give or
take, about 40,000 people a year die in car crashes in America. But the
population was under 200 million then, and is over 300 million now. Cars are
safer, ain’t no doubt. And we
drive better, having grown up in cars in the first place. We are better adapted
both as consumers and producers.
Sure, in 1965, we had computers, and we had telephones, and
we had cameras – but they were not the same device… and none of them listened
to you sleep to tell you when you had enjoyed the best REM cycle.
 |
| Sarah Smith and I, January 2010. |
Take another measure: I have all of my teeth – well, most of
them. I gave up a molar a couple of years ago. The students at the University
of Michigan Dental School assured me that they would “go to heroic lengths”
(their words) to save the tooth.
“Then what? I will be 85 and back in the chair with a problem. If it
will not leave me with a sagging cheek, just take it out.” But when I was a kid no one my age now
had all their own teeth. None of them could do the push-ups or sit-ups or clear
the mile that I did last year to earn a fitness ribbon. (My brother has a new Dacron aorta and expects to return to running marathons -- but he always outshone me...)
Utopia has a cloudy lining. My wife has a brand new Honda Accord. When you put on the
right-hand turn signal, it speaks back the last text message from your phone.
Fortunately, the Honda Accord is one of the least susceptible to outside
hacking. It could be worse.
Speaking of “susceptible” it was in the Asimov Foundation
Trilogy that the homework computer corrected the kid’s spelling. We cut that
short by 23,000 years…
ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
John Kemeny Knew: We Shall Have Computed
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