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"The results stunned the NASA team."
Apr. 18th, 2004 03:03 pmI sometimes wonder if the above sentence - variations upon which I seem to see with increasing frequency lately - isn't just a teensy bit of an exaggeration. After all, we live in a fairly blasé time as far as science and technology are concerned. Or maybe I'm suffering from the well-known shortcoming of historical near-sightedness.
When I was a kid attending P.S. 69 in Queens, New York, I recall there being a set of books in my 4th grade class all about famous people, mostly scientists. The bindings were blue, as I remember, and the sparse illustrations took the form of silhouettes. They absorbed me completely.
One of the standard features in the stories about scientists and engineers such as the Wright brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Louis Pasteur, and others was the ridicule they endured from the apparently otherwise educated, intelligent people of their era. It seemed to almost be formulaic: one could not have been an inventor or innovator in those days if people didn't believe you to be a crackpot or nut case.
An indirect result of it all was to give the unsuspecting reader a somewhat underserved and tenuous sense of superiority: We lived with the knowledge that humans could, indeed, fly, convey their voices through wires, and so on. An even more indirect result was to inculcate in us, generally speaking, the feeling that we could never fall prey to the same kind of short-sightedness that led the director of the U.S. Patent Office to declare, somewhere around 100 years ago, that it was time to wrap up his department's operations, since everything useful that could have been invented had been.
Of course, it's not as if we have a rampant flat-earth contingent running around, winning any hearts and minds. We tend to be fairly skeptical of any claims that declare there to be limits to technical progress. The news, over the past few years, announcing the discovery of planets circling distant stars, of the likely presence of fossilized life forms in meteorites of Martian provenance, and of numerous other discoveries really hasn't raised eyebrows or accelerated pulse rates very much outside of a small circle of specialists.
Where am I going with all of this?
I'm not exactly sure, except to note that just because we may be immune in one area (science and technology), that doesn't mean we don't suffer from this ailment in other areas of our lives (e.g., religion, politics), and often acutely.
Obviously, this thought needs more development.
* * * Yesterday was a prime day for walking. I did the two-mile loop "around the block" yesterday morning and then walked to and from the Hollywood Video rental joint after returning from work (I suspect it's at least 1.5 miles each way.)
I rented Kill Bill and something called Wasabi, a French film with Jean Reno, and Galina and I ended up watching both last night (although G. zonked out in the middle of the latter film).
Quent Tarantino proved again that he is one sick puppy, although sick in the same way I think of James Ellroy as being sick... in a sort of entertaining way. To be frank, I don't think I harbor any desire at all to see Kill Bill again, or its sequel for the first time, any time soon.
Wasabi, on the other hand, I may watch a couple of more times before I give it back, if only to acclimatize my ear to French sounds that are not uttered by Michel Thomas in a structured manner. As a story, it's not exactly GWTW, but it did keep my interest, even to the point where I briefly mused about a pairing of Jean Reno with Clint Eastwood in some kind of cop drama (along the lines of Dirty Harry meets The Professional, except as partner "no-nonsense" cops... then again, any such pairing would likely leave the city in which the action takes place a smoking ruin, but I digress...).
Duty calls. It's been a light day so far, but the Russian side just dropped a preliminary Form 24 for the 21st into our lap, and I'm just the person to translate it.
Cheers...
When I was a kid attending P.S. 69 in Queens, New York, I recall there being a set of books in my 4th grade class all about famous people, mostly scientists. The bindings were blue, as I remember, and the sparse illustrations took the form of silhouettes. They absorbed me completely.
One of the standard features in the stories about scientists and engineers such as the Wright brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Louis Pasteur, and others was the ridicule they endured from the apparently otherwise educated, intelligent people of their era. It seemed to almost be formulaic: one could not have been an inventor or innovator in those days if people didn't believe you to be a crackpot or nut case.
An indirect result of it all was to give the unsuspecting reader a somewhat underserved and tenuous sense of superiority: We lived with the knowledge that humans could, indeed, fly, convey their voices through wires, and so on. An even more indirect result was to inculcate in us, generally speaking, the feeling that we could never fall prey to the same kind of short-sightedness that led the director of the U.S. Patent Office to declare, somewhere around 100 years ago, that it was time to wrap up his department's operations, since everything useful that could have been invented had been.
Of course, it's not as if we have a rampant flat-earth contingent running around, winning any hearts and minds. We tend to be fairly skeptical of any claims that declare there to be limits to technical progress. The news, over the past few years, announcing the discovery of planets circling distant stars, of the likely presence of fossilized life forms in meteorites of Martian provenance, and of numerous other discoveries really hasn't raised eyebrows or accelerated pulse rates very much outside of a small circle of specialists.
Where am I going with all of this?
I'm not exactly sure, except to note that just because we may be immune in one area (science and technology), that doesn't mean we don't suffer from this ailment in other areas of our lives (e.g., religion, politics), and often acutely.
Obviously, this thought needs more development.
I rented Kill Bill and something called Wasabi, a French film with Jean Reno, and Galina and I ended up watching both last night (although G. zonked out in the middle of the latter film).
Quent Tarantino proved again that he is one sick puppy, although sick in the same way I think of James Ellroy as being sick... in a sort of entertaining way. To be frank, I don't think I harbor any desire at all to see Kill Bill again, or its sequel for the first time, any time soon.
Wasabi, on the other hand, I may watch a couple of more times before I give it back, if only to acclimatize my ear to French sounds that are not uttered by Michel Thomas in a structured manner. As a story, it's not exactly GWTW, but it did keep my interest, even to the point where I briefly mused about a pairing of Jean Reno with Clint Eastwood in some kind of cop drama (along the lines of Dirty Harry meets The Professional, except as partner "no-nonsense" cops... then again, any such pairing would likely leave the city in which the action takes place a smoking ruin, but I digress...).
Duty calls. It's been a light day so far, but the Russian side just dropped a preliminary Form 24 for the 21st into our lap, and I'm just the person to translate it.
Cheers...
