Food for the brain cells….
Vietnam era Navy wife, indy/conservative, and an official California escapee now residing as a red speck in the sea of Oregon blue.
Food for the brain cells….
Vietnam era Navy wife, indy/conservative, and an official California escapee now residing as a red speck in the sea of Oregon blue.
Just a little more data from the “Big Picture” department:
It was noted that in the time it took to view the presentation (nearly 5 minutes), 67 babies were born in the U.S. During the same five minutes, some 11 babies were aborted. Worldwide, 440 babies were aborted during the same 5 minutes.
Just some numbers to provide a better view of the big picture.
Jeff V
The number of rich and middle class of India exceeds the population of the U.S. The number of people in poverty in India also exceeds the population of the U.S.
The Commodore 64 had about the same power of the computer used to send the first men to the moon.
Stealth aircraft were being developed in the mid 1950s. The first paint used to absorb radar glowed (the paint was called plasma stealth) from the heat generated by the friction with the air. Seeing this from the ground may have caused people to mistake the planes to be UFOs.
The first solar powered motor was created in France in the late 1880s. The motors were powerful enough at that time to run a printing press and irrigation systems.
Many of the first automobiles made ran on electricity from batteries.
The first brake lights sold, were sold as accessories.
A key component in electronic encryption used from everything from anti-jamming devices to cell phones, was co-developed by the actress Hedy Lamarr.
The first computer nerds were females as they were the only ones with the knowledge of how to operate the room sized computers. It was one of these females that developed the term “bug.”
The first digi-camouflage was used during the Vietnam War.
The idea of the using UAV was nearly abandoned as the technology didn’t meet the hype.
In the 1950s, the airforce was thinking about creating drone aircraft to be flown into buildings.
I appreciate the speed of the new fiber-optic lines. I’m waiting for internet-based TV programming (where I can pick and choose my channels then…bye-bye cable company…bye-bye satellite dish). This can open me up to programming from around the world and at a pitance of a price.
I’d heard it’s can be just as good as HD.
If Obama really wanted to create lots of jobs that would pay well, his stimulus should have included $200 billion for increasing the speed and bandwidth of the Internet “backbone” (the part of the network dedicated to switched data-packets) by a factor of at least 1000 each. That’s essentially the idea behind the ongoing research for what’s being called Next Generation Internet (NGI). $200 billion would create lots of jobs, and the NGI will require lots of new hardware and software engineering support, so those high-tech fields would enjoy a big boom as well.
Certainly high-tech private industry jobs are the kinds of jobs Obama has been promising, so where’s the “rub,” so to speak? There’s already a lot of activity in this area, but it would really speed up progress if there was $200 billion added to the funding. Talk about your ideal “shovel-ready” project! Not to mention how much more easily doctors and other health providers could access patient records, and we could sell technology rights to other countries, as well as actual physical goods manufactured here in the USA. So it begs the question: Why didn’t Obama seek aggressive funding for such an obvious project with great return on investment (you *do* remember that we’re not really just spending gobs of our children’s money; we’re *investing* it)?
I’ve got a couple of answers to that question, but I really want to see some other opinions.
Jeff V
Good video – isn’t progress great:)
This video was great. It shows how this world of communication technology is accelerating at light speed. What worries me is that many of tody’s youth here in the U.S. who are consumers of it don’t care to learn about it ad will be left hopelessly behind.
To me the most important point this video hits home with is not the technology of man creations, but biology of god’s creation. The numbers of humans and the information we are creating is rising exponentially, and like a system with over damped feedback something is going to have to give. Technology as great as it is, cannot keep up with the population growth. This video seems to say the opposite, marveling at how technology is out pacing even the human brain, using facts such as that a common news paper prints more information in a week than a person would have come across their entire life in the 18th century. However, I would like to see data which would capture how much the average 18th century person knew of their peers, which when there were less people, than we know of toaday of our peers when we have billions more of them. True technology allows us to tap into information all around the world, but the world is so much bigger in terms of the number of people, so do we really know our fellow brothers and sisters each and every one of them any more than a person did in the 18th century? I might even say , no we do not, we are more ignorant of the diverse of views an opinions today then our grandparents because today there are just more people, period. to know about Take that there are so many more people to know today, so many diverse ideas and beliefs coming from the billions of people alive today, I just wonder if technology is really keeping up,, .. do we really know each other, or just those few percent out of the total that we can network to over a cup of coffee before we rush off to our jobs, or our non virtual friends? Consider, how long would it take to read everyones page who exists on just face book alone, cant be done in a life time,,I don’t care how much technology we we have, or how great people think it is, the rapid growth of population is and will exceed the rapid growth in technology, lets not fool our selfs, lets not forget that each and every one of us out of billions are individuals , with unique ideas and souls, lets do not get caught up in the technical myth that we can all be networked and be knowing more of each other, cause as long as the population increases exponentially we will never be able to meet and know each and every person on the planet as an individual for who they are..the cliché alone in a crowd seems to say it all.. when the people of the world become so many and they begin to feel so un important because they are not being heard but only recognized by the small percent of the over all population that just happens to read their blog or face book or whatever, we will be ripe to finally look to God who will speak to us all as one…
@stacey
What’s amazing is that humans have been around for over 2 million years, modern humans over 200,000 years, language over 50,000 years, farming over 10,000 years, the wheel over 5,000 years, the printing press over 500 years, flight over 100 years, satellites over 50 years, the internet over 10 years and the iphone over 1 year. Hurrah for human evolution and technological development…
The Progress Paradox: The more things get better, the worse people feel….
Last I checked my seeds still don’t pop out of the ground before three days. And there’s no more sunlight coming to earth than there was 10,000 years ago.
Figuring that my brain still only thinks at the same rate it did, all that extra information is fluff and distraction. ‘Singularity’ – more like Babel 2.0. Big house of cards.