Don't forget about our terrible marvels. We have a red button in Washington and if we press it, within 15 minutes we can turn half of the cities on the planet into a burning hellscape.
It’s an age of marvels
111–120 of 425 posts
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#112It's refreshing to see a rare openly optimistic article about the world here first thing in the morning. I also like to occasionally appreciate how someone from even just the recent past would see our current world as one full of manmade wonders. Another one of these would be microwaves, although conceptually simple as a box that heats stuff, it'd be pretty mind bending that it does it essentially wirelessly. Adding…
Re: Moon landing - It had very little to do with people losing interest. In 1972 Nixon defacto completely cancelled the human space program, which he had been rapidly stripping away since Apollo 13. He was paranoid that a catastrophic failure was imminent and would negatively affect his 1972 election campaign. Interestingly when he signed off on the final stripping down in 1972, he remarked that we may never set foot…
That covers the cancellation of Apollo, but the fact that we didn't even put an uncrewed lander on the Moon within the 50 years in between is indicative of a lack of general interest, since we've had several presidents in these 50 years.
Still, this did lead me to the discovery that apparently the often made claim that viewership of the landings waned after Apollo 11 doesn't seem to have any clear evidence besides the point that Apollo 11 had the highest live viewer count until apparently the most recent Superbowl. The EVA camera was damaged in Apollo 12, and 13 was just poorly covered by the media until the crew encountered trouble.
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shipping blueberries around the world can’t be great for the environment.
Why not? Bulk shipping is really efficient, local farmers markets can easily be worse for the environment than going to a supermarket. A Semi moving 35 tons at 7 MPG is 25 times more fuel efficient vs a ford F-150 moving 1/2 ton at 20 MPG and trains or boats are even better. In the end fuel costs money so more efficient logistics is often good for the environment. Buying local makes a lot more sense if you live in a…
Replacing shipped blueberries with locally farmed ones definitely could be a wash or a loss, environmentally, for sure I agree there. But we have relatively efficient industrial scale farming in the US as well, if we admitted that blueberries are seasonal we could grow them in big efficient farms and then just ship them less far.
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> he thought _Germans_ weren't sufficiently white for america in his 50s 50s! I repeat, 50s! This was no teen edgelord. This was a man in his 50s in a time when most people he grew up with didn't get any more life experience than that.
OK, but that's also a person who changed his mind in his 50s, and would not defend his previous position. Don't minimize that.
In the same vein as George Wallace then.
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#115It's refreshing to see a rare openly optimistic article about the world here first thing in the morning. I also like to occasionally appreciate how someone from even just the recent past would see our current world as one full of manmade wonders. Another one of these would be microwaves, although conceptually simple as a box that heats stuff, it'd be pretty mind bending that it does it essentially wirelessly. Adding…
Considering that it's staggeringly expensive and there's not much to see there, it seems like the right decision to hold off once we'd established it could be done.
While I can understand that as a reason for not sending crew there, we didn't even send uncrewed landers. The result being that now our technology has changed so much that we have to relearn how to autonomously land there. If we had been sending the occasional lander, we would've smoothly transitioned from the technology of then to the technology of now.
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#116There's a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal about the fantasy of explaining current knowledge to leading lights of the past, but I can't find the link. Anyone?
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#117I am just glad to see I am not the only one making up imaginary scenario where I bring people from the past to have them marvel at our world.
My favorite "one of these" is the idea of taking a Raspberry Pi, or ATtiny, or modern Macbook Pro back to the ENIAC guys. Can you imagine how they'd have reacted to see these tiny little devices which pack orders of magnitude more computational power than their warehouse-sized computer? The mind boggles.
I tend to always play the cynic in these games. And I think one little way to easily do that is to reverse the roles with an example you are giving. So for your example, imagine somebody from the future came and showed you a pinhead sized device with countless exabytes of computational power projected onto a holographic screen. While I'm sure you'd be impressed and have plenty of questions, I don't think there would be any particular shock. Evolutionary progress - even at absurd scales, is still just evolutionary progress, and easily 'graspable'.
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
It brings to mind the story of how when Boris Yeltsin was visiting the US, he took an impromptu detour to a random American supermarket to try to catch them off guard, only to be blown away that Americans really did have supermarkets everywhere practically overflowing with food. The story goes that the experience played a big role in shaping his vision for Russia when he went on to become its first freely elected lea…
Although, Yeltsin was already a liberalizing reformer. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was playing it up a bit.
There's still a difference between the stores having meat on their shelves and the stores having every kind of meat on their shelves. And every kind of vegetable, every kind of drink, every kind of cheese as well.
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quantity of chocolate for sale in bulk certainly is surprising. Unfortunately I find American chocolate to be borderline inedible.
That's like saying you don't like American beer because you tried Bud Light, Coors Light, and Miller Lite and didn't like any of them. There are a lot of great chocolate makers in the US.
And cheese too! but you will hardly find good cheesemaker at a piggy wiggly (or even in SF more reputable supermarkets). The best i had was one from Hungtinton's Farmer market (WV), easily a top4-top3 goat cheese.
Re: It’s an age of marvels
#120More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists. You have blueberries for sale in January??? A variety box of tea from 7 different countries? A wall of spices? Pineapples? Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!! All relatively affordable and…
The mind would be perhaps be not quite as blown but the modern large urban area supermarket would be pretty mindblowing to someone from the 1960s. You could probably get a lot of the stuff the random gourmet-ish cook might want but it would probably involve some combination of Saturday farmer's markets--which might have other things like beef--(which my mother did with some regularity), maybe a separate fish market (ditto), a specialty gourmet store, ethnic market, etc.
And, as you say, things like out of season fruits and vegetables or the variety of things like spices and teas would be largely unavailable outside of maybe specialty stores in the largest cities.