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It’s an age of marvels

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Re: It’s an age of marvels

#171

Post by thombat »

somenameforme wrote: post #103
dotnet00 wrote: post #49

It'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…

NASA had only contracted for 15 Saturn V stacks, and in 1968 declined to start the second production run. That was still under Johnson - although Nixon was doubtless happy with the decision it had already become obvious that Congress wasn't going to approve sustaining the NASA budget at that level once the moon was in the bag.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#172

Post by ghaff »

wumbo wrote: post #157
ghaff wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tomatoes are probably about the worst example you could pick. Fresh tomatoes can be excellent (though I'm really not a tomato aficionado) during the short period when they're in season locally in much of the US. Outside that period, the recommendation for cooking tomatoes is generally to use canned because tomatoes are an example of something that doesn't ship well.

That’s why they’re the best example. Grow your own and the difference is extreme between that and a mealy, flavorless storebought

That assumes you care enough about tomatoes to grow them. My local farmstand probably does a better job than I could when they’re in season which is true of most of what they sell.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#173

Post by petsfed »

keybored wrote: post #53
brigadier132 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years ago that people were starving in the US during the great depression. Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric.

> It really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years ago that people were starving in the US during the great depression. This is fine and a good exercise (like a gratitude journal). The problem is that this is often used to tell people indirectly that they should stop with their political compla…

I understood the "extremist violent rhetoric" to refer specifically to accelerationists (in the states, we have the Boogaloo boys, but there are others), whose explicit goal is to accelerate the (from their perspective) inevitible collapse of the current order, to replace it with their own order. Often times, but not always, this is married to a both a doomsday-prepper I-can-go-it-alone mentality, as well as a libertarian theory of government.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#174

Post by mhink »

somenameforme wrote: post #117
epiccoleman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would agree if we were talking about, say, a team in 1970, but it's worth pointing out that we're talking about a team working during the very infancy of computer engineering (the late 40s/early 50s). Just off the top of my head, you had solid-state hardware, stored-program machines, and the Von Neumann architecture all just popping on to the scene. This is stuff that would definitely have been on their radar, but I think they'd be fascinated to realize how directly and fundamentally those inventions would affect computing.

Perhaps more importantly, I think they would be blown away by how directly and fundamentally computing would change the world. Doug Englebart and his team are the ones who really developed the idea of using computers for something other than performing calculations for scientists. They started that research in the early 60s, and didn't drop the Mother Of All Demos until 1968. So if I were one of the "ENIAC guys", and someone asked me how my work would affect the world, I'd probably just shrug and suggest that the computers I was building would help perform computations that would let other scientists make discoveries more quickly.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#175

Post by mckn1ght »

pushcx wrote: post #77

I think this post is right that Franklin would've been impressed by GPS. The author doesn't call it out, but the Longitude Problem was a significant area of scientific and engineering inquiry in Franklin's lifetime, with special focus on the difficulty of doing so at sea. I haven't looked into it, but given his research mapping the Gulf Stream it seems likely he spent time on the problem himself. https://en.wikipedia…

If only Ben Franklin had access to https://ciechanow.ski/gps/, he could’ve invented GPS to solve it!

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#176

Post by hnbad »

somenameforme wrote: post #103
dotnet00 wrote: post #49

It'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…

This reminds me of how the sad state of fiber broadband in Germany is ultimately the result of 1990s chancellor Helmut Kohl (the one who saw over the reunification, consequently selling off the East German public property to private investors for scraps) thinking that public TV was too hostile to him and wanting to empower private broadcasters by publicly funding cable television, which delayed the investment in fiber broadband by repurposing cable for broadband as a stop-gap solution.

Basically a long-running chancellor in the 1990s wanted to push media that presented him more favorably and that's why thirty years later our Internet is slow.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#177

Post by the_af »

A related thought-exercise I sometimes engage in, inspired by Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is this:

Ok, so I have a university education and know lots about computers. If I traveled back to the Middle Ages -- actually, make it the (inaccurately named) Dark Ages or even more ancient times, say the Roman Republic -- how much of my modern day knowledge would I be able to use to impress the natives?

The telephone? Nope. I cannot even explain how the telegraph works.

Electricity? Sort of. But how would I use it?

Hm... computers are completely out of the question, I wouldn't be able to explain how they differ from an abacus or why they are so novel.

TV? Not without an example.

The... um, steam machine? Look, I cannot really make anything with my hands, so I understand the principle but wouldn't be able to replicate it.

The... um... the printing press maybe?

Or tell them to wash their hands thoroughly before/after touching an open wound?

In conclusion: I suck.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#178

Post by ghaff »

throwaway11460 wrote: post #156
somenameforme wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's because you have witnessed the decades of exponential growth. It's not hard to extrapolate that growth further, albeit it still blows my own mind when I see a disk that looks like a RAM, is way faster than my RAM was 15 years ago (2 GB/s? You must've forgotten to take your crazy pills), and has 2000 times more storage. But show it to a guy working with electromechanical or vacuum tube computers and I'm sure it…

Read SF of the era. You probably have some very far futures where the computers running everything are essentially invisible. But SF authors for the most part are not imaging miniaturized supercomputers woven into the fabric of everyday life.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#180

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway11460 wrote: post #149
at_compile_time wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>exporting our heavy carbon producing industries to the Moon Never study rocketry, it wil ruin your whimsical innocence.

It's very fortunate that rockets are not the only way to get stuff into space, and more importantly, that we don't need to literally bring a whole factory and the input materials up on a rocket but instead use resources available in space. Even if we actually had to bring everything from Earth, Starship is cheap and powerful enough to build an orbital ring which would make orbital lift nearly too cheap to meter.

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