As I flew from Los Angeles to Miami, I was once again amazed by technology. I mean, we built a large, heavy hunk of metal that can fly<\/b> through the air<\/b> at hundreds of miles an hour (no, this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this, but it’s been a while since I’ve marveled at it). As I sat on the plane looking out the window down<\/i> at the clouds (just think about how beautiful that statement is), I was once again reminded why I’m a… technologist, for lack of a better word.<\/p>\n
Of course, it amazes me that college freshman are still often dumbfounded by computers. These days you can’t do much without being able to use a computer – at least, you can’t do it efficiently. It would take 10 times as long to research common things in a library with books as it would with google. For example, how many particles are in the universe? The standard estimate is about 10^85. That took me about 3 minutes on google (well, finding the answer once took about 30 seconds, but to find a few sites to make sure everyone had the same answer and at least one source appeared reliable). It would have taken much longer in a library. And yes, I do believe libraries and books have a place here still. But much of the more common research can be done quicker without them. Specialty research still requires them.<\/p>\n
Anyway, that was a tangent. My point is, if you take a moment out to look around and see all the miracles that have been performed by man, it really is truly breath-taking. Flying. Instant communication across the globe. I mean, we can now transfer entire encyclopedias across the globe in minutes rather than days. We can look inside our bodies, we can send people to other planets, we can build microscopic robots. The average person in the US has a machine capable of breaking some of the most sophisticated codes being used by 3rd-world countries in a matter of days or less.<\/p>\n
So, take a moment, in this fresh new year of ours, to stop and be amazed by the unbelievable things that we, as a race, have accomplished together. To paraphrase an author who I can’t recall at this point, human intelligence is by far, our most precious resource.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I flew from Los Angeles to Miami, I was once again amazed by technology. I mean, we built a large, heavy hunk of metal that can fly through the air at hundreds of miles an hour (no, this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this, but it’s been a while since I’ve marveled at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}