Monday, January 1, 2018

2018

Happy New Year, Gentle Reader.

Hey, where is all the cool stuff that the futurists were talking about, half-a-century back?

Where are the the flying cars, the orbital hotels, the lunar cities?

On the other hand, fifty years ago, they were still doing a barbaric procedure called "exploratory surgery"-- cutting into people to see what was wrong. You almost never hear of that being done anymore.

Not to mention being able to look up almost anything at all without having to go to the library or leaf through an encyclopedia. Encyclopedia salesmen are now about as rare as locomotive firemen.

Thanks to both social media and everyone having a pocket video camera, the freedom to be young and stupid has almost disappeared. Youthful mistakes are a lot harder to live down. That's not a good thing.

9 comments:

  1. Electric guitars and music software are booming, though... For most of my life, to get access to what you have now with a laptop and an interface, you needed a major label recording studio.

    -Doug in Oakland

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  2. Bought a set of encyclopedias when our oldest child was born in 1982. It came with a side set of medical, auto and home repair, dictionary, and atlas. The entire set was probably opened less than 100 times, but they looked pretty on the bookshelf. Now that we're downsizing into a smaller home, we can't give them away; even Goodwill won't take them as a donation. Probably have a book burning sometime, but not THAT type of book burning.

    Dale

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  3. For a really sobering thought, your chances of recovering from “exploratory surgery” back then might be fondly remembered as the good old days if we don’t get some serious new antibiotics soon. To consider than we may actually have to stop doing some things we’ve learned to do (in a surgical sense) because we’ve made all those nasty pathogens immune to our medicines is so 20th century...cue the crying Indian?

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  4. It is noticible that now almost everyone has a pocket video camera the number of UFO reports has decreased markedly ;-)

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  5. Happy New Year Comrade Misfit!

    While we certainly don't see eye to eye politically, we are in agreement regarding that magnificent beastie, the cat. I enjoy your work, even the stuff I don't agree with. Keep doing what you do, helps keep me grounded.

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  6. This is the best description I've heard of what the future has brought:

    I have in my pocket a device which gives me instantaneous access to the total wisdom of civilization. I use it to get into arguments with strangers and to exchange pictures of my cat.

    Happy New Year, Comrade!

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  7. Borepatch, isn't that the truth!

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  8. Lots of data, we need to learn to connect the dots. Happy new year to all, take a deep breath, count down from the number ten.

    AC2usn

    ReplyDelete

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