Science is like magic, sometimes good, sometimes bad

(Sorry for the delay in entries. I’ve been rather out of sorts the past few days. There will be explanations at some point in time. Right now I’m more focused on catching up on sleep.)

So I’ve just spent the past hour or so rewatching The Andromeda Strain. For some reason the HD channels always show this movie, though I’m not quite clear how a movie that was filmed in the 70’s could be considered to be shot in HD. Or even why it is one that you would want to show in HD as it mainly consists of a lot of people walking around a lab. Which is what I want to discuss right now.

This movie is incredible as it shows how what was state of the art thirty years ago is now so archaic that it is laughable. The entire film seems to be a parody of science and technology. All of the scientists are forced to wear matching white jumpsuits despite the fact that most of them should not be wearing tight jumpsuits. All of the computers use that wonderful greenscreen that those of us with mainframe experience remember so well. Hell, one of the major plot points is that a sliver of paper from the print roller got stuck in a bell mechanism and resulted in the failure of a buzzer to be heard. Today that seems like the dumbest thing in the world. Like you immediately go, “Why wouldn’t you just email the information? And get a real monitor?” But the fact is, at the time that truly was state of the art.

It’s pretty amazing how far we have come in just a few decades. I have much more computing power at my fingertips than the astronauts in the shuttle do right now. Hell, I think I’ve had calculators with as much power as the shuttle onboard computers. I’ve gone from writing in Paperclip 3 on my Commodore 64, a wonderful word processor in that it could only hold six pages of text at a time due to memory constraints, to now I’m at 150 pages for this document without even blinking. I’ve gone from 2400 baud dial up modems to, well, 56K dial up modems. Sorry, I’m still too cheap for broadband. But you get the point, where we have gone in just my lifetime is astounding.

It makes you wonder what the future might hold. There is a part of me that thinks that all of the wonders have already been found. That most of the glory of science has passed. It is possible that there actually is no better energy source than oil. Not all diseases can be cured. But then I think back and remember when the computer mouse was a glorious invention and think that we have very, very far to go. And that someday people are going to look back at what we are doing now and laugh at how quaint everything was back then. How low tech they lived their lives. Hopefully the world will be a better place by then.

The five random CDs for the week (delayed by a few days)
1) The Freddy Jones Band “Lucid”
2) Cowboy Junkies “Miles From Our Home”
3) Lyle Lovett and his Large Band “Lyle Lovett and his Large Band”
4) Beth Orton ‘Trailer Park”
5) Henry Rollins “Talk is Cheap Volume 1”