# Is there any U.S. achievement that is cited as an example by other countries? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [June 16, 2008, 7:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087 "2008-06-16T07:14:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Sublight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@Sublight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sublight)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 10:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/41 "2008-06-17T10:27:40Z")
The US is considered the cream of the crop for baseball and basketball, both of which are very popular here. An American coming to Japan to play (either sport) is usually looked at as having taken a step down and gets little fanfare: either they’re rookies with mediocre prospects or past their prime. A local player going to the Majors or the NBA OTOH merits regular sports news coverage (seriously, alongside all the local sports news, there’s always a segment of “how the Japanese Major League players did today”) ---
**Author:** ![Cicero](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cicero/32/3594_2.png) [@Cicero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cicero)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 10:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/42 "2008-06-17T10:32:38Z")
[QUOTE=robardin] Well, the major American engineering achievements of the 20th - Heavier-than-air aircraft QUOTE] That one is contentious. More [here](http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/planetruth.html). ---
**Author:** ![Laughing\_Lagomorph](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/6bbea6/32.png) [@Laughing\_Lagomorph](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Laughing_Lagomorph)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 11:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/43 "2008-06-17T11:48:53Z")
[QUOTE=Crocodiles And Boulevards] … Do poor peoples still look at America as a land of opportunity? [/QUOTE] They still try to enter the country in large numbers, legally and illegally so I would say yes. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 12:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/44 "2008-06-17T12:56:36Z")
[QUOTE=Crocodiles And Boulevards] Do poor peoples still look at America as a land of opportunity? [/QUOTE] By the millions, judging from the immigration rate. ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/45 "2008-06-17T13:58:50Z")
[QUOTE=jjimm] (I was kidding about one of the above.) [/QUOTE] It was the “saving our asses in WWII” one, wasn’t it? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![garius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e19b73/32.png) [@garius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/garius)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/46 "2008-06-17T14:33:02Z")
[QUOTE=Capt. Ridley’s Shooting Party] The American ability to see truly revolutionary technologies, and fund them well, is often regarded as admirable. Two examples, often cited, are the jet engine and the general purpose computer, two technologies where the United Kingdom had an early lead, but failed to invest in adequately, leaving America to clean up. [/QUOTE] Well in fairness that’s because we didn’t _have_ any cash to invest. We were still recovering from the war, and what spare cash we did have was needed to pay off the loans we’d had to take out with you lot to cover us in the dark early days. 😛 [We only finished paying them off in 2006](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6215847.stm) :eek: 😃 ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/47 "2008-06-17T14:38:24Z")
It used to be films and special effects, but I think other countries are closing in on that. Maybe Neal Stephenson had it right in _Snowcrash_. Aside from the movies, our real strength is Pizza Delivery. ---
**Author:** ![Sublight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@Sublight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sublight)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/48 "2008-06-17T15:15:22Z")
As a former American VP once said, “We have the best-educated American people in the world.” ---
**Author:** ![The\_Scrivener](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/eada6e/32.png) [@The\_Scrivener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Scrivener)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/49 "2008-06-17T19:56:18Z")
[QUOTE=Sublight] The US is considered the cream of the crop for baseball and basketball, both of which are very popular here. [/QUOTE] I was going to mention basketball in particular for finding increasingly widespread popularity around the world and for our understandable historic domination in it. OTOH, on the Olympic level, we’ve managed to go from “The Dream Team” Gold[1992] to _pphhhhbbbttthhh_ [Bronze, 2004] in twelve years flat… although that had less to do with the talent pool than with the way our Olympic teams are organized and the, truly, tertiary\* importance of the O-level game to the pro and college players and fans here. \*On second thought, though, I bet that following \*high school \* basketball and college recruiting is more compelling to more fans here than our Olympic teams, at least in certain regions. ---
**Author:** ![Omniscient](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/omniscient/32/3290_2.png) [@Omniscient](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omniscient)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/50 "2008-06-17T21:12:52Z")
[QUOTE=Capt. Ridley’s Shooting Party] The American ability to see truly revolutionary technologies, and fund them well, is often regarded as admirable. Two examples, often cited, are the jet engine and the general purpose computer, two technologies where the United Kingdom had an early lead, but failed to invest in adequately, leaving America to clean up. [/QUOTE] I know the background on the jet engine, but what was the UKs early involvement with the PC? ---
**Author:** ![Capt.Ridley\_s\_Shooting\_Party](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/cc9497/32.png) [@Capt.Ridley\_s\_Shooting\_Party](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 9:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/51 "2008-06-17T21:40:07Z")
Britain had a series of very early computers, like Colossus, the Manchester Mark 1 and Turing’s ACE (never finished - funding was cut). But Britain’s real claim lay with the work of Turing on computability. His 1936 [paper](http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=3&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thocp.net%2Fbiographies%2Fpapers%2Fturing_oncomputablenumbers_1936.pdf&ei=dylYSJXYEZCs1gbVwsjQCA&usg=AFQjCNHLCPE7ZMMOfz6ZUP2gDQYZGCoxIA&sig2=vHHDAgW4_0E8V0w4YE87hg), “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” showed that universal computation was possible in principle, by constructing a special mathematical automata that read and wrote to an infinitely long tape. In effect, Turing’s paper turned the task of building a general purpose computer into a definite engineering problem—who would risk spending incredibly large amounts of money building a machine that nobody knew was possible to construct, otherwise? Turing’s work also can be seen as influential on the work of von Neumann with the design of the stored program computer (his diary makes this influence explicit). ---
**Author:** ![Omniscient](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/omniscient/32/3290_2.png) [@Omniscient](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omniscient)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/52 "2008-06-17T21:54:30Z")
Interesting. I knew Turing from the Turing Test but I didn’t realize he was such an early innovator. ---
**Author:** ![Capt.Ridley\_s\_Shooting\_Party](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/cc9497/32.png) [@Capt.Ridley\_s\_Shooting\_Party](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2008, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/53 "2008-06-17T22:09:08Z")
That paper’s perhaps one of the most important papers in computer science (I’m sure other computer scientists may disagree :)) — it not only gives a negative answer to the Entscheidungsproblem (though he was beaten to first answering it by Church, an American) he also develops the notion of universal computation, shows the halting problem is undecideable, helps formalize what is meant by an “algorithm”, and the appendix also forms the genesis of the Church-Turing thesis! There’s a reason why so many things in computer science are named for him. ---
**Author:** ![greatshakes](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/58956e/32.png) [@greatshakes](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/greatshakes)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2008, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087/54 "2008-06-18T01:34:40Z")
We live next door to Canada, which is where Rush is from. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-u-s-achievement-that-is-cited-as-an-example-by-other-countries/453087.md?page=2)