What amazes me is the things that we have pretty much by accident. Chocolate, for example - along the way from the first person who consumed a cacao bean, to the packaged chocolate products we have today are a number of leaps forward that were quite accidental, or at least were not the result of careful forward planning.
One or more of those watershed moments could have gone a different way and we perhaps wouldn’t have chocolate in the form we currently know it.
That’s because you keep forgetting to turn off the “taser” function.
It’s intersting how people THINK technology has changed them. Oh don’t get me wrong on some levels it has brought meaningful differences but most are only inflated ideas in your mind.
Sure you have a cell phone. But what are you using it for? Nothing really, I can virutally guarantee it. Instead of making a grocery list, you go to the store and phone your husband to read off what we need. Instead of making plans and actually making an attempt to BE there, we play it by ear. Now we don’t teach our children how to behave because we cell phone them and check in on them 40 times a day.
I think it’s amazing how technology has made everyone feel they are the center of the universe. When I would do time studies I found people are less productive at work with more technology. Oh they work but they are using said technical advances for their own amusement.
We have digital camera and I see people say I have 1000 photos of my cat. That’s nice but they ACTUALLY have A THOUSAND photos of their cat. That is stupid. All it does is devalue the individual photo.
Look at music, I remember Jo Stafford saying, we’d cut an album in 90 minutes. You had better known the music and everything planned out in advance, 'cause you didn’t get a second chance. I listen to her or Dinah Shore and when they perform LIVE they sound very much like their records. I rarely hear a live performance of anyone that sounds close to their records. Why? 'Cause they cut the song 100 times and splice it.
Techonology has taken away a large portion of our creativity. Instead of thinking and using our minds to create, we rely on machines or simple create by massive tries. This is not to say the creativity isn’t there, but it’s unused.
I am not knocking technology, there are very good things. Electric lights, central heating, but the thing is look at what is TRULY used to improve your life, versus what is developed to occupy your time 'cause you’re bored.
It’s a shame I look around and people can’t relate to the world around them anymore.
Cut that micro-SD card in half longways and you’ll see the actual chip(as opposed to the circuit board) is only about a fifth of the volume of even that size case. The grey bits in the middle is where all the actual data is stored. The greenish line across the top is the circuit board which is required to create the paths you need to get to and from the chip(tiny) where the data is actually stored. Look at pretty much any computer chip and you’ll notice the majority of the space is taken up by the circuit boards and contacts which provide the electrical paths to the data. If we ever get the contacts small enough and clean enough, we’ll be able to store gigabytes of data in something not much bigger than a hair. Biologically we already store gigabytes and gigabytes of data in things much MUCH smaller than hairs. Technology has a long way to go to catch up with the information storage capabilities of biology.
Enjoy,
Steven
For me, its my Ipod classic 80gb with a nifty little gizmo that plugs into the headphone jack and transmits my music as an FM radio signal.
I have the equivalent of around 500 cd’s stored on the 'pod AND anytime I want to play something for someone, all I have to do is tell them “tune your radio station to 88.7FM”. To me that’s pretty mind boggling.
Also, my Sony Playstation Portable. This little hand held thing is capable of producing graphics on a level with the Playstation 2, and I can take it anywhere I go.
People moan about how our current technology doesn’t live up to what we were promised in the 50’s (Where the HELL is my flying car?), but if you went back in time to 1950 and brought someone back here, they’d drop dead of shock for all the amazing things we have and can do now.
Medical technology.
There’s a woman in my support group whose grandmother died in 1954 of breast cancer…she said every year they would just carve more and more of her chest wall away. Now, 50 some odd years later, her treatment is a lumpectomy, there are special targeted drugs to make sure the cancer doesn’t come back, and her survival rate is light years ahead of her grandmother.
Hell, this drug wasn’t even around 10 years ago. And now there’s a vaccine that can prevent cervical cancer, and women can have sex without worrying about getting pregnant.
I do tech support and I’m constantly telling people to go out and buy a USB drive to back up their important stuff. Right now a 16gb drive can be had for less than $20!
I especially like mentioning them to college age students (you know, I once again did the freudian slip of thinking “college student” and writing “college stupid”) about them, because just over a year ago, I was working Security for a small college. Our dispatcher students all carried them and kept their important papers on them. If you lose, break or have your laptop stolen, you still have them. Many profs would accept copying them from the drives as a better way of turning in papers.
During finals week in December, I had way too many young female students crying because their computer crashed or was stolen and they lost all their papers! DUH, back them up! Buy a USB drive, keep it on your keychain. You’ll ALWAYS have those papers with you.
The other day I also recommended them to an older woman who was talking about burning disks to share pictures with her friends. No, don’t waste your money on disks except as a permanent photo backup that you can stick in a closet. Buy a USB drive. Go to their house, download the pictures they want, upload their pictures that YOU want! Easy as pie!
One specific thing about the space program, or the history of flight, that I find amazing (I’m pretty sure I first saw this pointed out on the Dope a couple years ago) is that it only took about 66 years–less than an average lifespan, or at least an average modern lifespan–to get from the first Wright Brothers flight to Apollo 11.
Peachy. Just don’t forget to hit that little Safely Remove Hardware button before you yank it out. Oh, and you might want to back up all that crucial data you put on it once in awhile. Ask me how I know. G’wan, ask me!
:: mumble, grumble, frikkin, frackin… ::
Yesterday, I discovered how to set the new laser printer to “stun”.
…one more step to go…
Yeah, the fact I’ve never gotten polio or smallpox is all in my head.
Right now, nothing except the secure feeling it would take a somewhat improbable series of events to make me truly alone in an emergency.
I have to save this quote. It is fine, frontier balderdash.
Yes. Twain was crippled by the typewriter. Da Vinci was utterly destroyed by the new techniques he helped pioneer. Forwards into the past!
What? Was this supposed to make sense?
Boredom is not a virtue. Boredom is the prime excuse for criminality.
It’s true: Nobody respects and honors the four elements anymore, without which there is no comprehension of the natural world.
I agree that the life sciences will start to take off soon, but I think many of the things you are attributing to physics may actually be chemistry. Physicists don’t make new materials, they work with the materials that chemists discover.
Laser printer on stun, hee hee!
Anyway, radio spectrometry.
The fact that we can tell the molecular constituents of a given astral body (really far away!) by careful analysis of the light which it emits just seems so incredibly cool.
And, as others have said, being able to ask a question about protease enzymes, or the finer points of any philosophy, or canonical Cthulhu lore, or rocket science, or animal husbandry, or sock monkeys – and be answered in a matter of minutes, in multiplicities, with a few good one-liners thrown in – well, that’s just freakin amazing.
I wonder how this easy availability of arcane information has affected the frequency and quality of bar bets?
Snort. 
Open heart surgery. It’s the reason I still have a father. Back when he was the age I am now(early fifties) he had a heart attack. Between the meds, the angioplasty(still new at the time) and the bypass procedure, he’s still healthy now that he’s eighty. And see, in 1936, when his own father, at the same age, had a heart attack, it took him on out. I got to keep my dad, he lost his when he was seven.
Washing machines and refrigerators, gas stoves, vacuum cleaners and indoor toilets. My 104 year old grandmother told me that she doesn’t miss the times before all these seemingly commonplace(now) devices.
I remember when the first Walkman came out, in the late 70s. It held a 90-minute cassette (45 min. on each side). I thought it was so cool that you could actually carry your music around with you . . . a whole hour and a half worth! Now I have a 60G iPod that’s a lot smaller, and holds 1000 hours of music, and I don’t have to play it in order! And I can watch TV shows and movies too!
I have an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves, filled with about 2000 CDs. I have downloaded all of them (minus duplicate tracks) onto one of my 500G hard drives, with plenty of room to spare . . . and the best tracks go on the iPod.
This is beyond technology. This is magic.
Wrong word…I should have said ‘physical sciences’ of which Chemistry is. In addition, I mean biology in the broadest sense but don’t know the correct word.
I do keep this prediction in mind when I look at stocks 
I’m amazed when people in my general age group (55-65) ,who ought to know better, wax nostalgically for cars with carbureters and point ignitions. They hate that ,“Ya can’t work on anything anymore.”
Make that HAD to work on, and frequently when the Windchill was minus 50 or the Heat Index was at least in the low hundred-and-teens.
Balky automatic chokes were the worst. Always having to carry around in your head the uncertainty of “Is this a one-pump or two-pump morning?” Knowing that a wrong assessment would mean flooding the damn engine and worrying that your battery would give out before you “cleared it” by cranking while holding the accelerator to the floor.
If you guessed on the light side, the car wouldn’t be flooded, but it wouldn’t start, either. Your next guess was “Should I give it one extra pump, or two.”
I can let a modern car with electronically-controlled spark and ignition sit for days in any weather, turn the key without touching the accelerator in any way, and the car will start.
My Ford Ranger, being a stick, needs my left foot on the clutch because of an interlock designed to keep people from starting up in gear, but my right foot is never needed to start the engine.
All that raw gas from all those floodings diluted oil and reduced engine life. It also carboned-up the plugs.
Electronic ignition makes spark plugs last the length of 5-year note on a typical new car and neither the spark advance nor the fuel system needs to be touched when going from sea level to 8,000 feet.
I’m amazed that people send money to Nigeria, or sign up for Scientology, or otherwise fall for any of the other well-known scams in the world.
I mean, I’m not amazed that anybody does it. There are, and always will be, stupid people in the world.
What’s amazing is that there are enough stupid people that things like this can develop into viable industries. That, to me, is amazing.
Hey, nobody said it had to be good amazing.
Everyone in the thread is amazed by fairly new tech, but my amazement is for an older technological advance: Crochet.
I just took it up around Christmas, and have made a hat, some potholders, a baby blanket, and washcloths. From, essentially, string. And a stick. With specialized stick-wiggling.
Weaving, I can understand. Fancy layering. But winding stuff on a stick and looping it around itself in a way that makes fabric, with pretty patterns even? Amazing.
Really. String+Stick(s)+fancy wiggling=clothes? So cool.
