Andros, I thought the expression was “moistened bink”… but maybe my ears just need fine-tuning. 
Abe wrote:
Sex appeal, pure and simple. How many people drooled over the thought of getting into Niels Bohr’s pants, or of doing the horizontal lambada with Mother Teresa?
SPOOFE, nope.
From the UK slang dictionary at A Dictionary of English Slang & Colloquialisms of the UK | British Slang. It comes in soooo handy when I’m being berated by my Scottish mates.
Tracer, you’re right . . . but Marie Curie was pretty hot.
No, it has not. The world and our own national culture changed significantly after the Industrial Revolution, and the invention of Mass Media, which grew out of the IR.
Lost In Reality, you don’t seem to understand how we got to where we are now, technologically speaking. Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb to “help humanity,” he did it because he knew he could make millions of dollars if he could make a bulb that worked. Alexander Graham Bell didn’t give away telephones; he sold them. Commercial jets were based on technology that was developed for warplanes during World War II. Television, radio, the automobile, the personal computer, the laser, the Internet-—none of these things were developed for altruistic reasons. They either were intended to be marketed for a profit or served a military purpose in their original form until somebody figured out how to profit from them.
And that is my point. The drive to profit off of innovation is the real reason we have an advanced society, NOT a concerted effort by people to “make society better.” There was a surge of altruism coinciding with LBJ’s “Great Society” proposals in the late 60’s (watch original ‘Star trek’ episodes and you can see just how naively optimistic some people were back then) but it’s pretty dead now. The profit motive has ALWAYS won out.
But this isn’t itself a bad thing. Pure science for its own sake has always attracted enough people to keep us on the right track.
Lost In Reality, I think you are just suffering from teenage malaise. It’s a pretty common part of growing up and learning the world isn’t quite what you thought or were taught it was. It doesn’t mean people can’t, shouldn’t, or never do things based on priniciple. It just means there are always more factors involved in what happens to us than most people realize.
For my part (with tongue only slightly in cheek) these are the important principles to remember that will always hold true:
1- Sex always sells. If it doesn’t you’re not using it right.
2- If you want people to give you their money, convince them that one way or another, paying you is in their best interest because they need what you can provide.
3- You can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time. Make up your mind early which you wish to do, and never deviate from it.
4- Carpe Diem.
On a bit of a tangent…
I had a wonderful professor in college. On the first day of class, he announced that we were all forbidden to use the word “society” in this context. Why? Because it’s too easy to use ‘society’ when you can’t quite figure out who you are talking about.
There is nothing, he said, that you can say about ‘society,’ because it’s composed of many subgroups and many many individuals, none of whom will react the same way in any given situation.
Well actually I saw this on Rippley’s believe it or not, there is a Nobel Prize for most ripped abs. I am sure the winner of that Nobel Prize definitely has some sex appeal.
The Romans had this thing called The Coliseum a couple of thousand years ago. Inside, the people went to see, surprisingly enough, gladiators and other spectacles instead of philosophers talking about how to build a better aquaduct. People haven’t changed just because we now have cell phones and DVD players. They would much rather be entertained than hear about some new scientific breakthru.
LostIn Reality– The reason entertainment gets all the money and attention is because it has a much larger appeal than science. I mean, most of the population are not people who are interested in physics or biology or what have you. They just do their job and like to relax afterward and a movie or music or TV show is the most popular way to do so. Not many people are gonna come home from work on the farm and say, “well, its off to the basement for hours of research to cure AIDS”. They are gonna come home and want to sit on the couch have a beer and see some lowbrow fart jokes 
. Even the people who win the Nobel prizes are drawn into entertainment to relax. Entertainment is something that holds us together. It allows a farmer to talk to a Nobel Prize winner about something that they both have in common and both enjoy.