Category: Science/Technology

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PokeFrenzy: Social Crisis or Just a Walk in the Park?

The world these days seems to be divided between those who run toward and those who run away from Super Popular Trendiness. Some are always eager to follow the hordes and others always eager to stand apart. But often, people gravitate both ways, pulled strongly towards one pole then the other depending on interests, personality, craving for company, or available free time.

The Pokemon Go phenomenon is shining a spotlight on these two opposing views. Everyone starts talking about playing it; then suddenly everyone is talking how they are NOT going to participate. People are either enthusiastic or horrified; there doesn’t seem to be much of a reaction in between. And in our boom and bust communication cycles, a weekend of news about this games popularity is invariability followed by “world-ending” stories about car crashes, muggings, and even national security breaches attributed to li’l ol’ Pikachu. Continue reading “PokeFrenzy: Social Crisis or Just a Walk in the Park?”

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The Past Is Not What it Used to Be

Suppose you are looking at dinosaurs…

What do you mean you have not seen any dinosaurs recently? Do you not have any children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, or little neighbors, or do you not know someone else who has children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews or little neighbors? Surely, you know someone who has access to a young person, and it is summertime, therefore, you can take them to a science museum or natural history museum or for heaven’s sake a Toys-R-Us to look at some dinosaurs.

As I was saying…

The collection you are looking at is probably not all, in fact, dinosaurs. As a general rule, dinosaurs in the Mesozoic age, aka the “Age of the Dinosaurs,” did not swim or fly. Those giant things in the water that looked like a turtle crossed with a giraffe? Or had teeth and flippers bigger than your head? Not dinosaurs. The thing with the membrane stretched across one finger, depicted gliding across the hundred foot fern trees? Not dinosaurs.  This is true, even though most museum exhibits and reference books will include pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mososaurs.  They might as well have included crocodiles or gekkos while they were at it. Continue reading “The Past Is Not What it Used to Be”

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The World at our Fingertips

This week’s post was inspired by a sentence from the excellent essay 13 Right Now. This is what it’s like to grow up in the age of likes, lols and longing by Jessica Contrera, Washington Post:

The whole world is at her fingertips and it has been for years.

I read this book last year where the hero and villain chased each other across several countries to acquire secret technology that would rule the world. It had jet planes and speedboats and was written in the late nineties. The secret technology was described as the ability to connect all the world’s encyclopedias so that someone could type a word into a computer and learn everything there is to know about that thing. It would make education available to all, raise the standard of living for the poor, equalize disparate classes, and topple secret governments. The Internet.

060816 flyingfingers

Continue reading “The World at our Fingertips”