A basic theory of human endeavor suggests that the smartest people who will ever work in a field are those who work in that field when it is new. When a technology is new and exciting, it attracts the best people that it will ever attract. No modern oil painter has ever developed the skill of Vermeer or Rembrandt, guys who pioneered the use of paints that were then new. In computing, among the pioneers were Alan Turing and John Von Neumann. Can we honestly look at Windows Vista and say "Whoa, the guys who built this are way smarter than Turing and Von Neumann"?Read the whole thing. You wouldn't want to miss his timeline of Net innovations. :-)If programmers get dumber every year, how come we're smart enough to keep discovering clever new things to patent, things that those pioneers in computer science didn't dream of? We can buy all of our books on amazon.com and the early Internet pioneers couldn't go shopping online because they weren't smart enough to envision online shopping, right?
The answer is that the early Internet pioneers did envision essentially every service available on the present-day Internet. They wrote about it and distributed those writings to tens of thousands of people. They demonstrated prototypes, sometimes to rooms full of more than 1000 people, and distributed films of those demos. The only reason that we believe ourselves to be innovative is that we are too lazy to go to the library and read what was done in the 1960s.
If those old guys were so smart, why didn't they build amazon.com, eBay, and Google? Well, many of them died before the 50,000th person obtained Internet access. There wasn't much point in having an online store when there were only 50 or 100 computers on the Internet.
Alan Charles Kors, George H. Walker Endowed Term Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
- First, tribes: tough life.
- The defaults beyond the intimate tribe were violence, aversion to difference, and slavery. Superstition: everywhere.
- Culture overcomes them partially.
- Rainfall agriculture, which allows loners.
- Irrigation agriculture, which favors community.
- Division of labor plus exchange in trade bring mutual cooperation, even outside the tribe.
- The impulse is always there, though: "Kill or enslave the outsider."
- Gradual science from Athens' compact with reason.
- Division of labor, trade, the mastery of knowledge, plus time brought surplus, sometimes a peaceful extended order and, rules diversely evolved and, the cooperation of strangers - always warring against the fierce defaults of tribalism, violence, and ignorance.
- No one who teaches you knows what will happen.
"Politics has, like, jacked itself up to my level of weirdness," Gibson acknowledges. "I can work with this," he says, thinking of recent turns of events. "I like the sheer sort of neo-Stalinist denial of reality. That's what makes it work. It's interesting. I'd like to see it get less interesting. But I don't know that it necessarily will."[...]
"If I had gone to Ace Books in 1981 and pitched a novel set in a world with a sexually contagious disease that destroys the human immune system and that is raging across most of the world -- particularly badly in Africa -- they might have said, 'Not bad. A little toasty. That's kind of interesting.'
"But I'd say -- ' But wait! Also, the internal combustion engine and everything else we've been doing that forces carbon into the atmosphere has thrown the climate out of whack with possibly terminal and catastrophic results.' And they'd say, 'You've already got this thing you call AIDS. Let's not --'
"And I'd say, ' But wait! Islamic terrorists from the Middle East have hijacked airplanes and flown them into the World Trade Center.' Not only would they not go for it, they probably would have called security."
"Through the Looking Glass": William Gibson, interviewed in The Washington Post (September 6, 2007)
The National Maritime Historical Society (http://www.seahistory.org/) has invited me to talk about "No Higher Honor: Saving the Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf" tomorrow near their New York headquarters.
When: noon, Sat. July 28
Where: The Hendrick Hudson Free Library, 185 Kings Ferry Road, Montrose, N.Y. 10548
-- Phone: 914-739-5654
-- Google map: http://tinyurl.com/2smrqt
The event is open to the public; please come! Brad
Metropolis Rising (Steven Johnson, Urban Planet, New York Times, 15 November 2006)In late August of 1854, in London’s crowded working-class neighborhood of Soho, a 5-month-old girl fell ill with cholera, and unleashed a chain of events that ultimately helped shape the world we live in today. The girl — known only as a “Baby Lewis” — lived with her parents, Sarah and Thomas Lewis, at 40 Broad Street, across from a public water pump known throughout Soho for its reliably clean and cool water. When Sarah Lewis emptied out the water she had used to clean her child’s soiled linens, a small amount of that waste found its way into the well beneath the Broad Street pump, thanks to decaying brickwork that separated the well from the cesspool in the Lewises’ basement.
Within 36 hours, one of the most explosive outbreaks of cholera in the history of London erupted throughout the neighborhood. By the end, some two weeks later, 10 percent of the Lewises’ neighbors were dead, and far more would have perished had so many residents not fled in terror.
