We take so much for granted

I'm not sure I agree with his entire manifesto, but I think he's making a clever point. I always find it necessary to pull perspective out of the limited tunnel vision of personal annoyance and consider the larger gratitude of our time's magnificence. In a steep parabola of exponential evolutionary development, we have gone from a grunting, tree-shaking, poop-throwing mammal, to flying, networked, computer-building demigods.

We live in such an amazing time, and I find myself lucky to be part of a generation that has experienced both sides of the information-revolutionary coin. Whatever is happening to us on a large anthropological scale, will for future generations be the normative status quo of daily existence. Where we appreciate each new smarter phone and the benefits of improved iPhone apps, our offspring well observe its mediocrity with disdain. Let us not forget that in the same generation we went from the 2 rectangles bouncing a ball in Pong to the virtual world of Call of Duty 4. We went from pager code to text messages and from uploading photos to flickr for our Myspace page to direct uploads with our mobile phone to facebook which can automatically recognize faces and tag our friends for us. Chances are that you have probably been swept along the tidal wave of technological change so quickly that you have forgotten to notice how incredibly significant the passing steps have been.

It is the "Geeks", the "Professor Geeks", and the "entrepreneurial super geeks" that seem to be the ones sitting on the plane screaming "Wow, I'm flying". Geeks love the Gadgets. Professor Geeks love explaining the sociological significance of facebook vs myspace, while the Entrepeneurial Super Geeks are getting rich inventing Twitter. The rest of us dopey idiots sit around complaining about why the iPhone doesn't have copy and paste.

I guess I'm just in agreement with Louis CK. Throughout most of my day, I'm on a handheld device (my phone), updating my facebook status, checking tweets, and staying current with friends on facebook. I ride around in hybrid cars, while blogging to a network of minds that filter out the vast noise of each others conscious thoughts about personal and shared events. Still, I usually don't take the time to appreciate how we got to this amazing place. I forget to stand in awe of the infrastructure of human development and historical knowledge that allows me to navigate my car with satellite photos from space on google map. I will save my musings for an entirely different blog, but that's just crazy. Stop to think about what it takes to build satellites, launch satellites, accurately network satellites with the network of computer devices and cellular phones, much less build these devices. Ants navigate using pheromones and communicate with a series of Antenna touches. Bees give coordinates with dance. Crickets Chirp. Whales Sing. Sea urchins discharge chemicals. Then there is us. If you were an alien anthropologist studying us, then we would be some pretty interesting monkeys. So, I would like to take a moment to be thankful that I'm blogging and not throwing poop. Wow, I'm Flying!

In the mean time here are some crazy robots to trip you out:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/03/robots.html


Grunt Grunt Tweet Tweet,


-MM