March of Progress 5

5 comments

1. George Smith

   September 23, 2015 at 12:28 pm

   Not quite understanding this one although it seems to be another by a tech comic who shares the mindset that only the bros of the Silicon Valley have brains and solutions anymore.

   Anyway, he’s mixing up energy, chemistry and materials science with something that furnishes only a fraction of the potentials, a smartphone, which is a convenience sitting at the end of a long pipeline of energy and materials. I really haven’t noticed my laptop, for instance, is an energy saver.

   It gets into something I’ve been nibbling around the edges at for a long time. The big advances came from understanding basics in physics, biology and chemistry — said in a crude way, natural law, the underlying rules that make up the existence of the universe. Programming a smartphone, or making it talk, or making it smaller while increasing its computing cycles power for application in communications conveniences. Well, it’s just not as grand.

   The smallpox and polio vaccines are still greater achievements than this. So’s the development and understanding of disease. You can’t get a Ph.D. in natural sciences with a smartphone.

   And people like Kary Mullis or Carl Djerassi will always be bigger deals than Steve Jobs although most Americans have never heard of them.

    
2. George Smith

   September 23, 2015 at 1:50 pm

   You could also make the argument that the comic glosses over what happened in fossil fuel mining. Developments were at least the same leaps in innovation, if you want to call it that, as the smartphone. And that’s part of a bigger problem, obviously. We can get oil and other fossil fuel deposits that couldn’t be extracted 20 years ago because of limits to the technology available then. Progress.

   Boy, I ripped a new hole in notmyearthnotmyproblem.com, didn’t I? They mean well, I know.

    
3. Frank

   September 23, 2015 at 9:10 pm

   I saw it as an argument for adapting advances in power generation, such as solar and wind power.

    
4. Frank

   September 23, 2015 at 9:11 pm

   I saw it as a plea for adapting advances in power generation, such as solar and wind power, just as we have adapted advances in computer technology.

    
5. George Smith

   September 24, 2015 at 5:55 pm

   It did get me out to their site.