Thursday, November 24, 2011
Shrinking Thanksgiving
A little over five years ago I ranted about stores being open for thanksgiving. Unfortunately since then things have only gotten worse. Not only are stores like K-mart open today, but Black Friday, which has started earlier and earlier every year is now starting at midnight for most stores. This means that the employees of these stores, instead of being able to enjoy a brief Thanksgiving diner with their family, now don't even get that. Many employees have been complaining in order to work the midnight shift they must go to sleep around 2pm and completely miss out on Thanksgiving dinner. With on-line shopping available 24/7 is it really necessary to have the stores open at midnight? Are stores really going to make huge profits from those customers that are at the store at 1am to buy that one item on sale? Are they really going to spend time in the store buying things that they could buy at a normal time for the same price? It's time to let people enjoy a truly American holiday with their families and not force them to miss out just because they're not fortunate enough to have a job that allows them to sleep in. If you must go shopping on Black Friday, do it from the comfort of your own home on-line and skip the stores. If enough people avoid this ridiculousness maybe the stores will open later next year and let their staff enjoy the holiday the way it was meant to be enjoyed.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Are you a reporter or a doer?
I don't know about you, but I found this article about Bill Nye collapsing during a presentation at the University of Southern California a little disturbing. Bill passes out and the only action by his audience is to tweet about it? Sounds to me like he was lecturing to a bunch of twits. If I were in the audience, I know posting something about it would be the last thing on my mind. The first thing I would want to do is find out if he was OK and call for help. What would you do if you were in this situation? Do you want to be making news or reporting news? If the behavior of these students doesn't change the last thing you may hear is, "You're choking? I'll give you the Heimlich just as soon as I finish this tweet."
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
Has the future arrived yet?
I was reading an article in today's Chicago Tribune about two scientists who developed a roach motel type of compound for capturing and trapping nuclear waste. They developed a sulfide that traps cesium ions allowing for safe removal of radioactive cesium. Neat stuff. According to the article this new compound still needs further development as it currently uses gallium, a very expensive metallic element, but they think they can have a workable product in three or four years. This made me start thinking. What happened to all of those great scientific breakthroughs we've read about through the years that were supposed to change the world as we know it?
When I was in high school, the big scientific breakthrough of the time was superconductors. Everyone was playing around with these ceramic disks that became superconductive when placed in liquid nitrogen. You could then place a small magnet above the disk and it would float above the disk regardless of which pole was facing the superconductor. If you gave the magnet a little spin, it would spin almost indefinitely, or at least until the liquid nitrogen dissipated allowing the ceramic disk to heat up and loose its superconductive properties.
At that time the scientific community was a buzz with the future of superconductors and the promise of room temperature superconductors that would change the world as we know it. There was talk about how this breakthrough would revolutionize power transmission, allow for supper powerful computers, make electric cars a reality, and popularize maglev trains; and all this technology was only five to ten years away. Well, here it is, twenty years later and none of those things are a reality. The only places I hear about superconductors are in MRI machines and super colliders such as the ones at CERN and Fermilab.
What other amazing breakthroughs can you think of that we have yet to see? How about fuel cells that would allow you to power your laptop or cell phone for days off a small vial of alcohol? What about optical computers so powerful that today's super computers seem like something from the 1950's, or holographic storage that will allow you to store a near infinite amount of data on a tiny piece of holographic film? The reality is that most breakthroughs take years or decades before they become a reality in our everyday life. Most of the inventions that change our lives come in small evolutionary steps, rather than a big revolutionary change. We don't realize how much our lives have changed until you look back and try to remember when a portable computer weighed 20 pounds, when cell phones could only make phone calls, you listened to music on cassette players that could hold at most only two hours of low quality audio, or you needed a camera and film to take a picture and you had to wait an hour to sometimes months (depending on when you dropped off the film for processing) before seeing the photo.
When I was in high school, the big scientific breakthrough of the time was superconductors. Everyone was playing around with these ceramic disks that became superconductive when placed in liquid nitrogen. You could then place a small magnet above the disk and it would float above the disk regardless of which pole was facing the superconductor. If you gave the magnet a little spin, it would spin almost indefinitely, or at least until the liquid nitrogen dissipated allowing the ceramic disk to heat up and loose its superconductive properties.
At that time the scientific community was a buzz with the future of superconductors and the promise of room temperature superconductors that would change the world as we know it. There was talk about how this breakthrough would revolutionize power transmission, allow for supper powerful computers, make electric cars a reality, and popularize maglev trains; and all this technology was only five to ten years away. Well, here it is, twenty years later and none of those things are a reality. The only places I hear about superconductors are in MRI machines and super colliders such as the ones at CERN and Fermilab.
What other amazing breakthroughs can you think of that we have yet to see? How about fuel cells that would allow you to power your laptop or cell phone for days off a small vial of alcohol? What about optical computers so powerful that today's super computers seem like something from the 1950's, or holographic storage that will allow you to store a near infinite amount of data on a tiny piece of holographic film? The reality is that most breakthroughs take years or decades before they become a reality in our everyday life. Most of the inventions that change our lives come in small evolutionary steps, rather than a big revolutionary change. We don't realize how much our lives have changed until you look back and try to remember when a portable computer weighed 20 pounds, when cell phones could only make phone calls, you listened to music on cassette players that could hold at most only two hours of low quality audio, or you needed a camera and film to take a picture and you had to wait an hour to sometimes months (depending on when you dropped off the film for processing) before seeing the photo.