My talk yesterday at AAAS went well, if too long (the person who was supposed to be flagging the time got distracted, and never gave me any indicators that I was going on, and on, and on… But that’s not really what I want to post about. The thing that triggered this is the speaker giveaway from AAAS, which is a combination laser pointer and 1GB USB drive.<\/p>\n
“Big deal,” you say. Those are cheap.” And, yeah, they are, but when you think about it, that’s really kind of amazing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
50 years ago, the laser had barely been invented, and was still in search of a problem. Nobody had yet had the idea that one of the problems to which is was a solution was “What will I use to indicate where I am on a projected slide?”<\/p>\n
20 years ago, 1GB was almost unthinkably large. I’m not sure you could get a 1GB hard drive when I was in college. Certainly not an internal one– we were kind of impressed by the 100MB drives in my advisor’s office computer. I’m not sure what I would’ve done in 1991 to generate that amount of data.<\/p>\n
The idea that you would get both<\/em> of those items in a single package, with a weight of about 20 grams, and that the combination would be so cheap that they would literally give them away<\/em> to people for speaking at a conference would’ve been all but inconceivable.<\/p>\n I’m still waiting on my flying car, but in lots of little ways, living in the future is amazing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My talk yesterday at AAAS went well, if too long (the person who was supposed to be flagging the time got distracted, and never gave me any indicators that I was going on, and on, and on… But that’s not really what I want to post about. The thing that triggered this is the speaker… Continue reading Living in the Future<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,169,7,11,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences","category-lasers","category-physics","category-science","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}