Friday, January 22, 2010

Modern Miracles

Over at Cold Fury, Mike links to an auto blog that talks about the modern miracle of the internal combustion engine.  I think that there are a lot of modern miracles that people take for granted, and I believe part of it has to do with the fact that technology is changing so quickly that the newer generations don't even know that there was a more primitive form of whatever they're using.  Hell, just think about cameras.

I remember my first camera.  It was an old Kodak 110 film using brick.  Hell, even my first Nikon SLR would be archaic by today's standards.  Nowadays if you can't download the picture instantly onto a computer then it's just not worth having.  Hell, I used to use an old digital camera for my job in Seattle, and it was a snazzy, high-speed (for the time) 3.5 megapixel behemoth.  These days you can get a cell phone with a 4 mp camera in it.  Hell, these days a cell phone with any camera LESS than 4 mexapixels doesn't sell.

You push a button.  The image is transferred into a bunch of ones and zeros.  Those ones and zeros fly through the air to a box thousands of miles away, where they reassemble themselves into the very same image you just saw.  I can take a picture in Afghanistan, email it to my family, and they can see what I see in less than five minutes.

People, that's a fucking miracle right there.

What modern miracles can you think of?

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