Quote of the day
Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breath because someone built you a really good tin can that has seams tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.
But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks.
The drinks, people.
-Harry Dresden, wizard, in
Summer Knight by Jim Butcher
Jim Butcher writes noir detective stories, in the vein of Raymond Chandler et al, but with magic and werewolves and vampires and faeries. All the trappings of the pulp detective novel is there, the tone (world-weary private eye, struggling alone against a corrupt and unsympathetic system, but who still manages to make a sarcastic joke whenever possible), the gorgeous blonde looking for help (but it's a girl who can see the future, or a werewoman (that's a wolf who turns into a woman, instead of the other way around), or a changeling girl who's half troll), and of course there's Chicago (whose police department has a Special Investigations unit whose lieutenant knows to carry silver bullets).
All that has nothing to do with the quote above, it just spoke to me because I think it's fun to think about the technology around us in light of its amazingness. Consider how many questions went unanswered or wrongly answered before 80% of the world's knowledge became indexed and searchable and immediately available from the comfort of your desk chair (or beyond, depending on which cell phone you have). Think about instant communication with the other side of the world, to the most remote mountains or the middle of the sea. Think about GPS: we have enough man-made objects orbiting our little blue planet for not one, not two, but THREE satellites to tell each GPS unit where it is on the face of the world. Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I personally think he was selling technology short.