For what do you marvel at humankind?

(hey tie it with their fingers beforehand and hit it under their tongues. That may explain Boom's confusing lack of tongal dexterity in other areas.)

 

That our amazing ability for compassion (which produced people such as Mother Teresea) resides in the same species that produced Hitler, Stalin and others capable of extreme cruelty.


And the ability to roll a tongue.

 

30,000,000 commercial planes will be in the air this year, many going halfway around the world.

About 29,999,993 of them will land safely.

For as much crap as the industry takes on this board, remember those numbers.

 

Yeah, that's hard to think about sometimes. Just everything ... how we went from rocks and sticks to laptops and cell phones and tiny little computers, or even how we went from gears and levers 100 years ago to that stuff — it kind of boggles my mind.

 

Music. That we went from banging rocks together to Mahler's Fifth Symphony, Mozart's "Die Nozze di Figaro", Gershwin and the Beatles.

That for all the bad things that happen, people are capable of the most astonishing acts of kindness and generosity.

 

Communication. What once took weeks through the limitations of wind, sail and horses' fatigue can now be accomplished in a matter of milliseconds and keystrokes.

 

Opposable thumbs, plus the ability to rotate your hand from palm-up to palm-down. Think of all the things you couldn't two without those two traits.

 

Air travel and, to a greater extent, space travel. Every time I take off in a plane I'm fascinated at all the processes, trials and errors that went into that takeoff. And I can't get enough of looking out the window at the ground below.

I hope to live long enough to see commercial space travel (or at least become wealthy enough to blow a few million on exiting the atmosphere).

 

Love.

 

Air travel. Whenever I'm at an airport, I'm amazed that this all comes together every day and you can get from one coast to the other in a matter of hours.

The Internet/Google. I have access to a library wherever I have an Internet connection. Type a couple of key words into Google and the information I need is almost always there.

New York City. It's a marvel.

 

Add to that: Wiki-fucking-pedia.

When's the last time anybody ever opened up a volume of Britannica? I remember loving when those encyclopedias showed up on CD-ROM in my house back in 1994ish. Now, I couldn't imagine popping one of those in the computer to look something up. I can hit up Wiki on my phone in a matter of seconds.

Also: Baseball-reference.com and Retrosheet.com. To have all that information so readily available, and easily searchable, has changed the world.

 

I've been watching NASA TV a lot lately while the astronauts have been assembling the space robot and I'm awed not only by what those brave souls are doing up there, but also by the fact that technology is to the point where I can watch them do it.