I am exchanging emails with David Spragg when I think: It used to take two or three months for a message to ‘cross the pond’. The same for a response. We’ve just done a year’s communication in five minutes! How did they do commerce then(in the days of sailing ships)?

Is it just me, or does anyone else ever think about this stuff?

I look at an empty light socket and think: If there was no Wal-Mart 800 feet from my house, with light bulbs on the shelf, how long would it take me make a glass bubble, find the material for a filament, form a threaded metal base, and assemble the pieces with a vacuum inside?

I guess my point here is our total dependance on a infrastructure that most of us are not really aware of, and technology that only a VERY small minority understands.

Take the automobile. Don’t even consider building an internal combustion engine from scratch (and refining the fuel to run it), just consider a simple wheel and tire. Try forming some heavy gauge metal into a perfect circle, gathering rubber (not to mention the synthetics and reinforcing bands used now), curing the raw material and forming it into a tire (I have no idea how this is done) and making the air valve (we’ll also leave out the pump needed to inflate the tire).

Again, the invisible infrastructure that our whole society floats on.

Don’t even get me started on multi-layer circuit boards, or large scale integrated circuits, or cell phones.

A couple of years ago I was working for a computer company that reorganized and moved to a new location about twenty miles away. I liked the tacos from the taco stand near the previous location so one day I took a long lunch and drove the twenty miles to the taco stand.
As I’m driving, it occurs to me that it wasn’t that long ago that most people never traveled twenty miles from home in their entire life! Let alone traveling twenty miles(forty miles round trip) to get a taco for lunch.

Does anyone else ever think about this stuff? Or is it just me?

At the computer store where I worked, we got a flyer from an office supply store. It was eight pages (newspaper size) of pencils, pens, markers, writing instruments in general. I think to myself: How long ago was it that a large portion of the population couldn’t read or write?

Does anyone else ever think about this stuff? Or is it just me?

I want to die quietly in my sleep, like my grandfather.
Not screaming in terror, like his twenty seven passengers.