I feel like the number 100 is indicative, generally, of some sort of victory. If you've made it to 100 years old, you are no longer a creepy old person but a venerable piece of living history who garners respect from everyone. If you're a TV show, you've made it through a few seasons and are offically "A Success," possibly even "A Hit." And if you're a blog, and you've made it to 100 posts without garnering a big following, getting a book deal, or giving up entirely, you're either persistent or dumb or masochistic. I'm going to go with persistent, becuase this is my 100th post, this blog has gotten me nowhere really, but I'm still totally into it!
According to the NY Times, "only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled." Well, I'm still here and I'm still blogging and the blog may have looped around a few times and changed themes and such, but I'm hanging in there! I'm a trooper! A centurion, if you will! Hehehe.
But seriously, folks, this is an important blog not just to me (because it makes me keep my brain working and myself writing), but also to the world, whether it knows it or not yet. People need a source for a little laughter at the expense of the weirdos and weirdness of New York (as in the very lost and very unintelligible Albanian woman who was probably close to 60 years old and wearing a clubbing outfit who I met last night in Astoria. She was trying to get to the L train but had no idea where she was going, and decided that she needed to regale me with tales of her life in Yugoslavia until she moved here 10 years ago... and still somehow didn't know the subway lines...).
And people need someone to look out for them, to be willing to shout warnings from the mountaintops about things that are easily mislabeled as 'cool' rather than insidious examples of human stupidity, like these little gems about 120,000 year old (or older) microbes that scientists from my very own Penn State University have dug out from the Greenland glacier and, after months of careful and loving incubation, have finally succeeded in culturing. They have a few mysterious colonies going of "very small purple-brown ... ultramicrobacteria," and they're super excited because they think these hardy little guys could provide hints as to how living things could survive harsh conditions, possibly on other planets. I guess I can't blame them for being excited - getting a living thing re-started after hundreds of thousands of years is quite an accomplishment. But what worries me is this quote: '"H glaciei isn't a pathogen and is not harmful to humans", Dr Loveland-Curtze added, "but it can pass through a 0.2 micron filter, which is the filter pore size commonly used in sterilization of fluids in laboratories and hospitals.' ...once again, science at its finest, people.
Let's just do some quick, slightly paranoid but nonetheless self-preservative thinking here, folks. I'm sure that scientists who study microbiology can be pretty well certain when things are or are not pathogens, but given that they've admitted to not having ANY IDEA how old these things are ("...at least 120,000 years and possibly much longer") or how they normally behaved before being frozen and slowing down their metabolic processes way back whenever it was, how can we expect to know how these things will respond to being brought back up to speed? And given they're so tiny they can easily escape normal filtration systems, how can we be sure they won't break free and start some form of insidious mind-boggling-ly fast reproduction cycle that will cover half the planet in possibly methan-emitting global-warming-causing disgusting purple mold in like, ten minutes? Come on, people. A little caution, please?
Where would you guys be without me to point out the dangers and idiocy inherent in these 'scientific' schemes? Or the absolute horror of modern culture, as presented in this article about a 15 year old girl from Iowa winning 50 G's at the National Texting Championship on Tuesday. 50. Grand. For texting. This girl has a habit of 500 texts a day, 290-page cell phone bills, and using expressions like "IDK," "lyk," and "2ce." What's even scarier than the fact that texting has taken such a hold over our youth, however, is that it's also taking over our news media, which might not be the finest upstanding institution of cultural excellence, but which should at least hold itself up to the standards of using REAL ENGLISH. But no, no, in the article I've linked to above, they do a TEXT INTERVIEW with the winner of the 50 grand.
People, we need to fight these things. With paranoia, fear, violent uprisings when necessary, and even more violent mockery of things like text interviews. And that's why, even if this blog never makes me rich or famous, I know it's important. I know the world needs me. I'm at 100 posts and I'm not stopping.
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what does 2ce even mean? toosy? to see? but then why the e? weird.
ReplyDeletethat microbe thing is pretty nuts (fyi, the first link is broken) but im not super worried. when i read about it on aol, all the message boards were full of people freaking out about one of two things: either a, the microbes would kill everyone, or b, why scientists were spending time and money on that rather than on fixing immediate social problems. my response is, i imagine that these people are experts, and have taken all the necessary precautions. If the little buggers get through the standard sterilization filters, I'm sure those scientists are using super small filters instead. And as to the other complaint, I have to just dismiss it. I realize that science should help the world, but it should also find out amazing cool new things, like what millenia old life forms are like. I mean, this is as close to Jurassic Park as we are likely to get anytime soon.
Hmm, on second thought, that may have been a bad example.
Happy 100 posts!
That's exactly the wrong attitude, though. "I imagine that these people are experts, and have taken all the necessary precaustions." Yes, but you don't KNOW that they did. They ARE epxerts, but we all saw how Jurassic Park went. THEY were experts, too. And Jeff Goldblum was right, as he always is: "Life finds a way to break free."
ReplyDeleteAs for the issue of science fighting current problems - I agree with people who say that. Not on all fronts, and certainly scientists also need to be looking ahead and discovering and making cool new things that we'll need eventually. But I still can't help but think that until we can come up with a way to treat all of our citizens here in the US and all over the world equally and with the dignity they deserve (gay rights, civil rights, etc), we don't need robots to be new people.
/ramble