Little Things Close By
The power went out this Saturday morning, not an uncommon occurrence round these parts, but uncommon enough on a sunny fall morning. Loss of electricity for any length of time can be traumatic in my small town where fresh water comes from private wells. No electricity, no water. No drinking. No showers. Each toilet is good for precisely two flushes once the clock on the microwave oven begins flashing.
Right behind the water crisis, of course, is the FIOS and cable crisis, the wireless and web crisis, and the TV and microwave crisis. Followed, of course, by the can’t-see-at-night crisis.
I’m reminding you of things you already know because, as I went for my run that morning, I discovered two utility trucks and a policeman directing traffic around a snapped utility pole. Someone, somehow, on a sunny, dry morning--on a road marked at 35 miles per hour--managed to smack into the pole and turn the attached electronics and cables into a mid-air rat’s nest.
Utility poles are a 19th-century technology, designed originally to carry telegraph lines. Wikipedia says the average pole is made of Yellow Southern Pine and stands about 34 feet above the ground.
Whack them with one of our modern vehicles and they break like a toothpick. (Said more prosaically, when the 20th century runs into the 19th century, the 21st century suffers.)
That means no electricity, no water, no cable, no TV, no cooking and no light. Essentially, no life.
American Civilization as we know it depends on the well-being of a 34-foot weather-treated pine tree.
Gives you pause, eh?
Little Thing Far Out
Last week NASA reported that the Hubble Space telescope was sending back stunning images of exploding stars, stellar nurseries and colliding galaxies, thanks to its repair and refurbishment by astronauts in a series of tense spacewalks earlier this year. One image, of Planetary Nebula NGC 6302, shows what our universe will look like 4 billion years from now.
You may remember that work on the Hubble was almost scuttled when astronauts had a protracted struggle with a stuck bolt. It was the kind of thing that you or I might work on for an hour on a Saturday, give up, and go watch a football game. Or maybe saw it off and hope the other bolts were enough to hold things together.
In this case, one little bolt stood in the way of activating the Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, which has now shown us what we might look like in 4 billion years.
Gives you pause, eh?
Another Warped Greek Column
Meanwhile, researchers at Stanford University have proven what we all already know but have simply refused to admit: “Multitaskers are lousy at everything.” Their report concludes that multitaskers don’t focus, they’re more distractible, they’re weak in shifting from one task to another, and they stink at organizing information.
The funny thing is that the Stanford researchers began the research in awe of multitaskers, and were intent on defining their “unusual cognitive gifts.”
Instead, the study’s lead investigator, Eyal Ophir, reported that “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”
After all these years, all those time management articles, all that looking at warped columns and being told they were straight--gives you pause, eh?
So finally. . .
As I was running by the utility trucks and the police car, trying to think how this could possibly have happened, I pictured the guy passing me on Rte 128 earlier this week, going about 95 miles per hour—texting. And the woman who didn’t see the green light (and got a chorus of honks) because she was applying her make-up in the rear view mirror. And then there was the person watching the Gilmore Girls on a laptop as she rolled through the tolls on the Maine Turnpike.
Focusing hard on a stuck bolt allows us to peer 4 billion years into the future.
Driving our car into a 34-foot pine tree destroys Western Civilization.
Multitasking makes us stupid, especially behind the wheel of a car.
It’s not exactly a recipe for life, but—it does give you pause, eh?
(P.S.—A handy supply of WD-40, a few roles of duct tape, and remembering to install a large gas generator when you build the house helps keep civilization intact and the earth spinning.)
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