If you know the correct terminology there are very few things so obscure that you cannot find them by typing a few words on a computer and getting information about it.
And as stated above, you can do this anywhere....

You can find out (roughly) what the weather will be like in a week.

We have a picture of Earth where it only takes up a few pixels (from Voyager's "Family Portrait").

You have to potential means to communicate with anyone in the world.

You can have an audience of millions, and never see a person face to face.

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"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." — Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

441!!!! :)

I can be in Paris in a matter of hours - not weeks, and be entertained the whole trip, and it's relatively cheap to do.

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"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

...when you complain about the future stuff. ("The internet is taking SO LONG to load today.")

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

There is such thing as a pixel?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

What he said.

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Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem.

I'm really amused (and appalled) by the guy on the airplane when they lose their internet connection.

that reminds me--I was joking, but, last year at the Almost Heaven Star Party on top of Spruce Knob, WV, we had a storm come through and knock over the antennas that gave us our wireless internet. So when I came home, I told a cousin how I was roughing it and loving it, till it got too rough--and I lost my internet!

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

A while back I got a cut finger, and they put on a gauze-ish strip that clotted the blood, never had to be removed, absorbed into the wound and helped speed the healing process as it dissolved. And this was some ten years ago.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I heard Louis CK admit in a radio interview that that guy didn't really exist. It was actually Louis himself who was so upset about the internet service failing before he realized just how ridiculous that was.

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“There’s nothing that spells progress in large, friendly letters like trying to combine two totally incompatible technologies.” – David Szondy, Tales of Future Past.

yea, by chance he'll be in Austin this Friday, and I plan to go.

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"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

That's not too surprising. I'd probably do the same thing myself.

Nice sketch!

I liked the line about "you are sitting in a chair in the sky!"

We really should be awed everyday by the everyday. I wouldn't mind that people don't if only they'd show a bit more respect towards the ones who make their amazing lives possible.

When somebody in Minnesota can read a poem you've written before your parents do. (Because they were out that night and SpaceVidcast was doing a show.)

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Our local cable company has a television advertisement touting their video-on-demand service, and how you don't have to wait to watch a movie. Part of the ad is naming a bunch of other stuff that you do have to wait for.

On that list?

The microwave.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

...I beg your pardon?

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Ala Nose

A burrito takes a minute to cook. I want it now!

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

I don't care what apathy is!

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

I am not argumentative!

__________________
"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

You dial up the latest pictures of the
Martian surface from two robots that have
have been at it for five long years1

When I were a lad I had to make do with 22
fuzzy pictures from a flyby that took 2 weeks
to sort out. And I had to walk to school
in the freezing weather and sleep in cold
bedrooms etc etc.

Try telling that to young people these days... They won't believe you!

But I remember, back in 1980, my brother went on holiday to America, and visited (I think) Cape Canavarel. He brought me back some quality prints of the Viking mission, which I kept on the wall for several years. Viking has been bettered in recent years, but looking back, I still feel the awe of seeing the first pictures taken from the surface of Mars. The day before 20 July 1976, it was all speculative. Then suddenly we actually knew what at least a part of the Martian surface looked like.

A lot of people - especially SF writers - feel disappointed by the space programme. It's true, we don't have lunar cities, and nobody has set foot on Mars. But the fact that we do have real close-up views of other words is staggeringly awesome. The fact that we know that the universe feels no compulsion to conform to our expectations is a wonderful thing - and frankly, it makes up for the fact that there are no cities or princesses on Mars.

I went to the post office today to mail a couple of Mothers' Day cards, and the only vending machine in the place didn't take cash. I actually had to go to the counter to give them my eighty-four cents.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I wonder what things we're used to, having had them for what seems like a long time to use or even our whole lives, but which the next generation will think we must not have had. For example, based on the way my parents depicted the world they'd grown up in, I thought they must not have had electricity all along but gotten it at some point as adults. It just seemed to fit in with the general theme, I guess. My mother thought this was hilarious because electricity was obviously common long before she was born, and she told me that it's a running joke among people her age that their children all seem to think that way.

When you can find photographs of artwork in the United States Capitol online in seconds that it would probably take half an hour to find if you were in the actual building with a map. (At least with my sense of direction.)

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Your links lead to error pages

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Ala Nose

And anyway "a link to the picture" is not at all the same as "being there yourself." Oh, it's nice to have, but I'd rather be there in the National Statuary Hall.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

When you and a friend are driving somewhere and he pulls out this big contraption he calls a "map" to see which way to go, and you laugh for not having used one of those for a while.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

I would like to be there in person, for sure, but it's nice to know what the actual artwork looks like so I don't walk past it by accident if I do go there.

__________________
I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

when I can use my credit card in Europe and their machine checks my account in the US within seconds, and I make my purchase.

When we get worldly news in real time from an internet broadcast.

Can you imagine waiting weeks to hear how things are going? Before telephones or telegraphs armies were sent to fight, and the people back home had no idea how things were going.

__________________
"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

Tragically, there are numerous historical examples of battles being fought after the governments of the warring sides made peace. So, you might say, you're living in a sci-fi future when your armies know when not to fight.