For about thirty seconds on Saturday, I thought there was some kind of Challenger retrospective going on. Then I understood. I caught some of the news on the radio, some on the web… but honestly, Saturday was one of those days that I’m glad I don’t have a TV.
This morning on Forum they devoted one hour to Shuttle. No “experts” this time, just an hour of listeners calling in. Now I live in the Bay Area — the Left Coast — and so I certainly wasn’t surprised to hear caller after caller chime in with, oh dear isn’t it sad about the families, but what about the murderous US plans for hegemony and world domination, blah blah blah? Still, it got a bit monotonous after a while.
Some thinkers like to speculate about whether human mind is like a computer. If this line of thinking is true, I wonder, are some people just not given enough RAM at birth? Are they simply unable to handle more than one resource-intensive process at once?1
Finally near the end of the show a young man called in and said (paraphrasing), “I’m an anti-war activist. I’ve been in all the local marches. I’ve written my Congressman. I vote… And the thing is, I believe war represents one of the worst things human beings can do, while space exploration represents one of the best. Let’s not confuse the two.”
If the anti-war movement had more folks like him… well, there’d be an anti-war movement worth speaking about.
1. Addendum: M’ris informs me that Timprov says, “And some people are given those original Pentiums with the floating point problem.” Too bad that this sort of problem can’t be fixed in the next rev.