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| date | 2001-02-05:20:53 |
| Machines |
I love machines. Even ones that do stuff I don't much like. Guns are beautiful works of art, more efficiently engineered than almost any other human creation. That's because death has been avidly sought-after for all of human history and probably most of prehistory as well. Which is weird, because it isn't exactly a scarce commodity. Jan gave me a bread-maker for Christmas, and it's a marvel of engineering genius. My mother used to bake bread, and it's a complex operation. The people who figured out how to do everything required--the mixing, the kneeding, the beating down--with nothing but a dinky little paddle were geniuses. If I'd been running the research division I'd've cancelled the project, or never approved it in the first place. I bet the person who did approve it didn't know much about baking bread. Sometimes it's too easy to see the obstacles. Vannevar Bush, head of the U.S. navy's rocketry program after the war, said once that no human being would ever go to the moon because you'd have to take a rocket the size of a battleship, stand it up on end, and launch it into space, and it would be absurd to do that. We now know that that isn't quite required, but we also know that that's pretty much how it was actually done. Just because something's absurd doesn't mean it's impossible. What is required to do the impossible is the will to dream. I've been infinitely fortunate in the past year or so because Caro has given me a huge transfusion of the will to dream, when my dreams were at a very low ebb indeed. |
| Creatures |
Pretzel has discovered the fish. A few weeks ago we got a bigger and better fish tank. Our little fish tank has been inhabited solely by Spot the Algae Eater for almost two years, and he was starting to get a little big for the tank. So we got a 20 gallon tank and a bunch of fish to go with it. The cats didn't notice for the first couple of weeks, but now Pretzel, our skinny little wild hunting cat, has realized that there are other living creatures just behind the glass, and if she could only figure out a way in, she'd be able to play with them. I don't think she can open the tank's lid... |