At 01:31 PM 12/8/99 -0500, you wrote: >It will be a simple new year as usual, and how it passes fast as you get >old... Huge snip of Wagner's wonderful thoughts-- Here are a few of my own. NASA'a current efforts remind me of Heinleins "no Free Lunch"--I always said; "Good, Fast, Cheap---pick any two." Small probes to mars is like buckshot in a shotgun--some hit, some doesn't. We forget progress is made by hitting your thumb with a hammer and discovering it hurts. Look at the old movies of the dawn of the space age--how many blew up on the pad before they achieved a reasonably reliable launch capability. We learn by making mistakes. Stupidity is making the same mistake twice--and trying for zero failures--or perfect safety. My dad graduated flight school the year after Lindbergh. My Mom and Aunt survived the first fifty years of their lives without Penicillin--I can remember driving the family cattle down the beach to market in San Diego on horseback--and $0.13/gallon gasoline. We should all know about critical mass in nuclear reactors. But I have long felt there is a critical mass in information. My first wife was Hungarian, and we were married in eastern europe when there still was an Iron Curtain--and you did NOT tell Lenin jokes--even in private. I remember getting off the plane in Budapest in 1972 and thinking how old and decayed the buildings looked--until I realized that the holes were from bullets and tank shells--and were fairly recent. When enough people (that critical mass) KNOW that blue jeans and cars are common in the rest of the world, then governments that deny that reality WILL fall. I suppose we should thank the perrier swilling, BMW driving yuppies for exporting their lifestyle to the rest of the world--think what will happen when China is on the internet--it truly boggles the mind. Also, think of genetic diversity--and how we need it to survive as a species, and as a world. There is another variant called "memes" which are cultural ideas embedded in the way a group of people think about things. We need this diversity as well--a technical reason, if you will, to get rid of bigotry and racism. Remember Malthus--any severe over-population is self correcting--usually catastrophically. What form, do you suppose, natural selection of the human race will take over the next 100 years? Thanks, Wagner, for tripping some thoughts on the advent of the "new age." Enjoy your holidays, all. Will be monitoring the list, but probably not participating much. Kelly William K. Borsum, P.E. -- OEM Dataloggers and Instrumentation Systems & San Diego, California, USA