The Future Was Wrong It Would Seem

The idea behind encasing bicycles in plastic was one for safety. If somebody could use a spray can and increase the rigidity of these devices at certain points, then they would feel much safer during their travels. Older bike structural failures were often the result of poor welding or decaying components. If you ride an old road bike it will have numerous problems with its drivetrain that could cause an accident. Brake cables and unoiled chains are subject to rust. Eventually without proper maintenance these components will reach a point of failure. A plastic coating isn’t really what made the bicycle safer. The use of alloys did a much better job of that. The majority of modern bicycles are made out of either aluminum or carbon fiber. People still look for a simple solution as one may have thought plastic would be in those days. The future of bicycles now is based on really finicky concepts such as a tiny increase in aerodynamic efficiency. They are aware of stress points on the bicycle and are able to cover those with stronger materials in order to prevent a break. This is why the chain stays and seat stays are incredibly thin compared to the down tube. On old steel bikes there is not much of a difference.

Replacing teeth with those donated by other people was spawned out of vanity, as so much of the products that people use today are. This prediction isn’t the method used, as I would know. I happen to be missing ten teeth genetically, so I have been put in a situation of understanding what sort of solutions there are these days. The solution that I will undergo in a few years is a false tooth implant. Quite the opposite of what was envisioned in 1966, I will have a titanium screw inserted into my jaw, and one month later they will place a tooth-like cap on it. These have been around for about 30 years, and they have shown no signs of significant wear for a person. I would have preferred that natural teeth would be in my skull, but this will sadly not be the case.

Photo courtesy of bloop

             

   Our culture is still safety and vanity obsessed. They will probably never move away from those concepts as untimely death is always a tragedy and people will always support products that are designed to make themselves look better/more normal. People will always remain optimistic about future advances though. Even now people are researching ways to genetically grow teeth so that a person could have their own teeth put into their head if one of them was defective or missing. This may or may not ever come to fruition, as only time will tell. Certain values may change over the years, but some concepts will remain as solid as they were centuries ago. These concepts vary from noble to greedy such as they values I chose for this post. Safety is for the benefit of all people and vanity is for the benefit of an individual. No matter the method, a whole list of ideas of improvement will more than likely always accompany such values. 

Science and Science Fiction

The buildings used in the 1939 World’s Fair were large geometric structures that would seem wildly impractical, but very aesthetically pleasing. Some buildings had no windows, while some others were made almost exclusively with windows. Much of the production was very shiny. That might lead people to be overly optimistic about the direction in which things were headed. The country was still recovering from a very difficult economic time.

The realism of the radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds was because it was very similar to any other broadcast that one might hear at the time. They would have musical interludes while news was being gathered. As they cut to the reporter at Princeton the audience has already assumed that this is just like any other evening. Why would it possibly be a hoax? They made the professor seem dubious of life on Mars, and that would be common of any scientist at the time. There wasn’t any evidence to support a life on Mars theory, so they probably would assume that there wasn’t any life. These “gas explosions” that they mention make it seem as if there were observable events that would be more convincing than just “we see some aliens.”

I’m sure that some people were given quite the shock by what was being broadcasted. There was no real sensationalism in the voices of the announcers at first, or at least no more than would be had from any other broadcast at the time. The excitement rose as it would if there were people reacting to it. In fact they used sound clips of small crowds acting shocked and angry at the events. 

The music that is added in at regular intervals feels very strange when you know it's a hoax, but if you didn't it would probably add very strong notes of realism.

Also the broadcasters were held to a slightly higher standard of giving the correct information to the public. Radio was a medium untouched by the hand of the hoaxer. The first time something fools people is much easier than the second. 

Dino-postia

Like many children dinosaurs were ever present in my life early on. My parents would read to me every night, so for several weeks on end we would read Dinotopia. If I’m perfectly honest with myself I don’t remember very much of those books. They seemed to be a perfectly entertaining integration of dinosaurs and an early society, but I can’t remember anything else from it.

As it so happens though my family used to go on large road trips across the United States. We were going through the southwest US on one trip when we went to a museum with a ton of fossilized dinosaurs. There was even an excavation site that the public could view. This stuck with me a lot more prominently as it was a tangible event. Dinosaurs in this context weren’t just imagination. They were a long dead organism that was to be studied and speculated upon.

Typically today most people lump dinosaurs into a group that consists of creatures that have been dead for a very long time. We don’t think of them in relation to both ourselves and each other. The T Rex lived closer to us than it did to the Stegosaurus, despite the fact that most people would seem to guess that they lived in roughly the same time period if they didn’t often look at biological timelines. Without delving too much into an existential quandary I will mention that this fact makes our own human timeline seem rather insignificant.

Back to the way that children view dinosaurs; to them they are merely creatures that exist in a fantasy. There is a reason that many depictions of dinosaurs aimed at children can talk or are incredibly humanized. Without those aspects they would just be another dull animal that has been long dead for millions of years. 

Portraiture Post

The early men of science were often painted in such a manner that showed that they were scientists, or at the very least that science was an interest of theirs. If I were to pick such a portrait to be hung in the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art here at the University of Oklahoma it would have to be the portrait of David Wiley. What excited me about this portrait wasn't the device that Wiley would have prized, pictured to the left of himself. It is instead the device in his hands. He is carrying a predecessor to the humble capacitor. This device is known as a Leyden Jar. Capacitors are an important component to a good many electronic devices nowadays. Though his scientific devices are featured, Wiley is still the main focus of the portrait indicating that there was more prestige to him being known as a scientist than science itself.

Here is a the link to the image http://www.npg.si.edu/img2/franklin/wiley.gif, which for some reason has been formatted as a .gif.

Introductory post!

I finally got this up and running! So this semester I will be learning about Science and Popular Culture. The first post is simply a test post showing that we can upload an image, and the selected image for this class is Einstein. Here is a picture of Einstein riding a bicycle, which is somewhat important to me because of my sport of choice. Here is the link to the "source" of the image. I'm sure it's been reposted there, but it's fine for the parameters of the assignment. http://cdn.overclock.net/2/2e/2e32a700_albert-einstein-bicycle-quote.jpeg