Warning !! This will make you think!!!

To me, the explanation could be explained metaphorically.

You've got toast...its hangin out it the toaster, the little wires get progressively more red, more warm, going a little faster as time speeds up, the toast begins to sizzle softly until all of a sudden

BAM!

toast.

Toast, hmm.

What if you turn the knob clockwise?

Metaphorically speaking , of course?

Originally posted by spacedoubt
Toast, hmm.

What if you turn the knob clockwise?

Metaphorically speaking , of course?

Well, different people's toasters work differently...

Making your toast more toasty would metaphorically be like the industrial advance BOOM postponed, but with a bigger boom!!!!! Ane vice versa for the lightweights who prefer slighty toasted toast.

You could say...the knob has more to do with ideas, knowledge, and thought...while the actual toasting BAM! i spoke of earlierhas more to do with industrialization, invention, and physical changes.

...Or were you joking and I just seem really weird and obsessed with toast?

No, serious really, with a bit of humour

I get your metaphor.
Its interesting

I was trying to get more out of you.



If it wasn't for "toast" we'd all be loafing around..right?

Originally posted by spacedoubt
No, serious really, with a bit of humour

I get your metaphor.
Its interesting

I was trying to get more out of you.



If it wasn't for "toast" we'd all be loafing around..right?

Holy crap....that was really funny. I'm not kidding, i'm actually laughing!

Great pun

But yeah, I'm opening a little place called the Toast House or something along those lines. its a bookstore/venue for local bands/open mic night stands/movie showings/ place that sells nothing but toast.

Its for the kids that are way too cool to hang out at Starbucks drinking coffee. Coffee? Ha! We eat toast.

Sorry, I just went off rambling about my toast thing...sorry

I would go there.
Jams, with your toast!

Seriously though, probably should get back on topic.
I mean look at how we are communicating now!
Ideas, flashing across the world. In the past, ideas never could propagate that
fast..People learning from each other, in an instant..

That has a lot to do with the technology boom. ya think?

Toast and Jams...thats awesome! Thanks!
You should stop by eventually. It wont be up for a few years But when it is..you'll know.....somehow.....Im guessing probably in Pensicola

But back on topic!

Have you ever seen Waking Life? There's a great conversation about the transfer of ideas almost telepathically. You should definitely check it out.

I really think that it has alot to do with the act of communicating...

Think about it. Over a hundred years ago, most people were more worried about just living, and people didn't have much of a way to communicate over long distances. So, most advances were taken on by individuals or small groups, and most knowledge was only contained on paper. Then, *TOAST!* we get the Telegraph, and we can now communicate throughwires over long distances, although the 'text' communication was faster to arrive, it was still slow, so they made it better. Toasted again! We could talk verbally over long distances, and there were larger groups of people in different areas of the world who could work together and convey their ideas to eachother.

Then we developed a GIGANTIC toaster with the advent of the internet! Now we can toast eachothers bread all we want, no matter where in the world we live!

i compare the internet to those multitoasters, the crazy ones that can hold like 8 pieces of bread at one time

and all those crazy kids who are into weird science and awesomely strange religions and societies, they use toaster ovens...its a little different, but in the end its just as good

Holy Crap. Lysonczi or whatever his name is posted 7 times in a row.

CRIPES MAN, USE THE EDIT BUTTON!

Anyrate, if you think about it, what can be built off of a stick? A Hut! A Weapon! What can you get from that? Hunting abilities! What do you need to do to hunt? Be Mobile! What can't you do when you never stop moving? Think and advance!

When civilisation finally settled down, stuff started moving pretty fast. In the first 1000 years Rome was created, with water systems and thinkers and philosophers abound, and the world was advancing, then the Great Library, the jewel of civilisation, was burned down! No one knew anything anymore, and people then ran about trying to create gimmicks to make gold out of other non-gold stuff for almost 1000 years. Then the odds finally caught up with them and they invented gunpowder, heralding more modern chemistry. From then on things have progressed excellently, first we deduced as much as possible from the little bit we knew, then we used what we learned to develop further theories, we tested those theories and stumbled upon larger workings, which we knew little about. Human ingenuity kicked in and we deduced information again, then we knew more, and extrapolated, knew a tiny amount, and it has continued. The reason we are advancing so fast now is because a 2-country war can no longer destroy civilisation. It used to be that if you burned down a nation's capitol you'd set the world back 50 years in knowledge - now you do that and people learn more from it!

It isn't because aliens made pacts with us, or because we have only been here like this a little while. (Think about that, the reason we know we've been here some 100,000 years as humans is because we have skeletons from those times, and if the skeletons have not yet degraded, the tools would not have either. We have bones that are over 800 million years old - pieces of well-worked tungsten used in spaceships or wrenches wouldn't have degraded yet, and it would have been found by now.) It isn't because there is a conspiracy hiding reality, it isn't because humans are too arrogant. It is because you can create more from more. Let's say humans have Tsub n knowledge. This sequence is recursive, and is defined by T sub n = T sub (n - 1)*n lets say we start with T sub 1 = 1 meaning that at period 1, we have 1 'knowledge unit', the next period will have 4 knowledge units, the next 9, 16, 25. Now this is rudimentary, but it shows what I mean. The less technology humans have, the less that can be produced. We have been slowly building, and now we have more we make more, and it will only speed up. Much like breeding, really.

something that haunts me regarding this exponential explosion of human knowledge is that it seems likely quantum computing, or something just as magic, is just around the corner. It will be like talking to God!? We will cease to be the most intelligent lifeform on the planet!? It would seem time travel would be a prized goal as it would allow problems to be worked on in zero time with quantum power. I try to ponder this but it drives me mad. I don't think its totally unreasonable to believe that we are being visited by timetravellers or that a Godlike computer somewhere is already messing with the world (or that it is our world)_ I hope it has righteous intentions.

Originally posted by j619pinoy
Have you ever wondered how we advanced so much in the last 100 years than the last 10,000 years!?????

yeah seems quite easy, to keep it real short, the population exploded in the last century, so more scientists, more research, then the computer came, and today's computer invents tomorrow's faster computer, so this is ever accellerating. i think you should read chapter 6 of stephen hawking's 'the universe', its a cool chapter with lotsa cool stats and graphs.

What gets me wondering is why inventions by Benjamin Franklin and Telsa are not being used today, i mean yeah we use light bulbs, but they burn out after 100 or so hours of being lit, edison's lightbulb is still lit to this day, how come we don't have lightbulbs that last a lifetime? hrm?
Telsa also found a way to create a massive amount of electricity but we don't use that today we have to burn coal and charge people instead of creating really cheap energy. That's what gets me boiling... greed just slows our advances as well as advancing us.. hah it works both ways doesnt it?

maybe when we run out of coal and oil we'll use some of those inventions then.. maybe not, someone will probably come out with a new invention where it will be costly (for consumers) to have

Originally posted by crispexi
What gets me wondering is why inventions by Benjamin Franklin and Telsa are not being used today, i mean yeah we use light bulbs, but they burn out after 100 or so hours of being lit, edison's lightbulb is still lit to this day, how come we don't have lightbulbs that last a lifetime? hrm?
Telsa also found a way to create a massive amount of electricity but we don't use that today we have to burn coal and charge people instead of creating really cheap energy. That's what gets me boiling... greed just slows our advances as well as advancing us.. hah it works both ways doesnt it?

maybe when we run out of coal and oil we'll use some of those inventions then.. maybe not, someone will probably come out with a new invention where it will be costly (for consumers) to have

I wonder much the same, although the answer is rather obvious: politics and greed. Once people have power (e.g., through controlling oil or other energy sources), they are loathe to give up that power (e.g., allow Tesla's energy machines to be put into production).

knowledge is compounding, and the way the human mind works, we will always be looking to improve, to learn, to grow.

However, I see this as our downfall, not as a plus...

Originally posted by AlnilamOmega
terrence mckenna had a good explanation for this, in his "time wave zero" theory. he compared the electromagnetic cycles of the sun to the events of life, distant past and present. everytime there would be a peak or a valley in that particular solar influence (ie, any time the sun would go 'nuts'), it would coincide with a major historyical event. his culmination of this idea was how technology was progressing just as we were progressing towards that infamous date of 12/23/2012

Sorry if I'm being naive, but what happens on 12/23/2012?

ohhhhh more nonsense about the end of the world. ERGH i hate all that! QUESTION- where did the origin of the 2012 come from, bible code?

Technology and science evolve at a rate very comparable with population growth. Of course, there is a very good reason for that, tantamount to peer review. Because ideas can be exchanged more rapidly and reviewed by others more quickly, valid science leads to workable devices (built by still others). And others build on previous discoveries, not only improving upon them but also extrapolating theory and finding new principles and applications. For example, consider that when electric lighting came into use, it became easier for people to work on inventions long into the night. Also, because electricity was then wired to their houses, they could experiment with it, creating further conveniences. Additionally, technology helps people to live longer and thus reproduce more so that a self-reinforcing mechanism is instituted.

It really is not all that amazing, once you consider how technology is cumulative, just like population. And many inventions are not all that new, like how the facsimile (fax) device was invented in the 1840's. To sum up, Arthur C. Clarke (inventor of the telecommunications satellite and author of 2001 - A Space Odyssey) put it this way, "Any technology, sufficiently developed, is indistiguishable from magic."

I think it's a combination of many factors...

First, there was agriculture. With more focus on community, and permanent settlements, it fostered more discussion, and exchange of ideas... Instead of one guy in an isolated area having a good idea...now there was one guy sharing his good idea with others, and getting the good ideas from all of them...pooling the knowledge, to lead to advancements... That's the basic jist anyhow....

Most of what we consider to be modern advances, really only came about from a few basic inventions... Take their discovery away, and we'd be back in the dark ages...

Engines... This is what started the whole mechanization of the world...starting with steam engines, etc. The world gradually becoming smaller, and allowing for even more of that idea exchange to take place.

Harnessing Electricity...probably the most basic advance to lead to every other advance.

Transistor...what lead to most of our modern devices.

The pace of tech advance, when you look at it, is pretty directly related to how small the world had gotten. Advances in travel and communication basically lead to a flurry of new ideas, and thus even more advances.

It isn't a linear progression, but an exponential one.

I'm still betting on a bit of an assist to tech in 1947, hehe...but that merely pushed up the progression about a half century or less....

Well i kinda agree and disagree.

At first there were pre-historic people they were nomadic, there were no writen records and the only surgery around was triphing and everything was very supernatural. Then we had the Egyptian Empire, these people were clever, they had time to sit around and think, i mean they didnt know the germ theory (which came around thosands of years later) but the did realsie that keeping clean meant less disease, they also had organisation they had specialist doctors etc.

The Greeks again were thinkers and there was more war happening- they had Hippocrates( the hippocratic oath) and the four humours, things were less supernatural.

Now the Romans, they had baths, public sewers everything, Galen improved the four humours and they had alot of war so surgery was improved.

That was all destroyed due to war- Galens work was used all through the middle- ages- the middle ages was a time of regression.

My point is that these people basically built up our world- yes it was destroyed but it was built back up- doesnt anyone think that is wierd how we regressed instead of learnig from the Romans!!!

I hope someone sees my point and i havent just been blabbering!!! please say if i am!!