Reflections From a Murky Pond

Technology advances but people stay the same. Technological advances normally just change the delivery systems for things we already crave.

A New Improved Delivery System?

On the bright side, this could lead to a smoking hot future. 😛

An “iPad Killer” has finally been unveiled, though it’s not running Android, Windows, and isn’t even a competing tablet. It’s Pope Benedict XVI!

The iPad Killer – Pope Benedict XVI

Apple has easily survived the release of the information that its products are manufactured by Chinese slave labor worked and kept in horrific conditions. Likewise the electronics giant was not chided for its upwards of 60% profit margin on it popular portable products. These facts just don’t affect Steve Jobs’ and Apple’s image with the bulk of their customers.

On the other hand, the iPad being used by the Pope could quite likely hurt Steve Jobs and his company greatly. That is something that the average Apple customer – the Liberals, Hipsters, and Generation Y Slackers – really don’t want to be associated with. 😉

If this keeps up, Steve Jobs won’t be able to afford to buy any more Third World vital organs and will have to use the transplant waiting lists just like Joe and Jane Six-Pack.

This post is solely due to the emotions that my friend – you don’t really know me so you don’t understand the weight of that word upon my soul –  ichabod dredged up out of my memory by including a simple image in one of his articles.

I refer you, my valued reader, simply to this video – a rare glimpse of Canada’s Bluenose as she lived and loved upon the Widowmaker,

The Bluenose vs. Gertrude L. Thebaud

Years and years ago I stood the deck of the Bluenose II, which was a true replica of the original great lady of the Grand Banks. Standing there I wept. I wept with both the joy of her lines and life and with grief over Man’s casting her and her sisters aside along with the love of them in favor of the practicalities of modern maritime shipping.

I wept as I read and commented on ichabod’s article and I wept still as wrote this one.

I f you can’t understand why I weep without shame over the loss of these grand queens of the seas then the languages of our souls have too little in common with each others’ to ever truly understand each other.

I say that without reproach for I know that I’m a living, or plausible facsimile of living, atavism in this modern and needfully oh-so-practical world.

For those very few who will care, the Bluenose died in January of 1946 when she was gutted on a Haitian reef. With her died an era and large part, – in my estimation – of Man’s soul.

Western society, especially America, has in recent decades become increasingly skeptical and distrusting. Put simple, we lack faith and trust in each other and almost anyone in positions of authority or who claims some authority on a topic.

Pics Or It Didn’t Happen – Not That We’ll Believe The Pics

Cries, often less than joking, of, “Pics or it didn’t happen,” “Show your work,” and “What are your sources,” are rife in most discussions, debates, and arguments in the modern Western world.

More often than not, if these demands are responded to, the result is that the people do not either accept or review the image and/or sources provided; instead they declaim them as fraudulent or impugn them for some other reason, most often perceived bias due to whatever funding mechanism are in place for those sources.

Little or nothing is believed. This is certainly true of anything that contradicts people’s opinions and beliefs and I believe that even holds true for things that agree with said people’s opinions and beliefs, though they’re willing to “suspend disbelief” enough to use it to further their various agendas.

It seems to me that we as a societal whole have become cynical and skeptical enough that we’re actually proof against proof.

In the past decade huge advances have been made in the field of transgenic research, the study of transferring genes from one species to another. What was once limited to a small number of crops has expanded out into a broad spectrum of animals as well.

Transgenic Marmoset Expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP)

To date the highest order of animal that scientists will admit to having genetically modified by the inclusion of completely foreign genetic material is the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus).  The marmoset is a primate though and the changes they’ve made since 2009 have been genetically stable so there’s little in the way of technological hurdles left for them.

This, without even considering its use on humans, opens the door to some “interesting” possibilities. 😉

Transgenesis 1:24 ( New Atheists Bible )

I’m approaching this with a little humor, and not all of it ill-natured, because there is a definite potential benefit from creating transgenic organisms. Even the “sports,” which history tells us will be some of the first commercial applications, have the possibility of bringing people a lot of wonder and joy.

There’s, however, just so very much that could go wrong because scientists often ask, “Can we…” but rarely ask, “Should we…” and we really know very little about the interactions between genes or how transgenic creatures would affect the biosphere as whole.

I’m not even going to go into the nightmares this will cause when, not if, we start doing it with humans. Too many of the scenarios that instantly come to my mind are too deplorable and too plausible.