H.I.T.S.
Although we’re only in March, it seems that this year has proven to be incredibly high tech.
I’m not talking about things like iPads and laptops; I’m talking about things like this article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-12756789aarticle
, which details how the US has been using those cool flying drones to spy on the Mexican drug cartels.
In another article that I read, a 61-year-old man named Alan Phillip Gross has been arrested in Cuba and sentenced to 15 years in jail for trying to set up an Internet network for a small Jewish community there. It looks like recent uprisings, fuelled by things like the Internet and Facebook have made a lot of dictators really nervous regarding things high-tech.
Also this week, due to technology, we’re seeing all of the terrible scenes from Japan after the earthquake and tsunami. As if those weren’t bad enough, they now have the nuclear problems from their reactors, too. This may affect how we view nuclear energy in the future, especially after our own Three Mile Island incident in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
I remember Three Mile Island especially well, as I’d only lived here for a year at that time. The movie “The China Syndrome” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078966/
) came out that same year, which made it even scarier at the time.
Moving on to lighter subjects, I have an application on my Android phone that shows news from the UK. Some of it really highlights the differences between “us” and “them,” For a while now, I’ve been sharing some of these differences with my students.
The first one is that the sport of basketball is called netball over in jolly old England (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netball
) and is only played by girls. That’s not an insult — it really is only played by females and, despite the black looks I get, that’s just how it is.
Another females-only (or at least it was when I lived there) game called Rounders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounders
) is very similar to American baseball.
At this point, someone usually asks me about Cricket (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket
). I try to explain the rules and because it, too, uses a bat, people ask if it’s like baseball. That’s when I remark about Rounders being a girls’ game.
Speaking of sports, I was reading about the UK soccer club from Tottenham signing a deal to buy high tech shirts that can record a soccer player’s data and send it to a manager’s iPhone or iPad! I remember that we wrote some years back about the fancy Nike running shoes that send data to your iPod or iPhone (at http://www.apple.com/ipod/nike/
). All of this, for some reason, reminded me of the old TV series called the Six Million Dollar Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Million_Dollar_Man
).
This brings up another cool aspect of the internet. If you can only dimly remember something like an old TV series or movie, you can refresh your memory in seconds. A net search will usually reveal hundreds, if not thousands, of web pages with lots of info.
Prior to high tech, it used to drive me crazy trying to recall details of certain things I’d seen on TV in England during the 1950ss and 1960s. I found http://www.whirligig-tv.co.uk/
on the web a few years ago and saw clips from all these old British shows. There are also comments on the site from other people my age and I realized that these people had exactly the same kinds of reactions I had to these shows.
I assume that’s also why, when I came home one night, my wife had been watching “Return to Green Acres” on Netflix. Although a lot of American TV shows were shown in England, I don’t remember Green Acres, but I do remember Petticoat Junction at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petticoat_Junction
.
If you loved any of the shows you watched growing up, don’t forget you can probably buy them now on DVD or watch them on Netflix. Netflix has a lot of westerns, which are my personal favorites. Thinking back to the 1950s and watching those shows, who would have thought that in about 60 years, we’d have the amazing advances we have today?
Does that mean that in the next 50 years, we’ll be watching things like we used to see in “The Jetsons” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jetsons
)?
With that thought in mind, happy surfing.