Do Fish Fart?
The first computer I worked with was built by Singer and IBM and was 3 stories tall. All the input was though punch cards and round cartridges circa 1960. My smartphone has 100 times the computing power as the IBM of that era...
This post just made me smile as does my friend Dick Greenberg!
I'm an old guy and I've been around a while. I grew up when information came from encyclopedias, the newspaper, and Walter Cronkite. Wanting to know more usually required trips to the library or the writing of letters. It took real effort to find out a lot of stuff, sometimes too much effort, so we weren't as smart or well informed as we can be today.
I've been part of the computer age almost since it got going. My first experience with a computer was in 1965 with an IBM 1620, which, along with its card punch machine, card reader, card sorter and printer, took up an entire computer lab. I had to learn Fortran, PL1 and Cobol to play with it, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. My first MAC in 1984 got me on-line, such as it was in those days, with Archie, Gopher and Telnet giving me access to libraries around the world. And I was there when the web was born, and designed my first web page in 1994.
It's astounding to see what the Internet has become, especially in terms of information access. The search function has become an extension of our memory and an enabler of our curiosity. If we can't remember some actor's name, or need to know the chemical composition of sugar, or want to know when our team is playing your team, all we have to do is Google it.
We have a staggering amount of information available to us by just simply asking. Our capabilities have been expanded far beyond what we could have imagined 30 years ago. We have incorporated that seamlessly into our daily life and used it to usher in a world-wide age of productivity limited only by our imagination and character.
We take this for granted these days. It has just become a part of our lives, like water coming out of the tap, and we seldom stop and just be amazed at the sheer power we have to acquire knowledge, and the enormous changes this has brought to everyone.
So the other night, I idly wondered aloud whether fish farted. Mary grabbed her iPad and asked Google and within seconds, I had an answer. And that stopped me in my tracks, because I can remember how insanely hard it would have been 30 years ago to find an ichthyologist who happened to have studied that particular question and had the time to respond with an answer. It was a silly question of no significance, yet it served as a perfect example for an extended musing on how much our lives have been enriched (and complicated too, but that's a different blog post).
Of course, I wouldn't send you away without sharing the answer I got. No, fish don't fart, at least as a by-product of digestion - but they do burp. Now we know.
Mary & Dick Greenberg
New Paradigm Partners LLC
2601 S. Lemay Ave. #41
Fort Collins, CO 80525
970-689-4663
www.maryanddick.com
Data Source: IRES MLS
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