The Last Word--Robert McCaffrey is feeling lucky...

摘要

Do you feel lucky, punk?" These immortal words, spoken by Clint Eastwood in the seminal 1970s bad-cop flick Dirty Harry, might usefully be recalled every day, to remind us of our good fortune. After all, despite soaring global food, fuel and energy prices, environmental melt-down, geopolitical instability and financial turmoil, we are all very lucky indeed.Electric light and electricity have only been around for the last 130 years or so. Imagine the world without them. Industrial fertiliser production boomed after the First World War, when explosives factories were converted to manufacture something more useful for peacetime. TV started in the 1930 (although we are still waiting for something worth watching). Antibiotics really only became widespread in the 1940s-and the world would be a radically worse place in their absence. The amount of computer power that you have on your desktop dwarfs the amount available to the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s (the on-board Apollo Guidance Computer weighed 70lbs, worked at 2Mhz and had 38k of memory).