Nutso Techno

There are times when I am absolutely fascinated by technology.  And there are times when I'm terrified of it.  Let me give you some examples.

There's this little cider mill a couple of miles from my parents' home.  Open only for a few months during the fall, this quaint operation has been dishing out hot, cinnamon-y donuts for quite a few years.  They sell other stuff, but let's face it...it's the donuts that people stand in line for.  While you're waiting - if you're lucky enough to be with another person to hold your place in line - you can wander over to this little window and watch the donuts being made.

Some nice, older woman spoons the batter into a hopper and - through an amazing feat of technology - two perfect donuts are plopped into super hot grease about every two seconds.  They float along for maybe fifteen seconds and then - another amazing feat of technology - they get flipped over and drift happily for another fifteen seconds.  The result?  A perfectly golden sphere of deliciousness.

I could watch it for hours and hours.  Not kidding.  After a few hours I'd be Zen perfect.

Not long ago I watched an intriguing show about the "real" King Tut.  How can they call it the "real" King Tut.  Why, because of technology, of course.

They used super elaborate methods and equipment to test the death mask (the famous one with all that gold) and determined that the front piece and back piece were not one solid piece, but two, joined together by ancient duct tape.  Not really. I think they used rivets.  Whatever.

I have a degree in history (I might have mentioned that before).  I should be interested in this kind of stuff.  And I am, up to a point.  But when they're spending lots and lots of money and high falutin' microscopes and other equipment I can't remember, I have to ask myself:

Shouldn't this time and money be spent on something else?  Like curing cancer?  I know too many people battling all types of cancer.  Bad, nasty, life-ending stuff.  King Tut is dead.  And has been for a really long time.  These people need answers.  Yesterday.  We know enough about King Tut.  (I beg forgiveness for any Egypytologists reading this).

So...I was excited to see advertisements for the new series, "Breakthrough."  Six well-known directors taking aim at some of our world's leading breakthroughs in science. I was intrigued.

The first one scared the crap out of me.  It was about Ebola and the awful, painful death that is almost always inevitable.  And how catastrophic it has been - and can be - in a pandemic situation.  In a matter of weeks.

All I can say, after watching that first episode, is that there are a lot of SUPER brilliant minds out there and we should be thanking God that they are alive and using their brains to help develop a cost-effective treatment and strategy for eradicating this scary disease.

Then... Paris happened.  And San Bernardino.  And you realize that it doesn't take a disease to claim lives.  It takes a mind that has ceased to be rational.

And technology.

I often wonder what we'd do without the World Wide Web.

I really think we'd be safer.  And more ignorant.

Which is worse?