Last week, I posted a video lecture about ‘Sixth-Sense Technology’ on TED, the brainchild of a remarkable Indian inventor, Pranav Mistry. I caught shit from a bunch of people back in the States about my comments regarding the general decline in American education and innovation.
I really don’t mean to sound like I’m America-bashing. I really don’t. And I really can’t help it if people don’t like hearing the truth. Nor can I help it if I wind up sounding like a broken record (assuming anyone still knows what a ‘record’ is). But the facts are the facts. And it seems like every week, there’s another story about how some other country or part of the world is just kicking the shit out of America in the fields of economics, the sciences, and technology.
Admittedly, this time, it’s not India or China leading the charge. Rather, it’s the Swiss and French (which George Bush declared as irrelevant “Old Europe”). The NY Times/International Herald Tribune reported today, in an article entitled “Collider Sets Record, and Europe Takes U.S.’s Lead”:
Scientists said that the new Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile loop underneath the Swiss-French border, had accelerated protons to energies of 1.2 trillion electron volts apiece and then crashed them together, eclipsing a record for collisions held by an American machine, the Tevatron, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.
This moment has been inevitable since fall 1993, when Congress canceled a behemoth project in Texas known as the Superconducting Supercollider, after estimated costs rose to $11 billion. … In the future, as the collider ramps up to seven trillion electron volts, the dateline for physics discoveries will be Geneva, not Batavia, Ill., the home of Fermilab.
Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. In fact, I’m sure you paranoid idiots nice folks don’t want to waste good ammunition on lil’ ol’ me. Wouldn’t you much rather maintain your ever-increasing stocks of ammunition for President Obama’s impending socialist revolution?
P.S. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
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